Alecto's Ophelia

Fluffy the lap bus

When you have two enormous projects coming to a head at one time and your day looks like this:

I had to put it on an Excel schedule grid to make it look right because Outlook can't really do that. It gets all scrunched plus it doesn't show what really happens during the day, just what is meant to happen at the beginning of the day which was really only booked from 9 - 3:30 on this day and only mostly double booked to start. I book myself from 7 - 9 because that's SUPPOSED to be triage. More and more people are finding me. 

If a color is white it means I didn't get there or it didn't get done in that time slot. If a color is blue, it is the only thing I am doing. If a color is red, well, you can read them; it's a humanity thing and my days hardly ever look quite this extreme.

If a color is the color of bondo it means I was doing two things at one time. I can't call this multi-tasking because it isn't the truth. 

You know, if you are in one meeting and a speaker is saying something but someone else might be part of the presentation, you are not multi-tasking just because you are watching them both. You are only multi-tasking if you have tuned one out maybe 95% and are just listening for your name. Or something. I do miss a lot though. This is what I tell myself. It sort of helps. 

If a cell is yellow then I am actively engaged in three things and that's some bad shit. 

Look at the 4 PM slot. That was the height of ugliness. Plus I was so hungry I thought I was going to pass out. The need to pee had passed hours ago and I'm pretty sure my ass was numb. 

By the way, doing multiple things at one time is not bad. The bad part is this: Look at those gigantic conflicting time slots for ECR and Collibra. ECR UAT really just goes in the morning because it's supposed to be going live at the end of the month but then there was the director's meeting where we actually finally ADMITTED THAT THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL we're going live before the end of March and the entire end of project time line and resource requirements had to be rewritten and submitted to multiple people sorta ASAPish because I no longer own the resources and the little bastards have already started taking them out from under my nose. 

Collibra is imploding. Not the product, the project. They've been an isolated team since, forever? I don't know. I've been ignoring them because I took everything else but then they failed to produce anything of value and suddenly I owned them and they still failed to produce anything of value and I started to have heart failure and I put my boss in a box and he may never forgive me but if I can't save his life I can, at the very least, save the project, which is going nowhere.

The thing about these two projects regardless of where they are in their respective timelines is that both require my full attention right this second. I walk out of the room, virtual or otherwise for one second and shit blows up. In ECR UAT the only reason my head is still on my shoulders is BECAUSE we are not going to make it to Prod on time (not us) and because somehow Jalpa missed the part about migration schedules and migration requirements she didn't realize you couldn't just raise your hands and say, hey! we're ready to go now and none of the rest of us thought we had to tell her. Jalpa owns the project timeline, we, I can never really tell how many we are, own the pieces parts.

Um. Hmm. OK, It's changed, So, me, I build and maintain the hierarchies (OK, my team does). IT (who exactly is IT these days) takes my hierarchies, feeds them to the Fact tables, does shit to them and maps the leaf level members to, I guess it's the nSAP feed, and the Business provides the data and the hierarchy definition and properties to us and the mapping to them and.... ah, those are the guys that build the Essbase cube from which OBIEE reporting spits forth. We all have to work very carefully together so that nothing gets fouled up. 

Somehow in there somebody is supposed to know that UAT has to be thoroughly documented (with 8x10 color glossies with charts and arrows on the back) and paperwork with a gazillion signatures submitted to the migration team at IT (who exactly is IT these days) on the Tuesday before the NEXT Thursday that you want to migrate. And also, you cannot migrate during the first Thursday of any month because of where that Thursday falls in the close. And also the business will need at least three weeks to complete UAT when ALL of the data is loaded before you can even begin putting the migration submission package together WHICH will be torn apart with an icepick followed by several toothpicks. And a pie fork. 

As of LAST Thursday which was February 8 we did not have all of the data which means that UAT had not officially started. The date for migration to Production on the calendar was February 15. I was waiting for someone to say it. I had already alerted N. (it's not us, don't worry and thank you for the heads up) To get to a Feb 15 migration we would have had to submit our paperwork on February 6. Jalpa still wanted to make the end of the month. So we migrate on Feb 22. That means we sign off fully documented on Tuesday, Feb 13 and they have one day to do three weeks of testing and one day to put the paperwork together. Yes. No. Yes. No. YES!!! OK, talk to me when you have data and in the mean time I will have Brian fix his error.

Which brings me to the error. While I was not looking at ECR UAT, Uday said, I don't like that the properties in DRM don't match the properties in the FRD. He sent the email to me, Brian and Aparna. I made a REALLY FUCKING POOR DECISION.

Uday USED TO report to IT (who exactly is IT these days) but since this massive reorg happened he no longer reports to IT and is intrinsically an orphan who is on loan to ME because my team no longer belongs to me either, they have been reorged to the same place Uday has been placed and instead of swapping out the project manager they've left in the same horse. Uday now reports to me in this context. I THOUGHT Uday raised the issue with his project manager but he did not. WTH, Uday? So for two days no one but me and my now grown by 1/3 size team knew that Brian was not working on the Intake tool because Uday as upset about the properties EVEN THOUGH WE HAD A SIGN OFF FROM THE BUSINESS. 

When I brought it up on Thursday, the first time I'd been back to a UAT session I thought Jalpa was going to take several pounds of flesh. If Jalpa wasn't my friend I probably would have been beaten senseless in the parking garage and I would have had it coming. 

Brian - You have two days to complete five days of work. Do it now.

Jalpa - This thing is not going live. Please. Can't we just let him off the hook?

Alecto - Do you really want to be the one this project hangs on?

Jalpa - I do not. He will get it done.

Brian - get it done. I will buy you a case of, um, something. Don't fuck this up.

Later - Elizabeth, I totally fucked this up and now I'm killing Brian.

Alecto, I know you are. I can see him over there. You really screwed the pooch on this one.

Alecto.

What?

Thanks for not throwing your team under the bus. I would have had to kill you for that. 

So you see why I had to leave the Collibra sessions. You can see, right? You can see there was no way I could leave Brian,  and Uday, and Aparna alone in there. It's too much to ask of them even if they can ping me. It's not fair, especially this close to the end. And it's good that I didn't because I got to be there while Jalpa twisted and turned on the rope of denial while IT, OK, I think that's Nancy and Dan walked her through the dates over and over again and she finally came to the conclusion that the migration date was going to be on March 15 even though John put his face in his hands and said if Kanwar could march his guys through that fast, he'd be, well he'd just be WRONG. I didn't care. Brian could finish the first week of March which was the next open window. 

In the director's meeting one of the directors asked Jalpa if she wanted to ask for an extension one time or two times. 

Once, I thought, I only want you to ask once and I want you to get it right and please oh please oh please

And there was silence and N said

Alecto.

OH FUCK MY LIFE

Yes, N, I'm here. 

Alecto is my release manager and I expect she's got her arms fairly well around this. Alecto, based on the release schedule for these migration windows and the close schedule, when will this project go to production? 

OH FUCK MY LIFE

pause

N, I believe this project will migrate to production on March 29 assuming we can have complete sign off from all parties wrapped up and turned over to IT on March 20 and I don't see a problem with that.

Alecto, how much of a buffer does that leave you? 

N, that leaves us with a buffer of one week to accommodate the close and any issues we might encounter in the initial data tie which isn't complete yet and the system migration.

Alecto, are you comfortable with this?

N, I'm never comfortable but we can do this.

Alecto, I guess I meant are you willing to commit the team to this?

Yes, I will commit the team to this.

Meanwhile my IM is WAY TOO QUIET.

Crickets from everyone except for the Colibra working session, something horribly wrong has started up over there and I can't quite work out what but I have SOS messages from two of my newly minted senior developers and finally this.

I don't want to work here anymore.

He did not just send me that. He doesn't say things like that. What the hell just happened?

It is now 11 AM and I have been in my seat for four hours. I would give quite a bit to have two of those hours back. Not as a do over, I just need two more hours in that particular space. 

I want to ask N, N, please, did you just make me responsible for the outcome of ECR? You cannot possibly have meant that. I only own the DRM part of it and even now, I don't own DRM anymore and the DRM people are being sneaky and assigning my resources to other projects which means they're too stretched to do this job much longer and now I have to go tell them they aren't getting Aparna back quite as soon as expected. I think I'll not think about it but I do think I'll have to grab that timeline and pretend I'm the release manager at least in my head. 

FUCK MY LIFE I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT

And I now have hard proof that my boss has lost his mind. We have a new resource starting on Monday. No one else interviewed this guy. No one has seen his resume. We have heard conflicting stories about his skill set and they don't exactly make sense.

• IF you are a solution lead then you MUST have data governance knowledge. Solid data governance knowledge.
• IF you are a Collibra Solution Lead you must also have working knowledge of the product. Better working knowledge then I have which means you had better be a developer (I'm getting there).
• IF you are an SL, then your skill sets MUST contain the front end because that's the part the user uses.
• IF you tell me the SL only knows the backend I am going to be mighty suspicious because the one backend developer we do have, and he's quite good, doesn't know jack about data governance in context. He's tremendously good at creating the custom workflows you want using groovy script and whatever else he's got in his toolbox but he couldn't tell you why the happy path has to go this way and that way and why this Master Data Change Request needs three approvals in a blackout period and that doesn't need much at all and he can do amazing things with that library over there but an asset is an asset, whatever, just tell me where you want it.

So you're going to tell me that Ravi is a Solution Lead, can talk to the customer, figure out what they need, design the solution, feed it to the team in chunks but he doesn't do any front end work?

I don't think you know what the fuck you just hired. Thank god it's a consultant. The last one had to be sent back on day three. Wonder how long this one will last?

I'm scared. I asked Robin to invite me to a meeting because I saw the meeting on my boss's calendar. It's really bad when I find out about a project when it lands in my lap. So I came to the meeting and I listened to my boss agree to insanity. I didn't say a word. Surely there must be some mistake. Robin kept saying, don't worry about those dates so I did not. Mike kept assigning velocity points that also didn't make sense. How the hell was that much work going to get done by him and a new, untried resource in two weeks? I just shut up. At the end of the meeting he told me to get together with Robin and rewrite the stories (small chunks of project) so that they made sense.

The dates were mostly accurate and the dependencies stretch right into April. Holy shit. I had to fix some of it because the stories in the first two weeks didn't work. I dropped the velocity points and questioned her final deliverable for the sprint on the 28th. Yes, that is cast in stone. Are you telling me he can't deliver this? I can't tell you that. If he says he's going to do it then that's on him. I'll just have to make sure nothing else falls on his plate. 

I published the stories, sent him an IM and asked if he was completely clear about this.

Yes.

OK, I'm going to email this to you. I want you to be really sure you're ok with his because if you aren't, you need to tell Robin.

I'm fine. Ravi will hit the ground running.

OK, email on it's way.

OK.

And then what I have come to refer to as goo (because I cannot keep saying shit, it has simply lost all meaning at this point) hit the fan. The Collibra experts told them what they were trying to build was insane. This thing we just told the Decomm team we would deliver before June after months of screwing around and missing deadlines on the original project. After setting up the infrastructure to work with five business units for the next four months, we collapsed that project and rebuilt it to be just the two pieces required to satisfy Decomm.

Decomm is the decommissioning of a freaking god awful enormous system because the replacement they stood up last year can do 80% of the work - the trick is to find the 20% in all it's bits and pieces and rebuild it into the replacement and I have to tell you, that's a terrifying dance - there is no such thing as a lift and shift in this game. Best I can tell, there are over 200 moving parts of this system left over AFTER the analysis part where we took a very large sword and started hacking off limbs before we took the scalpel and carved out what was needed. Mike's Collibra team was already working on a project (that was apparently going nowhere) which was inserted into Decomm with the promise that he'd get to the Decomm part before June 12 but with zero project plan because he was a pilot Agile project. 

I was sent in when it fell down.

fuck my life on a smaller scale until I realized he didn't know how to build it and then everything became measured in increments of goo. How deep is the goo today? Nose level? Well that's not so bad. What can you tell me about the splatter pattern of the goo from that last meeting? Really? A straight arc to the back wall? Sounds like someone's throat was cut with a very sharp instrument. 

So. Much. Goo. The Collibra experts told the team this was a very, very bad idea and I wasn't there to hear it. During the debrief Mike ran away and when they got tired of waiting for him and wanted to end the call I suggested they just start without them. They let me know exactly what they heard. I wrote it all down. When he finally came back I repeated it to him. He denied it. That's when the IMs started flying back and forth.

OMG! What is wrong with that man?!

I can't take this anymore. Everyone is so negative. They haven't learned anything in all these months, they're useless.

I feel like I'm dying. Everything is falling apart and we have no leadership. I don't know what to do. Alecto, please! You've never let anything like this happen before.

And then the bombshell.

Don't worry, Ravi starts on Monday and then you'll have an extra set of hands full time.

Mike! No they won't! Both you and Ravi are allocated 100% to Robin's project the minute he walks in the door.

THAT'S NOT TRUE!

It is!

I sent it to you! I was in the meeting with you. Look in your email.

WHO WROTE THESE STORIES?!!!

Robin wrote them, you approved them, you put the points on them and at your request Robin and I cleaned them up. I actually dropped the points and spread the dates out so that you could do them. The February 28 date is a hard date and the plan waterfalls off that and right into April. It isn't negotiable. You'll need to get on the client's schedule very quickly to make this work.

I never agreed to this. Ravi is only 50% outside projects. 

Well, he has 35 points next sprint and the max for anyone ever is 26 and that's a high velocity performer like Jason and even those roll forward. Those 35 points were originally higher. If that isn't 100% I don't know what you think he's going to do over here but we can't say that the Collibra team has help in the next two weeks because they don't. Also, I can send you the whole plan, I think your name and Ravi's are all over it.

I have the plan.

OK. 

The IMs had stopped so I sent one out to the two of them but they bounced back. They'd actually gone offline at 4:30 and 3:30 respectively. One of them came back later but he lives in CST so I'm guessing he didn't think it was fair to run for the door just yet.

I called Elizabeth and we talked for an hour. 

I named the project Fluffy. Fluffy is a two ton bus with a great deal of very dirty, greasy fur. Fluffy slobbers and thinks it's a lap bus. It likes to have its belly rubbed and it needs to be walked about once an hour. It has a hot pink rhinestone collar and a matching leash. It's a very SHORT leash; we need to get Fluffy under control, whatever that looks like. 

There will be a risk review this week. Somehow I'm supposed to have gotten past the fact that I think I'm betraying Mike and Mike is absolutely going to feel betrayed but I'm beyond trying to save anyone at this point.

I have to deal with Fluffy. Mike is holding Fluffy securely in his lap and rubbing Fluffy's greasy belly. I'm not sure Mike has realized the bulk of Fluffy cut off his oxygen supply a couple of weeks ago. Also, Fluffy is now sitting on Mike's team. Fluffy is trying to roll its butt over on me the same way my cat does on the couch but I'm not having any of it. If Fluffy rolls over on me I'll be less than useless.

I have a short triage list for tomorrow morning (in case you were wondering, this is generally, but not always what I mean by triage). I'm just not sure how to order it. If I'd managed to meet with the team at the beginning of the day things might go differently but I'm going to be meeting with the team at the end of the day. Right in the middle of Mike's review with N.

• Get Fluffy's hair balls out of decomm, swab the deck
• Put ECR in a box and prepare to pack her up - automate Brian's bug report
• Write every single story for Sprint 32 with full velocity and prepare to submit on Tuesday
• Start sprint 8 for Collibra - Fluffy proof it
• Backlog the Collibra project plan out through June - Fluffy proof it
• Backlog Robin's project plan out through April - identify possible signs of Fluffy egress
• Check Mike's calendar for any signs of meetings I should attend
• Get template from Elizabeth and prepare the risk assessment on all three projects

That's not a very short list is it? Maybe some hair clippers?

Digital Memory

We post the photographs of our children year after year, in albums or loose in the stratosphere of our mobile uploads, adding to the communal petabytes (quadrillion bytes, or 1 billiard bytes) which feed the estuaries and streams splashing into datalakes where there is infrastructure or wild, thrashing oceans where there is not.

We accept this new world the same way we accept the vagaries of politics and running of governments as long as we don't lift its underthings. Someone wrote yesterday or the day before that she did not wish to have her DNA tested because she did not wish to be tracked by the government. It is Black History Month and now is the time, if there ever is going to be a time, to have a good hard look at our bloodlines. She is fearful of what the government might know or do with this information. She is not a white woman afraid of being black, she is just a human being who still believes she might be invisible. We gave up our rights to privacy long before the Patriot Act sixteen years ago and with the Patriot Act already firmly in place we continue to develop, adopt, and embrace the use of technology which has created that wild, thrashing ocean at an alarming rate. 

I am not so much alarmed at the rate at which we feed the ocean of data as I am alarmed at our unwillingness to be accountable for our choices. 

E-ZPass was conceived in 1980, implemented in 1987, and reached critical mass in the tri-state area, or close enough in the mid to late 90s that they started deliberately slowing the cash lanes (no joke) in an effort to force daily commuters to assimilate. In Stamford, CT, the Hyperion Software building was just off exit 34, an acceptable commute out of Brooklyn or Queens by car and completely reasonable out of Manhattan by train. The problem with Brooklyn and Queens was the bridge. I came out of Queens between January 19, 1997 and sometime in April and despite the reverse commute, I had a plastic box slapped on my windshield as fast as I could get it in the mail. Later, I had a co-worker from Mamaroneck with a girlfriend in Brooklyn who would not, under any circumstances put that tag on his car and thus began the first widespread philosophical conversations about consciously giving up privacy.

FaceBook was another big thing. What do you post, what do you not post? Who owns the data that you personally send into the void? Do you own it? Technically I suppose you do. Did you copyright it? That might help. Do you have control over it? Absolutely not. That we believe we have any right to anything we post ever again is astonishing. Once posted, consider it gone. The privacy wars began, the petitions, and posts, and untruths and half-truths and the outrage. The belief that this free platform owes any of us anything at all, much less privacy, is actually, well, funny. 

This blog site. I pay $89 a year for it. Not so much if you think about it. In eleven years I've paid $979 (assuming it didn't start slightly lower and it might have, but not much) to support the equivalent of an online journal. It's not a bad deal. I can export the content but only in a format that will go to another blog site. Technically I could reformat it to another platform; it's not that mangled, and so in theory I do have rights to it. It is password protected. People should not be able to break in and mess with my stuff. I can post and un-post, I can delete. What I can't do is retrieve anything that has gone out on an rss feed. That is gone forever. Privacy? Not really. I have to write with the assumption that what I post is on the front page of the New York Times, has been delivered in a letter to every family member and close friend I've ever had and been sent to all past, present, and future employers. I walk the line, no doubt. But I do think about it when I write. 

For the record, I do not think about stalkers. I don't publish my address and I don't outright mention direct names and locations all that often but quite honestly I'm putting myself more at risk by posting on FaceBook than I am out here. Number of friends to the nth power. People copy and paste information and share all the time. I consider this with every single post. There is no such thing as privacy. 

This is a brief list to consider:

• Medical records
• School transcripts
• School history (anything in addition to your GPA and there's LOTS)
• Any sealed juvenile offense
• Traffic violations
• Cell phone data - what is on your smart phone?
  • GPS - every step you take
  • Who are you with - stalk my friends
  • Where do I like to go - check me in
  • What am I buying, spending habits, what, where, time, how much, with whom, multiple apps are providing this information
  • complete email history
  • complete call log
  • complete text log
  • Snap Chat! (add the rest)
  • Instagram (oh my god)
• Banking information
• Credit history back to the beginning of time
• Tax returns
• Salary history (outside of your tax returns)
• Browser search history (holy shit)

That's just the obvious stuff I think about without thinking about it. If I looked at the apps on my phone I'd probably come up with six or seven more because to be honest, I do live and die by my smart phone and when it malfunctions I am more or less fucked except I've learned to carry some crucial information on paper and I do not rely on electronic payment methods outside of banking and I expect I could still walk into a BOA and get help if I needed to (otherwise 95% of banking transactions now occur on my phone - the other 5% occur in front of my MAC). 

The only person I have ever met who truly seemed to understand the implications of the digital world was responsible for data security at the last big company where I held a legitimate W2. He was thirty-five years old and had attended a few college classes before boredom knocked him senseless and he went to work as the apprentice to the then resident genius of what this current company used to be - which was pretty damn big and kinda scary (it's gone now but you can think about Tonawanda and the rest will come to you).  As the current resident genius of what that company became, I'd gone looking for him on LinkedIn and couldn't find him. 

Dude! Where are you?

I don't have a LinkedIn account.

Um, everybody has a LinkedIn account. Unless you intend to be here for the rest of your life, you also need to have a LinkedIn account.

Do you know what I know about data privacy?

I have some ideas, yes.

Then you might understand why I don't have a LinkedIn account.

Dude. I'm not talking about FaceBook. I'm talking about your name and your employment credentials which is how we get jobs.

I don't need a job.

Um hum. What you might need to do is network before you need a job. That's a thing. Just sayin'. 

(laughing) Remember the rolodex? 

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I just threw mine out a couple of years ago.

Did you go through it first and make sure you didn't actually need any of it?

Yes I did, every single contact.

I have a rolodex.

No shit. Where'd you get it?

I've had it since high school.

what about your phone?

This? It's my work phone. 

Where do you keep your music? (prepared for CDs and a CD player).

On my phone.

Which phone.

My work phone.

What if you lose your work phone because you don't work here anymore?

Then I lose my music.

Do you have a library?

Nope. 

Well you can get one.

Nope.

There's still a digital footprint associated with your buying that music.

Nope.

Do I want to know?

Nope.

Banking?

Yup.

Monosyllables? 

Yup.

You do keep your money in a bank, not in mason jars in the back yard, right?

Yes, Alecto, my wife and I have a checking and savings account and I have a 401k as well as other investments. I am not a complete lunatic, just mostly. I have my paychecks direct deposited just like other people and I pay all of my bills online, just like most people. Everything else is cash. 

Of course it is. No E-ZPass, right?

Actually, I do have E-ZPass, I just don't always use it.

He does have a digital footprint. He knows he has a digital footprint, he just wants to be at choice. A few weeks after I left I received a LinkedIn request. There he was. I sent him a message asking what the hell happened.

I didn't know how else to reach you. 

When he and his wife finally had a baby (when it takes some effort it takes a toll) that is how I found out, through LinkedIn. Just two sentences:

It's a girl. Thank you for being so supportive. 

I don't think about these things. I just know them. When I post a photograph of Elizabeth every year in front of the rock they go in an album and I flip through each photograph, k-12 now and look at this time capsule and I'm grateful for it. I think in retrospect I should have had a secondary album where I put photographs part way through the year, maybe in December, April, and June because the jump from September to September is always so stark. I got a real shock this morning though. I looked at it last night but I was tired and the truth of it didn't really sink in. 

I have photographs of Elizabeth with her friends, some of them going back to a Kindergarten birthday party but that batch of friends has turned over entirely and I can only go back as far as fourth grade with two of the girls in this circle but that's really far enough to watch time pass. I don't seem to have a series of every year in the same place. The closest I have is a few years of birthdays in the house but there are some gaps and that's OK, I just can't flip through them the same way and I don't know that I even have a sequence of two. I never gave it thought. 

Now I have a sequence of two and the difference is as stark as the September to September photographs but we don't think about this sort of thing in high school. I have a February 2017 shot in one location and a February 2018 in exactly the same place except they are more relaxed and they aren't willing to be told how to stand together. 

And they have changed in so many ways. T has grown up. Elizabeth has also but the difference in T is remarkable. 

What strikes me is this: we do not expect our children, for the most part, to hang onto each other year over year. We don't expect them to make a commitment, whether agreed upon directly or simply implied that will take them through conflict, difficult decisions, confusion, the need to develop a new sort of language specifically for sorting your way through relationships, and maybe most importantly to navigate the waters of something called the balance of power.

I had a fairly lengthy PM conversation with an old friend from the Contra world up North who wrote rather frankly on a subject I would not have brought up under any circumstances with anyone from the Pioneer Valley. I was immediately so uncomfortable that I nearly shutdown and walked away. This, I am thinking, is not my world and it is the very last place I will every speak of Portnoy or Portnoy's marriage. It is not only none of my business but this is New England and we are very tight lipped about our communities and no matter how we might feel, we don't talk about it with an outsider and let's face it, I don't live there and I never did. 

He did not write with bitterness, anger, and he isn't a gossip and he was careful at first because he wasn't sure what he might step on but he thought I might have some thoughts on the subject which might shed some light on something that was bugging the shit out of him. I don't even know that I was necessarily hearing judgement and with men of a certain age, just like women, we are all immediately suspect of sour grapes and summarily silenced if we have anything to say that might indicate, well, judgement.

He wanted to know why and he wanted to tell someone some things without being accused of whatever, I guess. It took a while for the objection to the marriage to come forward because I wasn't objecting, at least not on moral or ethical grounds. I hold women responsible for their own choices and while I do acknowledge what my step-mother points out in the case of the Lewinsky debacle, despite his position of power, she did have a choice. And also, yes, what he did WAS morally and ethically wrong and not because he was married, because he was in a position of power and she was not.  

And here we are. How he asks me, can there possibly be a balance of power in that relationship? There it is. There cannot, I tell him. There cannot possibly be a balance of power. She asked him to marry her, he tells me. Well, that's twice now, I tell him. Maybe she does not want a balance of power. Maybe neither of them really want a balance of power. Maybe they think they do but in reality they do not. 

His argument is that this is morally and ethically wrong on Portnoy's part. I can't really argue with it but I still hold her accountable for her choices and note that she can get herself out anytime she wants. He tells me I know perfectly well that may not be even remotely true. I know this may be an accurate assessment but I don't know her. I still hold her accountable for her choices but I think about the asking and that twice he has not had to be accountable for the act; he has only done the agreeing and again, it is not on him. 

When do we learn about the balance of power? When do we have to learn in order to move forward in our lives as whole, responsible adults? There has been no balance of power in any of my relationships. There has been struggle and in one case a near fight to the death. In my second marriage there was a clear abdication of power. I would eventually have buckled under that weight I think. I did not understand how to successfully negotiate or that negotiation even needed to occur. 

I do know because I'm watching and listening to these kids listen and speak to each other. What does she need? What does he need? How much does he need to shift in order to give her what she needs? At what point does he have to say, enough! and in what tone will it work? What does he need? How carefully does she need to measure her words? At what point is an apology necessary versus looking him in the eye and saying, no, I don't think so until they come to an agreement? 

She weeps with her head in my lap when they fight and says, this is the first big fight we've had and I tell her, no, sweetie, what about... and she says, oh, OK, that worked out just fine. I forgot. Yes, you forgot because you didn't hang on to it. Then she gets up and calls him and two minutes later.... Mom, is it ok if T comes over. Of course it is and they are glued together like limpets for a few hours having worked through what wasn't working but what I notice is...

They do not hang onto it.

It takes a while to stop doing something that makes another person unhappy.

A little bit at a time she gets better at measuring her words before she speaks. He always, she says, he always thinks very hard before he speaks and I just blurt and he's so sensitive. I'm getting better.

A little bit at a time he gets better at pulling himself out of his dark places because her patience really does have limits and he's starting to recognize the boundaries. 

A little bit at a time she recognizes that if she's completely buried in her stuff she will not see his and that all of us have only so much bandwidth. 

A little bit at a time he recognizes that some of her fears are well grounded and bear looking at. Telling her there's nothing to worry about isn't helpful. She feels invisible and stops talking because she doesn't know what else to do. 

A little bit a time she realizes she has to continue to speak or she will never be heard even if the risk is tremendous. 

All that out of digital memories. I'm looking at the intimacy that has developed in the twelve months I was only half paying attention to. 

A year ago she asked me, could this last?

What could I say to that sixteen year old girl? No, child, it cannot last and it should not last. You are in high school and these things aren't meant to last. I give it four to eight months before you either get tired of each other or one of you has a broken heart. I'm supposed to tell her that? Instead I tell her that and a little more. I tell her, it could last a while and play itself out and you could just get tired of each other and walk away. It could last a while or a long time and somebody could end up with a broken heart but that's what we risk when we do this. And also it could last but thing thing about last is what does that really mean? Do you need to put a definition on that right now? I tell her, I really don't know, Elizabeth. Anything could happen. What about you just don't worry too much about it? 

In the middle of it the conversation with T's mom about it going on too long and college and choices made for the wrong reasons and focus and me saying, you know what you have to do? You have to sit with your hands in your lap and say nothing. No. Thing. Nothing. 

In the middle of it the conversations with Elizabeth about relationships and compromise and hard decisions and fidelity and what that really LOOKS like. What is cheating mom? Where is the line? The line is anything you do or say that compromises the intimacy you already have in your relationship. So if I have feelings for A when I talk to him and that compromises how I am with T then that's cheating, isn't it? In a way, yes it is. You are giving part of yourself to someone else. How would you feel if T was doing that? AWFUL! Well then that's your answer, isn't it?

Mom, is it wrong to have feelings for someone else? Does it mean something is wrong? No. This will happen your entire life depending on what is happening in your life. The question is what you do with it. It should not be the basis for ending a relationship and you should never break up with someone and jump right into a relationship with someone else for a lot of reasons. If you are through with your current relationship you should be clear about why and end it and then you should wait a while until you have clearly moved on. If you don't, you will carry all those feelings with you into the next. 

Really?

Yes, trust me, REALLY. 

Mom, I don't think I can be friends with A anymore. 

OK.

This is really hard.

I know. 

It's hurting T.

I know.

I need to make a phone call.

I know. 

Elizabeth. Do you want to be with A? 

No, Mom, I do not. I would be sick of him in three weeks. I'm attracted to him and it's stupid. I don't want to lose T and I just don't know how to cope with this stuff yet. When I think about losing T, I cry. When I think about hurting T, I cry. 

Mom, could this last?

I don't know. Could it?

(I'm sitting here with my hands in my lap saying, shut the fuck up, Alecto, shut up, shut up, shut up) 

Digital memories. Without them would I see quite so much? Would I remember?

Facebook gives us the option to filter out certain memories we don't want to pop up in the 'on this day' feed. You can filter on people and dates. If I don't want Portnoy to pop up at all I have to filter on his name and then on any date we might have posted an event. I can't clear everything but I can clear most of it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don't suppose it's any different than getting rid of my last wedding album and any other photographic evidence of my third marriage (I'm not really sure where it all went I just know I did it) other than it saves me from having to delete it. 

What my heart aches to tell you

From the post, Powerful Photos: Moms see their babies for the very first time - if you have a minute, go on over there and take a look at the rest of these. I really think you should. When I went looking for a photograph I found smiling, happy, perfect moms and babies; cleaned up, sparkling, upper middle class, expertly photographed, blissful mothers and their infants and sometimes if the moment was right the father might be in there too. Even when I typed the word newborn it was all so squeaky clean and well lit and beautiful with perfect hair and makeup by Annabelle LaGuardia. I knew this would happen. It's what we're willing to show, not necessarily what we want to see. Don't judge us so harshly so fast. 

I typed the words home and birth and hit enter again and got a whole other selection. You want vulnerability and willingness? Try that. 

What kills me about this photograph is the father. The birth of his child, who happens to be his third, by the way after fifty hours of labor and if you want the scary scary brave details go read it, the birth of his child is just too much to bear. 

I wonder if that child will ever have the capacity to understand the depth of his father's love. This photograph will help but it won't explain everything. I understand. I've been there three times and I've seen two men entirely undone by something I still have no real explanation for. 

Why do we love?

That's not even a question worth asking, I don't think, at least not about our children. I'm willing to continue beating the dead horse of adult attraction, lust, love, and commitment because I'd still like to believe I have some sort of choice in the outcome, but I'm willing to accept what occurs at the moment of birth at face value. I'm also willing to accept the tragedy of circumstances that turn off the switch or muffle the connection as truth and willing to accept the theory that some of us are hardwired without the switch, but that's something else entirely. 

How do I tell you the way in which I love you? How do I show you the depths of my heart?

When I was growing up, almost as far back as I can remember, when my parents were frustrated they would tell me:

Just wait until you have children!

Or:

I can't wait until you have children, then I'll get even!

Or:

When you have children, I hope they're ten times worse because you deserve it!

I was thinking last night about my son and this thing that is broken between us that I've never managed to repair because I can't find a way in. I imagine Mike like a shell you could pick up and shake and when you did you would hear all the broken pieces rattling around in there and then I think of the last time I saw him cry with the blanket I knit him draped over his shoulders and his life coming undone because he couldn't seem to make different choices and if I were then who I am today the way choices I made then would be different. Can you see the parallel path? I find myself reaching back ten years trying to put my arms back around that boy and pull him close so he'll know, as if that might save him. Or something.

One of the hard and fast promises I made myself before I left home just past my eighteenth birthday was that I would never, under any circumstances say those things to my children. Ever. I would never say, just wait until you have children...

Because every time I heard that, any variation of it, a part of me died. 

However, sometime in the morning of November 10, 1986 in a hospital bed in Norwalk, CT I held my warm, sleepy seven pound boy in my arms and pressed my face into the top of his head.

The four major hormonal systems active during labor and birth are oxytocin, endorphins, adrenaline and noradrenaline, and prolactin. Between them they are the hormones of love, pleasure, transcendence, excitement, and the last is called the mothering hormone. This stuff doesn't just rush right out of the system; it hangs around a bit. Some of it sticks with you until your milk dries up. I wonder if prolactin levels don't stay up higher in some than others. 

That said, I had a rush of emotion accompanied by a revelation I've carried with me for over thirty-one years which has gotten me through some very hard times. I tried to explain it to my parents but for some reason I couldn't make them hear it or if they heard it I couldn't see that it landed. I found a book of poetry that described exactly what I felt. I bought copies for everyone in my family. Only my husband seemed to understand. In the end I gave up and saved one for my son. Eventually I forgot and the book probably got tossed. 

The revelation was about exactly how much my parents loved me. Not just the how much of it but the how and the what and the why of it. 

And I looked at my boy and thought

God, I hope you have children. I hope you have children because how the hell are you ever going to know how much I love you? How will you know that you've broken me? How will you know the ways in which you've changed me? How will you ever understand the lengths that I will go for you? That I would die for you, give up everything for you, be crushed for you...

All those hormones but the truth of it remains. 

Nine days later in a parking lot outside the local grocery store I held him in a front pack just outside my car. I looked down at the top of his head and cried. I stood crying until an old man asked if I was alright and suggested I put the baby in the car, it being cold and the baby being so small. I cried and cried and cried and said

I have no idea how I'm possibly going to keep him safe in the world. I don't know how to do it. 

I was twenty-two and it was the tail end of 1986.

The old man patted my arm and said I'd do just fine as long as I kept him warm and dry and then he walked off toward his car.

I looked down at Mike and was startled by the realization that kill for him. With my bare hands if that's what it came to. I felt fierce and powerful and put him in the car and drove home. 

The Ethics of Having Children in the New Millennium 

Now it is January, 2018 and there are many reasonable suggestions that the generation which has come of age and the trailing generation not have children or reproduce with a great deal of thought. I drove my father to distraction on Christmas Eve when I made a contextual statement he heard, and held onto, quite literally.

I invite this generation of women to choose not to have babies. (or something close enough to that) Contextually I was speaking to women putting themselves in bondage in response to my son's distress at the men of his own generation having not come particularly far in terms of how they thought of women overall. The man sitting next to him at a bar, in earnest tells Mike that he does not believe women have what it takes to lead and something about staying home and having babies. The man is probably younger than Mike and we can't really make excuses for the guy being raised that way because that is, after all, how it's propagated and who will stop the propagation? Certainly not the men and boys, not because it serves them so much but because there isn't much motivation to put up a fight and plenty of motivation to avoid it. Nobody likes being told what he's just said or done is offensive and most, no matter how well intentioned will at least start out with a good defense.

Can we really expect the men and boys who have been raised by mothers who have either truly believed the same, or not managed to stand up, to be the ones to break the cycle? That's delusional.

(um, don't for a minute think I'm letting anyone off the hook, wait for it)

I told my son that I was pretty sure it was on women, after all, to break out of our own bondage and that what mostly held us there was the vulnerability of pregnancy, childbirth, and the early years of motherhood. After that it's subjective. Stockholm syndrome sets in I guess. I stopped rewriting women's resumes a few years back because it was too damn depressing, like dragging a horse to water or worse, a completely freaked out horse out of a barn fire. All this education and early work history followed by a good chunk of years out of the workforce having failed to do what SAHD's do which is maintain the network but still, the past hasn't vanished. Skill sets are still marketable, you just have to believe these things and be able to see past a solid line. I know, I'm asking a lot but maybe not so much. In any event, I'm not going to stop asking it, I just can't bring myself to rewrite a resume for a woman who has no intention of going back to work. The reasons why not are astonishing. The would be male captors have long since walked away and she's sitting there wrapped up in her chains the way Sisyphus continued to push that damn rock long after Lucifer opened the gates of hell after he lost the bet with Morpheus. Except he didn't really lose the bet. Morpheus lost the bet; Sisyphus wanted that rock. 

I invite women to cross their legs, focus on their own futures and see what shakes out in ten or fifteen years.

It's OK. The world won't stop turning and the human race will not become extinct. The problem is that hormone cocktail I mentioned a couple hundred paragraphs above:

"The four major hormonal systems active during labor and birth are oxytocin, endorphins, adrenaline and noradrenaline, and prolactin. Between them they are the hormones of love, pleasure, transcendence, excitement, and the last is called the mothering hormone."

Do you suppose those hormones only kick in when that bloody winner in the sperm war reaches the egg? I think not. As a species, as any species, life will find a way. Problematically speaking, as with the over population of deer in the 2200 acres behind my house, when you're at the top of the food chain (which means you don't have a predator at the moment and nothing else) you keep right on breeding until your ecosystem gives out. This would suggest that we don't have a choice.

But we do.

Having smacked down the Catholic Church a good number of global citizens have managed to go from having eleven to seventeen (I pulled those numbers out of my ass) to zero to five children. Birth control. It's a choice (at the moment, old white men, hmmm). 

I don't mean to suggest the choice is easy or that it can be made without effort; I mean to suggest that it can be made. 

So there's that. 

There's a whole other philosophical discussion that could take place, discussions that have and are taking place on what would or could happen if women stopped having babies or even if enough of us just had them on our own. Just the one and moved on. It's the same old Lysistrata story Aristophanes told us in 411 BC except it's not really a comedy and it can be about stopping anything; war, bondage, world hunger, climate change (oops, too late), the destruction of our ecosystem (um, might be too late, there's strong argument that it's way too late), a collapsing economy..., pick one. The women Greece withheld sex and that in itself is telling, that this is what Aristophanes decided was most valuable or that this was funny; I'm not really sure which. Maybe both. Even today that particular comedy is timely. It has aged quite well; we still think of female value in terms of sexuality and we still find it funny that women would try or men would fall for it. It was never about sex. I don't think it was really a comedy (were they ever?). We laugh when we're frightened. I do wonder about those Greek women in 411 BC. 

There's this other thing which can be extrapolated from the last conversation or you can just look out the window or google some statistics. The world population, you all know this, has grown exponentially since the Industrial Revolution. The fertility rates have also dropped in key areas but that doesn't mean growth has stopped, it hasn't, it's just moved from one geographic region to another. Our children really have stopped having babies. Not entirely but it is slowing down. Some of them have stopped because they simply can't afford it and while that might not have stopped my generation (it did not), it is slowing down the generation(s) of my children. They do not want the debt of their parents and they do not necessarily believe it is morally or ethically reasonable to bring children into the world in its current state.

This affects me directly both financially and emotionally. I can live with both one way or another but it's the part about the ache in my heart that keeps me up at night. 

I don't directly feel the need for grandchildren. I don't feel it at all, actually. I have no feelings in one direction or another. I wonder about these parents who do. Am I missing something? Am I hormonally deficient? Do I have to go all the way through menopause before something kicks in or am I just one of those human beings who's managed to break the bonds? Maybe.

I do want something though and I want it very badly. Scroll all the way up to the top and look at that man's face or at least as much of it as you can see. Look at his body language. If you go to the site you'll see similar shots of mothers with hearts breaking open for the first time since they passed through the age of discovery and the walls started to come down. 

I have loved men with an intensity I thought might shatter me but I have never loved another human being the way I love my children. 

I want them to know this thing that transcends language. I want them to understand the depth of my love because don't we all deserve to feel what it is to stand in the light of God? 

There is a reason we call birth a miracle and I don't think it has as much to do with the mechanics of it as what happens in those first few seconds...

This is the root of my grief. 

What number forty-five said and what the kid from Asheville got caught doing

"I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it, you can do anything... grab them by the pussy."

Anyone could have said that, really. Any number of men I know personally would absolutely have said it, would say it today given the opportunity, even the men squirming in their seats wanting to believe differently of themselves. 

More than half the battle would be getting past our self-righteous superiority and looking that deeply ingrained societal norm in the face; eyeball to eyeball, parsing the hand me down belief in the entitlement of dominance and aggression from the hardwired old brain need to corner and fuck anything that moves if it looks, smells, and sounds like breeding stock. 

We would all have to do this, maybe women more so than men. That's a hard one to swallow, don't you think? The first place women go, men too, I think, is, this:

In all caps

DON'T YOU DARE BLAME THIS ON ME. DON'T BLAME THE VICTIM. DON'T MAKE THIS MY FAULT. NONE OF THIS IS MY DOING. DON'T SLUT SHAME ME. I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT. MEN HAVE TO CONTROL THEMSELVES. 

That's not what I'm talking about, at least mostly. We're all defensive though. Me too. I can feel it. I can feel the need to pummel men into the ground at this point in my life because my tolerance is just shot to hell and that makes it hard to hear so this thing I find myself saying to my youngest daughter bounces around in my brain with its own tagline:

You can only control your own actions and reactions. Do your best to put your stuff over to one side and listen so you can hear. It doesn't make anybody right or wrong but you might find it helpful to hear. Also, people need to be heard and if you want a snowball's chance in hell of being heard yourself, be the first one to listen and you might be listened to in return. You might not but then again you might. 

This part:

Do your best to put your stuff over to one side and listen so you can hear. 

Tagline for me:

Because you can't make any sense of what's actually happening if you don't. 

I get in a lot of trouble for this sometimes. Feminists have tried to string me up for some of the things I've suggested and male feminists (they're called allies but the ones calling themselves feminists tend to be rabid) would toss me in front of a train for some of the stuff that's come out of my mouth in the interest of stepping back a bit and having another look at it. I'm OK with that. Some of my sisters have gone so far left they've come around the other side (sound familiar?) and that's understandable. When you experience yourself as being nearly or completely powerless you tend to submit entirely or go entirely apeshit. It's taken me a while to understand how some of my sisters came to experience themselves as being nearly or completely powerless because they surely did not look the least bit powerless and that's a complicated explanation but it does come back around to two things:

1. The belief that we are powerless which has it's roots wrapped up in childbirth and childrearing as an all consuming function
2. This belief being fully supported by both genders culturally all the while yelling and screaming about women's rights from the perspective of someone who hasn't got any - or more accurately from the perspective of someone who hasn't got any power.

My father's wife about women in general and I'm paraphrasing:

S:    'Well then she'd better get herself employed, hadn't she?'

Me:    I would imagine so

S:    What's taking so long?

Me:    Women who quit working and stay home with their kids stop being employable 

S:    How does that work?

Me:    It's a generally believed fact

S:    That's bullshit

Me:    Agreed. I've rewritten a bunch of resumes around here for VERY well educated women with fairly extensive work histories prior to childbirth and they don't believe they are marketable. I'm sort of stunned.

S:    That's amazing

Me:    Agreed. I'm starting to think they don't want to work

S:    Why not?

Me:    Not a clue. I don't think it's about not wanting to work. I think it's about being lost and so much more.

S:    That's not really relevant. Do you know what's relevant? What's relevant is putting a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food in your stomach. That is what is relevant.

Me:    I know. 

S:    Do they know.

Me:    No. They don't. That's the thing. They think they're powerless with these massive degrees and amazing pre-baby jobs they think they're good for childcare and the management of household staff. That pays $10 an hour at best. 

S:    LOTS of people survive on $10 an hour. They survive very, very badly but they survive better than on nothing at all. Tell her to get a god damn job. Doesn't she understand that she has to take care of herself?

Me:    Nope. And there is the root of one particular problem. 

Back to what forty-five said and the kid from Asheville. I want to eliminate the conversation about the biological imperative first because it's bullshit. I realize it's there and it's there for both genders but there's this thing called self-moderation. I don't think I have that quite right. There's a kindergarten teacher from NYC who knocked the greater NYC contra dances on their collective heads when it came to general behavior on the dance floor. I'm pretty sure if that's not the phrase she used it's close. She was talking about men who said they had no control of their physical responses on the dance floor, most often Blues, and an uninvited, unwanted erection couldn't be helped. She looks so benign. Just like a kindergarten teacher should look. Young, fresh out of school, smallish stature, welcoming smile, that sort of thing, right up until you look or sound like you've either crossed a line or simply don't recognize a social boundary or what really needs to be a social boundary and this girl will get up in your shit so fast you'll have a small brain bleed before new words are halfway up your throat. 

You do get an explanation. Gently. One or two, actually. You get a time out and then you find yourself on the street. The dance changed. In Brooklyn in seemed to change overnight. Brooklyn is a young dance. Most of the dancers appear to be under forty, maybe even under thirty-five, but not all of them. In the Village it's a little harder because the old guard is still there and they do NOT want to let go of the social mores the, let's face it, define who they are. I'm talking about both genders. She did her work there as well and then moved south leaving another powerhouse in her wake and change is inevitable at that dance even if it means waiting until the last of the older dancers age out entirely. That's not so for a lot of the dances across the country because young dancers come in and either behave badly or leave and never come back. 

Women. We do this thing. It falls into the category my mother calls the lobotomy that occurs in the nursery. We put our power on a plate, in a pretty package with a bow, in our hands, in whatever way and hand it up to men from a kneeling position. This makes us feel good. We want this. Most of us don't even know we're doing it. We do it on the dance floor. We do it if we are in partnership with other women as well; I've watched it, I've done it. We ask to be sublimated and then, when we're deep in it, powerless and angry we lash out, victimized and wondering what the hell happened.

We own this shit.

You can only control your own actions and reactions.

Don't feed the animals, Princepessa.

Or, if you're going to feed the animals, either a) don't get all huffy when you get yourself cornered or b) leave when it gets tiresome. Find a way out. Seriously.  

S:    'Well then she'd better get herself employed, hadn't she?'

Employment ain't the half of it but it's a start. I'm sifting through a great, messy tangle of root causes, that's all I'm doing and I'm inviting you to sift with me from a woman's powerful perspective and as a man or a subjugating female I invite you to sit quietly.

You're wondering how the hell I'm going to tie this in with what forty-five said and that kid from Asheville did, aren't you? Maybe not. Maybe you've made that leap. It's not over a great chasm or anything.

Nobody needs me to explain forty-five or Mr. Cosby or Al Franken or that ridiculous man from New York who couldn't seem to stop photographing his penis, Weiner, of course. And Mittens from the Republican debacle before last. Not Romney, I'm talking about Herman Cain. I call him Mittens and literally NO ONE knows what the hell I'm talking about. Why did Mr. Cain finally, after every ridiculous mis-step finally drop out of the race? After every stupid thing the man did (and by stupid I am recalling the use of barely concealed racial slurs directed toward his own culture in conjunction with a particular style of antiquated localized colloquialisms used when speaking to a culture who wouldn't have accepted him had he thrown himself prostate on the great front lawn), even in the face of the lowest of low stats in the polls, what finally pulled him out on December 3, 2011 was sexual impropriety. A shitload of it. He was called Mittens in the press for all of there days and I laughed so hard I nearly drove off the road and then we promptly forgot about him. And it. We forgot about it. Mittens became synonymous with Romney and I was and am astonished. He was forgiven. Mr. Romney did not require forgiveness. Not really. He was the right color with the right name and the right amount of money and the right wife and in the end that was enough. Classic Old White Man in the making. OF COURSE HE COULD REACH RIGHT OUT AND GRAB THAT PUSSY or beat the shit out of that kid or whatever else he did or might do or is still doing. Because he can. 

And we forgive it. We understand it. We accept it. We expect it the same way we expect our government to be just as corrupt as it needs to be to keep us safe, fed, and living the life we feel entitled to be living as the Greatest Country in the World. Don't EVEN get me started. We only get upset when people make the mistake of getting caught and we have to look at this shit. But now? Now that this shit is so egregiously out there, he said it, right? He said it and we STILL elected him, all bets are off. Now we just close our eyes and like small children we close our eyes and say...

you can't see me...

And hope to live through it hating the resistance because they just will not let us go back to sleep. Bastards.

And Fuck the people, women and men, who look at the nature of women and men and question ALL of it because this is some scary shit and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. We can chip away at it and we do chip away at it, thank you very much, Miss R formerly of NYC and now some scary hood outside DC, but it comes back in waves when we close our eyes because I think that kid in Asheville isn't even thirty and my friend, the guy I met up with a few Saturday's back, while he might just have turned fifty, he is raising his sixteen year old daughter and thirteen year old son to believe all of the above. I remember this girl in her cheerleader uniform holding up a very large sign for Trump during the last election with a smile the size of Texas plastered on her face and a look of aggression behind that smile that pretty much summed up every blasted woman who stood behind the man and said never mind about

"I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it, you can do anything... grab them by the pussy."

My friend who at my second wedding announced the newly married couple into the room as Alecto Ophelia and Pat E's Dad instead of Mr and Mrs Pat E's Dad and has not gotten over it yet and that was eighteen years ago. 

How do you say: Listen, John, if I become Alecto Pat E's Dad and I stop being Alecto Ophelia, what has happened to me? Where do I go? I've cut off half of my self. What would happen if I asked Pat to become Pat Ophelia? He would have a far prettier name, that's for sure but he would no longer be Pat E's Dad. That would be freaking tragic. John is so far beyond hearing that, there's really no point. 

How do I say to my daughter, Lucia, why would you give up your last name when her response is, I'm not really all that attached to it anyway. I wept. 

Elizabeth: SMH

Me:    SMH?

Elizabeth:    You did the best you could.

Me:    What do I do now?

Elizabeth:    Nothing. You can't do anything, Mom. We all make our choices and you don't get to make the choices for a twenty-six year old woman any more than a man gets to make her choices.

Me:    Oh. Got it.

Later Lucia said she'd changed her mind because he wasn't really that attached to having her take his name. I wept. I wasn't sure for what. 

So there really isn't any difference between forty-five and that kid in Asheville. No difference at all. Except forty-five came right out and said it after he was caught and the kid from Asheville left the dance and wrote a significant and very public apology. That's the difference in the amount of power forty-five has although the kid has a fair amount of his own or he'd be in jail right about now. Hell, he'd have been in jail quite a while ago. Statutory rape can be a really big deal depending on the location and the circumstances and given what I'm reading on the subject I'm thinking when this was happening he'd have had his head handed to him. Except he's the kid from Asheville and he's an icon and by icon I mean Icon. The thing about being an Icon is everyone sees you, everything you do, it's right out there in the open, at least a good bit of it and what's not in the open, come on, do the damn math. Girls and women line up for this shit because this is what we do.

OK - here's where you burn me at the stake. I'll wait. Go ahead. Take your time.

Done? OK, now let's think about this. I'm not victimizing anyone. I'm looking at our culpability as a culture. We do line up for this shit. I have lined up for this shit and I have been victimized for it. I don't feel victimized but if I step back and look at it, well you tell me:

When I was sixteen years old I got into a Cessna 182 one night with a thirty-two year old man, he was a freaking GOD, and let him have at it. 

My choice. I was exactly where I wanted to be. There's even a really intense post out there about this. This man informed my sexual expectations for the next thirty years. At least. 

The age of consent in this state is eighteen with some exceptions having to do with the age of your partner. I thought it was sixteen in 1980 but that doesn't really matter all that much. I'm pretty sure he knew and I'm pretty sure he knew what he was doing was dead wrong. He was doing it anyway. People hated him for it. I remember this. I remember being thoroughly confused but the point is this. What thirty-two year old man in his right mind takes the virginity of a sixteen year old regardless of circumstances in 1980? (not talking about the nineteenth century here) What was he thinking? Had he not been a living, breathing sky-god on that drop zone would he even have considered the act? Don't think so. Given who my father was, given the presence of The Lion (don't want to be messing with The Lion), taking the virginity of this particular sixteen year old was a dicey proposition. Likely to get you possibly dead depending on The Lion's disposition at the time. The only other men stupid enough to have tried would have been the lowest of the low and I never would have gone there. 

My choice. I was exactly where I wanted to be. This man informed...what else did he inform? What would have happened had this not occurred? What choices might have been made differently? I don't know. If I thought about it, probably quite a few but I've never really looked all that hard. Probably should. 

So my point is that we do have to own this. I can't put this on a ten year old, a twelve year old, a... I don't know, when can I ask a woman to have some ownership and accountability? I don't have an answer for that but I do have the answer for her parents and it is at the moment of her birth. At the moment of her birth we are responsible for teaching her that she is accountable for her choices, her life, what happens to her in her life, and for the LOVE OF GOD SHE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HER OWN SURVIVAL and that means keeping a roof over her head, clothing on her back, and food in her belly and if she has children, she is responsible for doing the same for them. 

That doesn't let men off the hook, it just assumes responsibility because we bore them.

Next logical step...Why do they have their father's name? I'm just gonna leave that there.

Back to number forty-five and the kid from Asheville.

People. Why are you surprised about the kid from Asheville? You watched him. I looked at the photographs of he dances from Asheville and thought, oh. Wow. OK. I remember when he closed down a techno dance to anyone over thirty or something like that because they wanted to have a dance and not worry about creepy old men. Really? That's what I thought when I heard about it. Really? The thought of ageism made me sad but the underlying conversation was this: kid from Asheville, whatcha got goin' on behind those closed doors? And... Little Girls...For real? Do you really think you're safe? Do you really think it's the creepy old men that are your biggest problem?

Dancing at GFD there were three instances I recall dancing close in a swing with men/boys/whatever under thirty I'd guess who had clear erections. I had no idea what to do with this. It's just eight beats so you don't have a whole lot of processing time and I remember pushing one of them away and stepping back from another but the first was a shock. He made no eye contact at all, had the most amazing arms and his fingertips extended all the way out lying mine flat and beautiful and my brain just couldn't reconcile what was going on. Later I told Portnoy and there was a dual response I found amusing at first and later just appalling. He was incredulous. Who would possibly have an erection dancing with his fifty year old girlfriend or maybe I was still forty-nine. I wanted to laugh at him but there was no point trying to explain human sexuality. Later when he married a woman, thirty-three years younger I think, when he was sixty, I wanted to ask him, how, how, Portnoy, how could she want you? The dualism would have been lost on him I think. Anyway, going there was sort of pointless. So the second part of the reaction was anger. He wanted to know who they were. I was incredulous. Why would I tell you that? I would tell you that so you could fix it for me? Fix it for me as if I was a possession or child? It's not up to you to fix anything for me and you are angry why, exactly? If I am not angry then why are you angry? I will fix this, thank you very much. If I need to do something about it, I'll do something about it.

Later I realized I really did need to do something about it but this is also indicative of women not realizing that just because they've managed to handle something does not mean they don't need to clean it up for the rest of the community. That wasn't why he wanted to know. He'll tell himself that, but it's not why. If he'd been the least bit compassionate I might have bought that story. 

Creepy old men, not always the problem.

Portnoy had a, I don't know what the hell to call it. Portnoy had a fan base? No, that's not right. Portnoy's friends were primarily young and primarily women. Portnoy had some friends who were woman who were not young but I don't recall Portnoy having any friends who were men his own age. Acquaintances for sure, but not friends. I do recall him trying once but when that got cut off at the knees I don't know he ever tried again. Lots and lots of women in their mid to late twenties. Most of them very beautiful and most of them either looked up to him, loved him, admired him, or just plain liked him. I don't think any of them ever challenged him. The men under thirty did and I think that was problematic. He just did well with that gender and that age group. Did it make him a predator? I really don't think so, at least not in the way I define predator. However, if you told me he was and you gave me evidence, really solid evidence I could see it but it would hurt me very, very badly because then he would truly not be the person I loved at all. The person I loved did not take from people that way but this is how we propagate this shit, do you see it? My unwillingness to believe that my Portnoy could possibly do this thing, and this is real for me, by the way, my unwillingness is most assuredly in the way because I can see myself getting right up in somebody's face to defend the man - out of my own belief of who he is. But he is a high profile, charismatic man with a need to be wanted, admired, and validated. He has all the possibility. Just because I don't think he is, he still happens to sit in the demographic and given his fight against sexual misconduct it's a pretty good place to hide. Again, I really don't think he is but I am taking this somewhere (dude, in the very unlikely event that you're reading this, please don't hear it as anything other than an example of the possibility of a man of a specific demographic in a position of power and a woman who would be wearing blinders - if I'm not willing to throw myself under the bus, I can't very well throw K, Asheville and MJ, now can I?).

We have another dancer, same age group who is, let's face it, hot as hell, incredible dancer, and edgy. Girls like him too. The problem is, he can be scary, abrasive and when the girls get in line for a little bit of what he's got to offer they also get in line to throw him under the bus when he bites back and the guy is suddenly outed and becomes one of the creepy old men statistics. Did he really do what she said he did? Probably. Dude. Do not ask a girl on the dance floor if she wants to go somewhere and fuck. I don't think those were the exact words but close enough. 

Why did he do it? Because at one point in time he could. At one point in time we liked it.

Why did we like it?  OK, here it comes. We own this. 

We own this shit.

You can only control your own actions and reactions.

Don't feed the animals, Princepessa.

"I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it, you can do anything... grab them by the pussy."

Anyone could have said that, really. Any number of men I know personally would absolutely have said it, would say it today given the opportunity, even the men squirming in their seats wanting to believe differently of themselves. 

And any number of women I know personally would absolutely defend it, would defend it today if push came to shove and it was their man or men we were talking about. Even the women squirming in their seats wanting to believe differently of themselves.

I can see my own blinders and they sure aren't pretty. 

Why I absolutely will not dance in the State of Connecticut:

1. Uttered by a woman at my first home dance over and over again (the president, actually):
   
   Stamford: "Aw, he didn't mean it, let's give him another chance" as one more new dancer left the dance in tears never to return believing somehow it was her fault that sociopath grabbed her breast six or seven times during six or seven swings. And I mean GRABBED, not brushed.
   
   
2. When presented with the evidence that a twelve year old established dancer was lifted in an aerial, not like a child, like a young woman (although, does it REALLY FREAKING MATTER, consent is consent) not once but twice in the same dance after having been extremely clear that she did NOT wish to be lifted or touched in that way at all the Board of directors:
   
   Hartford: Banned all children under the age of fourteen. Later the ban was lifted but not until the twelve year old had actually turned fourteen and the twelve year old's response? What? They're going to punish the victim?! Yes. The man handles their sound, is what I'm told and they aren't willing to lose him. 
   
   
3. When presented with the complaint that went through the appropriate (follow the dotted line and we promise you'll be safe)  'proper channels: young female dancer with witnesses, progressive caller (also a witness), dancer organizer, man accused of harassment the dance organizer's response was:
   
   Branford: Led the offensive party to the mother of the young dancer leaving the young dancer ostracized by her own community (this was her home dance) weeping in a corner while the now deeply offended party literally screamed at the mother. When the offended party was through screaming at the mother, the dance organizer explained that they didn't want to lose a new dancer. When the mother and daughter were getting ready to leave, the other adult present got the attention of another committee member and said, if you don't do something now you're going to lose two dancers. A mumbled, I'm sorry this happened to you was as good as it got. The dance organizer never contacted the young dancer or the mother. The progressive caller pursued the issue for over a year.
   
   
4.  At the final dance several years ago in the far outreaches of the state, nothing happened but one thing was finally noticed:
   
   Mystic: Despite every dance in the surrounding states (that I'm aware of) having taken at least the first step toward acknowledging the problem of predatory men at community dances by placing signs either in public locations or at least in the ladies rooms indicating that committee members should be contacted if anything untoward occurred; none of the Connecticut dances had come even close. While committee members meet on Sundays or late on Saturday nights in diners after dances and try to figure out how to attract and maintain new members, younger members, how to keep the dance solvent and alive, the issue of predatory behavior is still off the table.

Number forty-five said it exactly right and the kid from Asheville behaved so egregiously that somebody finally got pissed off enough that she threw him not so much under the bus but to the wolves.

And you know what Asheville did? Not just Asheville but the WOMAN who makes the decisions at Asheville. 

Asheville banned women under the age of consent unless attended by a parent or family member of legal age. 

What The Holy Fuck is even up with that?

One woman questioned this. One woman. She questioned it directly and succinctly and the woman from Asheville shut down the comments. You do know who that one woman was, right? Not me. Don't look at me. 

It was the kindergarten teacher from the hood outside of DC by way of NYC. She just couldn't quite understand how banishing girls under the age of consent was going to do anything other than protect Asheville. She wanted to know what Asheville was going to do to handle the predator problem. Comments down. 

Stamford, Hartford, Branford, Asheville...and every other place that just hasn't been mentioned recently. 

Ladies. It is on us to hold everyone accountable. 

Last thing. Here's what I got in a shitload of trouble for a couple years ago in a post about some sexist motherfucker's post about why women get raped or why they have it coming.

The guy really is disgusting and if I could get away with it and had the opportunity I might be inclined to peel his skin.

What he had to say was this: Ladies, if you don't want to get raped, don't go to frat parties and get drunk.

What the world hears and has every right to beat the shit out of people for is this:

Ladies, if you go to frat parties and get drunk, you got it coming. 

So, that's not true, OK? That's not true at all. This shit happens, somebody needs to go to jail ASAP and colleges and universities need to be turned upside down with their dirty contents dumped out on the sidewalk. 

If you want to walk naked into a drunken frat party you still have the right to not be raped. Right?

So I have to ask you this. Are you going to walk naked into a drunken frat party? Are you fucking stupid? If you get raped you still don't deserve. You don't deserve it at all and you should NEVER be asked what you were wearing because it's not relevant.

However, are you FUCKING STUPID?

Have ya ever heard about a thing called self preservation? Grow some. Until we sort this thing out we need to understand what is dangerous and what is not and we need to teach our daughters. We also need to teach our boys to see it when it's happening for BLOODY WELL STOP IT. 

Here is the example I used to explain my above transgression:

You are a white middle class person in a near to high end vehicle. You are driving through a city late at night and you know the city well. You have a choice. You can go the long way around to where you want to go or you can take a very deadly shortcut. What do you do? OK, so you take the very deadly shortcut because you are a self-righteous fuck and you believe you can go wherever you feel like going or you just don't believe it's that bad or whatever, you make that left turn. 

You get in about three blocks and you're stopped at a light and your friend says, run the light, this doesn't look right and you say, I'm not running the light. The light turns green and you go. You see a bank with an ATM and you pull up. Your friend asks what the hell you're doing and you say you need cash. Your friend stays in the car. In the next three and a half minutes you are robbed and beaten within an inch of your life. Your car is stolen with your friend in it and you're lucky you still have your phone.

The police collect you and take you to the local precinct which is a place you couldn't even begin to imagine and the first thing they ask you is:

What the hell were you thinking?

They ask you that before they even get into the details.

Did you deserve to be robbed and beaten? 

A fairly high percentage of the population is going to tell you yes. They're going to tell you yes for being FUCKING STUPID. I am withholding comment. I'm coming to that.

Here is where I do my deep sighing business, shake my effing head and wonder how many times I have to swear in all caps before people start connecting dots.

Assault is assault is assault. Yup, sexual assault has a special place in hell, no doubt. Brutal rape? I'll put that right up at the top but peeps, we are responsible for keeping ourselves safe. It is never a question of deserving or not deserving no matter how often I might look at some asshat, shake my head and in my very quiet silent voice say: you truly had that coming. But we do not ever say it about sexual assault or assault of any sort on a woman.

But we are responsible for keeping ourselves safe.  

We can't always do that but in a lot of cases we can. Don't go to a frat party and get drunk. Don't do it. Stay sober and stay alive. We're still dealing with the thirteen year old boys being raised by my friend John. They are out there. There's this concept of special nail polish that turns a different color when you put it in your drink if your drink has been tampered with. I don't know if it's real but it should be. All sorts of things like that should be real. We shouldn't need this? Not effing relevant. We also shouldn't need to learn to fight either but we do.

Don't drive into Father Panic Village. Don't go into a Frat party drunk. Don't drive into Fort Apache even in broad daylight. Don't go into that guy's apartment and expect to come out in one piece. Do you know him? No? Then don't do it. Are you armed? OK, go for it. Oh, you're not in a stand your ground state and you don't actually know how to use that weapon? Never mind.

Do not flirt with that guy and then call foul play when he asks if you want to fuck in the middle of a dance. Try speaking to him in a way that makes it clear in no uncertain terms that this shit isn't going to fly ever again under any circumstances. If you want to go to the committee after the fact, that's cool, but please, don't feed the animals if you aren't prepared to smack them down yourselves.

You did not deserve to be asked if you wanted to fuck in the middle of a dance. You did not do anything to cause it. You are simply part of the human race and therefore responsible for making it look the way you'd like it to look.

Help me.  

Our best possible selves

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

 

I wrote this post three times over the course of the weekend. I can't make it work. It wasn't just about Tuesday, December 5 and the calendar either. So what the hell, I'll just post the picture and you can make up whatever you want. Not all days look like this day. 

What I do know is this: How your life is in one place, it is in all places. 

The first three chords

The first three chords said, this isn't a family session. Elizabeth has not unearthed the second or third guitar from her bedroom, there has been none of the usual muttering about that spare envelope of strings I brought you LAST time, Elizabeth and MOTHER! WHERE THE HELL IS THE TUNER?! THIS THING IS A DISASTER. Per usual. I had, however, located the last three packages of stings during the living room excavation earlier that afternoon and left them square in the middle of the large, bare coffee table. Couldn't be missed However, Lucia, fiance, and Elizabeth's dad are still at the table. Elizabeth is on the red couch with T, I can see both of them through either door in the kitchen and the 1000 Watt Smile has been questioning Mike all evening about what he does with his time on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday nights.

The first three chords. 

I put the roasting pan back on the stove top and turned the corner onto the landing at the top of the stairs, melted into the black cabinet with the china and crystal from the matriarchal line having come to me ostensibly beginning with Drucilla Lamb, wife of Jeremiah Robinson buried somewhere in Madison County, MO with his RANK and REV CO on the headstone. Having recently received the names and dates beyond my great grandmother and her aunt, making real what has been put in my hands to guard, augment, and pass on unlocks what you'd expect the ancestors to provide having been finally properly acknowledged.

I am invisible. 

If he sees me he will stop. Or falter. Or finish the song he's started and be done with it. I am the one person in the world he will not play for other than what we do together when we are safe and alone the way we started in my bed all those years ago with the simple American Pie moving onto Warren Zevon when they got bored with that and I did NOT start with the Werewolf song although that was covered eventually. We started with Excitable Boy and then Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and by the time we got to Splendid Isolation the boy was hooked and has remained so to this day. Sometimes he sends his set lists and I see Splendid Isolation followed immediately by Nancy Griffin's It's a Hard life Wherever You Go, because, he tells me, they're already reflecting by the time I'm done with them and then I sucker punch them with Hard Life and I think it's the only way most of them are ever going to be able to hear that. My kid's personal children's crusade. It's about compassion, mom, you have to give a shit about the guy in the white hood too because where the hell do you think he came from? What is the nature of hate? Fear. Where does it come from? How does it stop? And on he goes except I've never heard the man sing because he's not ready to be that vulnerable in front of his momma. What if he should falter? What if he should fail? What if I should think him not quite good enough? 

Sometime between whenever and whenever he moved from Everyday Mike at open mic Wednesdays to Something on Fridays and something else on Sundays and something about a radio show I'm not supposed to know about and not being willing to cross a boundary with my kids, this one most of all I bypass anything that happens to pop up on FaceBook because somebody decided to post him live from whatever studio he happens to be broadcasting from. Whole thing's a mystery and when the 1000 Watt Smile asked him if he got paid after having grilled the fiance up one side and down the other if his book was self-published (knowing perfectly well it was not) out of his mouth comes the word and a half smile,

sometimes.

Well do you have a day job?

Well, yeah.

Well what do you do during the day?

I'm an Industrial Designer?

I don't follow.

I make things. (not helpful, Mike)

Help me out here, what sort of things?

Things people use. (GOD, MIKE)

Like XE? (now she's getting even with you, Mike)

I don't know what XE is (shit, you really don't give a damn, do you)

The Human Experience. (um, 1000 Watt Smile, you know perfectly well what ID is)

Oh. That. We don't call it that. 

What do you cal it?

Human Elements.

What's the difference?

Humans don't always know what they're experiencing.

What?

They don't always know what they're experiencing but a product has to fit in with the human. So how does a steak knife fit in your hand? If it's not a bad fit you don't think about it. If it's an exceptional fit then the carving of the cow is very easy and you still might not be able to tell me why you like that knife better or why it's maybe even safer. It's a human element, not necessarily a direct experience but that's a bad example. We did an entire surgical room once right down to some of the implements of destruction. My father always wanted to play with sharp instruments. We've been working with clean rooms from since just after I was born. It really pissed my mother off as I recall.

Turning to me... Why?

(me) It's a dessert topping! It's a floor polish! But wait! There's more! Because I was having a really hard time with a disinfectant that could be used on anything including the things that go in the mouth. I wanted him to go back into lighting, he was really good at it.

Mom, there's no money in lighting.

It's not my problem anymore either so there's that. 

Back to your music, what do you play?

Mike takes out his phone and hands here his current play list which is really three play lists that can be and are cycled. I look at it and ask where his stuff is. Separate list and only at open mic. 1000 Watt Smile recognizes one song on the list of thirty. You don't know Warren Zevon? Seriously? Nope. Werewolves? His hair was PERFECT! OK, maybe but that's not on the list. 

I only pull that out if I have one of those audiences.

Mike, all your stuff is dark and twisty.

I'm a dark and twisty sort of guy.

Why do you have The Circle Game? In case you get old people?

The old people who come see me do NOT want to hear The Circle Game. 

So why do you have it?

Kids cry. They've never heard it before. It's the last song of the night.

No shit.

No shit. 

The 1000 Watt Smile wants to hear The Circle Game. Mike confesses to having stopped playing it. 

Why? 

I got tired of the crying. I want them to cry about the kids in freaking Belfast, not about white kids running out of time. 

Will you play it anyway?

Can't promise I remember all the words.

Do you really forget songs?

Oh yeah, all the time. Unless I wrote it. Then I remember. I don't forget the chords or the bridge though.

I really didn't expect him to play anything. I thought he might sit back the way he always does with Elizabeth next to him and she'd learn a new song from his playlist and they'd sing a little but he wouldn't belt out much because he was sick. His voice was just coming back and he was still coughing. He drank what looked like half a gallon of water with his wine and admitted to not having a cigarette in three days it hurt so bad which is when half the family found out he smoked. Apparently I was the only one. Only the 1000 Watt Smile. She believed. 

I knew he wouldn't, couldn't possibly do this in his mother's house without benefit of at least one sister, preferably the older sister harmonizing with him and something completely safe. He would like it if he is mother sat down and sang Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me with him so I could sing it in the minor key with him and let his sisters soar. So, so safe. 

I melted into seven or eight, I've lost count, generations of women, speechless. I turned and saw the fiance filming and thought, I'd better get this on video right this second because I am never going to hear it again. 

I got 1:06 of Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel sounding more like Darius Rucker than Dylan but definitely wanting the fiddle and the base of Old Crow behind him for sure and in the last :30 you could almost see him looking around for the harmony to step in. 

This is not my son and it is my son and I have not heard this man sing before despite all those years in the car and on the bed and the back porch and Lyle Lovett and his Large Band and If I Had a Pony, I'd ride him on the.... I thought I might get one more out of him if I moved slowly to the couch and sat next to the 1000 Watt Smile very quietly. It would be easier to hold the phone at the right angle. I sat down and he just smiled at me and I cried and he asked, deadpan,

Mother, do you need the tissues?

No, I have a perfectly good sleeve, thanks.

1000 Watts began the Circle Game Campaign and Mike laughed and said, I bet you'll like this and she looked up the lyrics with each song because she wanted to sing with him. I could hear her but she only belted it out when he finally did get to the Circle Game and forgot the words and she did it for him. In the mean time he went through one after another until he said, I'm going to do Run Around.

Run Around? As in Blues Traveler? I didn't see that on your list.

It's there.

That's one of the first four CDs I ever bought in 1994 when I moved into the apartment in Ansonia and I played that thing to death with Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Cracker's Kerosene Hat, and I can't remember the other one. There was a song called Nancy and something about bending a spoon, I don't know.

Yeah, I've had that rif in my head forever. I was eight years old when you were playing that thing to death and I loved it and then it just wouldn't go away. A couple of years ago I heard it in a bar and I had to ask half the people in the bar what it was because it was a radio and I was about to call the station when some old guy told me. Then he said it was the only decent track on the whole album.

I beg to differ.

Yeah? What else was any good?

Brother John.

OK, maybe but it's not Run Around. 

This is very true. It is not Run Around and Run Around is why I bought the CD and that's about the only track I ever played and if you recall I burned the tracks I liked onto tape and played those. 

Mom, you realize that was ridiculous, right?

.....

It's hard to get a decent recording with an iPhone from 20 feet away and as he put it, no acoustics, no mic, no backup, no damn harmonica (wait for it) and I could hear his voice going with each song so that when he finally got to the Circle Game he sang the damn thing so fast just to be done 1000 Watt had trouble keeping up. 

So this doesn't do him justice but it made his momma cry. 

Someday, he said, someday I will tell you when you can come but I want you to know I planned this. When I got sick I was really scared I wasn't going to have any voice at all and it wasn't until about two o'clock today I thought I might be OK. But I planned this, Mom. It's the best I can do for you for now, is that OK?

Yeah, kid, that's more than OK. Maybe for Christmas you can sing me some stuff from Zevon's last album. And maybe some Tom Waits  or some Cohen, maybe some John Prine, the older stuff? 

Don't push it on the Leonard stuff, Mom. 

Right. Right. Right. Leonard was ridiculously overrated.

Is. Is ridiculously overrated. 

Mike. The man is dead. Let it be.

Finally. You overplayed Suzanne the same way you fed us too much eggplant parmesan and we're never going to be the same. 

Sorry.

 

I am trying to convince him that he wants to convince Elizabeth to pick up her violin (not that she's actually put it down, she plays four days a week at school) and learn Old Crow's fiddle part for Wagon Wheel and if he shifts just a little bit she can back him up and we'll see what THAT sounds like. Throw Lucia's very sweet mezzo soprano in there on harmony...

But he'll never do it for an audience. It's been played to death and hacked to death and even when you listen to Old Crow at the bridge without the vocals and tried to meet that, the musicians in the room would drop their heads in shame for you because the song is for the lowest common denominator. He keeps it to reel in the unruly masses and it almost always works. 

And besides, he tells me, I can't exactly take a sixteen year old into a bar where they card you at the door.

...but that's only at the front door, Everyday Mike. They don't card the musicians coming in the back door who don't so much as step off the stage much less get within three feet of the bar (CT State law). 

You can share my hashtag

Well I have. Seen some weird shit. Weird being subjective or classifiable, I've seen all sorts of weird shit and I'm not often taken aback by the starkness of any one part of it; it all seems to bleed together the way you look at Dorothy sitting next to Alice and don't necessarily register right away that neither Toto or the suspiciously non-grinning Cheshire Cat belong anywhere near each other. Separate universes really, not even parallel. But there they are anyway in the same frame because Dorothy understands perfectly and Alice hasn't had time to catch her breath much less clarify her thoughts. Is it too much to ask to sit quietly and speak with like minded individuals who may remain entirely unknown because they've nothing in common other than one particular thing or event? 

Probably not.

You can ask.

I have to work to not actually live in a cave. This is the truth. Consider the logistics. The alarm goes off at 5 AM and I exit the house at 5:30. 

Le's pause. Please be duly impressed. In those thirty minutes a shower occurs, coffee is made and partially consumed (the rest of it travels) the suitcase is closed with the remainder of my stuff, I am dried off and dressed and fluffed (wet hair in the winter is going to be interesting, it will be ok I guess), everything I need is gathered (rolling red wheels, computer bag, and small knitting bag with two days of breakfast on top), small handbag and coffee, and I am in the car, nose pointed in the correct direction. Unpause. I really needed to share that accomplishment because 30 minutes alarm to car pointed in the correct direction is damned impressive. On this sort of schedule every single minute counts and you have no idea how easy it is to lose them. The minutes, I mean. Preparation and focus is everything.

Right, so in the car at 5:30 heading for Basking Ridge with a 7:00 AM ETA. I have the route down to 94.5 miles but 7 of them are on Route 53 which is a 35/40 mph state road running through Weston and Westport to the Merrit Parkway which I absolutely must hit before 6 which is when the early Stamford Clustermuck begins. Yes, really, that early. Drivers traveling Route 53 between 5 and 5:40 are traveling between 45 and 65 and they're coming out of Redding and they mean business. Drivers traveling the same route between 5:40 and 6 are doing the speed limit. It's astonishing. This literally changed my sleep cycle. I gave up 15 minutes of sleep to gain an additional 15 minutes of out of the car time. 

My best time so far, doing those 94.5 miles, 2 of which are off the exit and one of those is on campus, the last two tenths of a mile will ALWAYS require two full minutes to negotiate the parking garage ----- is 85 minutes. And I am traveling with the flow of traffic which means just above the median speed in the middle lane as often as possible.

Do you think I have the radio on when I'm driving like this? I do not. I am fully attuned to what's occurring around me. I am one with my second favorite organized aggregate in the entire world: highly motivated and interactive traffic (the first is the bee hive; they aren't nearly as behaviorally investing but they actually produce something and don't harm the environment).

The reverse drive is also interesting but a little more aggressive. Segment one: The Parsippany Crawl is a six to nine mile stretch of wait a sec, ok go, hold on, ok, no, stop, NOW MOVE, just kidding - OK GO NOW!!!, that takes about 35 minutes which is followed by 60 minutes of Segment 2: The Indy 500 where 45% of the cars doing their best imitation of the Indy 500 in and out of the oblivious left lane zombies who have come from somewhere and are going to points unknown. The Indy 500 crew are in it for the long haul, out of Parsippany and at least to the other side of the freshly opened on both sides brand spanking new Tappan Zee Bridge. There is a section of the Indy 500 where 287 meets the NY line at the intersection of 87 and things get weird and I do believe we all pray together:

Yea though I come barreling into the valley of interesting drivers, I shall fear no mishap; for Mario Andretti is by my side and his is the direct connection to the cerebral cortex of all Indy 500 drivers barreling through the valley of interesting drivers veering abruptly to the right at the very last minute in order to gain entrance to 87 East (might actually think it's South at this point) without dropping below the speed limit not even on the entrance ramp. Amen.

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough" - M. Andretti 

Segment 3: The Connecticut Line. I don't want to talk about it. This is when Mr. Andretti abruptly leaves my vehicle in disgust and I am alone again. He generally launches himself from all remaining Indy 500 vehicles at the Greenwich rest stop having no desire to witness the next 23 miles of what has now become know as The Douchbaggery Road. 

At no point would I even consider distracting myself with additional stimuli. No radio. No music. 

My drive to the office from the Hanover Marriott is brief and to the point. I don't make it from the bed to my car in 30 minutes but that's because I really don't have to. I make it in 40. I have nine miles of New Jersey goofiness to negotiate because it's a little later in the morning, not much but enough to make a difference and 15 minutes with the radio on would only be enough to confuse me. The drive back can take upwards of thirty and is actually part of the Parsippany Snarl so there's that. 

So. Access to news. I scan Facebook from the parking garage to my seat every morning. That's about 90 seconds. I notice that any other really early arrival is doing exactly the same thing. I asked some guy once what he was scanning at 7 AM. "My email and Facebook for news." "Damn, me too." He tells me it's the only chance he gets except for waiting for the individual cups of coffee to brew and walking to the bathroom and back and that can be a hallway disaster. I realize we're all doing exactly the same thing because in open work space no one scrolls through their phones, consultants don't do this much anyway. I do have a picture of our open workspace finally. I had to wait until 7 AM when really almost no one was present to take the shot. This is the Library table where the consultants, at least my local crew sit strategically placed dead center (more or less) in the middle of the room:

That's my red bag, looks darker than it really is but yes, it's dark, sitting over on my chair waiting to be unpacked and Jason's leftover water waiting for his return so maybe this was a Wednesday morning, yes it was because you can see my little container of yogurt plus the two bottles of hotel water which I have collected. The lamps are pointless and we wish they weren't there but maybe they're a good buffer. Aparna will join us on Monday morning and sit to the right of Jason who sits directly across from me and Bhaven, who is local sits to my left and desperately wishes someone other than me understood what a data lake was and if Ram ever comes back to the office (there's been some sort of vertigo problem for the last two months which has been wreaking havoc) he's going to end up on one of the ends. Max stays home. There is no way in hell a hard core developer would ever get any work done in this environment which is meant to be collaborative but is not. It is lunacy. Consultants are used to working in a war room and so our heads are down and we tune out what has become white noise, sitting up only occasionally when the table to the right (left side of the photo) periodically erupts in laughter. My boss, all the way on the other side of the room is eventually going to kill one of them. 

I am on the phone most of the day now and when I am not on the phone I am stalking Mike which is why I am in this office. At the end of the day I am not looking for news, I am heading for the door toward home and Elizabeth or the Hanover Marriott and Elizabeth and when I have had my share of Elizabeth I want white noise and something to do with my hands. I am on my fourth sweater and one of them is likely to fit someone. Sweaters for men is an odd sort of thing. 

Bhaven comes in at 8 and tells me when something awful has happened in the world. He tells me like this: 

Do you know what the body count is in LA? Do you know that the fires are totally out of hand? 

I google quickly.

Holy shit, Bhaven. I did not know. 

And then I get the international news. 

To his credit, Bhaven has never accused me of not caring or living under a rock. He has never presented the news as if I ought to know, only as if I probably do know and when I don't know he lets me catch up - as opposed to giving me the narration - and then we talk about it. I am quite certain he knows exactly what's going on. I am also aware that there are things he does not tell me. For example, I do not know what number 45 has been up to unless I check or back channel it by way of foreign issues or domestic events; in other words, what has number 45 done to upset the apple cart this time? Bhaven is very careful to keep that sort of thing out of it. He reports events mostly involving human casualty. There is no judgement communicated about how it happened. I find this guy refreshing; he is not bringing any sort of agenda into the conversation. He's just noting the human condition and acknowledging the tragedy. Some things he doesn't talk about. He has not mentioned what is occurring in Puerto Rico although we have talked at length about how long it's going to take for Key West to get back on its feet as well as what happened on Marco Island. 

Eventually I do get around to my Facebook feed which has started doing something odd. My notifications are shutting themselves down. I was getting notifications on maybe 30 - 45 people which gave me quite a list to plow through and some days I missed a lot of what was happening if, let's say, my kids decided to post six or seven entries each and if I happened to comment on something my notifications might blow up but I did my best to get through it anyway. I don't know how the mother's board determines which notifications I should see but that seems pretty random. You'd think I'd see my friend's posts but that's not always true. Now I'm down to birthdays, events, and responses to comment strings for a while. 

This is problematic. 

Initially I didn't realize I was missing anything until I opened my feed, prepared for a random scroll and saw this:

I had to go back to her page to get this and it has since been deleted and replaced but it started out this way '#metoo' and the emoticons were different. The quotes are there because I'm trying to avoid throwing another me too hashtag into the mix. If it had read the way it does today I might not have though much of it other than to maybe PM her and ask what the hell was going on. Normally this is vaguebooking and my daughter isn't guilty of it. The original post had tear emoticons which I later found particularly upsetting. I'm going to rename mine to get the hashtag out of there but right now it looks like this:

You can see this statement was posted in the middle of the afternoon on Monday, October 16. This never would have happened if I hadn't been working remotely. I wouldn't even have seen it until I was on my way to the car or in my room waiting for Elizabeth or I might not have seen it at all on my daughter's wall but I would have seen it elsewhere because by the time 7 PM rolled around it was just about all I saw in my feed. This isn't to suggest I wasn't working my ass off on Monday. It just means I'm working at my dining room table and if I have five minutes between calls and I need to catch my breath I'm probably going to use those five minutes to look at my life, a good bit of which can be found running through my feed. Also, I was sick as hell which has me wondering just how much that had to do with my response mechanisms. For me sick = tremendously vulnerable, especially if I'm home by myself doing everything I can to stay focused on the fires in front of me - as opposed to falling face first into the keyboard. 

I only had to scroll a bit to find out what she meant by me too and because she'd been brave enough to do it, I did it too, more in solidarity with my daughter than anything else. If you're going to stand up publicly and make that sort of statement at 26 then your mother, who went down hard at 17 had damn well better stand with you having spent most of your life telling YOU to stand the hell up. YOU, who also went down at 17, not nearly so hard if you're going to judge by a narrative but going down is going down and as I said later in defense of the hashtag, we don't get to judge the extent of another woman's hurt. 

Later I wrote something in response to one of Sparky's daughters who asked if it was wrong to feel grateful for not having a hashtag and I said, no, it isn't but it is indicative of where we are that this pathos even exists. I wrote that as my daughters grew up I had two parallel conversations in my head, three really: 

1. The ask: Please, God, oh please don't let my girls be part of that statistic. Please let them be outliers.
2. The surrender: When will it happen? How old will they be? How much clean up am I looking at? What will be left to salvage? (yeah, try that one on if you haven't already)
3. The negotiation: Please, maybe it will be just a small thing. Please let it be just a small thing. 

Well. That just stopped the conversation dead in it's tracks. The late thirties, early forties, financially secure, married working moms maybe just five years past their Burning Man years with one or two small children in the San Francisco Bay area are not ready for that sort of shit to hit home quite yet. Hell, I wasn't ready for that sort of shit to hit home quite yet. I hadn't really uttered the words; they'd just been floating around back there for years: The Ask, The Surrender, and The Negotiation. 

Later I was talking to Elizabeth about this and how I felt guilty for being grateful for having one safe girl (still) and she looked at me, diametrically opposed emotions doing battle on her face.

Elizabeth:    Mom. You don't have a 66% hit rate. 

Me:    What do you mean?

Elizabeth:    Mom. The hashtag is for everything from sexual harassment to rape. You said so yourself. You've written no less than four diatribes defending the use of the hashtag by victims of sexual harassment based on what it does to their experience of themselves in the world. 

Me:    I know. 

Elizabeth.    MOM! What the fuck?!

Me:    Oh my god. I have a 100% hit rate.

Elizabeth.    Yes. You. Do. Remember Branford? Remember that Asshole who stalked me up and down the line? Remember the way he danced with me? Remember what happened when you and Portnoy told me it would be OK to tell the caller and he would take care of it? Remember what happened when the caller tried to take care of it? Remember what they all did? Remember how they left me in the corner and let that guy scream at you? 

Me:    I know. I'm sorry.

Elizabeth:    Do you know how that makes me feel? Not just about what happened but about what happened when I trusted you and Portnoy and trusted the caller and then all my friends let me down. 

Elizabeth:    Do you remember what happened in Hartford? Do you remember in the car when I told you what that guy did and begged you not to tell but you did anyway? Do you remember what they did? Do you know how that feels? Do you think I'm ever going to tell anybody anything ever?

Me:    Jesus Christ, Elizabeth!

Elizabeth:    And finally, do you remember the guy who stalked the shit out of me at Round Hill Contra and how Carol let that guy stay even though he was chasing all the women away? You think I don't remember this? I remember this because of how long and hard you fought it and then how you walked away and never went back. You have a 100% hit rate. I don't feel safe and I don't think people will help me. I think women are more dangerous then men when it's over. 

Me:    {just crying}

Elizabeth:    OK, Mom, listen, I don't really want it to be this way. And you know I'd fight, right? But this really screwed me up. People suck in a lot of ways more than the world will admit. Have you read all those posts written by the people who think sexual harassment shouldn't have a hashtag?

Me:    Yes, Elizabeth, that's why I kept writing about why they should. 

Elizabeth:    You know this thing about Contra where they used to say that thing about getting a new woman in your arms every thirty seconds?

Me:    Elizabeth, they really don't say that anymore

Elizabeth:    But, Mom, they mean it. 

Me:    Elizabeth, it's hard to change a culture, it's like turning a battleship; it moves slowly but it gets there.

Elizabeth:    Contra dancers are really fucking disgusting.

Me:    Wow. Did anything ever happen up North?

Elizabeth:    Not directly but the last couple of times I was up there it was starting to get weird and you know what? I wasn't even fifteen yet. 

So here's what happened finally, by the end of the second day when I realized I had to get the hell off Facebook for a while. 

There were too many. I always wondered what it would be like to stand up in solidarity and look around and find myself not alone. I thought it would feel better. I thought it would make me feel strong. I thought it would look like a wall of women and men, yes, men too, a wall of women and men - and here's my mistake - strong women and men and we would feel stronger and maybe safer because of this unity and maybe we could make a difference and other people could stand up and finally maybe, people would listen differently.

That's not what happened. OK, maybe that's not fair. I really don't know what happened because in the end I didn't stick around long enough to find out but given the removal of the hashtags something happened. 

I felt like I was riding the crest of a Tsunami, not so much standing on the shore waiting to be engulfed, but riding the crest waiting to be turned and tumbled, lost in this abyss-like darkness, heavy water and silt filling every available cavity. I bled water and silt from my eyes and ears, vomited it up onto the wreckage and felt the bloat in my uterus which cannot decide if it is quite through with it's child bearing years or would go on a while longer, catching the occasional ovum tossed willy nilly down one tube or another on random months. I briefly suspect a surge in progesterone brought on mass hysteria, mostly women wailing in a single voice which I have realized is in a pitch that cannot be heard by the uninitiated. 

We are not a strong wall. We are a massive collection of men and women who harbor the secret, or not so secret guilt of our brokenness. We typed the words '#metoo' or Me, too or metoo or me too in our statuses with hope or fear or anger or all of the above but mostly to be heard, to stand up in solidarity and I do not believe that any of us really expected the backlash. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a great many of us expected the backlash and did it anyway. Maybe the only the damaged really experienced the reaction as backlash. I don't know. I do know an awful lot of statuses came down. They filled my feed on Monday. It was all I saw. From women and some men, just those two words with or without the # and some with an explanation and the ask to copy and paste the explanation. And then in my feed I saw the rebuke. Some came from women, some responses were from men defending the hashtags. Some were from men apologizing from past acts or for men as a whole. A good many were from men just reacting. If 100% of the women have been sexually assaulted, even if you're counting harassment, does this mean 100% of the men have done something wrong, one man writes. No, that isn't what it means but the damage is done.

Post after post by men and women about why the hashtag should belong only to victims of rape. Comment after comment by me about why that is not true and why I will share my hashtag with ANYONE who has been hurt and had their experience of safety in the world damaged such that the choices they make are altered forever. A hurt is a hurt, I tell them.

So this. I'm just going to say this.

If I take my rape which was truly a brutal thing. If I gave you the intimate details of what happened that night to my seventeen year old body face down on the white carpet on the dining room floor with the muzzle of the gun at the back of my neck, if I gave you the intimate details of the conversation that occurred before, during and after between my thirty year old rapist and my seventeen year old self which degraded who and what I was in such a way that I still wonder if I'll get it all back and at the same time had me mostly focused on working out how to convince him not to put a bullet in my skull. If I gave you the intimate details, which I have NOT, by the way, you would surely turn away. I don't know that you would read all of the words. I have never spoken them, I have never written them. My parents do not know, the police do not know, no man I have ever been intimate with knows. Only me. 

If I take my rape which was truly a brutal thing and I compare it to a fast and dirty up against the wall in an alleyway and then he's gone and she's left breathless and broken on the ground littered with alley trash, forty feet from her car and safety, can we call these events the same thing? Can we?

You bet. There is absolutely zero difference. She is just as broken as I am. Just as afraid for her life, just as changed, just as wishing she could rewind her life and wipe it away as I am. 

Because once that boundary is crossed, it is crossed. You can continue to do damage to varying degrees and I suppose you can make it an entirely other thing with kidnap and then that is an entirely other thing to contend with but the boundary of rape is just exactly that. Your power as a woman, or a man, but primarily a woman in this world has literally been ripped from you, body and soul and good luck getting it back. Your sexuality has been removed, torn, dirtied, and shoved back in sideways. The world is literally going to look at you like you committed a crime. You are bad. So it doesn't matter to what degree. Same hashtag.

Sexual harassment. Here's one of my favorite examples. Twenty-three year old intern, bright girl is on the fast track to something and she reaches out to a superior, maybe just slightly superior male colleague for help. She is too young to have figured out how to negotiate the crap that goes on with men in the workplace. His behavior toward her is aggressive, it isn't even clear what he's doing but she's uncomfortable, she wrap words around it and she's scared. She feels less than, somewhat dirty. She wonders about what she's wearing. She stops going to him for help and her project suffers. She looks around for help elsewhere but in the back of her mind she is afraid. 

Do have any idea how often this happens?

The career track she was on just got derailed and she doesn't even know why. He's not even clear that he did it because in our culture it's OK to do this shit. 

If she's lucky, somebody sees what's happening and picks her up because that brain is too good to waste and she's back on track but that little niggling voice in the back of her head will always be there. If she's strong she finds a way to get past it but it will always be there. Once that boundary has been crossed it cannot be uncrossed.

And here. Here is the worst part in the world. This is what the voices are saying. They are women speaking, not men. The women are saying this: Snowflake. God, that was NOTHING, you should have seen... Baby. Suck it up. Oh grow the fuck up. If she can't grow a spine, she doesn't belong here. Clorox in the gene pool. Daddy's girl. Waste of oxygen. She had it coming. Did you see what she was wearing? Slut. Do you think she blew him? That door was shut.  

I shit you not. I. Want. To. Punch. Someone. 

So. How were those boundaries crossed in the first place (yes, they were crossed twice, once by the man and then again by the women)?

They were crossed because we are still raising our girls to be obedient and we are still raising them to believe it's their fault (dress codes, boys can't control themselves), and we are still not believing them. We are still teaching them to question themselves. We are still teaching them to be tolerant. We are still teaching them that men are superior. We are still teaching them that anyone in a position of authority can pretty much do whatever they want to us (refer to my lawyer Arlo what's his name who, in the interest of making sure I could follow direction when given direction under any circumstances, locked the office door, pulled down my jeans and put me over his knees before I finally reacted and ran the fuck out of his office and when my mother called her lawyer friend we were told he did it all the time but getting him disbarred was going to be a real challenge). We do not actively teach them how to identify what's happening much less how to address it. Portnoy taught me how to identify a microaggression which is term coined to identify racist behavior but can easily be applied to any act where privilege and power apply in everyday life (Arlo's act was NOT a microaggression) . Microaggressions have been pounding us into the sand for decades. We cleaned up the big stuff but continue to do major damage with the underlying conversations. By the way, we are all guilty of these things and they can be really hard to uncover but once seen they're really hard to unsee. 

So. Damage. That was a microaggression and sexual harassment runs the gamut from that (or less visible) all the way up to just short of penetration which is when we're allowed to call it rape.

Damage that has us unable to make the choices we might have made otherwise. Choices that are life altering.

You can share my hashtag. I swear to God it's big enough for all of us. 

In the end I had to bail. It was too much. I don't really know how I feel about this. Bad, for sure. When you find yourself, after 36 years saying, Fuck, stop it, no, just no, enough, I can't really cope with this much pain - I don't really know what to do with this. On Thursday I thought I'd crawled into a cave and was never going to come out or talk about it again or pay attention and maybe just pray that my girls' statistics didn't go up. I thought maybe I was just going to stop giving a damn about whether or not anything ever changed because I really didn't think it would. I figured if Portnoy the self-proclaimed feminist could still have misogynistic tendencies then there was really no hope.

However, this morning I decided that if I could forgive Portnoy's misogynistic tendencies on the grounds that he is, after all 60 (you do kind of have to take the cultural background into account), and he is after all, or I think he is or I thought he was, trying NOT to have misogynistic tendencies then maybe I could start from there and start working out some faith again. Portnoy's really not the best example given some of the circumstances but he's a start primarily because he IS 60, he IS a self-proclaimed feminist (which I don't believe in, by the way, I accept allies but not feminist males, you kind of have to be a woman but whatever that's my stuff I have to kind of hear him as he's talking) and that particular demographic is often the most difficult to deal with because they have all the baggage of their generation plus they think they're right. So when one of those guys makes a damned good effort to change shit, his own shit, never mind the whole of it, just what he's working on, then that's got to be enough reason to stand up and start looking for more of it. 

So, yeah, all that. In the end it boils down to this though:

You can share my hashtag. I swear to God it's big enough for all of us.

 

and you thought this post was about Mario Andretti and open workspaces. 

 

Joining Genghis Khan in meaningful conversation

I finally agreed to go out last night. I think if it's planned in advance there's a much higher percentage of me actually showing up at a social event. If you ping me on Friday afternoon while I'm still at the keyboard the answer is generally going to be 'nope', especially if Elizabeth is home for the weekend - although Elizabeth is NEVER home on a Friday or Saturday night unless it's her night to host the boyfriend in which case they might as well be on another planet which means I could be anywhere so it has little to nothing to do with Elizabeth. I think my friends are finally working this out. Alecto does not leave the house on a Friday night without significant notice and a damn good reason. Saturdays are a lot more likely but advance notice is still required. 

I don't think it's an issue of spontaneous behavior having come off the menu so much as I haven't found the balance yet that will allow me to step off the metaphorical kanban board to which I've pinned my life. There's this thing called downtime, Elizabeth has a swim lane for downtime too, and while mine is sort of nebulous it has to exist; I just haven't learned to manage it so well as she has yet. I panic if I think it's become the least bit threatened so the text message which reads: do you want to meet for a drink? that comes in at 5:30 on a Saturday evening produces heart palpitations. I want to but... did I get enough done? have I had enough time just to rest? If I go out will it take too much time to unwind later? If I'm up too late unwinding will I have a hard time on Sunday getting ready to go for Monday? It's sort of stupid because the answer is generally, you'll be fine, Alecto, but I don't really know at a molecular level yet, so the answer is, no, I can't, I'm sorry. And suddenly I'm isolated without really meaning for it to happen. Of course, I don't really mind because I don't mind my own company in the least. I also know it's not really good for me. 

Sharon's starting to figure me out. Start at 10:30 on Saturday morning and let it sink in. Start in on Lisa at approximately the same time. Lisa and I will both happily wander about in our own backyards, oblivious to the rest of the world wandering about elsewhere and Sharon is NOT an introvert and yet she seems to have selected the two of us as balance. It was two years ago or maybe even three when she looked at me and said, I'm alone in a town of 10,000 people of which I know approximately 2,000 (holy shit) well enough and I have yet to find my people. 

I am aloof in a group of gathered mothers. Not unfriendly but subdued, standing on the periphery with a cup of coffee or glass or wine depending on the event and one by one I am approached, a small town curiosity. I participate in these events just often enough to allow them to put the face back on the woman who's occasional Facebook comments on the mom's board provoke humor, consternation, periodic irritation, and for some, faith that their daughters do indeed have a fighting chance. Sometimes I am approached by one of my own. 

Working Mom:    How did you get here?

Alecto:    I drove my car? And you?

Working Mom:    I flew on my broomstick. That's not what I meant. How did you get away from your desk?

Alecto:    I'm not really away from my desk. I'm on a very long bathroom break with my phone. And you?

Working Mom:    I'm at a doctor's appointment. Are you really on a very long bathroom break?

Alecto:    No. I went out to get food. I told them it was going to take about 45 minutes to get to the center of town and back with food and that's actually the truth. So I'll be a little late.

Working Mom:    I had to leave my office.

Alecto:    I work from home on Fridays. I really shouldn't be doing this because I blew out of a meeting but since I'm working in New Jersey Monday through Thursday and these are usually on Tuesdays I figured I'd better jump while I had the chance. 

Working Mom:    You work in New Jersey...

Alecto:    Yeah. Basking Ridge.

Working Mom:    How does that work?

Alecto:    5:45 AM Monday departure, My usual room at the Marriott, 5 PM (in my dreams and if I run when no one can see me) Tuesday departure, 7 - 7:30 arrival home, 5:45 AM Wednesday departure, My usual room at the Marriott, rinse and repeat on Thursday, work from home on Friday. All days begin at 7:30 AM. It works.

Working Mom:    Your husband must be very supportive.

Alecto:    No husband. Better that way.

Working Mom:    You have a senior in high school.

Alecto:    I'd noticed.

Working Mom:    What do you do with her?

Alecto:    I have someone come and walk her with the dog twice a day.

Working Mom:    (laughing) OK, really, how do you handle this?

Alecto:    I fill the house with Twinkies and powdered donuts. It's all she eats and I watch how many times she fills the tank on her Prius. That's how I know how fast she's driving. 

Working Mom:    Wow.

Alecto:    What?

Working Mom:    That's better than putting one of those things on their cars. I'm getting my kids cars like that when they drive. 

Alecto:    She's a good kid and she takes good care of herself. I have good support in the neighborhood and her father lives one town away. There's a reason I drive 400 miles a week. I come home on Tuesday night because she's lonely, not because she can't take care of herself. If I really had to, I could make this a daily commute. It would suck but it could be done. People commute four hours each day into the city and out so it's not like we don't accept this culturally but there's a difference between that time on the train and that time behind the wheel of a car. 

Working Mom:    How long does it take?

Alecto:    (smiling) 97 miles in 88 minutes in the morning, 7 of those miles are back roads. I'm driving with the flow of traffic or a little bit slower if you can believe that. 97 miles in the evening can take up to 2.5 hours. I hit a snarl of 6 miles outbound that makes me want to cry but then it's perfectly clear until I hit Stamford which really isn't all that bad because of the timing. I get off in Wilton because of the Westport backup and take Route 7 into the Forest. It doesn't suck; it's just a lot. 

Working Mom:    88 minutes?!!!

Alecto:    OK, not always but no longer than 94 ever and that was in the rain. 

Working Mom:    But you're missing her senior year!

Alecto:    I most certainly am not!

Working Mom:    I don't get it.

Alecto:    I am Tiger Mom'ing her from Basking Ridge and the Hanover Marriott. Believe me, I have a better handle on what's going on in that kid's life this year than I have in the last three years and I was unemployed for the first five months of this year. 

Working Mom:    I don't get it.

Alecto:    It sounds absurd but I just rolled her into the rest of my day. She's a year long project. Doesn't that sound odd? She's on the board just like any other project and since I wouldn't let details of any other project slip or the well-being of any of my team members to go unnoticed she falls under the same protection and the same sort of focus. The one difference is I don't leave her at the door when I leave the building. She gets more attention from the Hanover Marriott. I just manage her board a little during the day, mostly I monitor it after 3 when she starts making changes. Her review and coaching happens after 7. 

Working Mom:    Board?

Alecto:    Um. A Kanban board is a way to manage individual project tasks broken into swim lanes. You have a backlog, an on-deck, an in progress, and a done column. You can pull done tasks out of archive if you need to look at history. You really don't want me to go into the mechanics of Agile project management.

Working Mom:    I know about Agile I just don't know about Kanban. Nobody uses it in my office. It's too complicated.

Alecto:    So I've been told. By the teams that don't use it.

Meanwhile we are an island in Sharon's kitchen and the conversation has morphed from mothering to work and I realize I have been away too long and run for the door. I realize I have no idea who she is. I don't know her name, what she does, where she works, how old her kids are, how many, I can only guess at her marital status. She knows everything about me. Well, not everything, it just feels that way. 

Sharon has me figured out. The first text comes at 10:30 and they come on and off all day at reasonable intervals until she understands that I have not only surrendered, that I am actually vested in this. I make my every three weeks Walmart run and come home and shower. I assure her that I can be ready to go in exactly 21 minutes. She is not dubious. She is incredulous. I am dead on. Really, Sharon, I am out the door four days a week in 28 minutes which includes coffee, professional dress (pantyhose take longer than jeans), closing up and rolling out the luggage (which involves shoving the pillow on top of what was already packed), picking up the computer bag and bag of knitting (and not dumping coffee onto the current sweater in progress), dragging everything to the car in the dark, shoving it into the back, slamming the door, climbing into the car while not wearing the coffee, starting the car, hitting go on the Garmin (for timing), backing up and pointing forward out the driveway. 28 minutes. It should take longer to get out of the Hanover Marriott because of the long, long hallway and the elevator but it does not. I think this is because I am not traveling with coffee and I have no house space to negotiate. Maybe. 

Sharon and Lisa have decided we are going to Heibecks. Heibecks is an ice cream stand. I am not going to argue with this. It is 64F out there and I do not eat ice cream when it is below 80F but that's fine. I have noticed they have food. I don't expect particularly edible food but for some reason they both seem to think it's particularly edible food. However, when I was last there with Elizabeth I noticed a rather lovely seating area in the back which seemed out of context with an ice cream stand, even a rather expanded ice cream stand and a big sign which read BYOB. Really. I grabbed a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and... ah crap. I am not bringing glass back there. They'll kill me. Plastic cups? In my house? Yes, I have plastic cups. I have ENORMOUS plastic cups. I think they might be of the 32oz variety. Bad idea. Disposable plastic cups? Not so much. In the back of a cupboard I found those really nasty small styrofoam 10oz coffee cups leftover from one of Elizabeth's birthday parties in December when we were all outside for a scavenger hunt and the parents had hot chocolate with rum and the kids had hot chocolate with hot chocolate. 

We arrived at 6 and as it turned out the food was exceptional. Also, as it turned out, there were three or four families in the back with multiple bottles of wine and REAL WINE GLASSES. They also came equipped with the sort of small children that ran loose shrieking at the top of their collective lungs. One of them came directly up to our table and let loose a war cry that would have impressed Genghis Khan. We collectively failed to even look at him. He did it again. We collectively waited for one of his parents to react. Nothing. 

I turned my head to the left and looked at him.

Alecto:    How old are you?

Genghis Junior:    Ten

Alecto:    Where do you go to school?

Genghis Junior:    WIS

Alecto:    Do you pull that shit at WIS?

Genghis Junior:    YOU SAID A BAD WORD!!!

Alecto:    Yup. I sure did.

Genghis Junior:   I'M TELLING

Alecto:    I'm counting on it. But you didn't answer my question. Do you pull that shit at WIS?

Genghis Junior:   WHAT SHIT?!!!!

Alecto:    (laughing hard enough to blow wine through my nose) The shit you're pulling right now. You know what I'm talking about.

Genghis Junior:   I don't know what you're talking about.

Sharon:    Why are you talking to him?

Alecto:    Because he's obnoxious and I want to know if he pulls this shit at WIS.

Sharon:    You know he does.

Genghis Junior:   I DO NOT PULL THIS SHIT AT WIS!!!

Genghis Junior's Father:    STEVEN! GET OVER HERE NOW!

Genghis Junior:   NOOOODOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 

Genghis Junior:   SHE SAID SHIT!!!!!!

Alecto:    I certainly did and I'm going to drop the Eff bomb next if you don't get your kid away from our table.

Genghis Junior's father did NOT bring him back to the table. What he did was point him toward another table about twenty feet away and there Genghis Junior stayed until his family with their several bottles of wine and real glass glasses decided it was time to leave. 

Sharon:    You're going to get us thrown out of here.

Alecto:    Do you really mind?

Lisa:    I want to be like you when I grow up.

Alecto:    Trust me, you do not.

Later when it was finally quiet Sharon needed the bathroom but Heibecks does not appear to have a working bathroom, just an outside walk-in freezer and a large potted plant in the corner. I nodded toward the large potted plant in the corner. I offered to pee first but she wasn't having any of it.

Sharon:    12oz of wine and you'll pee in the corner.

Alecto:    Zero ounces of wine and I'll pee in the corner given the right circumstances. Aren't you glad you finally talked me into coming out tonight?

Lisa:    Yes! God, Yes!

Later we made plans to go to the last night at the meadow which none of us really understand but it's something our town does last Fridays of the month in the summer and early fall and Sharon really wants to go but she won't go alone. I contemplate this fact for a while. She is an extrovert, oddly attached to two introverts and she cannot bring herself to do things like this by herself. I will go alone, I think that Lisa would go alone if it was something she really wanted to do although Lisa suffers from social anxiety where I do not, at least not directly. I think about why I would go alone and why that sort of thing appeals to me. When I go alone I can come and go as I please. I am not bound by anyone so if something happens or if an event or environment is suddenly too much for me to cope with, I can take care of myself. I think I have experienced a lifetime of not being able to take care of myself either because I have been powerless or because I have been unable to communicate what I need or if I have been able to communicate what I need the price has been astonishingly high. So when I add all that up I get tense just thinking about the experience of feeling trapped. Sharon doesn't feel trapped at all. She feels scared when she's alone. I feel safe. 

I didn't think extroverts were afraid of anything. Maybe it's the other way around. 

I wonder, what is Genghis? Why is Genghis? Was Genghis just an extrovert terrified of being alone? Was the battle cry the only thing he had that ever worked? Turned out by his own tribe, Genghis is a nomad now, moving from table to table waiting for someone to join him in meaningful conversation (meaningful conversation being extremely subjective). 

Other things I think about

This is his house where he lives with his wife in Miami. The house was built post 1992/Andrew when the building codes where changed, some of which addressed sustained winds of up to 120 - 140 mph and water intrusion. I don't know enough about the codes to know about storm surges and depth of rising water but I understand the changes in roofing material, the way we shutter our homes and the materials used in shuttering. I also understand vehicles are considered a complete loss up front in the face of a surge which will submerge the vehicle to the engine compartment and that the winds that come with a cat 5 will blow a vehicle up and over and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. 

The alternative, which is evacuation carries its own risks. We just got past the long explanation about why Houston chose not to evacuate and I'm fairly certain, based on results, that explanation was flat out lost on most of the population. It comes down to this: evacuate to where, exactly? And by what route are that many people with the sudden shortage of fuel, food, water, and shelter going to travel? We forget the evacuation stories with the death tolls that outnumbered most of the storm deaths. There were an estimated 90 - 118 deaths on the highway during the 2005 Rita evacuation immediately following Katrina which is why Houston wasn't evacuated during Harvey. There was just nowhere to go. People died of heatstroke and dehydration. A bus caught fire killing 23 nursing home evacuees. The highway infrastructure couldn't cope with the estimated 2.5 - 3.7 million people fleeing the Texas coastline. But what about Katrina and the 9th ward? 

In 2004 Hurricane Alex upgraded itself from a tropical storm in the night to a cat 2 and grazed the Outer Banks. By grazed I mean the winds registered at 120 at one point and the ocean breached the dunes, washing across the narrow island until it met the sound. We watched from the third floor of our rental house as the water rose up the post of the no parking sign until only the No was visible. Shingles flew by like the witch on her bicycle but Toto was nowhere in sight. We watched the neighbor drive his van to high ground before the surge and then we watched the van slowly rise, rock back and forth, and finally float with tide toward the sound. I don't believe it ever got so far as Highway 12 but it had a clear agenda. Later we realized our car was doing the same parked under the house, maybe not traveling so far but definitely floating above the concrete parking area. We drove off that island, one of the few cars with an agreeable engine when all was said and done. Most people were bussed to Newark and drove rental cars however many hundred miles were left on the backend of their trips. Sometimes I think about the people from Ontario and wonder what that must have been like. 

That was just a cat 2 on an island that's been withstanding hurricanes since the dawn of time. We nailed the outside shower door back in place the next morning. 

When you choose to shelter in place all of these things might be considered, the shelter you're in, your supplies, your exit path, what you have to gain or lose. Your faith, if faith is something you live or die by. I don't know what had my friend choose to shelter in place. He is not from Miami. He is from the Northeast. His wife is from Miami. His wife is from Cuba. His wife's entire family is in Miami. His wife's family is now his family. 

Every day he walks his Boxer dog along the waterways and periodically he posts a photograph of a good size iguana I have named Frank. 

Is it too hard to leave Frank behind? Are there too many people to pack in your car and risk in gridlock? 

All the armchair quarterbacks are screaming GO! GO! GO! 

Even after what happened here during Sandy to my friends in lower Manhattan, in parts of the boroughs, out on the Island, and on the Shore, I can't bring myself to tell him to go. Even after what happened to my friends during Andrew I can't tell him to go. Katrina is still incomprehensible to me. Here in the Forest, there is never any talk of evacuation because we are not on the coast and we can't do a damn thing about high winds. They are a fact of life. The trees come down and take out our houses, bring down our power lines leaving us in the dark without water, heat, or plumbing for a week (let's not talk about the number of generators in this town), but they don't lift us up off the ground. For the most part. We try not to think about those mini tornadoes that sprout up now and then any more than Oklahoma wants to mention that funny color the sky turns that says head to the storm cellar. 

I have never heard of a native from the Outer Banks leaving the island during a storm. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, I've just never heard of it. I've read some pretty hairy stories about roof top rescues and when Isabel actually tore apart a piece of the island in 2003 and wiped from the face of the earth three hotels which managed to withstand God knows how many storms for at least fifty years, there was still only one direct death and I'm not sure it was actually an island death. 

So these decisions. They are hard, personal, and local. 

I understand him, I think. I don't really need to because it isn't my choice to make or even mine to understand or not. I am scared. I don't want to lose him and I surely do not want him to lose her. She saved him when he'd managed to carve himself down to not much left of anything. Well, that's not true entirely. She showed up in his life and offered up a choice, I suppose. He made a choice. It was a crazy choice and every armchair quarterback he knew shouted:

NO! NO! NO! You barely know her! Do NOT pick up your life and move to Miami and marry this woman you barely know.

I said:

Wow. You're doing what? You say you're flying to Miami this morning to get married? For real? Well that's cool. Congratulations. Be happy :)

Because really, what else can you say?

So, Bob. You're going to shelter in place. I see you have really great hurricane shutters and your house looks like it's up to current code. That's really great. Where is your car? Oh, I see it. That's cool. Lots of water? Awesome. Where's the family? Well that's good. Post when you can. I'll be thinking about you. I'm doing my version of praying too, OK? 

Response? 

God bless you, Alecto. 

He can get away with that. He's Bob. Cielo gets away with it too. Because they mean it. 

Anyway. That's my take on sheltering in place and these are the other things I'm thinking about right now and you know, I'm scared, but probably not nearly as scared as he is. 

...peace be with you...and also with you

Post Script, September 10

At a little after 11 on Sunday morning from Miami. Nothing else, just this as 10 to 15 feet of surge water threaten to cross Miami just now. 

Love in the passageways

I walk alone whenever possible. It isn't an attempt to be antisocial; it's a power grab for personal space, a reasonable amount of time to spray down the white board and maybe just look out the window at the landscaping in front of the great, curved building before turning right toward the stairwell and heading into the passageways which are part of a multilevel warren I've yet to work out that contains - at the very least - a cafeteria with decent food, a large seating area which smells oddly like high school, outdoor seating and gardens, a giant sweeping staircase leading to an airport lobby without the airport but definitely with the Starbucks and rows and rows of nearly empty consulting carrels. Like rigid octopus tentacles, the yet un-inventoried passageways lead off the upper level; places I don't care to revisit. I've been lost down one or two of them, badly enough to avoid repeating the process. The back end of the very lowest level leads to the gym which eventually leads to outside my building which I only understand because I landed outside that gym during an evacuation.

I walk alone because I'm rebooting the system the same way I have to reboot my phone at least once during the day or it starts doing weird stuff. I am on my phone four hours a day at a minimum which generally turns into six and can max out at eight and one day went nine. I blew through a brand new set of Apple earbuds in three months. Yup. They do wear out. One day they just stopped working. So the phone, I am clear it gets to a point where it just can't cope. If I have five minutes before I have to launch the next web session which will be associated with my phone, I reboot the phone just to make sure it doesn't decide to tip the session over on its ass. 

The problem with rebooting me is during the process everything is out of context. I once ran into my boss's boss, who I really just need to start calling my boss, understanding I have three bosses and that's just how it is, in the hall and I gave her a completely blank look. Later she asked if I was alright. I said was trying to work something out and just deep in it and since I'd only been there maybe six weeks that explanation flew. I've learned to just smile for the most part at any and everyone coming at me these days. That sort of sucks, you know that, right? It's this thing women do, we smile to disarm and this is because it stops two things from happening. It stops that INSIPID, smile, sweetie, you look so much xxx when you do, and also when we are smiling we are harmless (you know we're not harmless, right?) so it is necessary that we smile. Eff the patriarchy... but I do it anyway, it's been useful and keeps me out of trouble during the reboot. For the most part. 

It does not keep me out of trouble if I happen to run into my Boss during a reboot. On the other hand my Boss doesn't expect me to be harmless and my Boss expects to find me rebooting periodically. My Boss checks to make sure I'm not going to kill something if it looks like I need a reboot...

My Boss is quite certain I am eventually going to kill the Collibra guy who is really a solutions guy and not a dev guy and that I will kill him on general principle. I have assured him I have absolutely no desire to kill the Collibra SL. The Collibra SL is more than likely to kill his own self and I'm mostly motivated to save him from his own self for purely self-serving reasons. If he is dead, even by his own hands, the shadow of that ONE SINGLE TIME I ATE HIM FOR LUNCH will settle over my head like Shelob's gossamer web and I will have to live with that. Far better he continue to stumble along making people crazy and I will traipse along behind him offering help. One of us looks absolutely delicious. Sometimes I have to reboot twice.

There is a very large project that launched well before my arrival. I was stuck on that project just to watch in the event that our part of the project might actually show some sign of upcoming traction. At some point I fell off the meeting distribution list and didn't even notice. It was moving so slowly it didn't even matter. I got back on the distribution list, jumped back into the weekly meetings, reviewed the notes from the meetings I'd missed and realized not much had happened. I am marginally embarrassed to note that I was entirely unaware of the end date. It was moving so slowly the prospect of an end date didn't even register. What my team would have to do, which is massive, since the project actually revolves around two of our systems wasn't even registering because so much of the pre-work with the existing systems just wasn't moving. Theoretically speaking I knew exactly what was going to happen when it got to us, my Boss knew, theoretically speaking, but we were tracking the way you track a hurricane heading for Florida (Irma) a week before the Caribbean has gotten particularly upset. 

At some point the project manager was given another project manager which is an odd thing. They didn't replace him, they just stuck one in on top of him and suddenly we had to yank a resource off a high profile project (sorry, guys) and throw him into the melee head first. Here are your line items and here are the associated deliverable dates. Can you produce this by these dates? I don't know, he said, I have to look at this. Wise move. New PM didn't like that but I understand; I'm guilty of an assumptive close now and then and if I was in his shoes I'd be pushing the entire team like their lives depended on it because apparently the date on this thing is Q1 and I'm just not seeing it. 

My boss's boss came to visit me in the dungeon (back when we still had the dungeon and I seriously miss that room) and I have never seen her lean in with such intensity. She wanted two things. She wanted to not promise anything we couldn't deliver. Right, that's good. And she wanted to give him what he was asking for. Yeah, I hear you. You, she said, get people to make deadlines. Yes, I said, I do, but in this case, we don't quite understand what we're looking at yet so we're asking for a minute. Go talk to him, she said. I'll find him, I said.

I went to the original PM, a really approachable guy, and asked, where is he? I need to talk to him. He pointed out the back of this guy's head. OK. We are in open workspace now. This is what open workspace looks like:

This is close to what we have except those workspaces have dual monitors which are a little bigger and the desks come up and down so you can sit or stand. The round tables are for conversation and don't have power (so you can't sit there all day) but the long table with the lamps is called a library and you can stay all day. We don't have a row of offices, we have conference rooms and collaboration rooms which can only be booked on the spot. The open workspace is supposed to take us out of our cubes and offices so we can collaborate but what it does is create a noise fest which drives us into conference and collab rooms as often as possible. When people stay at their desks they develop a hard shell, keep their headsets glued to their ears (the landlines are all gone, if you want a speaker phone, you go to a conference or collab room, the number of meetings that take place by webex with people sitting right next to each other is astonishing) and their eyes focused on their screens. When we were in cubes you could stand at the edge of a cube and politely try to get someone's attention. Now you are invading personal space if a headset is on and eyes are forward. 

I stared at the back of his head willing him to move. 

I didn't want to ping him on IM without an introduction with a subject this heated. I slid around into his peripheral vision. He looked up. I mouthed: phone? He shook his head. I mouthed: I'll come back. I slunk back to the dungeon.

That was not a repeatable offense, I had not managed to introduce myself, none of our meetings were actually face to face, I had absolutely zero intention of having a resource conversation during a status meeting which meant I was going to have to resort to an IM introduction. Crap. Crap. Crap.

Crap.

AND Crap.

I fetched lunch later than usual because, life, so I was rebooting at about 1:30, head up, eyes forward, hugging the glass wall on the right to avoid taking out anyone with a full lunch tray and

Hi. You were looking for me.

Dead stop. Processing. I don't think I've seen your face dead on before and I have no freaking idea who you are and why are you looking at me like that? Crap. You want something from me. I want something from you? I don't think I want anything from anyone right now. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This is going to be a missed opportunity if I can't think of what I need from someone and attach it to your face...

You want to talk about J's deliverables. 

(oh holy crap it's you!)

(it's you and how do you know it's me? I am nearly certain we have NOT been introduced)

(you have beautiful eyes)

(where the hell did that come from?)

(why are you smiling at me?)

(stop that. seriously. stop that. stop smiling at me.)

(oh my god. we're just standing here not saying anything and you're smiling at me and we probably look beyond stupid)

I smiled at him and said, yeah, about that, listen, J can give you the green lines and the blue lines in this sprint but the red lines are still a big black hole and we seriously don't want to promise you something we don't understand yet. 

PM:    What can you give me?

Alecto:    He said he could give you timing on the red lines by the end of next sprint. I realize that's a horrible answer and we really would prefer to tell you we'll GIVE you the red lines next sprint but since we don't even know what it is we can't promise you something we can't deliver. 

PM:    What the hell is a sprint?

Alecto:    Oh. It's a two week cycle. I'm sorry. I thought you knew. We use Agile project management and I just realized you're on Waterfall and none of that is going to make any sense. So listen, about those other line items below J's. The one's with my boss's boss's name on them and the September 11 date, that's a joke, right?

PM:    I don't joke.

Alecto:    You're still smiling at me.

PM:    That has nothing to do with this conversation.

Alecto:    Well, I'm going to use it to the best of my advantage anyway.

PM:    You're still smiling at me.

Alecto:    That has nothing to do with this conversation.

PM:    And I'm going to use it to the best of my advantage anyway.

Alecto:    Of course you are. 

PM:    Those lines are going to have her name until you can give me a resource and a date.

Alecto:    How about never?

PM:    Did you really just say that?

Alecto:    No. Not really. I just don't know what it is yet but it looks like the re-engineering lines and if it's the analysis, we're going to need to break it up. 

PM:    By when?

Alecto:    God! You sound like me!

PM:    So you'll have something for me by Tuesday's meeting?

Alecto:    I will. 

PM:    It was nice to see you. Where do you sit?

Alecto:    In the dungeon.

PM:    You're a contractor?

Alecto:    Yes.

PM:    How long are you here?

Alecto:    Forever.

PM:    Seriously?

Alecto:    No. Contractors can stay for thirty months.

PM:    Well, that's long enough I guess.

(long enough for what?!)

(stop smiling at me)

(you have the most beautiful blue eyes)

This Thursday we moved back upstairs to our new space and I had no idea where anyone was located. Bhaven and I secured a Collab room for the day which kept us out of the chaos and the Deloitte crew got the big conference room right next to us but it felt weird being separated from them despite their overall noisiness. 

This Thursday was hard because I'd screwed up my hotel reservations and only had Tuesday night because of the holiday. So I drove home on Wednesday night, which made sense if you look at the normal pattern of stay Monday night, go home Tuesday night, stay Wednesday night, go home Thursday night, but drove back on Thursday morning and then right back on Thursday night and fitting 50 hours into four days - which was NOT my intention - while driving 400 miles was a bitch. So on Thursday in our new home on the third floor I was having trouble processing by about 3 PM and the world was on fire. I found myself with my Boss standing in front of boss's boss because we actually caught her at her workspace, discussing those really scary re-engineering lines and, well, the resources we either do or do not have. We talked about the new PM and what I agreed to and what I did not agree to and why her name was still on that spreadsheet with those atrocious dates. 

Boss's Boss:    Get them off!

Alecto:    He isn't going to take them off or move the dates until we have a resource and dates and we won't have dates until we have and analyst looking at them. But please, notice the entire thing is in pale grey. 

Boss's Boss:    Go and talk to him.

Alecto:    I don't even know where he is.

Boss's Boss:    Well he knows exactly where you are.

Alecto:    What?! 

Boss's Boss:    He's staring at you like he's about to reel you in and he's got a funny look on his face. 

Alecto:    What?!

Boss's Boss:    Turn around.

Twelve feet behind me he sat at his new workspace with his headset on but not staring at his screen. Smiling. 

Boss's Boss:    Do you see that library table over there just behind him?

Alecto:    Yes.

Boss's Boss:    That's where I want you to sit starting Monday.

Alecto:    Seriously?

Boss's Boss:    Yes. 

I walked over and said, well, now I know where you sit. 

PM:    And now I know where you sit.

Alecto:    How do you know that?

PM:    I have very good ears.

(Fuck)

Later my boss said, I have never seen that guy smile. Seriously. Never. 

Alecto:    That is because he thinks he's going to eat me for lunch. 

Boss:    I don't think that's why he's smiling.

Alecto:    I don't need a smiling shark sort of complication in my life right now so I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that. Do I really have to sit at the library?

Boss:    Yup.

Alecto:    Fine, but J sits with me. His head might pop off but at least I'll have something to feed the shark first.