Nothing about nothing

One of my friends thought I should spend my downtime blogging instead of writing him emails and repeatedly sweeping the kitchen floor with a toothbrush (I swear I am not on meth, I am actually this hyper).  OK, it was the Boi and I think I am bugging him with too much attention.  I tend to do that and he isn’t the first guy I have annoyed (Apologies, former boyfriends! I know I can be a bit much, kind of a like a deep fried Twinkie with a Snickers bar incased in it).  That was so gross, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.  Anyone want to kiss me?

So I am consulting (I totally keep writing “consluting” but thank God for Microsoft!) and am running out of things to do.  I can be a bit of a steamroller at work (surprise!), so I am starting to annoy the hell out of them by analyzing their IT and administration systems.  Everyone appreciates that.  “Why don’t you have a universal email directory?  Want me to make one?”  “Why can’t I print PDFs?  Want me to renegotiate the copier lease?”  “Why don’t you redo your policies to cut down on the churn of FMLA claims?  I can do that!” 

Yeah, everyone appreciates advice on how to do their jobs.  I actually tell new employees in orientation to keep their mouths shut and their ears open the first three weeks if they want to be popular.  And by popular, I don’t mean the kind of “popular” I was in high school.  Yeah, don’t be that kind of popular at work.  By this I mean slut. 

So this week I had the opportunity to catch up with three dear friends.  I sat Shiva with Ariella and Kiam for her father’s death.  It was an awesome ritual and I only hope I honored my mom that much at her wacky Irish/Hawaiian wake.  Ariella told us the story of her father’s life and simultaneously told us the story of the Holocaust, founding of Israel, and the immigrants tale.  Her father sounds like my grandfather who was a second generation Irish immigrant – full of love and gregariousness and light and love and acceptance and swagger.  Kind of like Ariella and Kiam.  Little dude wore two different colored boots to my Easter party and told the adults how to play a fake made up game.  Love me some Kiam! 

I also caught up with the HR Goddess from one of my consulting gigs at Daniels.  (That is the cougar pick up spot, yo!  If I scare the Boi away, you can find me there every night looking for 25 year olds in the construction business.  Yumtastic!)  She has great hair.  I wish I was a blonde so I didn’t have to dye my hair all the time.  (Shit, umm, Boi?  This all a façade.  Botox and hair dye and zip ties are keeping me together.  The shoes are real and nothing says I love you like footwear and real estate.  I figured you should know). 

And, I got to see my hero Larry who convinced me to take this giant leap into the void. 

So last night I had to hoop it out in the park after hh with Maureen.  I started to eat shellfish a few years ago (mostly for the clam chowder) and we shared some crab parts, so my hyper went into gazillion and I had to hoop it out.  I look like a freak, but I don’t care.  It is like dancing with shiny things,  and, therefore, makes me happy, 

So, Boi, I am trying not to overwhelm you, but I need a lot to do or I fall into bad habits.  The Devil will find work for idle hands to do.  Not only a Smith’s song, but also a true-ism.  Someone needs to give me a job now.  A really busy job. 

And, Boi, I love the calls from M and story time and the fact that you wore the Chicken Hat and Bunny Nose and impressed my friends with your hockey skills.  Boi, I like you.  You are in for it, sucka! 

Thanks Easter Bunny!

Yesterday, I held my annual Easter Party - Hop, Bok, Chirp, Meow.  I have two annual parties – Easter and Christmas.  The rest of the parties happen organically.  Because I am more than slightly OCD/ADD/neurotic, I start planning for my parties months in advance.  By last week, I had the plastic eggs stuffed, the menu planned, and I had been over-messaging the guests on Facebook.  My other party is a more sophisticated affair with good wine and I let people use the real china.  Easter is all about the candy and the cheap champagne and the chaos.  The beautiful, awesome chaos.   And I am really really into Easter.

I love Easter for many reasons - it is Spring!  Spring!  Spring!  (and yes, I am bouncing as I write this)!  It is such a gift to have survived another winter in Seattle and see my plants start to thrive.  Easter was my favorite holiday as a kid because my mom would make it into an adventure game.  She would hide little clues in eggs written kind of Dr. Suessish and I would have to follow egg trails to find the clue to my next chocolate or stuffed bunny.  It beat the crap out of Christmas.  Most importantly, there is never any drama on Easter.  No one’s weird uncle ever gets drunk at Easter dinner and tries to make you sit on his lap and starts yelling about sports. That NEVER happens at Easter.  Thanksgiving OWNS that sport.  Although I hear Groundhog’s Day is making a run for it.  They got a Twitter account and flyers and stuff.  I think they are in it to win it.

The party has evolved through the years.  Now that we are getting older, people are bringing their kids and the tune is changing from pure Bacchanalia to a mix of kid and adult silliness, although I still crash out at 7 p.m. for an hour and I don’t think that is ever going to change.  I put Ian in charge of the younger kids because he was the oldest that wasn’t legally an adult.  (Look, Sean, I KNOW you want to sit at the kids’ table, but you are 40 years old.  Stop picking your nose – that is gross.)  That worked really well because he is a hard worker like his dad, Mark.  If I ever go back to Burning Man, I am going with Mark because he can tear down a petting zoo in like 5 hours.  Why would one need to tear down a petting zoo in 5 hours?  That is next week’s blog post!   Anyway, Ian rocked his job as Assistant Manager of People Under 18 and asked if he could use me as a reference. 

This was important because there were people and dogs and cats and eggs and chaos all over the place, so someone needed to be in charge – don’t ever send a 40 year old to do an 11 year old’s job.  I woke up this morning at 4 a.m. to start cleaning and found in no particular order:

• A lacrosse stick
• A hockey stick
• A jump rope
• Someone’s underwear
• Peeps in my bookcase
• Sunglasses
• A baby
• A Corgi

This is a diversion, but for some reason I was reading about ANOTHER class action FLSA law suit at Wal-Mart so I looked at their home page and they have the most foxy doctor on their home page.  Remember how everyone fell in love with Kal Penn in Harold and Kumar when he was in the ER?  Indian doctors have some kind of crazy hotness factor that I can’t even begin to understand.  It is like they get an MD in yum. 

Back to reality!  Sorry about that, dear reader.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste. 

So the most important part of yesterday (besides seeing my friends and their kids and their honeys and their critters and my friends – mwuah mwuah mwuah (that is the sound of me kissing you)), was that The People got to meet The Boi.  He will inevitably dump me now that I made him official, so I just have to roll with that and handle.  I hang with Canadians, so I know they can help me if I get into a bind and get emotional.  They will beat the crap out of me with hockey sticks until I man up.  It usually takes about 45 seconds.  Thanks, buddies!  Eh! 

The Boi (gushing like a fricking geyser ovah heah) is awesome.  He wore the chicken hat and The Nose and played Hockey Bunny and taste tested the food and was just standing around being hot.  Haute.  Hawt.  I don’t know how many more times one can describe his hauteness.  Hotness.  Hawtness.  Oh. My. Yum.  AND that isn’t to say I just like him for his body.  I think he can spell and everything!  And he helped Team RDI win the second round of trivia last week.  And he is a fellow HR Guy, so he actually coaches me when I get out of line.  I can’t wait to write him up for a serious violation of law, safety or policy.  He makes me laugh my ass off. I like.  If I get too clingy I will ask my people to scrape me off him like opihi off a rock (yes, you do in fact have to be Hawaiian to understand this sentence).

So the Easter Bunny, the Pope and a rabbi and my mom walk into a bar on Easter.  They play hockey.  Bunny. Wackiness ensues. 

Smarterer

I feel like a dunce.  A real-live-sitting-in-the-corner-facing-the-wall-wearing-a-dunce-cap dunce with a sign that got taped to my back when I didn’t notice because I was standing in line at the cafeteria waiting for my apple crisp that says “I’m stoopid”. 

I have been in HR for 18 years.  I have done most everything, usually because I work for non profits and we can’t afford staff.  At one place, they bought me rubber boots because the basement kept flooding and I had to go down and unplug the drain when it rained or sewage would get all over while I was in the middle of hiring summer staff which is not a retention tool.  Another place took me out of a CFO interview because the coffee maker was broken.  I have negotiated with plaintiff’s attorneys while mopping the floor.  I sued the Feds over not making a decision on a Green Card while uploading a job to Craig’s List.  I can multi task, I am smart.  Or I used to be. 

The last year ate my brain and spit it back out, but it spit it out kind of weird.  Like it had a parasite.  Or a fungus.  Like that really big fungus that is underground and covers all of Michigan.  I had only been back from Indonesia a few weeks when I started to feel lazy.  I was really afraid I would wake up at 6 a.m., do my job search, clean the house and then crack a beer at 8 a.m.

An HR colleague was kind enough to try me out on a contract doing national Leaves of Absence.  I know FMLA, I know WA leave, I even thought I knew CA and OR, but the devil is in the details and I am not detail oriented.  You will know this if you ever come over and use my bathroom.  It LOOKS fine from the door, but if you really crawled around on the floor, you would be horrified.  My friend Dave just told me you have to take the screens off your windows to clean them.  Ohh!  That is why they just get gross when I hose them down and make the windows all foggy!  I definitely need adult supervision on home repair.  Or home disrepair. 

So, as I was saying, I am dumberer than I used to be.  I had a few minutes of flat out panic where I put my hands over my face and cried and tried to give them their money back.  To be fair, there were a lot of hands in this stuff before I came and following the paper and electronic trails back is harder than solving a Nancy Drew mystery, but I still like to add value.  I am not even charming – I just stare at the screen and try to figure out what happened in Florida in 2010 with a leave and then take my obligatory walk to Subway for lunch and checking email on my phone.  (Six inch veggie on honey oat with all the veggies except olives and cucumbers, please!)  Then I come back and have a high degree of stupid again for a few hours and try to figure out how to print (the printer is really really hard.  IT gets confused, I am not kidding.).  I have finally met a copy machine that is more intelligent than me.  I don’t know what this means for AI or for me, but either way, it is scaring me. 

I do think it is finally sinking in, which is good.  I guess five days isn’t that bad of a learning curve and I have demolished the paperwork stack they handed me.  Shredding feels like walking on the beach barefoot, or eating baked brie or your first kiss – that is  how satisfying killing some of this paperwork is. 

The thing about being new in a job is that you always feel like a dork the first few days – you can’t dial your phone, you don’t know how to run the copier, you can’t figure out where they put the tea – I know this.  I tell people this all the time.  I also tell them “I told you that during your orientation and sent it to you on email so you wouldn’t forget” which is exactly what good HR folks do (and in this case did, but it doesn’t matter because it is me and I don’t want to be the dumb one that forgotted everything I was told) but I am THAT girl that didn’t pay attention the first day of class.

Next week, I am supposed to help a company I have worked with for years on some additional immigration issues.  I hope I don’t screw up and have their employees sent to India for 5 months on accident like happened one time before (but that one was NOT my fault).  I sued the government and won – yeah! 

I went to Macy’s for a Dunce Cap because I figured I should own up, but they are too expensive, so I had to get one at Value Village (that is where I shop for my friends and I got GREAT discounts on some of them!).  I will be wearing one tomorrow.  It is mauve. 

Pillow Fight Club

The first rule of pillow fight club is to NOT talk about pillow fight club.  The second rule of pillow fight club is to NOT talk about pillow fight club.  The third rule ……. you get it.  You are smart.  Or you wouldn’t be able to read this blog because it is written at the 6^th grade level. 

Today I got my ass handed to me by a 2 year old, a 4 year old, a 7 year old, a 14 year old and a bunch of writers.  Maybe that is why I am staying home nursing my ego.  Or it could be staying out dancing with the drag queens at Neighbors on Thursday and then having a weirdo contest with my friend B at The Buck on Friday, but I am kicked.  I just rewrote my to do list for the day, canceled any evening events and penciled in “fold clothes”.  That is how I party!  Oh yeah.  Gonna watch X Files reruns and eat some soup tonight – top that Church of Mez!  (I know you can and this is not a challenge.  By the time you read this, I will be in bed sleeping on my kind of icky pillow from the pillow fight today and dreaming of my dream job or how I can rent a steam cleaner.)

This morning, my best HR buddy of mine, Noelle, and I went for a walk and hit the farmer’s market.  Noelle gets into the best friend circle (Dante’s 4^th circle of hell) because she lived with me for 5 years.  We were both HR folks, so we created a behaviorally based interview process for new roommates to share our house.  Behavior based interview questions rely on the premise that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.  So we had questions like “tell me about a time you weren’t able to pay the bills.  How did you handle it?” instead of “what are we supposed to do when you can’t pay the bills like every other roommate we ever had?”  It works in work, but it doesn’t work in roommates.  We went through one a year, they had to be men because we thought two women was enough in one house and only survived each other because we are both only children so like to squirrel away and have conversations with ourselves for hours.  (It is what happens when you don’t have anyone to play with, you create a vivid inner world – mine involved a lot of talking cats and flying over the ocean.) 

One roommate used to come home stoned and cook beans and when I would wake up for work in the morning, there would be food on the ceiling.  I have no idea how anyone could even accomplish that, but we wound up just painting over it after we moved out.  Another took all the light bulbs and screwed the light fixtures back in, so when I went to show the upstairs room, the lights didn’t come on.  I called an electrician and our landlord and they discovered the problem.  A third had a room so messy that after the earthquake in 2001, I went to check on his things because we had some damage and thought his room had been destroyed.  I found cans of tuna and socks all over along with a bunch of Kleenex and didn’t ask any more questions.  The last one filled the washer with packing peanuts and the dryer with used motor oil.  Do not hire me to pick your roommates.  To be fair, it was the 90’s, maybe that is just how things went down in cat town back in the day.

I headed up to my friend Dave B’s house to return a plate I had borrowed and to bring the kids some cookies.  Dave has been a friend from high school and I am thrilled to still be able to hang with him and talk about the good old days.  The cookies set off a riot – there was crying, screaming, jumping off counters, trying to ride the dog, and that was all Dave.  Not really, he is really awesome with the kids, but they had obviously had their sugar for the day and were shoving carrots up their noses, throwing bananas, and changing into superhero costumes every 5 minutes.  It was exhausting.  And I am covered in snot carrots, banana pieces, something that may or may not be part of a hot dog, and dog slobber. 

BUT, this is no time for wimps because I have to pick up Joy for Pillow Fight 2011!  Yeah!  I am going to beat the crap out of my friends and total strangers while being filmed by KOMO.  I didn’t know about the KOMO part or I would have worn a better outfit. 

Joy is the most luminescent person I know.  She glows with light.  And she wears a lot of sparkly shit, but her soul is beautiful.  So when a 25 Chilean lead singer of a Nirvana tribute band from Santiago showed up looking for a someone she had arranged to couch surf with at Joy's apartment building, who, oops!, went to Buenos Aires and forgot to leave the key.   Joy stepped in and offered lodging.  OK, we had a full crew for the fight plus a new visitor who is really into grunge – how awesome could this day be? 

Wait, before you answer that question, please remember I live in Seattle. It was raining and hailing.  We met about 15 friends and headed down the street to the pillow fight place carrying pillows.  We looked like hooligans (some more than others) that were going to settle down for a collective nap and stick it to the man.  I love my friends.  We arrived to find the PF going in full force.  I jumped in and started hitting people all punk rock mosh pit style when I met my nemesis – a 14 year old with two pillows and mean one-two punch.  He got me good several times, so I bowed out for a breather.  I ran into one of my colleagues there who, after catching up, showed me who his kid was.  It was the freaking Karate Kid and he had seriously messed me up.  I told my former colleague (whom I had hired) that he better control his kid or something nasty would turn up in his personnel file.  I don’t care how many PhDs you have, call the kid off!

Went back in with a battle cry to find the love of my life (besides my Nikon) in the form of a 7 year old boy hell bent on making me pay for ratting him out for chucking pears at the neighbors house.  I was so busted. I tried to get my friend Piet to save me (because he is like 6 foot gazillion) but he didn’t want to hit a kid. So I tried Lauren (who is the most kick ass pillow fighter in Seattle and my new best friend - sorry, Noelle!), but she was no match for this 65 pound hunk of pillow swinging madness.  I tried to grab his pillow, enlist other help, run, cry, block, hide behind other people, stick small defenseless children in front of me as human shields – but he was relentless!  I must have beat him at Pokemon or something.  LR – you got it coming, better watch your back..... 

After, we went to Eric’s house to unwind.  But Eric was wound. He kept changing outfits like Dave’s 4 year old.  He finally wound up with rabid squirrel outfit (everyone I know has a dress up box - mine is full of weird hats and a lot of tutus) and was trying to communicate with us through chirping.  We decided to have a poetry reading and my ass was so handed to me by the most erudite poets and writers I have encountered in years.  I am going to need my day job, because I don’t measure up.  Stan, Eric, Lauren, Jenny – you guys kick ass.