Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes…

I love reconnecting on Facebook with friends from long ago and former coworkers at companies none of us still work for and classmates I haven’t seen since our 5-year class reunion, which (trust me), was a long time ago.

And I love how much easier it is to keep up with family than it used to be in the Olden Days, when you composed actual letters by hand and sent them through the actual post office to share your news. Or when you had to actually pick up the telephone, which was probably connected to the wall and had a curly cord attached to the receiver, to find out how Aunt Myrtle’s hip was healing or if Cousin Bubba was out of the slammer yet.

But sometimes I fear that Facebook is taking over my life.

And I’m not the only one, either. Just take a look at all the panicked comments whenever the powers that be at Facebook tweak the site or – as they did this past week – do a whole lot more than mere tweaking.

Multitudes of users start posting wild rumors about how Facebook is going to start charging exorbitant monthly fees to use the site. And people threaten to close their accounts if the site doesn’t immediately change it back to the previous version, which, incidentally, people complained about back when those changes occurred.

However, shortly after they make this declaration, they post comments and jokes and photos as if they’d never threatened to close their account in the first place.

This tells me that (a) people are big fat liars, and (b) we really, really, REALLY hate change.

I, too, have a hard time accepting change – even though I made a vow to myself when I was 20 that I would embrace change as it occurred throughout my life. Yeah, evidently I’m a big fat liar sometimes, too.

So what was my big “Aha!” moment I had at 20 (even though we didn’t call it that in pre-Oprah days)?

Well, settle down children and let me tell you a story.

It all began a long, long time ago when, as an impressionable youngster at the tender age of 13, I learned how to use a manual typewriter. The reason for the development of this particular talent was because my dad, an engineer, wrote ten metallurgical and chemical abstracts every month for publication and he wanted me to type them for him. He coerced me by paying me a dollar per abstract. Believe me, to a 13-year-old back in those days, $10 a month was major coin.

So I had an incentive to learn how to type. Even if it was on a stupid manual typewriter.

But, if you’ve never seen a metallurgical or chemical abstract, let me just tell you – they look rather like hieroglyphics. They contain elaborate equations, so I had to twist and turn the paper on the roller on the typewriter to get all the subscript and superscript characters in the right place. I’m sure they made sense to someone, but to me it looked like my dad had taken a bunch of numbers and characters and threw them at the page. Wherever they landed – even if was on top of another character – they stuck.

Also in these abstracts were strange words I’d never heard before like "decarburization," which means: “Loss of carbon from the surface of a ferrous alloy as a result of heating in a medium, usually oxygen, that reacts with carbon.”

Yeah, scintillating – right? Especially to a 13-year-old. So I learned to type those abstracts as quickly as possible so I could move on to more interesting stuff – like Tiger Beat magazine that had pictures of my teen idols, Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson. (Hey, gimme a break – I was 13, for pity's sake!)

Fast-forward to my junior year as a college student at Ohio State... (And, no, smarty-pants, I was not still reading Tiger Beat and I did not still have a crush on either Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson.)

Anyway, having spent my sophomore year working in the food commons area in our dorm was enough to teach me that I never wanted another job in the food service industry.

But I still needed to earn beer-drinking money, so I took a part-time job in the Metallurgical Engineering department. This was back in those prehistoric days before cell phones and laptops and any sort of instant communication. Sadly, it was even before copy machines were commonplace in offices as I recall printing student exams out on a mimeograph machine. I left my office job many a day to attend class with purple-stained fingers.

The full-timers who worked in the office were just learning how to use their new computers, which were slowly being purchased for office use throughout campus. These bulky machines took up nearly three-fourths of the space on their desks and looked extremely slow and cumbersome to me.

As “student help” I was hired to do whatever scut work the full-timers didn’t want to do, but that was okay with me. It wasn’t, after all, my career choice or anything. They got me to run from one floor to another delivering paperwork and messages and whatnot. And I also typed a lot of the midterm and final exams for the professors.

Naturally, these exams included a lot of elaborate equations. But all those years of typing abstracts for my dad had turned me into a pro and I could type at a rate of 95+ words a minute. So I could whip through those hieroglyphics like nobody’s business. Sure, I still couldn’t understand them, but that didn’t matter as I was also not interested in metallurgical engineering as a career path.

So there I sat in front of an electric typewriter, insisting that I could type the same thing on the typewriter that the office manager, Cecily, could do on the computer – and I could do it faster.

(Now you see where the “Aha!” moment is coming, don’t you?!)

So we had “races” – with me typing on the typewriter and Cecily working on the computer. The first couple times we timed ourselves, I did beat her, but that’s only because she wasn’t used to the commands on the computer and had to keep stopping to look up the codes to create a superscript or a subscript character. But all too soon, she was beating my time by a remarkable margin and I had to admit that this newfangled computer thing had merit.

And the first time she finished a page and printed it out while I was still only halfway through, I had to concede. It was in that moment that I told myself that I would never again resist change.

Then, of course, I went on to prove myself a big fat liar, so I’m not sure what the lesson is here. Except that whenever I’m faced with something completely new and different and my first reaction is to resist the change, I really do try to remember how I felt when I realized that something new could work better and faster than the old way.

I wish I could tell you that I took to the computer like a fish to water, but it did take me a little while to catch on. Like, for instance, whenever I needed to enter a superscript character, I’d invariably reach up to the side of the monitor as if to turn the roller on a typewriter. And then I’d sneak a look around to see if anyone had noticed. (And, no, smarty-pants, I never once tried to take a bottle of white-out to the computer screen to correct an error!)

And I’ve learned to love every stinkin’ computer upgrade and program refinement we’ve had over the years.

So to all you Facebook friends who are frustrated with the changes, just give it time – okay? There might even be good reasons for those changes.

Or maybe they’re just messing with us.

The Evil Morning Commute

Did you ever see the movie, “Office Space” with Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston and Gary Cole? The film opens with the main character, Peter Gibbons, stuck in a traffic jam on his morning commute to the office. He’s drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in frustration as he sits in a non-moving lane while the cars in the lane next to him are moving right along. Finally, he’s able to ease out of his lane and merge into the moving lane. Which promptly slows to a stop. And then, of course, the lane he has just left starts moving.

Yeah, well, that’s how my morning commute has been going lately. And it is. Driving. Me. Nuts.

Haha, aren’t you funny. Okay, so sure, I was already a little nuts – but, you have no idea. This commuting thing is putting me right over the top in the nuts department.

One morning last week I gulped down my coffee a little faster so I could leave home a few minutes earlier. I tried a different route, thinking that I’d have enough extra time built in for slow-moving traffic due to the approximately ten sprinkles of rain we were experiencing. Well, not only did I not make it to work on time, I was about 15 minutes late. Why? Because those ten raindrops were apparently enough to cause a five-car accident. So much for thinking, eh?

Oh well. At least I wasn’t one of the five drivers with smooshed fenders.

Another morning, I noted that it was a good commuting day. There was no rain, no snow and just a little bit of sunshine with enough cloud cover so that drivers wouldn’t be blinded by the sun, which evidently causes many drivers to bash into the car in front of them for no good reason other than to cause me to be late for work.

But despite the near-perfect atmospheric conditions, Columbus drivers were uncooperative and I was doing the finger drumming on the steering wheel thing. There was another multiple car accident close to downtown. Big surprise. It made the phrase, "stop-and-go traffic" a complete misnomer as there was very little “go” in the traffic that morning. What’s worse is I never heard about the accident from the traffic reports on the radio. And given that the tow truck was already there (blocking traffic, of course), I knew the accident had not just occurred.

Traffic reports are – in my humble opinion – pretty worthless. Yet I still listen to them carefully and choose a route before leaving home. Inevitably, I choose the wrong route. I find out about some new tie-up about a second after I’ve passed the point of no return. Either that – or the traffic reporter never even mentions a problem on the route I’ve chosen, yet traffic is still backed up.

Yesterday was the first day of school for the multitudes of Ohio State students and, as I feared, traffic was at a near-standstill. At least until I finally passed the campus exit. Since I didn’t own a vehicle and lived on campus all four years back in the dark ages when I was an OSU student, I had no idea what was happening on the freeways around Columbus. Now, however, I am painfully aware. Clearly, there are a lot of students who commute.

Not only that, but the fall quarter is the worst time for campus traffic as students start out all shiny and diligent and take early morning classes. By the time spring rolls around, I sail right along past campus since the student commuters have smartened up and don’t start class until a more appropriate hour, like, say, noon.

It's a win-win situation for both the students and me at this point. But, sadly, I’m among those commuters who pay for their learning curve at the beginning.

I suppose I should look at the bright side of this whole thing and be grateful that I have (thus far) avoided being one of the poor souls standing next to their crunched cars frantically dialing their insurance agents.

Saying this, of course, makes me knock on wood. Every time. Even writing it makes me knock on the desk. I really don’t want to talk to my insurance agent and I will be most happy if we never meet in person. Ever.

I seriously hate the word “deductible.”

So, until I become either independently wealthy or my boss tells me I can work from home in my PJs, I guess I’ll have to grin and bear it and keep on truckin'. (Ha. Like the truck driving profession is one I would ever attempt - for more reasons than mere traffic snarl-ups!)

Nevertheless, I can’t promise that I won’t be the commuter grinding her teeth and drumming her fingers on the steering wheel in utter frustration.

Yeah, upon further contemplation, which took approximately 3.2 seconds, you should probably count on that.

The Happiest Day of the Week

Ah, Friday has once again rolled around. I love Fridays when the whole weekend looms ahead of us with all sorts of possibilities. What to do, what to do?

One thing we know for sure we’re not doing is heading out of town. We’ve been out of town three times in the past month or so and we’re sick of packing our shampoo and undies and socks and toothbrushes. And then unpacking them again.

Besides, I keep losing stuff. I lost my razor (one of the non-disposable kinds) on our first trip and I haven’t replaced it. I keep saying I’m going to, but haven’t. Needless to say, if I don’t replace it soon I will be braiding the hair on my legs. I did borrow Vince’s razor for my underarms because, well, eww. But the legs require more commitment and effort. Plus, I don’t want Vince to shave his face and nick it all up from using a dull blade.

So perhaps “Buy New Razor” should be first on my weekend to-do list, eh? Maybe I should buy an extra large can of shaving cream, too, while I’m at it?

The other thing we will have to do is put the furniture back where it belongs once the carpet cleaners finish cleaning today. We managed to clear out a lot of stuff so there are large areas for them to shampoo, but this means we have no surfaces available to sit on or lie on or eat on. Our coffee table is currently residing atop the couch – and you can’t even see the spare room bed because there is so much stuff piled on top of it.

Who knows, a clean carpet might even inspire me to spend part of the weekend attending to things that never get attended to. Like baseboards. Who spends a lot of time (or gives much attention) to the baseboards?

Yeah, not me, either. Nor am I feeling it. Cleaning baseboards might have just gotten crossed off my to-do list.

We may attend Vince’s son’s football game tonight, but it depends on the temperature. Or maybe it depends on whether or not I can find some of those hand warmer things. While it’s a beautiful day today, the high is only going to be something like 61 degrees. And once the sun goes down? Brrrrr! So if I can find some hand warmers, I might brave the elements. Their team – the New Albany Eagles – is undefeated, though, so it might be fun to cheer him on from the sidelines. Maybe I can find my parka?

One of the things I’m most looking forward to doing is sleeping in on Saturday. I LOVE to sleep in. That whole “early bird catching the worm” thing? Lemme tell you somethin’ – I’m totally okay letting someone else have the worm. They don’t look terribly appetizing, anyway. And I’m quite happy hitting the snooze button.

We’ll also be rooting on the Buckeyes tomorrow. Hopefully they’ll have a better day than they did last Saturday. If not, I can always switch the channel to my saved programs – like Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. Need to catch up on my “stories.”

Or maybe we’ll have great weather and I can go outside and do something that I haven’t done for a while. No, silly, not go for a walk, although God knows I need the exercise. No, I’m talking about washing my car. It’s at the stage where some smart aleck kid could easily write “WASH ME” on the back window. Actually, I’m kind of hoping someone will – at least that will give me a shot at being able to see out the back window. Opaque windows aren’t a real plus in car driving situations.

I think at some point this weekend I need to drink a glass of wine. It has been a while since I’ve had a glass of wine – and I do, after all, have a reputation to uphold. No, not the wine-bottle-in-a-paper-bag kind of reputation. I prefer to think of myself as more of a wine connoisseur – even if it IS only in my own little mind.

Do bottles of wine with screw tops count? Hehehe.

Ah well. I am sure that whatever we do this weekend, it will be fun. Just spending time with my Vince will be fun enough. Hopefully we can also be a little productive and get some of the household chores done that have been neglected during all this out of towning we’ve been doing.

So, happy Friday. Let’s raise our glasses to a great weekend! And maybe also to smooth legs…

The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship…

You know how you have some friends who seem like they’ve been your friends forever? And you never have that awkward “getting reacquainted” moment if you haven’t seen them in months – or even years? Well, I am blessed to have a lot of those kinds of friends.

The other day when we went to Cleveland for the wedding, we got together with several friends I categorize as my “OSU friends.” Most of them went to Ohio State, which explains the category. (Duh.) Some of them, however, did not – but I categorize them that way anyway because I met them through my Ohio State friends.

I believe we are all friends for life. (If they haven’t kicked me out of their friendship circle after 30-something years, well, I guess I should be pretty safe…unless, of course, they read this and decide to be funny…!)

Anyway, it’s a little hard to believe that our friendship deepened to the point that today we consider one another family. Why? Well, because my introduction into the group started rather inauspiciously.

It was my freshman year at Ohio State when I met the first of these characters – let’s call him “Adam.” It was the middle of winter and we’d recently had a record snowfall that even closed down the university, which was practically unheard of. So what else were cooped-up college students to do but head to the bars? (We could, by the way, legally drink 3.2 beer at age 18 back then.)

At the end of the evening Adam gallantly offered to escort a couple of us back to our north campus dorm from the Thirsty Eye. He was, as you can guess, interested in one of us, otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have made an extra stop.

He was doing the guy thing of trying to win over his potential target’s friend, which was me. And to clarify – I was the friend; not the target. But I was also not (at that time) a beer-drinker, so I didn’t have that magical layer of beer protection where the wind chill factor isn’t, well, a factor. My teeth were chattering so much that I was a little concerned about breaking a tooth. All I wanted to do was get back to the warmth of my dorm room. But he was laughing and joking and trying to get me to smile. What he was rewarded with looked sort of like a set of those fake chattering teeth. Not a good look – and not exactly sincere.

So how did Adam respond? He pushed me into a snowdrift!

Now anyone who knows me would understand that this is hardly the way to win me over! As you can guess, I was not pleased, nor did I think it was cute. But he helped me up, which was a point in his favor.

The next time I saw him, he forgot my name as he tried to introduce me. Strike Two.

But, actually, it wasn’t really a strike. He was so funny and a genuinely nice guy that I didn’t really get mad. He introduced me to his twin brother and all their friends – and, believe me, there were a LOT of them – and that was our first tentative steps toward a blossoming friendship.

…Until the next time I saw them. I walked into a party he’d invited us to and I was greeted with a loud chorus of: “Jane, you ignorant slut!”

I was shocked, appalled and embarrassed. I’m quite sure my face turned a bright shade of red in complete and utter mortification. I didn’t even know these people and they were calling me a name I’d never spoken aloud in my life, let alone done anything to earn the title!

As I wheeled around to march right back out of that party, Adam ran after me and said, “Haven’t you seen Saturday Night Live?” Uh…noooo…I hadn’t. We were not usually at home watching TV on Saturday nights and this was before the advent of VCRs or DVRs or any other television recording device.

So he explained the whole Jane Curtin/Weekend Update/Point-Counterpoint thing where she played the earnest television anchor stating her opinion about some current event. Dan Aykroyd, her co-anchor, would begin his rebuttal with, “Jane, you ignorant slut!”

Oh.

But doesn’t it figure? If the role had been played by Gilda Radner, I wouldn’t have had to live with such a greeting all these decades later whenever my college friends see me.

Not only that, but then they proceeded to combine it with the Jetsons line, “Jaaaaannne…Stop This Crazy Thinggggg…you ignorant slut!”

Cripes.

Up to that time, I was rarely called anything other than “Jane.” Sure, I got the occasional “Plain Jane” thing thrown at me in grade school. (Grade schoolers are not exactly known for their creativity in schoolyard taunts.) I also had several nice nicknames, too, as my cousins or a teacher might call me “Janie.” And in high school a bunch of us high school friends decided to end all our names with “ers” – so my name became “Janers.”

All of those nicknames I could handle. Being basically called a woman of ill repute? Not so much.

But, anyway, it was all done in fun – and if I’d really objected they would have stopped…

…Oh, who am I kidding? Knowing them, they would’ve used the phrase louder, more often, and probably under the most inappropriate of circumstances.

By the time they started translating the phrase in Italian, I gave up trying to stop. This. Crazy. Thing. (Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em…)

So, do you see why it’s a little surprising that our long-lived friendship had a chance given that kind of beginning? But our friendship did grow and, through them, I’ve met many other forever friends. Their 80-and-change mother even calls me “family,” which is, indeed, an honor.

No matter how close or how far away we live, we somehow manage to come together for happy occasions like birthdays and weddings and baby christenings. And sad occasions like funerals. And every other occasion in between. But no matter what the occasion, when we see each other, it is a celebration. Of the best kind.

One of these days, I’ll tell the story about our infamous ski trip to New York. If I can remember the details…

Weekend Update by Jane-You-Ignorant-… (If you know the last word, you used to watch Jane Curtin on SNL and you are old enough to read today’s blog.)

Well, the weekend was a resounding success and a great time was had by all at both the wedding in Cleveland on Saturday and the 80th birthday/Father’s Day cookout in Newark on Sunday.

Vince and I managed to get everything done prior to our departure on Saturday. At least I think we did. If we missed something, well, we really didn’t notice – so it probably wasn’t critical. And nobody ended up going “commando” – so I was happy that my list-making worked. For the most part.

Well, okay, so I did forget to pack my super-duper hair smoothing serum that should last me at least a year and cost more than the gross national product of a small, underdeveloped nation and, thus, not something I was interested in replacing for an overnight visit. I figured my hair was just going to have to frizz out if that’s what it wanted to do.

And while I packed both my deodorant and Vince’s, I didn’t check to see if there were sufficient quantities in each to get us through two day’s worth of application. If I had, I would’ve noticed I was on the very last dregs of my Fresh Scent Secret (“Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”). Thus, I had to use Vince’s Right Guard on Sunday and probably smelled studly all day, but at least it was better than being, um, “aromatic.” Fortunately, I didn’t notice anyone giving me a wide berth at the cookout on Sunday. And it was a hot and sweaty day so, believe me, that Right Guard was certainly put to the test.

When we got to the hotel on Saturday, I checked in and was told that, as a Rewards Club member I was entitled to a free breakfast in the morning. The thing is I have absolutely no recollection of signing up as a Rewards Club member. But who am I to question a free breakfast? So I took the card and beat a hasty retreat toward the elevators lest the girl at the reservation desk realize that I wasn’t really entitled to a free breakfast (with an overpriced retail value of $11.99) and had the chance to snatch it back out of my hands.

For a woman, getting ready for a wedding is a lengthier process than, say, getting ready to go to dinner at Applebee’s. It takes me a minimum of an hour. We won’t even discuss how long it takes an actual bride to get ready for her wedding, but the process begins right around the same time the engagement ring is placed on her finger.

Nevertheless, I was merely a guest at this wedding, so an hour was all I needed. Only I didn’t get an hour. I had about 40 minutes. For you uninitiated to the world of women’s “special event” preparation, those 20 critical minutes are the difference between showing up fully coiffed, dressed with all zippers zipped, buttons buttoned and hooks hooked and ready to party – and arriving with nervous perspiration on the upper lip and forehead, lipstick applied crookedly, hair only half curled and smeared eyeliner on at least one eye.

And this was an outdoor wedding under the hot, relentless sun. I was doomed from the beginning!

Fortunately, I managed to get over my snotty When-I-Say-I-Need-An-Hour-To-Get-Ready-I-Don’t-Mean-40-Minutes attitude, and was able to enjoy the wedding. I enjoyed it even more that we had an hour and a half gap between the wedding and the reception.

We spent a few of those precious moments chatting with good friends I’ve known since college along with their “80-And-Change” mother, Mrs. B. Once upon a time this group would have used that hour and a half to head to a bar somewhere to indulge in a little before-dinner libation, but our friends had their kids with them and needed to bring them to the babysitter’s before the reception. Well, the kids, plus the baby deer they had in the back of their SUV. Yes, I’m serious. A baby deer. I’m still shaking my head. Only these friends… (Bambi had apparently been abandoned and wasn’t old enough to fend for itself, so our animal-loving friends were taking care of it until they could find an alternate care solution.)

So Vince and I went off on our own in a quest to find a place where I could indulge in a soothing glass of red wine. And while it wasn’t a fine dining experience complete with white linen tablecloths and a full wine list (or any wine list, for that matter!), at least the one type of red wine they served had an alcohol content higher than, say, Diet Coke. So I was happy. Plus, I was able to remedy the crooked lipstick and smeared eyeliner situations. Really couldn’t do much with the frizzy, half-curled hair thing, but then that was my own fault since I forgot my semi-precious hair smoothing serum.

Nevertheless, by the time we showed up at the reception I was back in a good mood and ready to party. And party we did! We were seated with my old college buddies and we all had a wonderful time. The photos may show a group of middle-aged people laughing and dancing like, well, middle-aged people, but we didn’t really care. We figured as long as none of us fell down and broke a hip, it was all good. Plus, the mother-of-the-bride was dancing right along with us, so we had no worries.

We discussed the possibility of heading out to a local bar after the reception to keep the good times going, but none of us managed to work up enough energy. Thus, like a bunch of Cinderellas (or middle-aged weenies), our evening ended before midnight.

This was probably a good thing because Vince and I had to be up-and-at-‘em bright and early the next morning. For one thing, we wanted to get our free buffet breakfast before they found out we weren’t really entitled to it. So at the crack of dawn (or 9AM – same thing), we made our way to the dining room in the hotel and enjoyed our overpriced lukewarm sausage and eggs and relatively fresh fruit and blueberry muffins. No, I kid. For the price we paid, it was some good eatin’!

We met up with our friends to say good-bye (which, with this group, requires a minimum of one hour), and then we headed for points north and our Sunday event.

I have one word for Sunday: HOT. I spent the first 45 minutes in the kitchen arranging food in serving bowls and making sure plates, napkins and utensils were at the ready for the hungry hordes once the steak and ribs were ready. Most of the time, however, I was digging through boxes and bags looking for a particular item the Grill Masters needed only to discover (a) they’d already found said item out by the grill and had neglected to inform me, or (b) they’d changed their minds and didn’t need whatever it was I was searching for anymore. Grrr.

By the time I came outside to the patio where everyone was gathered, I was hot, sweaty and completely wilted. And hot, sweaty and completely wilted I remained for the duration of the day (thank heavens for Right Guard, even if it did make me smell studly!). But we had a festive afternoon with helium-filled balloons, gaily wrapped packages and a memory book that we’d prepared for the birthday boy. So we enjoyed watching him look through it. And we enjoyed the food, the company and the conversation.

We ended the day full, happy, and sweaty – but we couldn’t have asked for a better day. Well, perhaps if I’d been able to use Fresh Scent Secret instead of Vince’s Right Guard, I wouldn’t have sweated like a man all day. But really, otherwise, it was great. And I didn’t have smeary eyeliner or crooked lipstick. Life is good. And, as Vince says, “It’s the little things…”