Sep
16
I hate the new Friendster blogs
September 16, 2008 | | 1 Comment
I like that they’re free. (Though they didn’t offer to give me any of my $40 back.) I like the new template options. I hate the actually blogging interface (What can I say? I’m familiar and comfortable with MoveableType.), though it’s still better than the horror on MySpace.
But, now I’ve got to go back through nearly seven hundred posts and check the formatting to make sure there are no errors due to the change over. Grrr.
Aug
15
Another request to commenters
August 15, 2008 | | 7 Comments
It’s funny. I rarely post blogs anymore and so often miss out on my readers’ comments. The only reason I opened the blog today was because I was frustrated by the horrible, racist and/or completely clueless comments that have been left on one of the blogs at work.
Since I wouldn’t be allowed to post a blog specifically addressing the issues at work, I’d decided to go ahead at do it here. And that’s when I found the following. I was just as bad, if not worse, than anything posted on the blog at my job.
I deleted it from the post, but have decided to reprint it here because I also “outed” Chuck, the commenter, listing his email address, in a comment of my own.
I draw the line, however, at leaving it out for the casual viewer to read.
Chuck said:
I am in a fit of desperation; confusion, and distrust is all around me, even to th3e point that I cannot help but think, the country is ready for an eye opener. My thinking? It is the predatory lenders that has wrecked the economy of this country, in that no one can save for the future anymore. When your government allows Lenders to charge up to 30 % interest on your loans and pay as much as 81% on your home mortgage then it is time for a change. The only way to make change that will be effective and restore the ability of Americans to save and prosper is to outlaw the Predators. We must do away with the greed of the super rich and restore sanity to our economy or we will be looking like a 3rd world country overnight. And I mean overnight. Germany, just prior to the 2nd world war was economically enslaved by the rich Jews that owned everything and had the German people working all day for a loaf of bread! It is no wonder the Germans rose up against the Jews, and the same thing is happening right here in America, today. They are enslaving the Palestinians, and the U.S. and want to control the world. They have just about accomplished that already! We need to stop the bleeding, but our politicians and so-called religious leaders keep us brain-washed to believe that Jews are God’s Chosen People. That is in my opinion a bunch of hogwash, lest we also believe that God is prejudice? Does he/she/it wear a KKK outfit?? We need to stop the Predators! Chuck
And that’s why I shared his email, folks. I’ll write about the other awful commenters another time.
Jul
31
Desperate times
July 31, 2008 | | 7 Comments
News spread like wildfire today.
It hit the wire services only minutes after we found out.
Some nightside folks found out from friends at other papers before they even had a chance to come to work.
My company announced that it needs 200 full time, non-union employees to agree to a buyout and for our unions to agree to certain concessions by 1 October of this year, or the newspaper will be sold.
Needless to say, spirits are down.
Jul
13
RIP, Carly Car.
July 13, 2008 | | 7 Comments
This morning, I donated my car to charity. I’d been thinking of doing it for months. The 15-year-old Mazda was becoming a bitch to maintain, and I resented every dollar I had to pay my mechanic to not fix it.
I decided to give a half-ass try at selling it — just to see if I could. In all honesty, I was ambivalent about handing it off to some poor sucker who didn’t anything about cars, and to that end, I discouraged two potential buyers from taking it off my hands. A third buyer would have been dumb enough to take it, but she was friends with a rude little thug/mechanic who wisely advised her to leave it alone.
So, less than a week into the two weeks I gave Carly to sell herself were up, I put in a call to one of the many donate-your-car type charities I’ve been hearing about on the radio for the past year or so. The people on the other end were cold and they made the transaction rather complicated. "Fill out our on-line form. We assess your donation and get back to you in a couple of weeks about whether we’ll take it. If we do, we’ll arrange pick a few weeks after that."
A second charity was slightly more accommodating.
I decided not to go with either one of those. I really wanted to donated to a particular group, in any case. I don’t know why I chose them — possibly they were the first I’d ever heard of. But it didn’t seem as if it was going to matter why I wanted to give to them because a week went by without me hearing their radio ad.
In that funny way that usually only happens in books or movies, I’d actually picked up my phone to call on of the first two charities when a familiar sound drifted out of the radio. I recognized the of the L’chaim commercial’s announcer encouraging all to get rid of their unwanted vehicles in the name of a good cause.
I was so excited, I nearly dropped the phone.
I held my breath as waited for her to give the number to call.
And then I dialed before the commercial was over.
The woman at the other end of the phone line sounded like she knew her business, while still managing to come off as warm and friendly. She answered all of my questions and came up with suggestions for me to prepare for the hand-off.
Her next words had me dancing the happy dance: "Can we pick it up tomorrow morning?"
(They couldn’t because I was going to be at work before their driver could make it, but still!)
That was Monday. Tomorrow, July 14, was my long-time deadline for getting rid of the car.
I thought I might be a little sad about it all. We Americans, after all, tend to get attached to our cars. If nothing else, I thought I’d be disappointed about not getting anything for all the cash I had poured into Carly.
In real life, I stayed outside watching, long after the charity rep told me I was free to go. I watched until he loaded Carly up onto a flatbed tow-truck and didn’t go back to my apartment until he was long out of site.
The whole time I was thinking, She’s your baby now! Better not come to me when she’s giving you a hard time.
Jun
24
Big mouth rides again!
June 24, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
Some people never learn. It’s an unfortunately fact of life. And while life can be difficult enough when you’re the one making the same mistake over and over again, it’s a little bit different when the culprit is a colleague. Their actions might affect you, but you’ve got no control over them. And if you are not particularly close to the colleague, you might also have little or no influence on them, either.
Such is my situation with Mr. Worst-Case-Scenario. Some of you may remember that he and his wife were trying to adopt a child, but had run into some difficulties. When it looked as if the child they’d thought they were adopting wasn’t going to become their little darling after all, Mr. W-C-S mentioned to another of our colleagues that there was a possibility — worst case scenario — of him and his wife adopting a Black child.
Though he looked chagrined when he noticed that he and his companion had infiltrated my snug (it was winter and we were outside) and that I’d probably heard the comment, I was pissed as hell for a long time after. He, however, has been extra-friendly to in the two and half years since the incident.
Funny that today was the first time he offended me anew in that time.
Today, from across the newsroom, I heard him bellow, "Well, look at the Aborigines! There’s a reason they’re dark!" He was speaking with a reported here, who is an avid surfer. They could have been talking about anything from Australia in general, to sun protection specifics.
Coming from nearly anyone else, this exclamation would have been curious, but not necessarily potentially derogatory. I probably would assumed he was talking about sun and skin cancer, and then not have thought about it anymore.
But because it was his voice, my hackles rose and I listened as he went further into the conversation.
I don’t remember much of what he said because inside my head, I was chanting, "Suntans! Sunscreen! Zinc oxide! Come on, say something to explain yourself so I don’t start hating you all over again."
Finally, I noticed that he seemed to have veered off topic, he was talking about a National Geographic spread featuring Tour Du France cyclists.
"I mean, the rest of them were like me — pale white [Note-from-Tara: This man is rather swarthy, actually.], but their legs were pitch-black. I mean PITCH black with their feet and thighs white."
Finally, I thought to myself, suntans.
But some niggling inner-voice still wanted to kick him in the shins: We Black folk come in all shades of dark, but even the darkest of us can’t be compared to pitch. And, it crossed my mind to wonder, would I have found his words more tolerable if he’d compared his and the cyclists’ skin to bird shit, or if someone else altogether had told the story?
Why couldn’t this colleague have just kept his mouth shut? I was beginning to see him as a probably a nice, if ignorant and nearly oblivious, guy.
Coming, as it did, the day after Don Imus stuck his foot in his mouth again, I couldn’t help but wonder at his timing.
Jun
16
Reminiscence
June 16, 2008 | | 3 Comments
Life is funny. I just reread an old post, "He’s getting married" and the responses it elicited. I found myself chuckling a bit at what I, and everyone else, had to say.
I don’t know why, but nowhere in that post did I mention that the "love of my life", or whatever I called him there, was the Elf Prince. I guess I figured that any regular readers of my blog would be able to figure it out on his or her own. But that’s not what had me laughing.
I still remember how I felt that day. Yes, I was supremely happy for him. He’d had a rough deal before he and I got together, and he that our relationship had hurt me and our friendship. He’d felt terrible about that.
That day, he approached me at the copy machine — I’m pretty sure it was almost first thing in the morning. I stood there listening to him, a happy smile plastered on my face. I even teased him a little as he struggled to talk to me about it.
The whole time, my mind was racing. Why the hell is he telling me this? I wondered. I mean, why is he approaching me specially to tell me when we haven’t exactly been close friends over the past year. I mean, why Why WHY does he think it’s NECESSARY to tell me personally? Does he think I’m still in love with him?
I was, of course, still in love with him. I think I probably always will, after some fashion, love him. But, consider two things: I didn’t want him to know how I felt. And I genuinely didn’t have any hopes for the two of us to ever get back together. His decision to take me aside and tell me pretty much dashed any hope I had that he thought I was over him.
So, I stood there, grinning like an idiot and congratulated him. And when he started to explain, saying. "You know, sometimes things happen when you don’t expect them t–", I quickly cut him off with more teasing. "You mean she proposed to you?
Because, the only time during our on-and-off-and-on-and-off-and-off-and-on-and-off romance that I’d been the one to end things, I told him that I couldn’t stop loving him and he couldn’t start loving me. And he told me that it wasn’t about me — he’d spent his entire adult life in one long-term relationship after another; he didn’t want that again, he told me.
"No," I told him. "You don’t want that with me."
I was right, I knew, because if there was ever a man made to be married, to be committed to one woman forever, it was him. He just hadn’t found the right woman yet.
It wasn’t long after that conversation that we met the woman who is now his wife, and my first thought was She’s the one!.
My friends told me I was being silly. One even suggested that the woman might be engaged to someone else, but I was certain. Even though the Elf and I were back together by then.
So, all of these thoughts were crashing through my head as he told me he was getting married. That, and trying to figure out a diplomatic way to ask him if I’d guessed right about his love (she’d moved halfway across the country not long after we first met her).
In the end, I just started talking vaguely as if I knew exactly who he was marrying, ended the conversation as quickly as I could, and went back to my desk feeling a bit numb.
I was cheered, strange as it may sound, to learn that I was right about her identity. (I had to get confirmation from one of my other friends.) And that I could tell my nay-saying friends "I told you so."
But I didn’t write any of that the morning he told me. He was one of my blog readers and I’d decided he should never, ever, know just how much I loved him. I was happy for him (I didn’t fall into a mess of tears until two days later, and in the privacy of my own home.), and he didn’t need to know that the love I’d written about was still very much in evidence. No wonder so many of my readers called me "strong".
Jun
15
Eras have to end sometime
June 15, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
Yesterday, we had a final good-bye in the park. Aunt Jan will drive Nanny to her home in North Carolina sometime next week.
A lot of faces from days gone by were there. Many more were not. Still, considering Gina-sister didn’t really tell many people, just let the news spread via word-of-mouth, I was shocked by the number of folks who turned up.
More amazing still, were the family of tourists who stopped by the pavilion to honor my grandmother. They’d heard just a tiny bit of her story, and what she’d done for the town, and they wanted to shake her hand.
The day was beautiful. Full of tears and laughter and hugs and dancing.
And soon, there will be (almost) none of us left.
I wonder if the town will notice?
Jun
6
Finally!
June 6, 2008 | | 2 Comments
It only took over a week’s worth of emails, but my blog was once again accessible through my Friendster profile. After several back and forth emails, finally, someone at Friendster support grasped my problem. While all her predecesors sent me to the blog support folks — even after I’d stressed that the problem wasn’t with my blog — Andrea actually adressed the real situation.
Hello ,
Thank you for contacting Friendster Customer Support.
We apologize for this inconvenience and will submit your case to our engineering department. Unfortunately, we do not have an estimated time frame for a fix. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Regards,
Andrea
Customer Support
May
27
I can’t believe I’m paying for this!!!!!
May 27, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
Why can’t anyone see anything I’ve posted since Flatterer? Grrr!
May
1
I don’t even know how to describe this creepy dream
May 1, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
I had the strangest semi-erotic dream last night.
In the beginning, I was at a party in some gorgeous apartment that I’ve never seen in the real world, but wouldn’t mind living in myself if it actually existed. I was surrounded by dream-friends and having a great time, but in reality, I didn’t recognize a single person I was hanging with. At some point, though, I found myself talking to a short, tubby man, who balding on top, but extremely hirsute everywhere else. He was a complete stranger to dream-Tara.
And she was captivated.
I mean, I’m pretty sure my physical self, as well as my Dreamland counterpart, was wiping the drool off my chin as I slept. That’s how strong the attraction was.
This was one of those dreams where everything feels extremely real. The kind where the lines seperating reality and the imaginary are almost non-existant. Dream-Tara desired that man like no else she’d ever lusted after, and half of the real me wanted him, too.
But a small part of me remained aloof. A tiny bit of real-Tara chanted from some invisible corner, that it was all just a dream. Unfortunately, her voice faded more and more as desire, warm and golden, sweet as honey replaced the blood in dream-me’s veins.
As often happens in dreams, time whipped around without any reasonable transition. One moment, I was flashing back to an earlier moment at the party, seeing out of The Guy’s eyes. He’d seen me across a crowded room (thank you, South Pacific), and instantly knew he had to meet me. He’d grabbed one of he dream-friends on the shoulder and pointed. The friend understood instanty.
Then, just as suddenly, we were in my apartment (it looked just like my real apartment), in my bedroom, tearing off each other’s clothes amid fevered kisses and caresses.
My breath came in desperate gasps. His flesh (and the hair covering most of it) was damped with sweat.
We fell back onto my bed, and real-Tara issued a last ditch effort to wake me up. Eww! she thought, grimacing at the idea of his sweaty, hairy body touching our gorgeous sheets. But in the same instant, the pelt-like body hair thinned tremendously, and his sweat began to evaporate in the light breeze wafting in through the open window. Real-me blacked out, and I was completely dream-Tara, lost in the heady touch of his hands and lips covering my body.
So wrapped up were we, in learning the other’s body with kisses and touches, we were still half clothed when he flipped over so that I was lying under him. Lying atop him, horizontal to the floor, his diminutive stature didn’t matter and his pudgy body simply offered more for me to explore.
His skin was now pink and cool, as nearly all of the body hair had dissappeared. I rolled off of him to help him out of his pants. Slowly, reverantly, stroking his round belly as he lifted his hips to ease the black trousers over his ample bum.
He hadn’t been wearing underpants, and to real-Tara’s faint but readily apparent distress, the magical depliation had spread beyond his arms, chest and back. Again, though, the me of the real world was banished in the heat of lips meeting lips.
He somehow managed to remove the rest of my clothing — I think I’d been wearing a black halter dress and sheer black stockings with black satin garters — without ending his latest kiss.
Completely naked to his eyes for the first time, I basked in their glow when he pushed up with strong arms, and held me just above him.
I ran a finger slowly down his cheek, a slow smile creeping across my face. I couldn’t stop it from growing to a full-out grin. Leaning down for another kiss, I stopped just short of his lips.
"What’s your name?" I whispered.
And then my dog burst through the bedroom door and leapt onto the bed. She licked my neck and the back of my head until I dragged myself away from my strange almost-lover.
The Guy sat up, grinning, while I wrestled my dog off the bed, and then sat on the floor, the cold seeping into my bum, and soothed her.
"Didn’t you recognize my voice?" he asked, suddenly sounding like one of the announcers from my morning radio. "I’m (Bleep) (Bleep)." He was from the radio show that wakes me up every morning. "I thought you knew. I thought that’s why you brought me home."
By this time, my dog was settled, accepting the stranger in my bed was no threat to me. (Bleep) (Bleep) opened his arms and beckoned, inviting my dog to join us "as long as she stays at the foot of the bed, though!" Which wouldn’t interfere with the activities of a man as tiny as him.
I climbed back into the bed, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was in bed with a short, fat, stranger who was losing his hair. He was the opposite, in every way, of the American idea of beauty. In spite of all that, I still wanted him. But he was a stranger, and the idea of what I had done disgusted me, and I couldn’t bear to sully him with my filthy hands.
He was really polite about leaving. By then, the sun was just beginning to come up, and my bedroom window faces East. Usually, sunrise is one of my favorite times of the day, but this morning I was wrapped in sadness. He’d taken the morning off work to be with me, and I was sending him home. I felt worse than ever.
When he was gone, I trudged to my bathroom and turned on the shower. I called to my dog, who had slipped away during my miserable musings. I wanted to thank her for bringing me back to my senses.
She didn’t answer.
I ran around the apartment, searching everywhere for her. Checking some rooms — the living room, my office — two and three times.
She wasn’t there.
I flew out of my apartment, not even stopping to throw on a robe to cover my nakeness.
I must have been screaming, because, soon, my neighbors were pouring out of their apartments, and peeking over the stair rail to see what was the matter.
"I can’t find… ," I cried, even more upset by the fact that I couldn’t remember my dog’s name. " I can’t find… " I tried again, this time much more quietly.
I sank down on the stairs. "She’s gone," I whispered, dropping my head into my hands.
A neighbor came and covered me with a blanket, sliding an arm around my shoulder and squeezing me as she sat beside me.
I looked over at her.
"Champ? Champ? Champ! Champ is gone! She’s gone!" I would have crumpled into my neighbors arms at that, but just then, a short, sharp bark rang out, and a clattering of nails against tile sounded on the adjacent staircase. Seconds later, Champ appeared in the lobby, at the bottom of my own stairs.
Through my joy and relief, it occured to me that I don’t even have a dog, let alone a bitch named Champ.
And then I woke up.