Dinosaur Mom, Salary Parent, Bureaucromancer
I like the Metta World News Segments in the Key and Peele Show. Non sequitors rule. The title of this post is a phrase I thought I heard someone use yesterday. Mondegreens also rule.
Leaving this afternoon for a few days of not being anywhere near my workplace visiting my parents and brother, aka the Protosaurs, in Florida and retrieving Mouse from her two-week stay there. I can already feel the muscles in my shoulders and neck starting to unclench.
Thanks to the latest Internet quiz, I can now state with greater precision than ever the extent of my true malevolence: to wit, I am 26% Evil. That sounds fairly accurate to me. I only have one Facebook friend who got a higher Evil percentage than mine, but one is better than none in this context. I would console myself that maybe I’m just being more honest than other people in my peer group, but that sounds alarmingly self-righteous. And if one is to be 74% Not Evil, one could do worse than to avoid self-righteousness.
Mouse returned from two weeks of sleep-away camp completely in love with the order and relative autonomy of camp life and with horses. Once again, I marvel that so spectacularly normal-seeming a child should have come from me. She was only home for a couple of days before being whisked off to Camp Protosaur for a couple of weeks with my parents and younger brother.
The last few days at work have been rougher than usual. I got some psychological relief from going with Dino Spouse, TeenBot, and his bestie* to see the latest “Purge” movie tonight when I got home. It was better than the first one. Podrostok is out with friends tonight, hence his absence.
* TeenBot’s best friend is a delightful tomboy his age who has been his boon companion all summer. She’s taught him and Mouse both to skateboard.
I wrote a rhaspodic post about the joys of using my new stylus, the one that makes my somewhat crappy Windows tablet considerably less crappy. But the tablet and/or the “quick post” feature on Word Press ate my post. So darn. Still grateful for the boon of technology.
I took one of those internet personality quizzes and learned that I am a mere 18% bitch. It was obviously a bad week for internet personality quizzes, since apparently I was also a “normal kid” in high school. But the bitch thing kind of resonated with me. It’s not that I’m such an all-fired nice person. It’s just that I’m more of a douchebag than a bitch. I’m not a confrontational person, and over the years I have cultivated a long enough fuse that I can usually resolve or find my way out of difficult interpersonal circumstances before I explode abruptly with an outburst and/or outright flight. Neither of these are good supervisory tactics.
(I’m not sure that they’re particularly good adaptive mechanisms in general, but they seem especially ill-suited to the workplace.)
The irony of this, of course, is that I’m considered something of an expert on how managers should provide employees with direct feedback on an ongoing basis so as to forestall the abrupt outbursts and snap decisions that get supervisors in trouble.
I am rarely plagued by insomnia. Probably I could sleep, now that I’ve wiled away the night playing Ms. Pac-Man and aimlessly searching the internet for things Podrostok can do with the rest of the summer and/or the “gap year” he’s planning between high school and college.* But the bed’s up there, and I’m down here.**
* “Gap Year” sounds much nicer than “Constructive Ways To Keep Podrostok Engaged In Life Until He Is Sufficiently Motivated To Pursue Adult Life Agenda Under His Own Steam.” His job application efforts have been somewhat lackadaisical, so I’m thinking he needs a volunteer work experience to start breaking him to the yoke of the workplace. Alternately I suppose I could have him working with a tutor, but for some reason I have yet to see a report card from the high school and therefore don’t know which subjects he needs help with. What I am not doing is expending effort on college research, because I refuse to entertain the notion of funding post-secondary education (beyond gen ed credits at the local community college) for someone who does not know what he wants to study and has a high school GPA that perennially hovers somewhere between 1.9 and 2.4. God forgive me.
** The household’s good laptop mysteriously sustained an injury that partially destroyed its screen display, hence it is attached to a monitor in the basement.
I dropped Mouse off at camp – two weeks of sleep-away camp – last weekend. I’ve been in a funk since then. It’s funny – I was looking forward to being untethered from my daughter, who is a wonderful tween and excellent company but believes in attachment parenting a lot more than I do. Instead I’m lonely and peevish and staying up late to play Ms. Pac-Man. My baby is going to grow up and leave me to face the reality of The Rest Of My Life! I’ve checked out and read a bunch of books about aging and/or coping with existential issues, but they haven’t done much to cheer me. (They have, however, scared the crap out of Dino Spouse, who was alarmed today by my spate of questions about what we could do to be happy in our empty nest years. As long as he has Podrostok at his side he will never feel alone, but TeenBot’s daily wanderings and efforts to escape family time have some of the same effect on him that Mouse’s absence is having on me.)
Salary Mom Chronicles 