lists

12-9-09

Why am I so freaking tired? I suppose the mini cold I have doesn’t help. I am pretty sure I slept quite well last night. I woke up a couple times, once at 3 which really annoyed me since I really had to pee. I opted to get up and pee, and I got back into bed where I was shockingly comfy and happy for the next hour. But now I am at a point of exhaustion again.

I found out yesterday that Grammie is not coming out on Saturday now. Since it is supposed to be raining from tomorrow to Sunday, she has no desires to drive in the rain. I don’t blame her. I don’t like driving in general anymore, and she is older than me and has a hard enough time with driving at night time. Now add water falling from the sky and anyone could understand how unpleasant that sounds. So instead, she is driving out Tuesday and we will do her Christmas presents for the kids and then we will do dinner. This is probably fine, since we will still do cookies on Saturday with my folks. We can then go home at lunchtime and do nap at home.

I am supposed to try to get trained on these web forms today. Hopefully the guy is free long enough for me to go over there. It would make my day go by faster, and it would keep me awake.

I am in pop culture heaven these days. It is not only end of the year stuff that has lists and recaps everywhere, but end of the decade stuff. I have my EW here and I am having a hard time working knowing that there is gobs of fun crap to read about. Time has lists galore on their web site of everything from biggest scandals to top ten apologies and just historic moments. I may even need to pick up something like Cosmo to see lame stuff like top 10 fashion trends of the decade. Then I will read Discovery which will have top ten scientific breakthroughs (I figure I can balance myself out that way). I have considered making my own list of top ten items of this decade. I don’t know that I could come up with interesting enough stuff. So maybe I will try. Here are 10 things that shaped my life in the last decade:

1) Becoming a mommy: Please, like I am really going to choose the birth of one kid over another? Bobby was my miracle, and Dax was a wonderful comfortable blanket, and both let me know that not only was I actually fertile, but that I may in fact be pretty good at this.
2) I am now Mrs. Brenan: I certainly started the decade off with a bang. Even though we had been dating for 4 years, owned a home and had several cats together, it is amazing how great taking that last name has been.
3) Wrote a book: ok, I didn’t write the whole thing, but I wrote a lot. As a ghost writer, I dove into a topic that I knew very little about including religion, the black community, and writing about a guy I had never even met. It was incredibly challenging and rewarding, and how cool is it to have a book with your name as the author?
4) Had my gall bladder removed: I figure I had my appendix removed last decade, and the gal bladder this one. I am curious as to what organ I will get rid of next decade.
5) Made it through more than 3 years at a job: I worked at Blockbuster, Earthlink and Corporate Express for about 3 years each. Strangely, I also started and stopped the jobs in about the same month, September. So when I started at MQ in Oct of 2000, I was sure that by Sept of 2003 I would be packing up a box. It is now Dec of 2009, and I am still going strong. There have been good years, and there have been crap years, but I am glad to have gotten all 9 years.
6) Got in touch with my past: Thanks to the likes of MySpace, followed with Facebook, I got in touch with gobs of people I assumed I had lost forever. I even met some new friends. I now can talk to elementary friends and I now have a relationship with my half brother, whom I have not talked to in probably 15 years. Thank goodness for the net!
7) Started Blogging: I always wrote in a journal, but to start making it super public was only this decade. I am allowed myself to be vulnerable in front of whomever wanted to see it. I caused problems and have had a nice outlet to get things off my chest. It also has made me discover that what I really want to write in life is a column.
8) Entertainment at its best: I am stealing from other top ten lists when I say that things like Harry Potter have in fact changed my life. It is the first time in a while in which I eagerly anticipated an upcoming book. I found myself reading the book while eating, working, hell, I know I read pages while I waited at red lights. I hope I can find something like that again soon.
9) Shutterbug: I have always taken gobs of pictures, even before having the digital camera. What is even better is how many I have saved and collected and have together. In the last couple years, I started scanning them all in and now have them at my fingertips online. This hobby has really inspired me to organize the rest of my pictures and get everything digital. I know it will be appreciated for generations to come.
10) Lost a bunch of weight: Ok, I am back to being a fat load, but what was significant about this one period of time is it gives me hope that I can do it again. I am hoping that by 2019, when I am writing my top ten list of that decade that I cam add lost a bunch of weight-and kept it off.


Of course, as my day, and week progressed, I am sure I will come up with other items. This list was hard. You worry that maybe one is too trivial, or that one is probably worth 5 points. But bottom line, I know that all of these things are in my head a lot, and I think it is because of them I am the Gena I am today.

Oh my goodness, I am bored! Yes, I am working, but it is boring work. I am so easily distracted today, but with nothing worthwhile to distract me. I keep thumbing through my magazine, but I have to make sure that no one sees me reading it. Not that gobs of people come to my neck of the office, but the one day I am so blatantly goofing off will be the one day I get the president at my desk.

It doesn’t feel Christmasy enough to me. I feel some stress, too, since it is now the 9th and I have like no shopping done. Of course, this weekend will help that. Plus, I can wrap some stuff, too. That way I have some wrapped presents under the tree. I was horrified when I realized we had forgotten to open the drawers on our advent calendar for the last couple days. I just need some Christmas spirit.

Yesterday we were listening to the radio. First up was “Help Me, Rhonda”. We listened for a while when Bobby finally pipes up and says, “Mom, what does he need help running for?” He thought they were saying “Help Me, Run Run, Help Me Run”.

Later, the Beastie Boys song came on (I think it is just called Intergalatic) and Bobby loved that part of the song sounded like a robot, and then he wanted to know why the guy kept yelling at the robot. I guess you don’t realize how much the Beastie Boys yell in their songs.

I was pleased when he liked the song “Wonderful Christmas Time” by Paul McCartney. He assumed it was the Beatles, recognizing Paul’s voice. I didn’t correct him.

I was torn later when I was scanning through stations and skipped over Feliz Navidad. I landed on some 80’s song. The boys yelled at me to go back to Feliz Navidad. I was excited at their wanting to hear a Christmas song, but I didn’t like that they wanted to hear the “Dora” song again. Sigh.

Ok, I just made the mistake of looking up my best friend from the 1st through like 4th grade. No, not a mistake, since honestly, it is really cool to have been able to find her. I had not seen her on Facebook, and I thought, why not google her name just for the hell of it. Not only did I find her, I found gobs of pictures and articles about all the numerous awards she has won for technology and Bioengineering. Just this year, she won the 2009 World Technology Award in Biotechnology. Dude, pretty freaking impressive. She works at Standford, or she did. There was so much on her, it was slightly overwhelming. I am super proud of her. It is amazing to see how much she has accomplished. Yes, I feel kind of lame now based on how little I have done. I don’t even have a degree, she has a PhD! Dude!

I met her back probably in the 1st grade? I don’t remember exactly. I know we were friends. I know she was one of those few people where I actively went to her house as a kid. She lived pretty close. I also remember once when she and I must have been on the phone and she forgot to hang up, so my dad and I had to walk down to her house to let them know since for some reason we were still on the line with her. I may be remembering that wrong.

I remember her little brother loved trains. I remember that she liked jump rope when I liked soccer, so we would alternate in what we played each day. I once had mac and cheese at her house and choked down a giant pat of butter that had not melted fully only because I didn’t want to be rude and point out that it had not melted. I remember this was the first praying before a meal that I was ever a part of.

She moved to Torrance in the middle of our elementary years. She went to a different school. At one point, I remember riding my bike over there and the two of us went and saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I also remember talking to her briefly in High School. I have a picture of her in her tall flags uniform. Yet since that time, really, I have not heard from her at all.

So why now? Well, it has been a great deal of fun catching up with a couple people from Madison lately. A handful of them I have even had comments from and some chatting. It seems like the one person I should try to talk with is the person I considered to be my best friend at one point.

I found that she had an email address on one of the sites and I dropped her a quick random note. I am nowhere close to being the same person I was when I was 7. Shoot, I don’t know how much of the same person I am that I was when I was 17. I have to say, I am pretty impressed that someone I called my friend turns out to be that freaking smart. Maybe she and I might have been friends for longer had she not moved. Maybe that is one of those things that bums me out. I don’t have a childhood friend that I have known since kindergarten. I have a couple of people I have known a long time, but it seems like it would have been cool to know someone that long.

It should be interesting to see if she remembers me, or more importantly, cares. LOL!

Yay! She just emailed me back! She said she did remember me. Cool! So I sent back another little note. I don’t expect a ton of contact, but it is still nice to catch up.

I will admit, I am feeling quite insecure all of the sudden. I know I am not stupid. I am pretty confident that I feel smarter than the average bear. I just sometimes wish I was smarter. I always felt stupid around my high school friends. These are guys that could build a computer from scratch back before a lot of people even knew what a computer was. They now work for places like Google and have positions that I don’t even know what they do because I don’t have security clearance. I know that all of the fields they excel in were never my strong skills. I am not mathematically advanced. Yes, I know, I work with numbers all day long, but collecting and A/R, I can tell you, there is very little math involved. I know my talents are on a more personal level. I think I can read people pretty well, and I can write pretty well. I just wish I could come up with that one thing to excel to me to a point where I could stand up proud at a reunion and say, “I wrote that” or maybe just be some kind of amazing therapist. I need to stop comparing myself to others as it only will frustrate me and make me blue. I need to take pride in the person I am, and stop whining. But for right now, I think I need a few minutes of feeling like I wasted a lot of time.