a short story about how a co-worker changed my life - enjoy.

i'm in the mood for story time, so here you go.

From about age 12 to age 18, I was one of those people that others rarely actually wanted to spend time around. not because i was particularly weird, (i was, but that didn't seem to be their reason...) or because i was rude, or anything like that at all. 

for the longest time, i couldn't figure out what the problem was, and i let it kind of eat at me. of course i acted like it didn't bother me at all that i didn't really have friends, per se, i more had acquaintances at school. people who were fine spending time with me when i was there, and when there were school related activities, but who wouldn't dare be seen out in public with me outside of that school-related realm. i acted like it was completely fine, but it definitely bothered me. 

and it bothered me up until about a week ago. and then i was at work, and i made a realization. 

i used to take myself too seriously. 

there, i said it. i did. that was the difference between me, and pretty much everyone else that i knew from the start of high school to graduation. and not only did i take myself too seriously, i took everything too seriously! not to say that it's bad to sometimes be serious about things, like getting a job, or starting a business - its definitely okay to be serious about those things. the problem comes in when you are serious about everything, to the point that you become dramatic. 

i was definitely to that point. 

because i took things so seriously, if something went wrong it was a serious matter instead of being something that i could a) laugh off, or b) easily remedy and go on with life. i mean, if i were to go back in time as the person that i am now, i wouldn't want to spend time with me either! i would probably want nothing to do with myself. 

i have a particular co-worker to credit with this realization, but she will likely never read this. but if she does, she will know who she is. 

since high school, i have learned that nothing is that big, including myself. maybe nuclear war-fare. you can't joke about that... its some serious stuff... but anyway - nothing is so big that you can't go forward. you can argue with me all you want, but that is what i have come to realize. if you take yourself so seriously that you can't function as a human being who makes mistakes and learns from them in a productive way then you should probably take a step back and think about whether you would like to continue the way that you're headed now. you may not notice it, but there are probably things going on around you because of your behavior that you don't want to continue. 

so if my new puppy pees on the floor, i clean it up. that's the end of it. if i'm late to work because i was writing a blog post, i'll apologize and make sure i'm on time the next day - but i'm done with all of the dwelling, and the oh-so-serious nature of life getting me bogged down in piles and piles and piles of feelings and reactions and stresses that really don't matter much in the grand scheme of things. 

i will, of course, sometimes catch myself in those thoughts, thinking those stressful things, but then i remember that it will all be okay, if i just take a freaking chill pill and figure out the most reasonable solution. 

i think the most important part of this is that when i learned that the fate of the universe did NOT, in fact, rest on my shoulders (shocking, right?) i learned that i can actually be funny. i have a sense of humor! who knew... 

the end.

dear Hollister models - you owe me dinner.

I was working yesterday at the mall, and I noticed something. 

It was something that I had seen a great number of times, but this time it really bothered me. 

I was looking out towards the escalator, and I saw this young girl - she couldn't have been older than maybe five, coming down the escalator holding a woman's hand. She looked really excited, with her brown ponytail bobbing up and down as she talked with the woman I'm going to assume was her mother. 

She was in white capri pants and had on a blue and black plaid shirt that was tied up in the front so that you could see just a little of her blue undershirt, and you could see from a distance just a hint of sparkling lipgloss on her smiling lips. 

This girl was holding a Hollister accessory bag. The bag had on one side a nearly naked, rather muscular twenty something man, and on the other, a quite seductive (also scantily clad) woman of around the same age. the only reason you could tell the man was wearing anything at all was because you could see the top maaaybe an inch of what I'm assuming were jeans. The woman was wearing a chiffon shirt, with one button done, and a bandeau. For those of you who don't know, a bandeau is basically the socially acceptable way to wear your bra in public as the main covering for the upper portion of your body and still maintain some level of social acceptance. She wasn't even in one of their beach pictures, so I don't know what they were really going for there. 

The bag probably held some headbands or maybe a bracelet that she had seen walking through the store with her mother, and just couldn't live without. 

Like I said, I see that kind of thing every day, and normally I just thing "awww she's so cute" and that's the end of that. But when I saw this girl and the bag she was holding, I was really disgusted. 

I mean REALLY disgusted. 

Not because of her appearance, but because that bag was in her hands. 

I don't have anything against Hollister, or that girl's mother, but if I were the mother of a five-year-old girl, I certainly wouldn't want my child to be exposed to that kind of sexual message at that age. That kind of a message about what people should look like. That kind of message about how to behave. 

When I was younger, I LONGED to look like the women in Victoria's Secret ads, and Hollister ads, and Abercrombie Ads. 

I really did. Maybe that says something about my self-esteem, or my self-confidence, but regardless I thought I was falling short of the standard that I felt I had no choice but to meet. They were everywhere - my friends wore their clothes (things we couldn't really afford at the time, though I didn't understand that) and if I didn't fit into their size "00" box, I wasn't good enough. 

And I have never, ever fit into that. In all likelihood, I never will. I'm not overweight, but I'm not a Hollister model either. I'm all okay with that now, but if I were the mother of a five-year-old girl, I would be doing everything in my power to make sure that she didn't feel the need to conform to that standard like I did. Because it SHOULDN'T be the standard. In my humble opinion, there shouldn't be a standard in the first place - maybe healthy should be the standard - but I don't know, and that's not the point. 

The point is, I saw a five-year-old girl - an innocent person - holding images of our hyper-sexualized culture, and it made me sick. 

It makes me sick that the only way you can avoid seeing images of random, nearly naked people is by never going into public spaces. Which is really, really hard. (And also a lot less fun.)

The worst part for me is that there are some of these pictures that are leaving VERY little to the imagination - one more inch in any direction but up and we're seeing things we never intended to see, and all we wanted was lunch in the food court! 

Maybe it's just me, but if my intention were to see that much of a man, he would be buying me dinner first. 

Probably multiple times. 

if you judged them with only your eyes, chances are you're wrong.

You know what I never posted about? An experience that I had over Christmas break from school. I was working my day job at the mall, and I got off of my shift at about two o'clock I would say, (It's been a while so I don't completely remember the time...) and I had been having a particularly difficult morning on the EDS side of things. 

By the time I got done with my shift I was exhausted and I was limping rather badly because I had somehow managed to injure my left knee. My left side is my bad side, and if I can get through a day without injuring something on that side of myself, it's seriously a miracle. Anyway - I'm limping out to my car, which is parked in handicap parking, because I'm handicapped. 

Lets talk about that for a minute, since I'm ranting. 

I went through the arduous process of acquiring a prescription for a handicap placard from my geneticist because when I started driving I realized that walking from the south-end-of-east-parking-lot was really awful with misaligned hips. I can't tell you the number of times I tried to go to Kroger and had to sit down by the time I got to the front of the building. I'm basically an 80 year old woman - but I digress. I went through this almost two-month process because I wanted to make my life slightly less painful. I didn't do it because it would make my life more convenient, or because I wanted to play the system or anything like that. I did it because walking hurts, and no body likes pain. Agreed? Agreed. Moving on. 

So I was parked in handicap parking, with MY state issued placard displayed clearly, hanging from the rear-view mirror. I finally reached my car after limping through the packed mall parking lot, (since it is Christmas season, after all) and I get in, start my engine, and begin to pull out of the space. 

I see movement to my right. 

There is a woman, looks like she's in her late 40s early 50s, standing next to my passenger side window. She knocks on it. I open it. I look at her questioningly and ask if I can help her, not thinking anything of it. 

This woman looks at me with all the loving kindness of an upset crocodile and practically spits "You don't look very disabled - you take Mommy's car today so you wouldn't have to walk?" 

I can only imagine what my face looked like after she said that. I was half pulled out of my parking space, blocking traffic, and this woman is waiting for my response. I was so upset that I burst into tears and said, "This is MY placard ma'am, from MY doctors - I have a joint disorder that causes serious pain. You don't have to be OLD to be disabled - if that's what you mean. Maybe you should think about other people's situations before you judge them - If I could have walked from the edge of this parking lot, I would have. But I can't." She shook her head as if she didn't believe me, and I continued to sob as I rolled up my window and finished vacating the parking space so that whoever she was saving it for could park. 

Not all young people are self absorbed. Not all young people have no respect for authority. Not all young people think they can take advantage of systems that are there for people who need them. 

Not all old people are disabled. 

Not all people with disabilities are old. 

Some of them are 5'4", 18 year old brunettes who can't believe that the handicap space is so far from the employee entrance. 

If I had been 50, would anything have been said? 60? Maybe even 45? 

What about gray hair? Would that have done it? If I had been wearing a brown scarf instead of the hot pink one my co-worker had just given me? Something more mature? Older? Would that have made me look "disabled"? 

Do 30 year old men with cardiac problems walk with limps? Do they wear joint braces? Can you see their disability? No, you can't. 

Would that woman have said anything to a 30 year old man, using HIS handicap placard? Probably not. Maybe he would have been old enough to be disabled, old enough to warrant respect. 

Clearly my hair wasn't gray enough, my face not wrinkled enough, and my back not hunched enough. That experience has obviously effected me quite a bit, because I'm still talking about it three months later. Three months later that interaction is still etched into my mind, and I can't seem to get rid of it, because it taught me something about myself, and it taught me something about people. 

I give those around me the benefit of the doubt. All the time. I think that I would want them to give it to me as well - I give people respect initially, because they have done nothing to me that warrants my behavior being anything but kind. 

Most people don't give those around them the benefit of the doubt. People are judgmental, to a degree that I didn't think possible. It was severely naive of me, I know, but I didn't realize that everyone is always judging everyone else's motivations. I thought that kind of thing existed in the hallways of high schools where unfortunate kids were forced to spend four years of their lives - I thought the trivial drama stopped when you graduated. Boy was I wrong. Not only does it not stop, but it gets worse. It gets worse because after school sometimes your job, your livelihood is relying on the resolution of those petty dramatic moments. Sometimes conflict doesn't happen in parking lots, it happens in cubicles. 

The point is, I was affected much more by the encounter than I would like to admit, and it's been bothering me. Someone who I personally thought would be a very nice lady was very unkind. Someone who she thought was a self absorbed young person was really a young person dealing with pain. Maybe next time she'll think twice about saying something. 



If you've judged someone with only your eyes, you're probably wrong.