Sunday, October 23, 2005

Reunion Update


In the midst of the Sox excitement, I forgot to post about my high school reunion. It went well. The turnout was low, as was expected, but those of us who were there really had a good time. I'm in the process now of uploading photos and emailing and what not, and it is taking far longer than I anticipated. I also discovered that someone was nice enough to take a picture of their hairy ass with one of the disposable cameras! Yes, thank you for that. My reunion experience is now complete. What is it with boys and taking pictures of their naughty parts? Umm, you know what it looks like, please leave it at that. Only those women who are drunk enough to sleep with you should see that.

Speaking of which, I drank an alcoholic beverage that night. I know, watch out! It was something like a wine cooler, only slightly less wimpy, and one was all I needed to take the edge off and start karaoke-ing!

I really did have a blast and I'm so glad that I did it.

An update on my earlier post about the wife making fun of me; she's white. Go figure.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Go Sox!!!

The Sox are going to the World Series! First time since 1959, which is when my dad was 3 yrs old. My Dad and brother are near tears right now, they're so happy! Brian is possibly going up to the airport to meet the Sox when they fly in tonight. Early tomorrow, he'll be buying ALCS champs t-shirts and hats for sure!

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Go Sox!

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Have you seen my Middle Ground?

Just a few posts ago, I was writing about how underused I was. How do I go from underused to stretched thin in just a few posts? I had the day off work today b/c of Columbus Day, which was splendid. This gave me time to work on the reunion. It is this Saturday. I did rope in two people to help me decorate and one person is making last minute phone calls. Thanks goodness for that, b/c after my phone call yesterday, I was infuriated.

I really don't think a lot of things make me mad. I can be slightly perturbed or annoyed, but mad, I can name the times in the last year I've reached that point. Infuriated is another thing altogether. Mad, or anger, for me, involves being out of control of your emotions. You are yelling and you can't help it. You want to throw something. You really think hitting something might make you feel better.

Infuriating is just a complete intolerance and unaccepting attitude toward something. Knowing that is the way of the world, but not liking it. So, as a result of this phone call, I was infuriated.

I was calling a classmate to see if he was going to come to the reunion. I had personally gotten the contact details for this classmate when I ran into him at a store a few months back. He was the one who approached me and asked me about the reunion. He told me all about his family, immediate and extended, and the tragedies and happy days of the last ten years. When I took his info, he said, "I'll let my wife know you'll be calling" and kind of laughed, explaining she'd want to know why a random woman was calling him.

I hadn't received an RSVP from him, and I knew he was interested, so I called him to follow up. I also wanted to know if there was a particular reason that might keep him from attending, such as money, and tell him not to worry about it. He could pay whenever, or just come. The whole point of this affair is that everyone should be able to attend.

So I called and his wife answered. I thought of the exchange earlier about his wife being concerned about another woman, and I also didn't want her to think I was some kind of bill collector or telemarketer, so I just said, "Hi, this is Sabrina from the high school, can I speak to B?" She dropped the phone on the floor. I could hear it hit the hard floor and bounce. Then, she does it - she mocks my voice to B letting him know he has a phone call. If you haven't guessed this already, I am white. I get INFURIATED when someone outside my race makes fun of my voice/accent. This black woman was making fun of me by doing her "white voice" and laughing at me. She's laughing at me for being white? For speaking properly? What exactly? For not knowing who I am? For not living in the projects? WHAT???

B gets on the phone and I just ask if he's coming to the reunion, he says, no, he won't be able to make it. Okay, bye. I'm not exactly in the mood for chit chat at that point since I am envisioning his wife in the next room laughing, B being completely uncomfortable with the situation and trying to shield me from his wife while not pissing her off. Yes - okay, bye was all I could say.

Now I'm not about to make the argument that what goes for whites should go for african americans, too, I'm not that naive. I know it's different. There is just something about this particular behavior that infuriates me. It's happened before when I was working in retail and it was so blatant and so rude and so racially dividing I was appalled. Here I am trying to be as nice as I possibly can only to get slapped in the face for it. Yes I am white and I do talk really white. I have a high pitched voice and I use the word "like" a lot. I am what I am, and I think it is far more damaging to change my tone of speech depending on with whom I'm speaking. That would mean that I would have to be mindful of the race and socio economic status of the person I'm interacting with. Then what I am going to do? Start speaking in a different tone, using different slang? Umm, I don't think so, that would be, at best, legitimately hilarious, at worst, racist. (Note, the song, "Pretty Fly for a White Guy")

Should I be like the oblivious heads of state and corporation and laugh it off while I count my money? Shaking my head at those poor, poor people? Umm, no, to that, too. Not only am I not a rich white man running a Fortune 500 company, I live down the street from the projects, in the same zip code, schools, stores. Am I poor? No. Am I rich? Nope. Am I a yuppy? Umm, no. I work in social services in one of the highest crime areas in the United States. Do I see myself as different from my classmates' wife? No, I don't. I didn't when I picked up the phone to call her and when she did her "impersonation" it was a clear statement of "you're different from me" and I had only spoken one sentence.

I am thankful for my life and my blessings, and I honestly pray in thanks every day. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Maybe it's naive to think that while we are all different, I expected to be considered a peer by my classmate. I have traveled around the world and have embraced this place as my home and these classmates as my friends, and know that no matter where I may go in the world, these people share a part of my history that no one else does. To have that taken away in one snide phone call is disheartening at best, infuriating, at worst.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Nun follow up

I was thinking about the story I wrote about in a previous post, where the movie star became a nun. I just re-read it, and it seems a bit harsh that I said it might not have been her calling. I was just thinking again, about how things might have been had she not entered the order. My imagination portrays an image that would have one wishing things would have turned out differently.

On the TV show, Medium, there was an episode about an old TV show called "I Married a Mind Reader" (a fictitious show, btw). Anyhow, the stars are married both on screen and off. However, the husband begins having an affair with the wife's personal assistant, who ends up pregnant. The wife finds out, but doesn't let on that she knows. She fears her career will end up damaged, as she is getting older, and Hollywood is not kind to older women, and the show would not be able to survive if the public knew they were separated in real life. In the meantime, the wife finds out she is dying of lymphomic cancer. She decides to take her career legacy and fate in her hands and shoots herself, making it look like she was murdered by her assistant. The husband will not let his pregnant lover go to jail, so takes the rap for her and spends his life in prison. He makes the mother of his child promise to never speak of what happened there.

Enter the Medium. Forty years later, the wife asks the medium to set the record straight so that her husband can be free and he can meet his son. The assistant had just passed away. The husband had never seen his son, nor did his son know who his father was. The Medium gets everything in order and the husband is reunited with his son and released from prison. Now the souls of the wife and the assistant are at peace.

I can imagine a similar situation may have lay ahead for the movie star mentioned in my previous post and God may have pointed her in different direction. Perhaps the love she had with the man who was once her fiancee was the love that this man needed, but had life taken turns, they may have lost that love.

God only knows, and in fact, I'm sure he does, which is why, in contrast with my previous post, I don't question the decision.

Here's a link I just found about becoming a nun in an order here in the Midwest.

http://www.poorclares.org/discern.html

Wake me up when September ends

Oh wait, it did! And it turned cold, like overnight. I was hot and had the a/c on in my car as high it would go, then I woke up and I needed to turn the heat on. Insanity. Yep, that's why Chicago is the second city, b/c there are only two seasons! (That was on some radio commercial a few years ago).

I was away all week travelling for work. Which means I am back to work. Those powers of deduction you have there are something else, eh, kid?

I'm still volunteering on Saturdays for the Humane Society. Today was my first time volunteering after a full week of work, so I took a long nap afterwards. And I mean, like four or five hours long! We were so busy at the shop today, which is a good thing, but there were a few crabby people which rubbed me the wrong way! Oh well, c'est la vie. It's amazing, though, how like two crabby people stay in your mind, versus the hundred nice people. How twisted.

Next weekend is my high school class reunion. I'm organizing it by myself and again, a few negative comments and I felt like throwing in the towel. The event is also going to be a toiletry drive for a local women's shelter, and I received an email from an angry classmate who stated that while she didn't have a problem with giving things away to help people, in general, she was upset that it was at our reunion. Oh well, c'est la vie.