My Level of Awareness

So, I am sitting here, after finally getting back to my hotel room after a long day on the road, and a very satisfactory dinner with a good friend, minding my own business, basking in glow of my laptop monitor and the afterglow of my dinner-martini and after-dinner latte, all warm and happy and thinking of bed.

Then, with very little warning, and absolutely no foreplay, I am contemplating a view of my toes.  Except they are set against the backdrop of the ceiling plaster, which is not the usual setting for toes.  Fascinating.

After getting my toes back into their usual position at the gravity-end of my body, I called the front desk to inform them of the critical furniture failure in my room.  We come to a brief understanding.   They won’t charge me for the chair.  I won’t sue their asses off.

Actually, they were quite nice about it - they even offered to bring me up another office chair.  But with bed so imminent, there really didn’t seem to be a point.  I just wanted to make it quite plain, that while I cannot vouch for what OTHER hotel occupants did with their chairs, I was innocent of any possible charges of furniture abuse.

(P.S. - I will be answering the rest of the questions - just as soon as I get back!)

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I am writing to from the road again.  Such is the life of a trial monitor. 

Y’all have NO idea what a PhD in Biochemistry qualifies you to do.  Really.  I’m serious. 

While the bulk of my job can be incredibly tedious, it has moments that border on the surreal.

 Tonight, it’s Dali-land. 

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Moira asks:

My deep question is: How do you deal with asshats within an SCA group? The ones who get pissed when you don’t drink their kool-aid.

Ah, again.  SCA questions.  Universally applicable answers.  And, by the way, I have always had a deep fondness for the term asshat.  Nothing else is quite as succinct.

The nice advantages of being a certified dinosaur in the SCA is that you reach a stage in your involvement where you no longer feel compelled to drink anyone’s brand of kool-aid, no matter how strenuously it is offered.  Conversely, you really no longer feel the need to serve anybody any either.  You reach a point where you feel you have earned the right to say “you do your thing, and I will do mine, and we don’t have to invite each other to our respective birthdays.”  It’s much nicer than simply saying “piss off”.

Aside from adopting the attitude of a person too scarred to give a proverbial poopy, I have decided over many years of SCA administration on several levels, that the “Enough Rope” approach is the most effective.  It does require, however, the most patience. 

The Enough Rope Method of Asshat Management is simple, because it requires very little effort on my part.  Basically, you let your Insistent Annoyance play out enough line to not only hang themselves, but hogtie themselves in the process.  And it is effective because:

1.  Over inflated views of self-importance basically guarantee that they will play that line out to the very extent of their own incompetence.  Every.  Single.  Time.

2.  Most people witnessing the dispensing of said Rope, are not stupid.  I will present, for your consideration, that the great majority of people are not only decent and well-meaning, but are fully capable of discerning between the righteous and the merely self-righteous. 

Eventually, anyway.  That’s the patience part.  For your more devious asshat, this sometime takes a bit longer than others, but good does ultimately prevail.  Permanent damage is rarely done, except, of course, to the asshat.

 And if it doesn’t?  In that case you might have to sit back and reconsider who is really the one being the asshat.

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It’s a wonder I can ever get up in the morning.

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Tara asks the eternal question:

Toilet paper over the roll or under? Just for something light.

HAH!  I will admit, that as a young woman, I was seduced by the “under roll” crowd.   It made everything look so neat and precise.  I am really, really into the concept of neat and precise.  No torn-off jagged ends to remind me of the last occupant.  I didn’t have to think of the fact that OTHER people were, well, you know, on the SAME SEAT that I was.  It almost hid the true purpose of that pristine white roll.  You just almost could think of it as something other than a big continuous sheet of buttwiping paper.  Oh, yeah.  Out of sight, out of mind.

But now I am in the second half of life where function definitely triumphs over form.  The bleary-eyed middle aged me no longer cares as much about how the damn thing looks so long as I can most efficiently locate both roll AND end in the middle of the night.  Hell, as a 40-something year old with a toddler, I am just glad if the roll is actually ON the roller, rather than perched precariously on top of the tank or completely discharged in a heap on the bathroom floor.    The optimal position for quick location and dispensation to a middle-aged woman, desperately in need of bifocals, and stumbling in the half dark is definitively OVER the roll. 

Efficiency.  At my age, it’s all about efficiency.

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So, I was in Target and I was pondering the elusive nature of happiness and the human pursuit of it.  Nothing like a large retail establishment to make you all philosophical-like.  And where I ended up was with the realization that sometime we are so caught up in the grand scheme of What Will Make Us Happy (TM), that we forget that on a routine everyday basis, it isn’t the big answers that make us happy.  It’s the little happinesses of the moment that make our heart sing.

So, I bring you the little happinesses of Robbin’s day:

Antibiotics and Harry with no ear infection.

Google-Chat with Charlotte - She gives good chat.  Try it sometime. 

This, burning in my office:

 Just a little touch of summer-to-come.

And this, which just became my new favorite gum flavor:

Mmm.  Mojitos.  Makes me want to leave my office and run off to Havana. 

I found the perfect parking spaces when I ran my lunch errands.

No line at the checkout.

Ottmar Leibert’s Isla del Sol on the iPOD.   Spanish guitar for the Latin soul.

And did I mention the day is beautiful, warm and sunny?

It all adds up to happiness.  Right now at this moment.

What is making you happy?  Today?  Right at this moment?

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Kat asks:

Do you feel a certain apathy growing in our kingdom? And what can we do about it?

This is obviously an SCA-related question, but the answer about large group dynamics and politics is applicable to any large volunteer organization really - you may want to read it even if you aren’t in the SCA because you may find a bit of resonance if you have every been invovled with a church group or hobby group of any kind.  We just dress differently, but the dynamics are eerily similar.

 The answer to the first question is - no, I don’t. 

 This is not to say I don’t think there are issues, but I don’t think the root is apathy.  I think it is discontent.  I think the root is that we have become a Kingdom of “waiters”.  And I don’t mean the kind that bring you iced tea and remove your plates.

This is a thing that we inherited in part from our parent Kingdom.  Meridies has always been a place of strong personalities amongst the Peers, and these personalities shaped the Kingdom identity more than any other factor.  Because Meridies became a Kingdom rather by default, not design, it did not experience the strong groundswell of cultural identity seen in the birth of other Kingdoms.  This has led (as these things often do), to both Meridies greatest strengths and it’s greatest weaknesses. 

Meridies is notable for it’s incredible acceptance for diversity - largely because it has never experienced one over-riding Kingdom identity.  Believe me, this is a good thing.  A great thing.  It’s one of the things that has made our populace friendly and hospitable. 

But Meridies, with a notable lack of strong cultural guidance, has always looked upward for it’s leadership.  They have been, historically, a top-down kind of Kingdom.  Things don’t really “develop” as much as they are decided on by the Crowns or influential Peers and adopted by proxy.  Individual “pocket” areas develop very strong identities, but they don’t tend to permeate Kingdom-wide unless consciously enacted by law.  Laws are made by Crowns.  Crowns often disagree.  Meridies establishes traditions by fits and starts.

Gleann Abhann WAS one of those pocket areas.  We do have more of a ground-up personality.  More.  But not entirely.

We still tend to hold our breath and look toward our leadership to tell us what to do.  We need “official” benediction before we act.   And this permeates a bit farther than it should.

There are lots of dynamic people with lots of really, really good ideas out there.  But they are waiting for somebody to TELL them how to make them happen. 

Stop.

Folks - I have a super-secret Peerly thing to tell you.  It ain’t bloody brain surgery.

If you have an idea, and you can convince enough people it’s a good one, it has a way of happening.  Even without the help of us Peers and sometimes in spite of us.

If you have a vision - make it happen.

Don’t wait on us, because the truth is we are waiting for inspiration.  Your inspiration.

We have raised a Kingdom of people who seem to think that leadership is something that magically gets dropped on you with the regalia of the Peerage.  That somehow we become magically imbued with the wherewithall to make things happen.  I think some of my compatriots in the Peerage believe it.  Not to tear the curtain away, but it simply isn’t the way it is. 

This isn’t to say we don’t have something to offer.  Peers didn’t become Peers by accident.  Our Peers are a deep well of experience that is all-too-often untapped.  You would be amazed at what they will do if you just ask them and how much easier their experience can make a complicated endeavor.

But they are more of a well to draw on than a geyser that spontaneously springs forth in bursts of creativity.  And most of us have been doing this for a long time.  We get into a pattern of “what works,” not necessarily “what is possible” or even “what is ideal”.

So - you have already gone to your local Peer and got the cold shoulder and you still want change?

YOU make it.

You want prettier tournaments?

YOU bring out your best.  YOU make your five-yard banners.  YOU get rid of your camp chairs and sneakers and beer cans in favor of wooden benches and turnshoes and pottery beakers.  Stand by the field in all your finery to respect your fighter.  Do all reverance and respect to your inspiration and your Crown.  Love your Kingdom.  Display her badge.  Cheer loudly.

 Yes, we may set bad examples - so set a good one for us.  Raise the bar.  Up the stakes.

I grant you my permission to be better than I am.  In fact, I DARE you.

 Come on.  Don’t wait for us.  Shame us.  We will be the better for it.

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I wrote this post during last year’s Mardis Gras.  I revisited it while reminiscing through my old MySpace blog.  The pain, the regret, and the tears still come back, as fresh as when I wrote it.  It is a chapter of my life written in indelible ink on my memory.  While our government’s handling of the biggest natural disaster in US history may not stand in in the march of time as our biggest national disgrace, it is the one most intimate to me.  I may never regain my faith in our civic leaders. 

Although I know Kris and I made the best, the only, decision we could to survive financially and emotionally intact, I will never stop mourning New Orleans, nor get over the lingering sense of guilt at abandoning her: 

It started on Mardi Gras.  I think the combination of finally selling the remains of the house in Slidell, juxtaposed on Mardis Gras finally did it.

For the most part, I have not really had the chance to mourn the loss of the house.  I mean, there have been a few crying jags and all, but all-in-all, I don’t think that what happened really sunk in.

I knew this day would come, and hoped it wouldn’t.  I miss home.  I miss Louisiana.  Every time a radio show comes on about what is going on in New Orleans, or I read an article about one more displaced person, I have this horrible aching, sinking feeling.  It’s so bad I cannot read anything from beginning to end if it mentions Katrina.  I have to turn the radio or the TV off, or to another channel.  The pain, the despair, is just too much.

Kris says he doesn’t miss New Orleans much - he just misses our friends.  I miss our friends a LOT.  But I also miss the city.  There is no place on earth like it.  No place where people identify themselves so much by where they are living.  It’s not just a city, it’s a way of life.  It’s living each day slow, one day at a time, and taking the time to revel in good food, good laughs, good music, and the sun on your face.  It’s a mix of Old Europe, New World and Third World that you won’t find anywhere else.  It’s Gumbo.  It’s Lagniappe.  It was the home I chose.

Katrina took something away I can’t get back.  It wiped out my history.  I have almost nothing left of my life before August 29, 2005.  Nothing to show my son.  No pictures of his mommy as a young girl.  No old SCA photos.  No pictures of me in school in Spain.  Absolutely NO trace of my first marriage.  All that is left is from a small tubby I kept in the attic.  And I am still sad that he will never get a chance to grow up in the room that I spent nine months meticulously preparing.  He will not know by that physical presence how much his little life was anticipated.  Something intangible was stripped away that can never be recovered, only duplicated like a poor photocopy.

And there is nowhere to tell your story to try to get it out of your heart.  The same story is being told, over and over again, all over the country, by family after family, to the point where people are tired of hearing it.  So you carry it in you like a sharp stone in your gut.  And you tell yourself that you are lucky because you survived, and you moved on, and life goes forward.  But it doesn’t really make it go away.

Almost six months of my life - 3/4 of my son’s life - was stolen.  Blown away in wind and storm surge.  Lost in hours on on the phone transferred from person to exhausted person, numbly repeating the same information until it comes out of your mouth without thought.  Lost on countless miles of highway from house to house.  Lost in sleepless hours of worry where you turn everything over and over in your head, wondering what the heck you are going to do.  Lost in the interminable limbo of a life on hold, neither in one place or the other, where a question as simple as “what’s your ZIP code” has no easy answer.  Lost in deciding, with a slate wiped completely clean, who you really are and where you are going with your life.  Because all the signposts you used to have are gone.

Now, our last physical tie to Louisiana, the house, is gone.  We built it on our dreams and now another man will rebuild it on his.  But somehow finally and truly being in one place doesn’t make it feel any better.

Laissez le bon temps, roulez, y’all.  Happy Mardis Gras.

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Beth over at Diary of a Playground Dropout has already moved on to the next month of the project, and I am JUST finishing my first month of the Small Change project.

I like to subscribe to the philosophy “Think Global, Act Local”.  I think that we start changing the world by doing our part in our small corner of it. 

I kept passing by the aisle in our local Walmart that STILL contained the clearance toys from Christmas, and I kept meaning to go down the aisle and buy some DVD’s and toys to donate to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital.  But money has been tight for us this year, too, and I kept passing it by and passing it by.

This month, thanks to lot of medical bills last year and being on a single income, we finally got a bit of money back from Uncle Sam.  So last night, while I was grocery shopping, I bought a bunch of little kid’s DVD’s and a few sudoku games to take over to the Children’s Hospital.  I have filled out the paperwork, and I will send them with Kris on his way to work next week.

For all you Arkansas locals, here is a wish list from Children’s Hospital.  They need small things that help make the stay more comfortable and comforting for the children and families that come from all over Arkansas to be treated.  Please spend just a little extra when you make your next trip to Walmart to help these families cope just a little better.

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I am just not up to it today.  I am feeling cold.  And shallow.  And whiny.  And cold.  And sleepy.  And grumpy.

And did I mention that I am cold?

And that every time I plug in my space heater at work I shut down an entire corner of the building?

And this leaves me … cold again.  Only I am cold and in the dark.  And unpopular.

So, until both my typing fingers and my mood defrost, ponder the cuteness of the universe:

Harry phone home.

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