Posts

Showing posts from 2017

Eve Decorates Christmas Cookies: Second Annual Edition

Image
Well it was more of an addendum to my last post of last year, but I still found it enjoyable. She started out pretty traditional. She was frustrated trying to find her technique with the icing again. She didn't feel like this was an adequate representation of her abilities. A little more uniform here.  "Wow, I mean, I really am quite incredibly talented. I'm surprised I didn't see it before. I should try something hard." "Like a horse. I'm going to do a horse". "Oh my God, I amaze myself. I am amazing. What do you mean a horse isn't Christmassy? It's a talent thing. You just don't get it." "It needs a hair tie." (At this point, she giggled so much Matt asked if she was drunk.) "Well obviously this is heartbreakingly beautiful. How could anyone bring themselves to eat it?" (Angus says he'll eat it, Eve is offended). (She searched through the sprinkles, found an orange

O Little Town of Rush and Mayhem

Image
I think a lot, at this time of year, not just about everything that has to get done, but the whole issue of expectations, and where they come from, and what to do with them (as opposed to what I sometimes feel like telling people what to do with their expectations, which is another matter entirely). It's such an odd thing, this season of alleged comfort and joy, merry brightness, decked halls and midnights clear, that counter-intuitively often causes huge stress and strain and great antipathy toward one's fellow human. Last year Matt was away for work the second week of December. It was terrible - I felt like it put us so behind in Christmas prep that we never caught up. I didn't send out Christmas cards at all for the first time in years. This year there was no travel on the horizon but I didn't really trust it to stay that way, so we started decorating early, as opposed to my usual "oh, we'll start December first, oh wait, was today December first? We'

Girl Gang

Image
So, the Gingerbread Yahoos? I got them gingerbread pajamas. 

Extreme Home Makeover, Gingerbread Style

Image
So on the week-end, these four yahoos decide to go buy gingerbread houses and decorate them. They bought two kits, and the original idea was for everybody to work on both, but when they got them back home Eve said she suddenly realized she didn't want Marianna or Alison anywhere near her gingerbread house. This is because Eve and Davis (partners in cooking class) are neat, deliberate, detail-oriented people in nearly every respect, while Marianna and Alison are, let's say, a little more into freestyling. So Matt and I picked up the three girls that had to be driven home, after some drinks around a Christmas tree with friends, so all of this was doubly hilarious. Alison: "You know what, I'm not even embarrassed about our house, because your house is, like, the kind of house that nobody ever buys because it's too intimidating, because it has, like, nine bathrooms and you can't just relax in it." Davis: "The houses are literally the exact same s

Still Working on the Geography Thing

Eve, a few days ago, storming into the room: "My next cooking project is so weird! It's called 'pasta est ceci'. What the hell is that? 'Pasta is here?' It's not even pasta! It's chickpeas!" Me, Googling: "It's not 'pasta est ceci', you dork. It's 'pasta e ceci'. Italian, not French. Pasta with chickpeas." Eve, the next day. "Okay, you're right. It's tiny pasta. With chickpeas." Eve, yesterday: "Where is Rome?" Me: "Italy." Eve: "Huh. So they speak... Italian?" Me: "Yep." Eve: "And that's... different from Spanish, right?" Me: "Um, yeah." Eve: *sighs* "Okay." Eve, today: "I apologized to my cooking partner, the Spanish exchange student, for trying to make her read Italian."

Thirty Days Has September

Image
I still have to use that rhyme to remember which months have 30 or 31 days (shut up February, ya freak). Well, here we are. Today was generally very good. I had an appointment to meet my new doctor, because my old doctor retired and I loved her but she was all the way downtown and it could take an hour to get to her office (where the parking lot was expensive and often full) and, especially in the winter, I would get massive anxiety about just getting to the appointment, never mind whatever it was about. Today was an easy thirteen-minute drive, to a small town nearby that I always mean to spend more time in anyway. The office is in a large mini-mall with a giant free parking lot. I was so giddy with happiness I started to feel afraid that I was going to get in an accident in the parking lot just because things couldn't possibly be going this well. Then I met the doctor (at only nine minutes after the time my appointment was scheduled for) and she was unbelievably awesome, and

Day 29

Image
Not gonna lie, everything kind of feels like this right now. I was talking with a friend the other day about how I think I have to reassess my anti-depressant. I kind of feel like my emotions are blunted, like I'm feeling things, or know I should be feeling things, but not the way I think I would if they were unmediated. In the case of depressive feelings, this is a good thing, but it's less good if all the feelings are being indiscriminately shielded (I like to think that some rebel feelings are mounting an operation to get through a thermal exhaust port, but you can't really count on that kind of thing). It's a hard thing to recognize when you're stuck in it, but a friend's husband died a couple of weeks ago and I suddenly realized that I was sad, but not as sad as I should be. And yeah, the tragedy isn't about me, but the reaction is. I have absolutely no doubts about taking medication that helps me to function, if it makes me more like myself a

Doppelgangers in Row Six

I didn't get groceries yesterday - my usual day - because I wasn't feeling great. I still wasn't feeling great today but the cupboards were getting bare (yeah, that's not remotely accurate, the cupboards are overflowing with coconut milk and canned soup and about-to-expire tomato sauce, but my over-indulged brood were insisting on things like fresh produce and non-moldy bread ). I felt like I looked okay. I kind of like my grocery-shopping uniform - gray leggings, blue stripey shirt with cool handkerchief hem, work socks and boots. But my hair is in desperate need of a cut and colour - I was using this root spray that seemed okay for a while, but now it just makes me feel like one of those guys in those "spray paint the bald away" infomercials, and it just seems too sad. So I didn't feel like I'd make children cry or anything, but I was kind of hoping I wouldn't run into anyone I knew. So I got there and immediately ran into someone I knew. We d

Day 27

Eve came home from school and asked if we could go on a field trip to Indigo because yet another book in the School For Good and Evil had come out and she had a million gift cards - she offered to buy me a book for taking her, as if getting me to go to a bookstore needs additional inducement. We got there and I only mocked her a little when we found the book shelved in Fiction 9-12. I think it makes a pleasing contrast that she's going to be reading this alternating with It . Then we got hot chocolate and drove around to drop off some boxes I had for Facebook group members who are collecting stuff for the homeless or for their kids' school's Christmas bazaar, which was good because my usual M.O. is to collect a bunch of stuff, leave it sitting in boxes on my dining room table until the deadline for dropping it off has passed, chuck it all at Value Village and feel like a giant failure. On the way home, we were talking about cooking class and scary Italian Youtube cook

Glad I Put All That Forgetfulness Business Behind Me

Matt: "What are you making?" Me: "Trifle." Matt: "What for?" Me: "Remember? We usually go overnight to Collette's father's cottage, and go shopping and have lunch in Westport and then make dinner and play drunken Cranium at the cottage? But this year Collette can't come because they're going to the Grey Cup, and she wanted us to go to the cottage without her, but that seemed weird to us so we're just going for the day and then doing potluck at Janet's? And I'm doing dessert?" Matt: "Cool. Why two kinds?" Me: "I'm making the lemon raspberry because Collette doesn't really like chocolate." Matt: "...." Me: "Yep, I heard it."

'Nuff Said

Image

Wordless Wednesday: Goals

Image

Television Pet Peeves

I really like NCIS New Orleans. I love Scott Bakula, I love C.C.H. Pounder, I love Lucas Black (creepy child actor grows up and becomes surprisingly hot and speaks with a delicious New Orleans southern drawl) and Daryl Mitchell. The setting is really fun. I watch the original NCIS but for some reason I've never gotten into the Los Angeles one. They're all among the few shows that actually stay on On Demand in their entirety (rather than the earlier episodes disappearing, which I find infuriating), so I usually catch up on a half-dozen episodes all at once when I'm spending the day cooking or cleaning. So here's the thing about NCIS NO though: Bakula plays Dwayne Pride, the Agent in Charge of the New Orleans office. He is, predictably, a real stand-up guy, a little intense - okay, a lot intense, to the point of self-destructiveness. It's a well-known type (in sad fact, it's making me like the show a little less just thinking about this more closely). I'm g

City Champs

Image
So last Tuesday evening was the city volleyball final for Angus's school team. He told us not to go last year and then told us we should have come because it was really exciting. So naturally I decided we would go this year if they made it that far. And naturally Matt was in Japan when it happened. It was November, and cold, and dark, and I wanted to leave the house about as much as I wanted to french kiss a cactus, but I love my son and I am always trying to be less weird, so off I went. It went well. My contacts were untroublesome, so I could read all the signs well. The route was extremely circuitous and downtown, which I don't like, but the traffic was fine and I got there easily. I found the gym with some difficulty (it was on the third floor, which seems weird, doesn't it?) It hadn't occurred to me that there would be an admission fee, and it was three dollars and I only had a fifty - cue feeling like an absolute tool. They were nice about it, and I don't

Shrew-Taming and Trivia

So as a direct result of seeing the play on Thursday night, Eve and I watched 10 Things I Hate About You and I now have half a dozen versions of Cruel to Be Kind on my ipod. I am now, predictably, sad again about Heath Ledger. But I'd forgotten that the hilariously irate English teacher was played by Daryl "Chill" Mitchell . I really liked him in Ed  (one of my very favourite tv shows ever), where he plays a bowling alley manager who's in a wheelchair. At some point - I don't even remember if it was before or after a really moving episode they did about his life in the chair - I found out that he had actually been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident in 2000. He's still acting (in NCIS New Orleans) and clearly thriving, but it was weird to see him standing in the movie. In the play it was a short little black kid that Eve likes - they had to give him a box to stand on behind the teaching lectern. He did a great job. World Trivia Night was fun and edifying and

Day 17

World Trivia Night is over, Eve made a legendary club sandwich in cooking class today and we might get thirty centimetres of snow this weekend. However, that would mean it would happen just after my husband gets home from Japan, rather than just after he leaves, which is how it usually goes. Grateful for that. Good night. 

Day 16

I went to see the play at Eve's school because her friends are in it. I went alone because she was supposed to have basketball practice tonight, but when they got there the gym was full of stupid ball hockey so they didn't, which is annoying because she was planning to go tomorrow night, and I can't go tomorrow night because of World Trivia Night (right Lynn?) So this is my week for going places alone at night and feeling like a big loser. Anyway. The play was pretty good and now I have to watch 10 Things I Hate About You tomorrow and feel sad about Heath Ledger. Also, I got home and Eve told me that the girl who played Kat broke up with the guy who played Joey halfway through the play and then she could have a real kiss with the guy who played Patrick instead of one where she stuck her thumbs in between their lips. So. There's your real drama.

Non-Wordless Wednesday Because I Feel Like Talking After All

Going to take the tip from Nicole , post twice today and say it makes up for the day I missed. So the other day on a Facebook group I follow - it's called something like Fat Loss Without Deprivation, but so far I'm just using it to deprogram from my fucked-up relationship with food - someone said something like "it's still really hard to think of eating as fueling myself for my activities rather than thinking of exercising as punishing myself for eating". I didn't gasp in recognition or anything, just nodded in recognition. Then today I took Lucy for a walk because our cleaning lady was here and it makes Lucy lose her mind and it's really embarrassing, and I'd planned to get out for a walk anyway. I headed out on our usual route. About fifteen minutes in, I realized I wasn't really enjoying myself. I felt like I was just wishing for the walk to be over soon. This seemed a little weird. It was quite nice out - brighter after the unrelenting gr

Wordless Wednesday: Found While Cleaning Out Angus's Hat and Glove Drawer, and Appropriate for November

Image

I Do Realize That This is Inexcusable

So, after a Facebook discussion this afternoon wherein I admitted that my children were probably exposed to Cards Against Humanity younger than was strictly   speaking appropriate (my nephew was the youngest one there, my sister is a worse parent than me, HA), and confessed that I could stand to be a little more circumspect as a parent, Eve came home after school and grabbed a leftover fortune cookie. She ate it, then read out her fortune: "You have a keen mind and an active imagination". Naturally I couldn't stop myself from snickering in an extremely immature manner, and she pestered me until I told her about adding "in bed" to your fortune. She said "Oh. OH. Ew. Well, I'm glad you didn't tell me that before my last fortune. It said 'be spontaneous'."

Shoot the Whole Month Down

This post came up in my Facebook memories today. It's slightly more comforting than depressing to be reminded that this is just what November is for me - less embracing than enduring. This is also about the time when I give up all pretense to witty and entertaining blog posts and start using this space as therapy, so let me just take a moment to thank you all. To everyone who shared weird and embarrassing incidents of missed appointments due to completely inexplicable time changes - thank-you. To Anonymous who encouraged me to start decluttering - thank-you (especially because seeing the tag Anonymous always makes me think I'm about to be offered penis enlargement or something). And to Hannah and Nicole , who have talked me down from one crisis or another repeatedly over the past week (because it turns out this is also, weirdly, becoming the part of November where my husband goes to Japan for two weeks and gets home on World Trivia Night) - all the thank-yous ever. I was wa

Yep. It Happened.

Yesterday was the first time in .... (counts on fingers).... about nine years that I missed a day in NaBloPoMo. Not for any really good reason. I slept in, did a few miles on the treadmill, did some reading, went out for a nice dinner for a friend's birthday. Didn't drink too much, got home before midnight. Got ready for bed and realized I hadn't posted. Went through the dumbest mental debate imaginable: Should I go down and post something? Just to say I posted? Even though I don't have anything to say really and it would literally be a couple of meaningless sentences? But posting every day is literally the point. But it's really an arbitrary thing, nothing really important rests on it. So this might bother me for the rest of the month. This might mean NaBloPoMo is over for me. I don't know. I guess we'll see. I desperately need to get a bunch of stuff out of the house. I feel buried under crap. There is disorder in almost every single direction I look

It's Weird, Because Reading is Supposed to Be My Thing

So. I don't know. Given that I always felt like I read all of the instructions for my online courses really well, multiple times, and still ended up at an open-book exam without the book, I'm kind of worried that my reading comprehension has drastically deteriorated in the past few years. Last night ramped up that anxiety by a factor of HOLY FUCK. I had an interview at six o'clock. In November. I was insanely, irrationally, stupidly nervous about the interview - not the interview itself, if that makes any sense, just the whole process. Because of this, I wasn't really concentrating on the getting-there part of it, and it didn't occur to me until far too late that six o'clock in November in Ontario would be dark. It was also rainy, as it happened, which didn't help. I should have done a dry run. The interview was at Greenbank Middle School. I knew that because I read over the email several times, SEVERAL TIMES, and asked my husband where Greenbank M

Ceci n'est pas un blog post

I had a job interview today. I was weirdly panicky about the whole process, which was a little weird, and I don't want to say anything else about it for now, and I don't know how things will turn out, I'm just limp and noodly with relief that it's over. Eve is still at basketball practice and the temperature is plummeting and my head hurts and I don't have the energy to say anything witty or intelligent right now. The story of getting TO my interview is going to have you marveling (huh. Only one L in marveling? Okay then) at the extent of my ability to screw up simple tasks when I tell you about it tomorrow, though. Promise.

Wordless Wednesday: Law of Conservation of Ruffles

Image

Where in the World is... Basically Anything

I've always been bad at geography. I don't remember directions well, I don't know which way is North at any given moment, I get lost easily. I had a terrible time with map tests. The car GPS system changed my whole life - I wouldn't have gone half the places I have without it, or not without a lot more anxiety barfing and palpitations. It kind of just became a thing, though, where I would say "I'm terrible at geography" and leave it at that. As if it was an irremediable condition. As if there was NOTHING AT ALL that could be done about it. My friend Collette has really good directional sense. If she drives somewhere once, she knows where it is forever. And she knows where stuff is in the world too. "I learned it from television", she said once, and when I looked at her with blank incomprehension she said "You know, like, I learned where Korea was from MASH". I watched MASH faithfully. I had no freakin' clue where Korea was. It'

Cats and Cattiness

For Joe (HI JOE) and Nicole (HI NICOLE), the Schrodinger's cat joke: Schrodinger is driving along and gets stopped by a cop. The cop finds his behaviour suspicious and searches his car, including the trunk. When he opens the trunk, he says "oh my god, there's a cat in here and it's dead!" and Schrodinger says "Well NOW it is!" Today: slept too late, made myself go to the gym. Came downstairs from the gym, went to grab a grocery cart. As I was pulling it back, someone walked into me. I half-turned around, about to say sorry, and saw this older woman, obviously rolling her eyes and pissed off. Because she had walked into me, while I was pulling out a shopping cart, which is what people do with shopping carts. And she wasn't leaving or going somewhere else, which might have meant her attention wasn't on the shopping carts, because she then pulled out her own shopping cart. So I looked back and saw her being a bitch because she had walked into m

Sub-Blogging

A former friend just tweeted that she has serious reservations about the mental health of people who can't cope with Daylight Saving Time. I can't say I'm terribly surprised - when someone routinely says mean things the shock value wears off after a while. It just made me stop and think for a moment. I do, in fact, have mental health issues, and I do find that Daylight Saving Time makes them worse for a little while. I feel off-kilter, more anxious, never sure I'm in the right place at the right time, and tired. Which doesn't seem that weird, really. We literally CHANGE THE CLOCKS. By some weird decree from on-high, we take this huge fiction that our lives are quite literally built on, and agree by another enormous fiction that it's different now. For about six months, when we'll all (except our wise, wise sister Saskatchewan) change it back. How can this not have some effect on many people? So, yeah. Sometimes something is true and saying it still makes

Ripping Off My Witty Daughter for a Blog Post. So Not Cool.

My Facebook memory today was about Eve learning a Schrodinger's Cat joke from Bones and rehearsing it every day to tell to Matt when he got home from Japan (he's in Florida right now. He comes home Monday. Tuesday he leaves for Singapore. Things have changed so much. NOT). I read it out to Eve and she said "oh yeah, and the other day we were talking about that thing where if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? I'm pretty sure if I ever take a philosophy class I'll never sleep again." We also finally got her in to a chiropodist to order orthotics. She's had foot pain her whole life just like me, but we're lazy and procrastinate-ish and we kind of wanted her feet to stop growing to we wouldn't have to replace the orthotics every few months (lazy and procrastinate-ish and cheap, in plain talk). The foot guy said she had extremely tight Achilles tendons. She said "wait - are you telling me

In Which Angus and I Keep Yelling "Choose Me!" to Various Bodies and Organizations

I'm still looking for a job, I'm just not being as much of a loud-mouthed schnook about it (see? I CAN SO learn stuff!). When I have spare time I go on job sites and noodle around looking at what's available in my area. Apparently if you want a job trying to sell cars it's really, really easy to get one. Unfortunately, I suck hard at selling anything. Back in high school I took singing lessons from a lovely older lady named Betty. For a while, my friend Rachelle took them too and we had consecutive lesson times. Betty said Rachelle was better at selling herself, and if we had to sell a pencil, Rachelle would have people in a bidding war over it while I would be standing there quietly saying "it's a ... pretty good pencil. It can make a decent mark." There were a couple of openings for fork lift operator too. Now that I would like to take a crack at. As far as library openings, right now, "Hey!", I yelled to Matt, "I could drive the bookmo

Dead Like Me

Hannah reminded me yesterday that BlogHer doesn't even EXIST anymore, and BlogHer was the reason NaBloPoMo existed, so now I feel kind of dumb. I mean, I never really did it as part of the big BlogHer thing anyway, I only added my name to the massive blogroll a couple of times and every time I found someone I liked via the massive blogroll they seemed to stop blogging three days later (presumably not just because I started following them, although, shit, now I'm worried that maybe it was just because I started following them ). There were prizes, but you couldn't win them if you were in Canada. So it was just something I did, because after Halloween there was just this bleak Novemberish stretch of cold and rain and ennui until I started panicking about Christmas, and it seemed like a good distraction. But also, BlogHer being gone is just another sign that blogging is dead, right? And yet, here I am, rambling and shambling on like I don't even know it. OMG, I HAVE A ZO

MoPoBloNa Backwards

Image
It's really unfortunate that NaBloPoMo isn't starting on a Surly Thursday because HOLY FUCK today is chapping my ass. It was stupid hot all of October, and I wished for cooler temperatures - apparently we only get those with apocalyptic amounts of rain and a wind that is basically a douchebag in weather form. Also, I cooked rice and it tastes like ass, and I don't even know if it's the rice or me, but at the moment I don't trust either of us. Last year the volleyball team, including Angus, went to the final and he told us not to come but then said we probably should have because they bussed fans in and it was a really cool atmosphere and they won. So this year we figured we'd go, but (of course) Matt's going to be in Asia. And it's in the evening, at some far-away high school, and if I go I'll be alone, which I hate. BUT I did have a lovely visit with a woman I used to volunteer at my kids' elementary school with and I think I'm going to

Close Enough for Government Work?

So Matt was running around printing out passport forms and gathering needed information and signatures yesterday to get passport renewals for himself and the kids - I'm on a different cycle, and I said I was happy to take the kids' forms in but he's taking Angus to Florida next week-end for a baseball showcase so he said he might as well just do them all. We thought we had everything squared away, and he left this morning to go to the passport office. As I was getting ready to leave for the gym, he swept back into the house on an immense wave of irritation, having gotten to the part where the preliminary person scans your documents and been informed that Angus is now an adult and needed the longer form filled out. Which is annoying, particularly since neither of us had noticed that that fact is mentioned in writing right at the top of all the passport forms, and reading is kind of supposed to be my thing - it's nice that Matt didn't mention that, now that I think

My Main Man Michael Marshall Smith

So I was all droopy and restless about what to read before Thanksgiving. I decided to reread something good, and went on the library website to see what I could get instantly as an ebook, so I started searching the names of my favourite authors. So kind of funny thing about this author. I read this really cool science fiction book ages ago - it was called Only Forward and it was by Michael Marshall Smith, who I'd never heard of before. It was sort of part Blade Runner, part noir detective story and I really liked it. He only had a couple of other science fiction books, and I'm not sure if I even read them, although I meant to. Years went by. I had a kid. That kid broke his leg while I was pregnant with a second kid. It was a stressful time. My parents came to help out and sent me out for a night of coffee shop and book store therapy. I came across this paperback mystery. Do you ever pick up a book, read the title and synopsis and just feel like it's going to be really

Scary Stories

Image
Every once in a while there's a glitch in the Ottawa Public Library's ebook system, and a book that should be expired and inaccessible on my ipad just... isn't. It just sticks around until I tap on it to delete and return. It's a happy little gift from the literary gods for which I am always grateful. This time it is a massive tome called New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird , and if it hadn't gone all Overdrive Slipstream I never would have gotten through it on time since it weighs in at around 1100 digital pages. As a fairly devoted horror fan, I'm not great at appreciating actual Lovecraft. Look, I relish tentacle porn and the unjudicious use of the word 'eldritch' as much as the next girl, but it's a little too on-the-nose for me - I just like my horror a tad more subtle. So it's probably not even technically allowed that I love Lovecraft-inspired horror fiction as much as I do. But I do, and most of the stories in this sprawling, wide-ranging

Visiting

Image
Last week-end Eve and I and my parents drove down to London to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her family (the boys stayed home because Angus was writing SATs Saturday here in town). This week-end I drove down to Waterloo with some friends to go to an Oktoberfest event with friends that had moved there in the summer (Matt went to Watertown with Angus for baseball - Eve had music camp at school and found it inexpressibly amusing that Matt and I were both going to places that had Water in the name. She's weird). Both week-ends were great, except I'm getting worse and worse at staying at other people's houses. It's never been my favourite thing. I'm a weird guest. I use a lot of ice. I need a lot of showers. I hate getting up in the morning in a strange place. And I'm used to keeping my house a few degrees above a walk-in refrigerator's temperature and this fall has been unseasonably warm, so I was melting for close to the entire time. I don't know

There Were Two-Ton Kangaroos Before We Came on the Scene

It's been kind of a crappy week. I'll spare you the gory details, except to say that perimenopause is not for sissies and my already-dire iron levels are in danger of plunging even further. That coupled with the suffocating, enervating heat and humidity meant Monday and Tuesday were pretty much a write-off. Which was okay, I didn't miss anything important, Lucy and I spent some quality time in my reading chair in front of a fan with some pretty good books. The problem is always re-entry. I end up feeling like Rip Van Winkle, unsure about the customs and expressions in this world that's continued to rush by as I lay fallow. I dragged myself out to book club last night with ill grace, after apologizing to my husband for snapping more than once (I know it only seems like the worse I feel the dumber his questions get). It was good. We had read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which was splendid. He does an amazing job of making centuries of human history comprehensible and

In Which Defeat is Only the Tiniest Bit Agonizing

Image
I have a friend who posted her engagement on Facebook a few years ago, and then confided that she felt stupid for having done so when it fell through. I told her she shouldn't feel that way at all, because her real friends wouldn't feel anything but sympathy and she had nothing to be embarrassed about. But I confess that I felt slightly the same way about broadcasting my first job interview attempt in twenty or so years in serene confidence that it would go positively and then.... well.... True, I could have slunk away and licked my wounds in private then. But in all honesty, people, is that ever how I roll? Let's see: depression posts; period posts; condom posts.... NOPE. It's all very well to say that clearly I was overqualified and they were just afraid I wouldn't stay long. The bottom line is that I put myself out there and they said no thanks. And that stings a little. But it was still a good experience. Before I whipped that application together I was para