Tag Archives: postaday2011

My Doppelganger Dwells in California

25 Aug

I’ve been getting some unwanted emails lately.

As it turns out, out there in the world somewhere – Northern California to be exact – is another Jackie with an email address just one minuscule adjustment away from mine.  So minor, in fact, that the marketers, promoters, and event planners that are trying to send her materials she signed up for don’t notice the minor different and instead email me.

I know this because I once received an email that contained her correct email address in the body and the incorrect address (mine) in the recipient line.

It started out as just one or two emails here and there.  Lately, however, it’s been much more frequent.  It appears that the nice weather brought an onslaught of interest in California Jackie to go to sales, enter promotional contests, and run marathons.

Yes, that’s right: run marathons.

Apparently, California Jackie is a lean, mean, running machine.  She also happens to be an actress – or at least an aspiring one.   I know

this because in addition to her marathon registration confirmation emails, she also receives audition confirmation emails.

I find this interesting because my parents used to live in California.  In fact, they moved back to Pennsylvania right before they had me because they wanted to be closer to family.  My brothers both got to taste the West Coast air, but I was born and bred – and always will be – a country bumpkin.  

California Email Jackie is like a glimpse of what I could have been.  She’s an actress and a runner and involved in community events.  She’s probably got long, beautiful, California hair and a carefree attitude.  She’s probably city-chic and easy-breezy in conversation.  The emails that I get that are meant for her are like mockeries.   Big, fat, tongue-sticking-out mockeries – reminders of what I need to be better at.  A glimpse of what I could have been.

I tried to be a jolly goodfairy and forward her the emails and letting her know that I understand how important it is she receive the information or I wouldn’t attempt to directly email her.  I noted the reason for the mix-up on our email addresses and asked her to emphasize the difference when handing out her email.

I didn’t hear anything back.  Nothing! Just a never-ending slew of emails about races I could be running, trails I could be biking, and auditions I could be getting called back for.  No big deal – just some nagging reminders of where I’m failing in life.   Pudding-like country bumpkin Jackie is unamused by fit, California-chic Jackie.

A glimpse of what could have been. But alas, I can barely swim.

Naturally, I’ve been trying to devise ways to play with this ungrateful doppelganger, but I don’t want to spam her – I just want to find out what she’s falling short of in life and email her related items so she can begin to understand my pain and work harder to distinguish the difference between her email address and mine.   Maybe I can hire a private investigator.  Yeah: that’s the key.  I’ll hire a PI to document her fears, failures, and general shortcomings and then I’ll search the web for the genres that make her feel all desolate inside and slowly but surely get inside her brain. 

Then maybe she’ll see things from my East Coast perspective and send me an email saying she’s sorry and that she’ll change her email address altogether to avoid confusion.  

…Or maybe I should just go run a marathon so I don’t have to feel guilty anymore.

Nah.  The PI plan is far more practical. ♣

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Tips for College Success, Lesson 1: Crosswalks

24 Aug

Figure One.

Yesterday  when I was out on my lunch break, Dave and I almost ran over a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, college student because instead of choosing to not cross in front of an oncoming car, she proceeded to slowly cross in front of the car, wincing while she walked.

Because wincing, as we all know, is the all-encompassing shield of protection.

Morons.  Walk when the walk sign is up.  That’s why it’s there.  You see, we should be intelligent enough to know when to cross the street but since we as a human collective fail at this, the government decided to guide us with an enormous, lit sign with a picture of someone walking to indicate when we’re supposed to walk.  It’s very straightforward.  Push button, see light, walk.

Otherwise, I’m allowed to hit you.  I’m allowed to.  Legally.

Actually I’m making that up, but it’s the argument I’m prepared to use in the event of a trial for vehicular manslaughter. Your walking around, staring at your cell phone and listening to your iPod while I’m trying to avoid you and your friends like a sick video game is giving me ulcers.

I wondered how anyone could be so mindless and then it hit me: it was move-in day for the college students.

There are seven universities in the immediate city area alone.  Move-in day is always a chaotic, hot mess. Meters are blocked off, carts are sloppily rolling up and down the sidewalks, parents are spinning in and out of the bookstores clinging to what scraps are left of their wallets while harboring a single, lone tear in the corners of their eyes.  Tables and booths and street vendors and temporary tents pop up overnight.   

Darn.  I was just starting to get excited about the whiff of autumn in the air but soon, I shall be confined to the walls of a prison cell for running over one of these poor, young lads or lasses. 

Come to think of it, I hope that if there’s some terrible accident, blogs aren’t admissible in court.  That would be an awful shame.

Listen: I have an important message.  If you are the parent of a college student, please take the time to teach them how to cross the street all over again.  I know you reviewed it once or twice in the early years, but once out of your grasp, children completely evacuate from their heads everything you’ve told them.  Please use flash cards if necessary.

If you happen to be one of these college students: you are in grave danger.  Every time you walk outside your dorm, apartment, or cardboard box (whichever your parents allowed you based on how terrible you were to them in high school), you are taking a terrible risk.  Please do not leave your place of residence until you call your parents and have them review with you the chapter titled “Standard Road Crossing Procedures” from your childhood.

And if you  happen to be neither of these and are instead find yourself swerving, wiping sweat from your brow, and nursing ulcers instigated by near-fatal experiences, please do everything you can to get this message out. 

Also, I’ll be forming a support group.  Details forthcoming.  ♣

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A Recipe for Lackluster Pie

23 Aug

I think one of the most disappointing discoveries of my adult life is that pie-making is not a soothing experience.  If you do everything from scratch using merely the loins of the earth, it’s a little daunting for your average pie virgin.  And what makes it much, much more difficult is when you’re following a copy of a copy of a cryptic recipe that’s in a woman’s head almost 300 miles away.

Happy Lollipop Tuesday, girls and boys.

I’ve been getting pretty intense with my Lollipop Adventures as of late with all the pinball competing and the Battle of Manassas reenacting and the rapping in public.  So this week, I was more than happy to take Pezcita’s suggestion on my “What’s Lollipop Tuesday?“ page and take it easy, throw on my apron, and make a hot mess of my kitchen.    In order to be true to the wholesome, innocent, comforting nature of the patriotic pastry, I thought it only right that I use David’s grandmother’s recipe for apple pie.   David’s grandmother’s apple pie is so lusciously wonderful, in fact, that my tastebuds had abandoned an affection for pie altogether until I tasted hers and it restored their faith.

Indeed it is a fantastic pie.  …when she makes it.

I don’t know what it is about grandmothers that makes them think recipes are just ingredient lists and not step-by-step instructions for how to accomplish something, but I would kill for a grandmother who can take the time to write down their navigation of a process instead of carrying around all that precious knowledge in their heads like hoarders.   Not wanting to bother his grandmother at such a late hour last evening, I decided instead to call David’s mother for any suggestions she might have to add to what was nothing more than a list of ingredients, a temperature, and a time I got off an index card that was passed on to David – a cryptic family food jewel.

Call me stupid, but I can’t bake a pie with a list of ingredients for the crust followed by a list of ingredients for the filling.   

His mother was a wealth of information.  There were all sorts of lovely bits inside her brain that I needed to suck out, which she gleaned from her mother back in the good old days when kids used to cook in the kitchen with their mothers instead of playing iPad games where they cook in the kitchen with a cartoon chef.  She was hoarding information on what kind of apples, how thinly they should be sliced, what order things were done in, and that – get this – I should throw milk on the sucker before I threw it in the oven to keep the crust from burning.  

How on God’s green earth would I have figured that out on my own?  Because I’ll tell ya – throwing milk on a pie just doesn’t occur to me. Not in the slightest. 

I started out pretty hopeful.  After all, people make pies every day.  Surely I am smarter than your average bear and

Goodbye, paycheck.

surely merely average bears have conquered pies and so surely I could conquer a pie. 

I think the first indication of a problem was that I had absolutely none of the tools required for the job: no pie pan, no rolling pin, no pastry brush, and no kitchen timer.  Well, to be fair, I have a kitchen timer – but it keeps ticking past the “0” mark, thus negating its purpose.  It only has one job and it sucks terribly at it.

So after a costly trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond, I dumped out the newly bought implements of destruction onto the counter and hoped for the best.  I made a wild, mad mess of the kitchen and tried my hand at a homemade pie crust.  And failed.   And tried again – and made something that looked like crust and so I deemed it as such and laid it in the pan.   It took me almost half an hour just to get that far and then I realized I had to do it all over again for the top of the pie.  

My underwhelming second attempt. Apparently, I decided that everything could be fixed with flour. ...It can't.

It was here that I began to get discouraged.  

I remembered Dave’s mother’s words about how pies are hard and I should try not to get discouraged because everyone sucks horribly at them.  But I hate to suck horribly at anything that I’m genuinely attempting and so I was overcome with grumpiness.

A grumpy woman making a pie is a terrible thing.

It was in my sourpuss state that it became clear to me that pie-making is just meeting of the two kitchen skills I completely lack: rolling dough and cutting apples.   My apples were all shapes and sizes and my dough left, well, a lot to be desired.  Thick at one end, thin on the other, with pinched together, stuck-on pieces in between to patch up the holes along the way.   But when I let go of my visi0n of pie as a perfectly smooth and beautiful pastry with carefully-pinched edges and a light apple-scented steam venting from the symmetrical slits on the top and though of it more as a doughy bowl with apples in it, I started to expect far less of myself and lightened up.

Absolutely no idea if I'm doing this right. None.

In fact, once it was all baked I was pretty excited to eat it.  Of course, I wasn’t really sure when it was done because the “recipe” said “350 for about an hour”, which didn’t do much for my necessity of black and white in life.  So I just decided to pull the plug at 50 minutes, which is “about an hour” in my book.  

The end result wasn’t too terrible, though pulling up a piece of it revealed quite a bit of liquid hanging out on the bottom of the pan.  

Well, that and once I bit into a piece I realized I probably should have peeled the apples first.

Turns out apple skins don’t bake all that well.  The rest of the apple turns to mushy yumminess and the skin turns into this slightly less mushy alien-like strings, dragging behind your fork.

Hey: how was I supposed to know? Had the instruction “Peel apples” appeared anywhere, I would’ve been sure to make it happen for myself.  But like the milk, it just doesn’t occur to me to do these things.  Which is, you know, the entire point of a recipe.

End result?  A very sleepy Jackie with a smaller bank balance, a few shiny new kitchen utensils, a lackluster pie, and a serious hankering for a grandmother with a knack for detail. ♣

Mmm...lackluster pie.

 

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Christmas in Excel

22 Aug

It begins.

Yesterday I officially started my Christmas list.

Not my Christmas list, but my Christmas list for others.   You see, as the Type A portion of my brain grows into an insatiable monster and begins to eat away at the only bits of Type B that remain in my brain squiggles, it has begun to pour over into every single area of my life.   I don’t really know when it all started.  I remember one time being incredibly Type B.  My room was constantly a mess, I never showered, I was always doing things last-minute and pulling all-nighters to complete tasks, and couldn’t ever find anything I needed.

And then somehow, one day, I began to change.  I got a dry-erase board and mapped out my months.  I started working up a loose idea of a budget every few weeks.  I started keeping little to-do lists on post-its.  And I began to track my Christmas gift ideas in an Excel spreadsheet.

No joke – straight up Excelin’ it like a nerdy nerd.

Last year, I made a table for each member of my family in Excel and color coded each.  I had a column for gift ideas, a column for ones I had secured already, and a running total of how much was spent out of how much I was willing to allot.    And while it was lovely and organized, and almost too-devised, apparently my Type A brain monster is growing this year and isn’t satisfied to simply have an Excel sheet, but wants me to start the game 5 months in advance.  5 months in advance! 

It seems to be a familial trait. My grandmother shops for Christmas gifts 11 months in advance and my mother has begun to do the same. Or maybe it’s just an old person trait.   Perhaps this is just another example of my rapidly advancing age.   

I’m a little frightened to know what the Type A monster will be like in even just five years.  If I graduated from Christmas Excel spreadsheets to buying 5 months in advance in only a year, it’s just a matter of time before I’m making my bed, regularly doing my laundry, and making something more than a bowl of Frosted Flakes for dinner. Maybe…I’m actually becoming an adult?

Gross. ♣

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An Adult Snow Day and the Power of Wishful Thinking

21 Aug

On Friday, the most magical thing happened to me.  

Magical like unicorns.  Like leprechauns and Imaginationland and psychedelically-colored puppies.

It was epic and beautiful.

I was feeling strange Friday morning.   I didn’t feel like going to work, didn’t want to spend money on coffee to make it less bearable, and didn’t really want to do anything once I got there.

Let’s be clear: I never feel like going to work.  But most days I can just flick a switch in my brain that puts me on autopilot, which lets me skyrocket through my to-do list with such speed and strength that I entirely forget to take a lunch.  That usually lasts until about 4pm, when I realize I’m a human being, not a monster, and I have feelings and hopes and dreams and I shouldn’t be confined to a desk and walls and carpet and darkness.

But then I only have an hour to go before I’m liberated and an hour is quite palatable.

Friday, however, was an anomaly.   I showed up at work in the morning already completely uninterested.   By 9am I was working at a snail pace, by 10am I was annoyed by my list of to-do’s, and by 11am I went for lunch.  When I returned at 12, I mused online with a coworker over how I wished we could all just go home.  I talked of liberty – of  freedom – of glory.

By 12:15 I was back to staring at my to-do list, completely uninspired to-do any of them.  

As time dragged on, screeching to an almost-hault just before 1pm I honestly began to wonder if I would be a better use of company money by going outside and getting ice cream.  Because quite frankly, at least then I would’ve been doing something with a measurable outcome.  At almost 1:00 on the dot, a colleague popped in my office to let me know that due to the terrible storm we had earlier that day (I wouldn’t know – I’m held captive in a windowless cave), the building was flipping to the emergency generator and would have enough power for lights only.   Without a computer, I can do nothing.  Which meant I had to go home.

I singlehandedly was responsible for the shutdown of our building through the power of wishful thinking.

Well, that and thanks to Our Lord God and Savior, who obviously saw that I was on the verge of a stroke from stress and unhappiness and decided to make it overwhelmingly obvious to me that I needed to slow down and breathe.  Deeply.

And breathe deeply I did.  Because the power to the elevators was cut and I dwell on the top floor of a very tall building.  And because I was elated.  Absolutely, truly, elated.

Perhaps when I return on Monday, I shall scribble a few key words onto a post-it note to remind me of the experience and prominently display it on my monitor for times when I feel trapped in my windowless cave. ♣

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This Is Major Jackie to Ground Control

20 Aug

Okay now, everyone calm down.

I want you all to know that I love and cherish each of your squishy, loving, concerned brains and am thankful that you care enough to check in with me and make sure I’m alive and well.

Which indeed I am.

Yesterday’s post was meant to be lighthearted.  I really thought the whole “brushing my teeth with butt cream” would have driven that home, but it didn’t.  So allow me to reiterate that all is well.  I was a bit stressed at the time I wrote yesterday’s post and it seemed like a good time to sit down and write about how my brain just hasn’t been working lately and maybe it’s a sign of senility or an oncoming stroke.  And when I think of senility and strokes, I think of old people.  And when I think of old people, I think of death.

So you can see how it was just a natural progression for me.  Butt cream toothpaste = death.  It’s very clear to me, but apparently it didn’t land for all my readers.  Which is fine – I truly do appreciate your concern over whether or not I’m struggling with depression and it’s awesome to know that if I ever need a support system ya’ll are right there.  That’s pretty cool.

But I’m good.  Not ‘I’m good but I’m not really good and I’m in denial about my situation’ but ‘I’m good like I had no idea what you all were talking about and had to read it 10 times to try to understand how that was the takeaway people got’.

So know that I’m just holed up in my apartment as usual, trying my darndest to endure the stench of Lola’s fresh gift that she has unleashed from her buttocks and into the world to share with me this morning.  Seriously, I should get that cat checked because the amount of poo that escapes her is absolutely astounding. 

Sometimes I feel like if I squeeze her, some will come out.

Allow me once again to reiterate to you all that I am well.  Thank you for your loving support.  And  a thanks to “Big Al” (http://thecvillean.wordpress.com/), who coined the lovely eulogy below. 

Here lies Jackie
Taken from us early
She was only in her 20′s
So it sounds a little squirrely.

But she insisted it was true
So it must have been a hex
But to honor her request
We must all pay our respects

She’ll blog with us no more
Which will really be a shame
We’ll just read some other blogs
But they’ll never be the same.

I hope she’ll reconsider
And stay on a little while
We sure would miss her writing
And it’s captivating style

So if she’s still around
And happens on this rhyme
I hope she’ll spurn the reaper
Cause she still has lots of time.  ♣

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My Death Is Fast Approaching

19 Aug

I think I’m going to die soon.

Listen, I’ve thought that I would die before I hit 26 since I was young.  Really.  I’ve heard lots of people think this, but I really genuinely think it might all be over soon for me.  And when it is, I want you all to publish this post as a big, fat warning. So that other people who say “you know, I really think I’m going to die young” can shut up and look at the signs.  Because here they are.

As a general observation, my brain is simply shutting down.  I think it’s just tired.   Tired of thinking, tired of learning new words and procedures and rules and things.  Tired of figuring stuff out and explaining it to other people, tired of having people figure things out and explain them to me.  It’s just done.  It’s off.  It’s actively rebelling.  Every day is a struggle against its stubbornness.  More and more often I’m doing things like putting cereal in the fridge.  Or squirting conditioner all over my loofah and washing with it.

The other day, I almost brushed my teeth with hemorrhoid cream.

Listen.  I know you won’t believe me, but it’s a great way to reduce eye puffiness.  It’s just not a good idea to keep it in your medicine cabinet.  Because you might find that when you’re about to die, your brain shuts down and you’re more prone to try to clean your teeth with butt cream.

I’ve also seriously started to rely on talking myself through situations.  When things just aren’t connecting for me, I talk myself through it.  Out loud.  I usually call myself names and say terrible things.  I’m not incredibly patient or optimistic when faced with my own moronicness.  And whereas I used to crank through it like a champ – now I have to talk aloud.  I have to walk myself through it verbally.  “Click this.  Put the paper down.  Remember your keys. Take the cereal back out of the fridge.”  Sometimes I have to just have a conversation with myself in the mirror.  “I’ll just go there, pick that up, run over there, grab that unless it closes early, and then I might be able to do such and such”.  

In these last moments of life, it’s important to do a little self-coaching.  Else, I might accomplish nothing whatsoever and my cupboards will be chock full of curdled milk.

I’ve also become completely incapable of dealing with stress.  I don’t know how I’ve done it my entire life up until now.  It’s like I’ve just completely forgotten how to let things go and relax.  Or how to handle 15 different things at once.   Now I just come home, eat things that will make me die sooner, and rock myself to sleep as my body tries very, very hard to not have a stroke.

My motor skills are almost entirely deteriorated.  My hands write and type things I don’t intend and I can’t even control them enough to delete or rewrite them correctly.  I knock things over, crack my limbs on things, and sometimes stare at an object for several seconds sending a message to my body to do something to it but nothing happens.  I  just stare.  Sometimes I’m in the middle of a conversation and I just stop.  I just completely stop.  As if someone has sucked every thought out of my brain I don’t know what I’m talking about, why I’m with the person in front of me, or what the last thing they said was.  And even if I stand there for thirty seconds, it won’t come to me.  I have to just accept defeat and walk away baffled and how failure is humanly possible on such a blatant, epic scale.

It’s time to face the facts: my time is coming to an end.  I hit the 20’s and fast-forwarded straight to senility.  It’s only a matter of time before I start involuntarily relieving myself and shouting at strangers.

Remember friends: these were the signs of a swift approaching death. ♣

My untimely demise, courtesy of http://www.sp-studio.de

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Please Don’t Make Me Listen to You

18 Aug

What is it that compels people to tell the same story twice?

I don’t mean the people who forget they’ve told you before.    I mean the people who you tell they told you before and they still keep going.  Not even a general reminder of the story – just a straight up, detailed, almost verbatim retelling.  

It’s not even the annoyance anymore.  It’s just the fact that it’s a waste of my time.

I’m finding that in my older, more crotchety days, I’m placing a strong importance on whether or not something is worth my investment of time. This is a direct result of saying yes to everything and anything and subsequently balling myself up in the fetal position and crying until I pull myself up out of the puddle of stress I leak on the floor.  If I can cut out things in my life that stress me out, annoy me, and are superfluous, then I can make more time for sleep.  And happiness.

One thing I can definitely cut for time is story retellers.

I’m thinking of disengaging them entirely.  Perhaps it’s time to have a candid conversation with these offenders.  Something along the lines of “Hey, look.  I’m at a time in my life where I’m really trying to cut the metaphorical fat.  And while you are important to me, I don’t see any sense in rehearing something you’ve already told me and I’ve made an effort to remember.  As a result, if you have no new information to pass on, perhaps we should part ways for now.”

Too cold?

Far worse than the story retellers are the joke repeaters.  I can’t stand joke repeaters.  Not the folks who tell you a joke you’ve heard before; that’s basically unavoidable, though I would argue that one shouldn’t socialize with folks who “tell jokes”.   Instead, I’m referring to people who recall what they believe to be a funny story and regardless of whether or not people laugh, proceed to run through the same exact thing all over again. Example:

They  lay out the sequence of events, drag you through them again more slowly, and then recap when it’s over.  It’s like a bad episode of Dragonball Z. 

Too nerdy?

The worst cases repeat the tagline (see above) until they squeeze a chuckle out of someone.  Let’s be clear: repeating a bad joke but making it louder and laughing more at yourself does not make it funnier.

I thought we were all clear on this.

 Anyway I’m tired of it.  It’s a senseless waste of my time, not to mention I have absolutely no plan for avoiding the incredibly awkward space where someone tells the same joke over and over that I can’t even pretend to find funny.  I have no exit plan.  All I can do is make a strangely inhuman fake smile face.  Which, on my face, doesn’t come out as a fake smile face at all.  It just kind of looks like I have to go to the bathroom.

I can think of at least five people I know who do this.  I’m sure there are more.  And if I add up how many times I will listen to things I’ve already heard and don’t care to hear again over the course of the next year, (let’s say 5 offenses in a month at 5 minutes each times 12 months in a year), that’s 5 hours.  5 hours! That’s almost an entire day of sleep.  Or learning how to knit.  Or showering more frequently.

Any of them would be nice, really.

This is just the beginning.  I’m cutting the metaphorical fat, friends.  No more wasting time with obligations.  No more enduring double storytelling and repeated taglines.

After all, I’m being held back from being an excellent knitter. ♣

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A Bad Case of the Man Hands

17 Aug

Yesterday at work someone complimented me on how “feminine” I looked.

What, exactly, does that mean?

I would have brushed it off, but that’s the second time in a few short weeks that someone has emphasized how “feminine” something makes me look.  Not pretty, attractive, lovely, soft, or other stereotypical qualities associated with my sex, but simply “feminine”.  Of or pertaining to female.  I would say it’s someone trying to avoid a sexual harassment suit while complimenting my looks, but they’ve both been women.  And older women, at that.   How am I supposed to take “Hey! You look like a girl today!”

Because I’m not taking it well.

By pointing out the times I specifically look like a female, I’m led to believe that I typically do not.  Else why draw attention to the achievement?    The first time it was mentioned, I was wearing a dress to work so I get it.  Not that it’s particularly world-stopping when I wear a dress, but rather the dresses I own are all inappropriate for work based on the super cleavage, the short hemline, or the tight waste.   On the particular day I mention, I was actually worried that I’d be scolded for bringing this dress to the workplace, but it was my birthday and I ventured I could get away with it. 

And since it was my boss who commented thus, I’d say I did.

The second incident was yesterday, when I decided to wear a blouse with flowers on it.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m not typically a blouse-with-flowers-on-it kinda gal.  But it was one of those days when everything else I owned was dirty and I could either resolve to do laundry or to wear a flower blouse.   And since I have a long, sordid history of buying entire packs of new underwear before I’ll do laundry, the flower blouse certainly won.

And subsequently led to a new complex.

It's probably my hands. A close look at a 5th grade photo of me with brother, who was born a smiley face, reveals startlingly mannish hands.

I’m not sure what’s typically unfeminine about me.  I’ve really lightened up on my tomboyish ways.  These days I’m wearing makeup,

jewelry, headbands and – yes, from time to time – the occasional flower shirt.  And since I’m doing all of these stereotypically feminine things, I’m led to believe that it’s simply me.

It’s me.  I look like a man.

I must.  Why else would two people take the time to point out that I look like a female on these days in question?  It’s because I was doing something that detracted from my mannish features.  And thank heavens I let a little femininity shine through; I wonder if the office was starting to question my gender.

Maybe they always wondered and never asked because I work in Diversity. 

Oh dear.  What if they think I’m a transexual?  Are they wondering? Do they have questions?

I don’t know how to combat this.  Perhaps I’ll add a tagline to my signature in work emails: “Female since 1986!” or how about “Hey! Sometimes I wear skirts!” or “Nope, not a tranny!”  I could also plaster my corkboard with pictures of me and my boyfriend.  I’m typically  a no-nonsense-office-decorations kind of gal, but if it will straighten out a few lingering questions in the office, I might give it a go.  Maybe I could just go up to one of the male Summer Interns one day and sexually harass him in front of the cube farm. 

I suppose that would give me troubles of an entirely different sort. ♣

 

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Of Balls and Men

16 Aug

This week, adventure propositioned me while I was at a frozen yogurt shop.  As I rounded the corner to pay, I saw a stack of flyers that directed me to my destiny: The World Pinball Championships.

Happy Lollipop Tuesday Folks.

Thanks to a recent post about my overwhelming Facebook anxiety, it appears I have some noobs in the house.  Hey: thanks for reading another post.  I’m flattered.  So allow me to explain that Lollipop Tuesdays are a special series on my blog where every week I try something completely foreign to me and blog about my humiliation and learning experience for your entertainment.  For more information on this exciting day of the week , see the top of this page and click the link that says “What’s Lollipop Tuesday?” Now: onward!

So with flyer in hand and no idea what to expect, I took a day off work and drove out to explore the wonderful world of pinball.  I pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a warehouse, with middle-aged men sporting bandannas and their best game faces hopping out of trucks and piling into the place.

I opened the door and stepped right into a nerd’s wet dream. 

It was beautiful.  Nerdtastic, if you will.  There were rows upon rows of lit up, music-making, pinball machines.  They had doubles and triples of some of the more recent games and old school machines in great condition.  And every single one was plugged in and playable. But it wasn’t enough to just gawk; I had to register and compete.  Because what’s a Lollipop Tuesday without a chance for severe humiliation?

Glorious. Simply glorious.

I don’t know what I expected.  I guess in some small way I thought my life of video game rocking would somehow pay off here and I’d be able to at least spare myself embarrassment.  But as I was standing in line to play one of the four machines that would compose my ranking score, I was approached by a tall, pleasant gentleman who asked me what my story was.  I explained that I didn’t really have one, but that I was actually there representing a blog and learning about the underbelly of the pinball world as an active participant.  

He told me he was there to be the first Canadian World Pinball Champion.

No, seriously.  He was.  Because he flew in from Vancouver and up until the scrappy Canadian playing on the machine in front of us entered the picture, the guy I was talking to was the reigning Canadian Pinball Champion.    And I’m not sure if he dug the blog idea, he wanted me to get hooked on pinball, or I was one of the only five females in the room and the only one under 40, but he was kind enough to walk me over to another gentleman and introduce me and my blog.

That gentleman just happened to be the three-time, reigning World Pinball Champion.

He seemed thoroughly unimpressed with me, but I was definitely impressed with him.  Because even if I didn’t know a shred about the world of pinball before I walked in the door, I had taken some time to play on a few machines while I was there for fun and in one corner were a row of machines that were saved as relics, with little cards on them stating who won the World Pinball Championship on it in what year and what their score was.  I was staring at a guy who had his name etched on three of them, and the most astronomical scores I’d ever seen on a game.  Ever.

So after I’d had my moment to acknowledge the company I was among, I realized I was about to really suck some pretty awful rearend in front of these people.  

Allow me to further explain my relative suckness.  On the particular day of my arrival, the Classics tournament was underway. The Classics is a competition in itself where only machines made before 1987 are used and there is no skill division – it’s just one big pool of merciless competition.   On some of these old school machines, the score is not digital, but like the odometer on a car.  And as I stood in line to play one of my four games, the gentleman in front of me rolled over the score on his machine.

Twice.

These people weren’t messing around.  There’s a $10,000 prize at stake for the newly crowned World Champion and a trophy that would stand almost as tall as the winner.  There were folks walking around with gloves on, folks in the ready position at the front of the pinball machine as if they were playing hockey and not just flicking flippers.  And most average Joes walking that refurbished warehouse floor owned pinball machines that they had in their homes. 

Where the magic happens

The two people I spoke to had over ten.

So of course I played, and of course I sucked.  In fact, on one of the machines I had the absolute lowest score out of all the people who played that day.  But on another, 100 folks went at it and my score rested safely at twentieth position. And that ain’t so bad.  I know this because The World Pinball Championships are actually pretty darn organized.  And as soon as I signed off on my score, it was uploaded into a database that is searchable by anyone who wants to go to the Pinball Association website and check out scores for a particular player, machine, or tournament.

I must admit that I went online to check out the final standings at the end of the 4-day tournament and was sad not to see my Canadian friend’s name as the reigning champion.  But after a bit of networking, I found that there’s another tournament coming up in March.  And aside from the overwhelming suck I brought with me that day, I actually had a fantastic time.

Who knows: maybe I’ll brush up on my game, throw on a pair of gloves and a bandanna, and try to give my new friends a run for their money in the Spring. ♣

For more information on the World Pinball Championships and other Professional and Amateur Pinball Association tournaments, check out www.papa.org

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