I’m realizing as this little vanity project goes along that my life does not always occur in discrete 24-hour chunks (and it never occurs in discreet 24-hour chunks, for that matter) which means sometimes it’s hard to pick the best moment to capture something, and some days are devoid of such moments. Obviously I am trying to keep the little random bits and pieces approach limited to Saturday Grab Bags, but I have entire days that are composed of many random bits and pieces, none of which ever get resolved. Yesterday was one of those days.
I had a work meeting yesterday morning which I was quasi-dreading. I didn’t really think anything bad was going to happen at the meeting, it just had an insidious effect on my day. It was a meeting with my teammates, all of whom are permanently set up at a government office in Rosslyn, while I usually work remotely in Crystal City. The Rosslyn office has a dressier dresscode, and I need to be escorted around the place because I don’t have a building pass. And by the time the meeting’s over, and I have to get to Crystal City, it’s no longer rush hour and the trains run slow, and the travel time cuts into the rest of my day (granted the rest of my day consists of surfing the web and working out in the corporate gym, but I like having plenty of time for those things) – there’s just a lot of annoying little things. Wah wah wah. As it turned out, my quasi-dread should have been real prescient dread because by the end of the meeting I had been informed that I would be the new pointman out in front for a process that has been going on for a while, needs to be done by September 30, and is currently NOT GOING WELL. On the one hand this is great for assuaging my general anxiety about never having any work to do at work, and if I can pull off a miracle I will look like the Golden Boy.
On the other hand it is going to be a huge stressor for the next week (and probably beyond if we miss the deadline, which we almost surely will) and it has nothing to do with the kind of work I like doing and thought I was hired to do.
But, this too shall pass. I made it back to Crystal City after the marathon meeting, and actually tried to start taking some steps on my new assignment by sending out a warning-shot e-mail. I wasn’t able to go work out because I felt I should stay at my desk to see if there would be any response to my e-mail (shockingly, there was not), and when the day was over I tried to let it all go, and headed home to pick up the boy, get him to bed, and of course watch The Biggest Loser.
(I’ve already asserted my love for that stupid show and guaranteed you that I’ll be watching it every week, but I’m not planning on blogging about it every week. It’s just not that interesting, not to mention the fact that the last thing I want is for this blog to start sounding like Bridget Fucking Jones’ Diary. I might bring it up if anything exciting or relevant happens. For example, Tuesdays when I don’t get to work out and then force myself to watch the zany trainer antics of TBL? Irritating.)
The big homefront news from last night is that little Blarney McWeeblewobble has settled the issue of talking or walking first, and the answer is … WALKING! Again following the theme of things rarely happening with stop-the-presses momentousness, the scales seemed to be tipping as early as Monday, when Blarney’s mom Morrigan was home with him in the afternoon and reported progress on both fronts. We always urge Blarney to “say bye!” when we retrieve him from daycare in the afternoon, and on Monday he did in fact parrot a perfect “bye!” Not exactly talking, especially not by the rules of the bet, but on the other hand the closest thing he’d ever done to saying a real word. Then, at home, he took three steps – definitely tentative, but unassisted, and clearly in line with the rules of the bet. Still, Morrigan and I both agreed to hold off on calling it one way or the other while we gathered more evidence. Last night I set Blarney in the middle of his bedroom floor so I could put something else away, and he very nonchalantly stood up and took seven steps toward a low table with a bunch of his books on them (he probably would have kept going if he hadn’t already reached his goal). So, yeah, he’s ambulatory. Morrigan wins the bet. (She also came within guess-the-MNF-points-total of winning the pick'em pool this week. She's on fire!) Cue the anecdotes about literally having to run around after the baby as he streaks through the house … coming soon!
Meanwhile, the whole of Tuesday came and went without posting here. Now I’m a good chunk of the way through Wednesday and I’ve been to the Pentagon (where I was successfully able to obtain an access card for the government computer system and a building pass so I don’t need an escort in Rosslyn) and I’ve made some progress on my Mission:Improbable assignment. I haven’t been to Crystal City at all (so no workout again, argh). And soon I’ll be picking up young Mr. McWeeblewobble and I’m sure the daycare workers will tell me that he ran them ragged all day.
I did get to witness a crazy scene at the Pentagon, though. There’s an office at the Pentagon where you can get both the items I needed today … assuming that you have all the proper clearance, the signed (and sometimes counter-signed, which is something I’m not even really sure what it means) paperwork, and the time to wait in line because they have about six or seven administrators manning the stations and they get hundreds and hundreds of people coming through every day. I got there a little after 8 a.m., and the office opens at 8:30 a.m., and of course there was line of fifty or so people who all had the get-there-early idea. Just before the office opened, the manager of the office stepped out to address the mob, and he gave a little spiel which I thought was both smart and humane. He explained how everything worked and what everyone needed to have, and the main purpose of that seemed to be so that if anyone didn’t have what they needed, they could leave (as opposed to sitting around for an hour while twenty-five people went ahead of them , and THEN finding out they weren’t going to be able to get what they needed because they lacked a magical counter-signature). I’m sure you will be stunned to hear that, in accordance with statistical probability, there was in fact a woman in line who didn’t have paperwork to get her new badge, because it was technically a renewal and she thought she didn’t need any. Of course, she chose to focus on the negative aspects of how much time she had wasted just by coming to the Pentagon and the bad info she had been giving about not needing paperwork, rather than the positive of the office manager saving her some potentially wasted time, but I can understand the frustration. I can’t understand the overly dramatic huff in which she chose to stomp off, but that’s just not my scene. She was actually yelling, really to no one in particular, “They don’t tell you that you need any fucking paperwork!” She may have repeated that particular bit of observational philosophy twice.
Where it got crazy was when a man who was also waiting outside the office decided he really needed to get in her face. Not about her attitude per se or the fact that she was yelling, but specifically about her profane language. In fact the man got just as loud and just as angry as the woman, he just claimed the moral highground by virtue of not dropping any F-bombs. It actually took the woman a bit to figure out what was going on; first she thought he was just yelling at her for yelling, and she defended herself by pointing out how fucking ridiculous the set-up was, and then he laid into her with “You are in the Pentagon! There is no place here for language like that!” (Which … wow. Just wow.) So she deliberately retorted with “Oh get out of my face, you fucking creep” which of course only riled the guy up more. It actually escalated to the point where the guy was abandoning his place in line to follow her and keep berating her, which prompted her to yell even more loudly, “Somebody help me! This man is harassing me!” I don’t know if you’re aware of how HEAVILY ARMED the Pentagon police are, but basically the woman was trying to push the whole conflagration to the point where it would have actively involved semi-automatic weapons. I’m pretty sure it didn’t get to that stage, but at that point it had proceeded beyond my line of sight (and I wasn’t giving up my place in line, nosirree.)
I am a huge advocate of free speech including the protection of four-letter words’ right to exist. I think cussing serves an important purpose in being human and has a glorious history, BUT I also think that profanity has its proper time and place and there are certainly times and places where a person can be in the wrong for resorting to vernacular descriptions of sex acts and other bodily functions. I also try my best not to be too judgmental of my fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth and I have a hard time wrapping my head around any notion of circumstances where I am SO sure I’m right that I’d be justified in aggressively scolding and belittling someone else. I guess all of that means that I was more on the woman’s side than the guy’s – assuming there are sides to take in a trainwreck.
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