June 18, 2007 at 9:12 am · Filed under Banging My Head Against A Wall, Random Musings
Hi, my name is Sarah, and I’m single, and I’m “30 Something.” Specifically, I have 13 days left before I can choose to be honest about certain numbers in my life (such as age) or I can go the route of Charlotte from “Sex in the City.” You know, where they’re all together discussing her birthday and she bravely says “I’m going to stick at 35.”Â
Yes, in less than two weeks, I am either going to be 6 squared, or I’m going to be 35 (wink-wink). Every year since I turned 29, without fail, the month of June has been incredibly difficult and dramatic and tragic for me as this whole cloud of “you’re getting older, you’re getting older, you’re still single, you’re going to lose out to your younger competition,…” starts going through my brain like a broken record. Oh, for those of you who were born later, a record is this usually black disc like thing with a hole in it where you would put the hole in the center of this machine called a ‘record player.’ The record player would spin around at a set amount of revolutions per minute-full records spun at 33 1/3 rpm, and for single records which tended to have a bigger hole, it was usually 45 rpm. Most record players’ needles were set to come off the record when finished, but some got stuck on a scratch, some were set to go right back to the start, but needless to say, there would be times when you’d hear the same line, verse, or even song over and over and OVER and OVER until it was so imprinted in your head that you thought you were going to die if you heard that song again.
So being born exactly six months into the year, the month of June approaches and the thoughts start coming. You’re single, you’re in a dead end job, you’re getting heavier, you won’t be able to compete with the younger girls (and you sadly reminisce about when you used to BE one of those lithe younger people. How could you have been so dumb as to think you’d stay that way forever?), and to quote Stuart Smalley from SNL, you’re going to end up being  ’homeless and penniless and  overweight with no one to ever love you.”Â
But not this year. If you have Google as your homepage, you can personalize it with iGoogle, which lets you make your own homepage from a number of pre-formatted things. You can get CNN and People Headlines. You can play hangman. You can see what stage the moon is in. You can put the dictionary in there. However, the coolest thing for me has been “Countdown.” With Countdown you enter a date of importance (say Arbor Day or Flag Day or they day you have scheduled to give your cat a bath), and it counts it down for you. So right now, I have 13 days or 303 hours, 02 minutes, and 18 seconds left. For some reason, I don’t know why, it has totally taken away all of the angst I usually feel about this time of the year. I’m not kidding. 36? Bring it on. I love numbers that are squares of other numbers. So if you’re one of those who gets relatively stressed out and sad about the fact that time is going by and there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to change it, get the Countdown add-on. It’ll give you something to cheer FOR rather than something to dread.Â
June 1, 2007 at 9:27 am · Filed under Random Musings
It’s been a bit of time elapsed since I had some ground breaking insight that was worth writing about, and even this is borderline. It all started a few weeks ago when I got my hair cut by this…interesting person. He was quite loquacious and energetic, shall we say, and kind of bossy now that I think about it, but the end result turned out great into this short hairstyle that in the beginning I had to use tons of product to keep it up in the back, and it allowed me to go out and get all sorts of little trinkets for the front, which I started calling ‘flair,’ like in Office Space. I thought that whole flair thing was a joke created for the movie until a coworker said that he once worked at a TGI Fridays and yes, the 10 pieces of flair were required, but you had lots of places to put them, so it wasn’t a big deal.
ÂOk so here’s my theory: if you’re required to wear at least 10 pieces of flair and you do, does that have any effect on how well you perform your job? Would the person wearing say, 15 pieces, would they be more committed to the team and building spirit and being a better server and all that? And if you saw one who was wearing the minimum and one wearing a lot more, and you ended up with the server who wears more, and they SUCK, would wearing the extra pieces of flair be trying to make up for the fact that they sucked as a server? It is these things I wonder about at random times when I have no caffeine in my system.
I think I would still go with the person who wore the minimal pieces of flair, if given the choice, because it would indicate that ok, it’s part of the job, so be it. Sort of a “You may take my time, but you will NEVER break my spirit” sort of attitude. However, I would think most people are not working at TGI Fridays as their ultimate career choice, that it’s just a job, they’ll do the minimum required, but that they still have minds of their own and refuse to suck up to anyone. This is of course based on the assumption that wearing more pieces of flair is looked as a positive thing, and since I haven’t asked my friend who worked there once, I don’t have a definite answer for it.
However, I’ve found here, which is one of those ‘corporate casual’ places, if I’m surrounded on all sides of me by let’s call it OPPRESSION for lack of a better term, the only thing I have to express myself is through my dress, and it’s not very corporate, and yet somehow it passes (or no one has said anything about it). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into work thinking ‘there’s no way they’re going to allow this.” After all, I’m “the receptionist, the first impression a person receives about this company.” In fact the only time someone said something was when I was wearing a tank top and my Bela Lugosi Dracula tattoo was CLEARLY visible on my shoulder. It was around Halloween. Someone said ‘I hope it’s one of those temporary ones), a couple others wanted to see it, and maybe that was an attempted subliminal suggestion telling me that this is not right, but there was no mention of it out loud.
But if I look at it in a different light, maybe that’s a good thing. Enginering firms, from the outside world, are generally perceived as pretty ’stiff’ places. You think of either scruffy dudes who haven’t shaved for days because they’ve been working so hard, or you think of a pretty tightly run uber-professional place. So maybe by wearing my odd hair and what my mother calls my ‘hippie dippie’ skirts gives that outside visitor/client that we’re not just like any other enginering firm (I’ve fallen in love with these garments known as Kariza Designs -they’re basically two pieces of silk sewn together with a strap, and from that you can make something like 100 different looks. The only problem a substantial amount of the looks are sleeveless, backless, or strapless, and I know that even if no one said anything to me, I would still feel wierd wearing one of those looks to work. Fortunately, you can make about 10 skirts from it, and that’s what I do.). From the company’s perspective, the lack of reprimand on MY dress code may be telling people who walk through the doors ‘we’re unique,’ or ‘we care more about our work than what people are wearing.’ Then again, it may be implicitly saying ‘That girl came to her interview in a suit and now look at what she’s wearing. Guess we messed up big on that decision.’
To which all I can say to them of course is HA HA SUCKERS!!!
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