Relative worth

I think I'm a decent writer. Better than a lot of stuff I read, that's for sure. But that could mean I read total crap.

I'm hard at work on my two books - mystery thriller and middle-grade reader about weiner dogs run amuck in a retirement home. Mom read the weiner dog book yesterday. "It's good! Really. It's good."

I'm being oversensitive, I know. I don't think it's all that good (what writer does?), so I look for affirmation of that in other people's responses. But can it BE good? I seem to need other people to tell me my books are worth working on, improving, before I can find the enthusiasm to actually work on and improve them.

What was the point of this post. Nothing, really. I was going to try to make some comparision between me thinking my writing is good, and my grandma cheating the local Meals on Wheels out of money.

My grandma eats a Meals on Wheels at the senior center once a week. She dubtifully sticks two dollars into the money bin, the money bin clearly labeled "Suggested Donation: $3.50."

I asked Mom about the discrepancy later. Mom rolled her eyes.

"Grandma seems to think that since she only eats about $2.00 worth of what they serve her, she only owes $2.00."

The pure, insane illogic of that hung in the air like a cloud of escaped flatulence.

I guess it really doesn't matter how good or how not good I think my writing is. I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy doing it to the best of my abilities.

As for the cheap bastards known as "The Greatest Generation", I hope Meals on Wheels prices their meals with the assumption that they're not going to be paid full price, so they ask for more and get reimbursed for what the meal actually cost in the first place.

I'll probably never sell a ton of books. But at least I can always count on senior citizens to keep the "overstock" shelves empty of my 75% off books.

A green pinky finger

My legendary cheapskateness brought me to try to plant tomatoes from seeds this year, rather than almost grown in Jiffy pots that you can just plop in the ground. I bought the teeny jiffy pots, seed mix, and have hovered over them like a mother hen. I gently mist the dirt several times a day, as it basks in the warmth of my laundry room (and new boiler). I started tomatoes, canteloupe, zucchini, basil, and catnip.

Seeing the first green shoots sprout from the dirt is a potent feeling. Like creating something out of nothing. Every day I rush home from work to see how the sprouts did today, what measurable growth there is.

I never thought I'd enjoy something as pedestrian as gardening, but I'm actually kind of good at it. All of my seed pots are sprouting something, even if I have no idea what it is. Mom's right - should've labeled things. I've got the basil mixed up with the catnip. Might make for some interesting spaghetti. I've got tomato stalks in an old bundt pan. Alyssum in egg cartons. I'm not planning on eating the Alyssum. The only pots not growing are the ones I think I forgot to put seeds in. Other than that, I have to say - my fingernails look much better with a little dirt under them.

Score one for the little guy (or gal)

I haven't wanted to blog on this for the past six months for fear that me and my big mouth would jeopardize it. But now it's over.

What is it? "It" would be me, all 5'3, 120lbs of me (okay, in my imagination I weigh 120 lbs) suing a local heating and air conditioning company, and winning. Through mediation, I got approximately 2/3rds of what I was asking for.

This might seem like a defeat. But alas. Defeat is in the eye of the beholder. Or something. Defeat is saying, "Man, it really blows that a company took advantage of a lucrative building contract and chose to install a crappy boiler in your house that almost killed you." That is defeat.

I spent the past six months gathering anything I could that might act as evidence against the company - new heating estimates showing my boiler was too small, all of my many service receipts, photos of rust and condensation buildup on my boiler. I put them in neat ziploc baggies to present during the mediation. Evidence A) Katie watches too much TV.

It was actually kind of fun, playing a game where there were real stakes, and no real losers. My remuneration was never going to result in someone losing their job, nor would it make much difference in the company's bottom line. It did, however, make a difference in my bottom line. You shouldn't have to replace a boiler in a 6yr old house. I certainly wouldn't have chosen to spend my money on that, provided that my house wasn't leaking carbon monoxide. I'm such a tightwad that I haven't even replaced my 6 yr old retainer. Evidence B) Why Katie is Still Single.

I succeeded in keeping my cool, even when the company representatives were trying to make this my fault. Even when the company representatives were refusing to meet my bare minimum settlement offer. I took their bare minimum settlement offer when they stopped keeping their cool. I could hear their voices raise against the mediator in the other room and decided that perhaps the extra few hundred dollars isn't worth having them yell at me to my face in court. Plus, they intimated that I would have to involve a collections agency to get my settlement from them. This plus that minus those equals "Okay, sounds good, please let me know when they have exited the building so I can sneak outside to my car."

I still took a good-sized hit in my finances for a mistake that I still believe was made during the construction of my home. But my home is now safe for habitation. Ellie Bean is as hyper as ever (maybe a little carbon monoxide in the kitty would help her sleep at night?). And I chose my battle. A very scary, overwhelming battle, but I chose it. I stuck with it, and I emerged victorious.

Note to Fate: This still doesn't make up for me losing that beauty pageant in high school. But it helps.

Dandelions

Dandelions were so pretty to my five-year-old eyes. Vibrant yellow, poking persistantly from green (or brown...) grass, they never failed to perk up an otherwise plain, boring lawn. Twisting them into crowns, and smooshing them against my hands made my fingers glow yellow.

Fast-forward twenty-three years, and dandelions are no longer beautiful. They are a menace, a menace akin to meth in our neighborhoods. Perhaps not that bad. But I bet under a bridge somewhere, someone who can't afford meth is smoking dandelions.

I took my dog on a walk this evening. My cigar-smoking neighbor, who I am slighly afraid of, was out washing his car. "Evening," I said. He nodded at me. "Looks like the dandelion crop is nice and fertile this year," I said, gesturing to the neighbor on the other side of his house.

"Ugh," he grumbled. "I can't keep the damn things out of my yard!"

I smiled in commaraderie and brought the dog inside.

When did this happen? This invasion? I'm not talking about the invasion of dandelions in my yard, but rather...the invasion of adulthood into my worldview.

I went out front and spent an hour digging the dandelions from my front yard. Lest my cigar-smoking neighbor start to have it in for me.

Back in my kitchen, I drank a glass of 7up and rubbed the ache from my digging shoulder. I looked out the back slider at my yard, and noticed a few dandelions poking their heads up.

We've got to make a lot of concessions to adulthood. Conform to societal expectations. That's the way it should be; that's what keeps civility and order in the world.

If I leave a few dandelions in my backyard, just for a little color, I don't see the harm. My dog will probably eat them anyway.

Breathe, Grasshopper

I'm afraid of chemical smells. Not Weed-B-Gone or fertilizer smells or interior wall paint or Elmer’s glue-type smells, but rather industrial solvent smells.

I have an…interesting history with chemical solvent smells. There is an outside possibility that industrial chemicals caused my bone marrow failure.

Given that I had to have a bone marrow transplant in order to remain among the living, I’m a little leery of things that might cause a need for another transplant. Rational? Yeah, about as rational as people who install unsightly lightning rods to the side of their houses, attracting the lighting toward their house to save…their house.

Today, someone at work used Goop-off or some other chemical to get something off of their desk. Within five minutes, the smell permeated the entire building, the harsh chemically scent driving straight to people’s temples. Driving fear straight to my heart.

While coworkers complained of the stink and the headache, I sat at my desk, willing myself not to breathe. Understandably, this method of avoidance did not work in the long run.

I was forced to breathe the minute quantities of a commercially available cleaner. My heart raced. My palms sweated. (They always sweat, so I suppose that doesn’t prove anything). My mind fuzzed, awash in the possible harm the smell was doing to me – invading my nostrils, tearing down my esophagus, slowly killing me from my innards to my hair follicles.

A door was opened, and relief flooded into my workspace in the form of 34 degree air.

I am pleased to report that I survived. I met a fear head-on, I maintained my sanity at all times, I kept things in perspective, and I am a stronger person for it. I didn’t even put on the sweater hanging from the back of my desk chair.

I can handle anything.

(PS – I work at a computer all day. As do my coworkers. I kind of want to know what it was that got so stuck to a desk in the first place to require Goop-Off. A lunch of leftover casserole?)

Just save it, would you?

Just when I think TV shows can’t get any more stupid, network executives surprise me with offerings such as “Undercover Boss.” The premise was interesting enough – the CEO of a major company goes undercover as an entry-level within his own operation, ostensibly to discover the things that are going wrong with his company, and the things his company is doing right.

I watched the first episode for want of anything better on TV. And I watched the second episode. The second episode was almost a verbatim copy of the first, only the company was different and the front-line employees were different. At the end of both shows, the CEO “revealed” his true identity to the few employees he worked alongside, and awarded them with various surprises. One of the employees was a young man wanting to be a chef. So the CEO awarded him a $5,000 scholarship.

Five thousand dollars. The CEO of Whitecastle Hamburgers couldn’t afford more than a $5,000 scholarship? It was a token gift of appreciation that I found insulting to entry-level workers everywhere. This CEO is spouting off concerns that employees don’t see a future for themselves at the company, and yet all he can find in his deep, vast pockets is $5,000?

You know how sometimes you don’t know what to say to someone, and you end up saying the wrong thing? Like, two years after you accidently back over your neighbor’s cat in the driveway, you see them coming out their door and you holler, “Hey, sorry about that one thing awhile back”? That’s what this scholarship offer was. “Sorry about all the hours we make you work in stressful conditions for crappy pay and no benefits.” (I wonder how much extra cost would truly need to be added to a McBurger in order to partially fund health insurance for the employees? Would you be willing to spend an extra 50c?)

If you can’t offer someone enough to acknowledge their humanity, their dignity, sometimes it’s better to offer nothing at all.

You're Fired.

My medical history is kind of scary. Not to me. To me, it’s kind of boring. I’ve had enough occasion to talk about it with family, friends, and in speeches for this or that so now, frankly, the story bores me.

But looking at a list of my medical history on paper, yeah, I can see how that would be overwhelming for a normal family doctor. Thus, most of my medical problems that aren’t flu-, cold-, or prescription refill-related have gone through my oncologist.

My oncologist has changed a couple of times in the past ten years, but for five years or so, it has been the same guy. We never really saw eye-to-eye on most stuff, but we tolerated each other. As if in a bad relationship, I was too aware of the risk I ran if I decided to look for greener pastures.

He didn’t push me on the stuff most important to me, and I yielded on the stuff I could tell I was going to lose on anyway. It wasn’t a symbiotic relationship by any means, but I made do. All of a sudden, he has decided he no longer wants to be my “point man” for medical issues. He only wants to deal with Aplastic Anemia issues. Not even issues directly related to the Aplastic Anemia or the bone marrow transplant fallout.

Well, that’s lovely, I say. What do I tell the regular doctors who see my history, see that I’ve got an ongoing upset stomach for the past month, and they freak, telling me to talk to my oncologist? I am a medical orphan. After feeling powerless and frustrated for several days, I came to a conclusion. Actually, the oncologist’s office helped me come to this conclusion when they called me with blood test results, and proceeded to read the results to me backwards – X value meant my prescription should be lowered, when in real-life medicine, X value means my prescription should be increased.

I took back the power. I harnessed my inner Donald Trump and told the nurse to please tell my oncologist that I will no longer be in need of his services. As he obviously only wants to deal with my blood disorder, a disorder that I’ve technically been cured of for the past NINE YEARS, I’ll look him up if there’s ever a blood problem. But in the meantime, he can cut me from his patient roster.

I thought I’d feel like I was tempting fate to fire him. I mean, Murphy’s Law, right? In reality, I feel in control again. I no longer have to sit in an office once a year with a room full of bald old people staring at me, wondering how sick I am, what with my full head of hair. Am I waiting for a diagnosis? Am I at the beginning of my treatment? Wow, that poor girl doesn’t have a clue what’s coming.

They don’t see the bald patches at my scalp, the thin spots above my ears. They don’t see the scars, real and emotional. I’ve been there, and I’ve had the blessed fortune to come back from there. I hope all the bald old people in the office have the occasion to one day fire the oncologist.