Oh Two

We were up in Breckenridge today, to see the International Snow Sculpture competition. We were walking around Breck, and realized.... I can BREATE up here!

Breck is at 9,600 feet (those t-shirts you see with Breckenridge: Elevation 12,998 are referencing the top of the ski hill.) We were here visiting from the flatlands several years ago, and huffing and puffing like the big, bad wolf. Today, not so much. We were walking around like we were at home, and the friends we were with were laughing at the Oxygen Bar on the main strip.

Yea, buddy. We are surviving, nay, thriving, at 7200!

Oh, and the Snow Sculpture competition? Knock your socks off awesome. Totally amazing that these teams can carve a block of snow into art.



Team Mongolia working on carving ice Friday Night.



The competition sponsors got their own ice sculptures, plus this bench we sat on. Anyone else think its weird that the sponsors had ICE sculptures and not SNOW sculptures??

 

 

Wow.

Ribbit, Ribbit

This is totally uncharitable to say... but I need somewhere to say it...

Stop posting photos of your frog baby! If they are underweight, any way you photograph them naked, it will NOT be their best side.

Think about limits. If you are posting 10+ photos of your child on a daily basis, you may have a problem. There's a 12-step program for that.

Stop telling me every time he/she poops!

No one wants to know about endless "baby blowouts" and the number of outfits your entire family went through, because apparently you used your child like a spray gun and everyone was victim.

Post about milestones. Milestones are not hourly updates on what toy said child is playing with/chewing on/throwing/shoving up the dog's nose at the present moment.

The One That Got Away

Do you ever wonder if someone out there thinks about you as "the one that got away?" One of my good friends is the "one that got away" for a college boyfriend. The funny thing is that he broke up with her. Yet, on at least two occasions, I have had late-night Facebook conversations (alcohol infused, I suspect) wherein the gentleman in question (married to someone else now) has asked lots of questions about my friend, asking if she's happy, etc. A decade later, and there's still some weird torch, "what could have been," and "if onlys" that obviously plague the guy. Ugh.

For me, if I were the "one that got away" its probably for someone I never dated, or even thought about as anything more than a friend. I was loyal as a retriever, and couldn't even think that anyone else was interested in me back then. Unfortunately, that resulted in getting yelled at by a boy I stopped by to see at his university when I was visiting some other friends. Holy cow, was he mad. Mad that I didn't know how he felt, mad that I didn't feel the same, and mad that being friends with him was interpreted as wrongly held hope. Wow. There might have been a little temporary crazy there. I could be that guy's "one that got away" but it would be more like "ran away screaming."

Not to say that somewhere in there, my teenage self doesn't sometimes think that it would serve an ex or two right if they found me on Facebook and realized that I was "the one that got away." (Ok, more likely their mothers would find me and think I was the one that got away. I was a pretty wholesome high schooler!)

Not that I care about any of them anymore (seriously, old memories, now devoid of emotion and, thank God, teenage drama.) The reality it that some of them are doing well,  (ok, one took a really, really long time to move out of his parents' house, and I suspect is still a little failure to launch.) I wouldn't, however, have wanted to end up with any of them. None of them were right for me, no matter how desperately I wanted that to be true at the time. It feels good to have my personal "right one," and not have to worry about the "one that got away."

I'm glad I don't have that kind of regret. And that fact may be better than being anyone's "one that got away." (nah, nah.)

Super Heroes

So, I harbor this secret fantasy that someday, I will develop super powers. I don't know which super powers they would be, flying, ability to move large object, telepathy... but I think I would like something akin to levitation, at the least. Sometimes, I get excited and/or irritated enough to think that it is quite possible that I would lift off the ground. How cool would that be - to rise up, move around...

When I was a kid, I used to dream I could fly. It was a recurring dream, and it was always on a beach (I assume, that since I grew up in Michigan, it was the beaches of Lake Huron) at sunset. I would sort of flap my arms, and start moving up and swooping around. Awesome.

Several years ago, I noticed this thing on my back. I removed it, with care, but it came back several times.

It might be best described as a quill.

No kidding.

It was this thick, bright white, hair that seriously hurt and was sticking STRAIGHT OUT of my shoulder blade. Seriously, it looked like a quill, or at least the start of one.

Dang it. Of all the super heroes, I get to be Porcupine Girl?

Crap.

What good is that super power? Quills? What, when confronted with a villain, I can... curl in a spiky ball?

It eventually went away and has never come back, but seriously?!?

There's probably a good reason we don't have superpowers...

The American (Idol) Delusion

I saw that the television show, American Idol is back on this week. I haven't watched much of that show in years - I remember Kelly Clarkston winning the first season, and Rueben Studdard and Clay Aiken facing off in the second. I think I was pretty much done with tuning in on a regular basis when Carrie Underwood won, and I'm not sure I could pick any of the winners out of a lineup after that...

Eric's favorite part of the show however, has always been the auditions. He laughs and wonders how anyone could believe that their terrible performance was Idol-worthy. He thinks it is a set up.

In part, I do too.

However, I know that some of those poor people are sincere. I know that some of them truly believe that they sing well, and that they have star potential.

Why?

Because in the fourth grade, I started taking violin class. From there until I graduated high school, I was in orchestra. I also did stints in honors choir, honors orchestra, regular choir, show choir, jazz choir, one year in the band, and several trips across the boards in various costumes and getups in the theatre. I loved performing.

It didn't mean that I was always good.

I remember the accolades, from very early on. "You were great!" "That was terrific!" At first, I believed all of them. Then, one time, I went back and saw the tapes of those fourth grade performances with a bunch of other fourth grade virtuosos.

Cats. Cats in heat. Cats in heat in a room full of rocking chairs.

See, no one tells you when you suck. No one tells you when your shirt is too tight, or you are off key, or, seriously, this is not a career line for you. Nope. They lie. They all lie with good intentions, but they lie none the less. They want you to feel good, but what often happens is that feeling good leads to a sick sort of self-delusion that allows you to ignore that niggle in the back of your head that is saying that your performance wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Sometimes you are good.

By then, however, at least for me, I have no idea how to judge if other people think so. The lies happen so often, that it's impossible to know when someone really thinks you were good, or you look good, or if they themselves are completely delusional (lulled into psychosis by the yowling cats, no doubt,) or if they just don't want to hurt your feelings.

I have a fairly good sense of perception (or, if in comparison to reality television, am incredibly self-aware!) I know when I suck and when I don't. I know when I'm calling it in (see: Monday morning work outfit and hair) and when things are going well.

So what then? The problem is that I, like most others, like validation. However, unlike the contestants on American Idol, I saw the tape. Crap smells, and my nose works. False validation on a pretty constant basis has translated into a severe skepticism of any positive validation, and as a result, a pretty severe case of self-doubt. Add in a dose of generally heightened anxiety, and you have one overthinking, neurotic kitten in this corner of the world.

I think I need to be buddies with Simon Cowell.

Maybe I can't take that level of brutal honesty...

Maybe I need to go back to sleep, because I had yet another dream of singing backup for U2 last night, this time at some summer festival on a college campus... man was I good!

NASA, or "They Aren't Out There"

Back when I was working for the Court, I got a call from a local county official (read: jackass who was skittering on the edge of irrelevancy) questioning my budget. Not that it was any of his business, as my work came exclusively from grants and not from county tax dollars. I think once I told him that, he had to do some back peddling on his veiled accusations and went on and on about how his constituents are complaining about property taxes. Which got me thinking.... if I were an elected official, what if anything, would I cut?

NASA.

Ok,  know its a beloved icon of America, first to the moon and all that crap. However, at its core, we're really talking about looking for aliens and conducting research on dead rocks. No one really expects that our exploits to the moon and Mars will result in finding an area on one of these aforementioned big dead rocks that will sustain life. In fact, just the idea that Mars MAY have sustained life the size of small single-celled organisms 6 million years ago makes the news and people get all atwitter over it. THAT's what you're looking for? THAT's what we are spending 6 billion dollars to build a space shuttle for?

Let's face it. They aren't out there, and they aren't coming. If we are really that paranoid as a planet about the possibility of alien invasion, I might suggest to things. 1) Stop reading Orson Wells. 2) create a multi-national space monitoring initiative run by the UN that everyone funds, rather than each country (and by that I mean primarily the US and Russia, followed at great length by China's, who's ego is getting in the way of good sense) creating their own science fiction, I mean scientific protocols. This proposal would also keep track of meteors, solar flares, etc., which are in fact the more useful if less glamorous purposes of NASA.

Another thing. Time and time again, we have learned on an international level that the best scientists do NOT work for the government, and that the most scientific progress has been made in the private sector. Example: privately funded scientists cracked the human genome code 18 months before government funded scientists even began to figure out what they were looking at. Einstein did not get funding from the German government to study relativity - in point of fact, they kicked him out because he was Jewish, but that's another rant for another day. I could go on, but the overarching point is that while this may not be the biggest government program, its still costing money and for what really purpose? To satisfy the American ego that we can go back to the moon if we want to, even though we've already done it and haven't repeated the feat in more decades than I've been alive? To give our top military pilots something to fly after they come off active duty?

I would propose that we should turn over this whole space exploration and research thing to the private sector, who can raise the funds from interested parties.  Instead, refocusing the (albeit few, relatively speaking) dollars that we just now eliminated from the extravagant waste that was the NASA project to the thoughtful revamping of social services and funding of prevention programs might actually do some qualitative good for future generations. Granted, they won't have the joys of childhood that I did watching the space shuttles take off on television, but then again, that's what the movies are for.

Beam me up, Scottie. Megs out.

Optional Body Parts

I wrote this back in 2007, when I had a MySpace account:

"I just have no relationship with my uterus.

You know, I just never think about it. It's like a pancreas, or maybe a gall bladder. I know I have one, but its not like I think about what I use it for, or really have any real connection with it.

However, apparently, many others are concerned about the state of my uterus, and well, its lack of productivity. Never mind you that no one ever really bothers to consult me if I actually have a desire to use this particular organ, everyone just assumes that since I have one, I should be using it. Sort of like TiVo, I guess, like, why bother having one if you aren't going to use it? Since we've been married for 4 1/2 years, and last year bought a larger house, it shocks people that we do not have children, are not "trying" for children (like the lottery?), and have no real plans for children. Therefore, the look I get every time I answer "no, no kids," especially to people I don't know well, is that look that says "oh... poor dear, she must not be able to have children." Except, of course, they can't actually ask the burning question "oh, so is your uterus broken?," so instead, they dance around it, yet persistently dig into my reproductive life and ask if we're going to have some soon, planning on it, etc. Then launch into the inevitable diatribe on the wonders of children, how your life changes once you have kids (as if I was living on a cave on the moon and hadn't noticed), and wish me luck. One woman even put her hands on me and told me she would be praying for me to have babies. Holy crap! Literally.

What people (especially conservative Christians living in the state of Indiana) do not seem to realize is that my husband and I may actually, (hold all shocked inhalations of breath here) be choosing not to pursue the "miracle" of parenthood at the present time. Additionally, we, myself in particular, do NOT feel like our life is reduced, limited or unfulfilled in any way by NOT utilizing the uterus available to us.  And yes, we assume that my uterus is available, and NOT broken, so sympathies are likely misguided here.

I know this may come as a surprise, but we didn't actually purchase a bigger house in order to fill it with our progeny. We purchased our wonderful home in order to have space available for others, but not necessarily those that share our DNA. We enjoy entertaining and taking care of other people and feel blessed that we have a large home in order to do that. The fact that people have taken a tour of our home and picked out the "nursery" bedroom (seriously, this happened this weekend), doesn't mean that we're actually going to use it as a nursery. I just haven't gotten around to taking down the cloud wallpaper yet - the hideous Vera Bradley wallpaper needed to go first.

It amazes me that people do not seem to have any respect for this decision - it occurs to them only that they had children, and that is what married couples are "supposed to" do. Further, they seem to fail to understand that this is OUR decision, not anyone else's. They make it their mission to convince me that having children is wonderful, and just wait until we have them... oh and don't forget that I'm 28 and "still have time," as if I've never looked at my biological clock to note the hour.
I and my husband are OK with not having children yet, and additionally have considered the possibility that we may never be ready for children - if they happen to show up at our door wrapped in newspaper and looking for a home, we aren't going to send them back, but if they don't, that's ok too. Why is no one else OK with this decision? Why should I be forced, cajoled, shamed etc., into using all of the equipment I have? Do they? Honestly, like, when is the last time anyone used their appendix? Why not, you have one, you should use it! It gets to the point sometimes where I start to feel bad, like I'm wrong for not longing for and desiring to have children to raise at this very moment. However, I can't change my feelings on the subject, and certainly am not going to because some virtual stranger gives me the joys of children monologue... so I guess the next time someone asks, I'll just have to question their use of their appendix... or maybe launch into a lecture on the value of wisdom teeth. I wonder what would happen then?"

You know what, all of the above is pretty much still true. Except, now I think about my uterus. Mainly because now, at 34, my biological clock is ticking, loudly. LOUDLY. I'm also fairly convinced that those same people that I complained about back in 2007 can HEAR said clock, and if I let them, they would probably provide it with a megaphone, just to make sure that I can hear it.

I really don't think anyone else gets this. I like my life. I don't want to change it, and I'm pretty sure a baby would do that. I like kids, but lately, this whole "you're getting older, shouldn't you have a baby" mantra that rolls through my head on a pretty constant basis, has me feeling so guilty I don't want to be around kids (even the ones I love), and start feeling ridiculously uncomfortable passing the children's clothing section of Target.

All this to say, I don't need anyone else reminding me (like, oh say, yesterday) "See, you're good with children." Like all I needed to do was realize that I know how to hold a child and that would miraculously change my mind?? I was good at science in high school, but that doesn't mean I should have embraced being an engineer. Dude, I have enough guilt going on here, but I'm absolutely positive that's a crappy reason to have a baby.

Let's return to a discussion of your pinky toe, shall we?