Last night we rented and watched Series 7, which is a spoof on the reality shows that have become so popular lately, such as Survivor, or Big Brother. The people who were portrayed were ‘real’ people, and the editing, the voice-overs, the music clips, the little interviews were all reminiscent of how these “reality” shows have been set up. The content, however, was slightly more extreme than anything the current reality shows have yet to portray. In The Contenders, the show covered in this film, six people are chosen at random (they don’t apply, and they also cannot refuse to participate, no matter what), and then the “game” is that they’re required to kill each other, until there is only one left alive. Each person is assigned a cameraman, who follows them throughout the days that follow, filming the participants as they kill, or are killed.

The premise of the show was disturbing enough, but what was perhaps more unnerving is how eerily true to life the film made it seem. Six people, chosen at random, yanked from their ordinary lives and told that they must either kill or be killed, simply to provide an over-the-top form of entertainment. And all the while, the producers subtly manipulated their victims to make it that much more exciting. It provided tidbits about each unwilling participant – the man dying of cancer; the woman who was pregnant and near-term; the 18-year old female student; the ultra-religious nurse. The edgy filming, the matter-of-fact killings, and the mingled scorn and fascination displayed by the family members and spectators for those who were “chosen” to participate only made it more compelling to watch. Each segment of the series ended with previews for the next, and the way the ‘game’ was presented was exactly like all the existing reality shows – raw, a bit disconnected, and in this case, unnerving in its twisted version of ‘true’ life. I found myself silently rooting for one of the participants, hoping she would win, even as I cringed back from the knowledge that in order for her to win, the others would have to die.

What disturbed me most about this film is that, while “reality” television has not yet reached these extremes, it has become more and more obvious that some producers will stop at nothing, all in the name of entertainment. Crude home videos of horrible accidents are displayed on prime time television, accompanied by dramatic music and the deep tones of an announcer who narrates the clips as if these were acted out by stunt men or women who could leave the scene alive as soon as the camera stops rolling, instead of real people wounded or killed in the scenes that unfold. People allow their lives to be manipulated and twisted on camera, or allow their every move to be filmed and then edited and pieced together to provide whatever perception of them the producers want to create, regardless of whether the result is true or not.

In the movie Natural Born Killers, two serial killers become the darlings of the media, which sensationalizes them and their crimes, glossing over the sheer brutality of the murders being committed. It is only when the camera men themselves are faced with the fact that they may also be killed by these two cold-blooded killers that it begins to sink in that perhaps this “reality” isn’t quite as entertaining as they have been portraying it all along. While using the same theme, Series 7 shows a different side to this desensitization of violence by the media, by exposing the unsettling truth about the illusion of “reality” television. By setting up murder as nothing more than a game, the producers of the “reality” show portrayed in the movie reduce a violent crime to little more than an edgy bit of drama, edited to fit a half-hour time slot during prime-time television. Those who watch it can conveniently forget that when the show ends, those people they cheer or jeer for are forced to keep on playing a game or living a life that they, unlike the watching public, cannot escape simply by clicking a button on the remote control. And those who win or lose in these “reality” shows do so in a reality that was never actually real at all.

When it comes to sending presents to people, I am the queen of procrastination. It’s not that I procrastinate in actually getting the present, it’s that I’ll get the present, and then it will sit in my house for weeks while I try to remember to get it to a post office so I can actually *send* it. My older sister lives only an hour or so away, so she usually ends up lucky enough to get her present right around her birthday, simply because I’m likely to see her more often. My younger sister, unfortunately, lives in Washington. This means that sometimes her presents may be weeks and weeks late. I don’t mean to let this sort of thing slide; it just somehow happens. Heck, we just recently delivered Beth and Sabs’ Christmas present to them, so it’s not like I reserve this sort of behavior for just family.

I’m even worse when it comes to sending cards. Most of my friends and family are lucky if I ever manage to get a birthday card into the mail (or attached to the gift). While my mom and older sister send off cards for Easter, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, etc., the only holiday card I can be relied on to send out are for Christmas (which may or may not include a letter, depending on whether I type it, hand-write it, or just give up and sign our names to the bottom). I used to be really good at all this sort of thing, but somewhere along the way I got busy and then the habit just slipped away.

So yesterday, I not only wrapped my younger sister’s birthday presents, but I actually got them in the mail (via Richard, who was sent with address and presents in tow to the post office), and with a birthday card too. Granted, the package may not arrive by her actual birthday (which is tomorrow), but the point isthat it was mailed *before* the event, and not after (and did I mention there was a card included?). Heck, it was even mailed in the same month as her birthday. We are talking turning over a new leaf in a big way.

I sent her an email, letting her know of this momentous occasion, primarily so that she wouldn’t keel over in shock when it arrived the actual week of her birthday. Her tongue-in-cheek reply (“Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it? Radical shifts in behavior scare us counselor types.”) was probably just what I deserved.

Yesterday morning, while sitting at church, Richard took a break from sketching out signs for “Bob’s House of Uncollectable Items and Cats” (I have no idea either) to scribble a note on the bulletin suggesting that if it was nice out, we should take a long bike ride. Considering that the air smelled like rain when we headed off before church to get coffee and put up posters for our choral concert next weekend, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be feasible (and okay, so there was this teeny part of me that was kind of hoping that it *wouldn’t* be nice), but luckily the sun was shining and the gray morning turned into a beautiful afternoon.

It really was a nice day to go riding, zipping along the back roads, admiring the birds singing in the trees above us, noticing the abundance of spring flowers, taking deep breaths of bug-infested spring air. The gnats were out in force, as were other, larger bugs that kept slamming into the side of my helmet and then buzzing drunkenly away. I grimly made sure to keep my mouth shut, and reminded myself over and over that at least I no longer wear contacts. I’ve had the experience of a gnat slamming head-first into my eye, and then adhering to the contact. The searing pain as one tries to blink over a contact that has suddenly sprouted the mangled carcass of what was once a bug is not something one ever really wants to repeat.

But the bugs were only a small deterrent; otherwise the ride was a lot of fun. Eight miles total, including a trip through the local cemetery, to weave through the curvy roads that wind between the expanses of old gravestones.

This morning when we got on our bikes (while it was still dark out, I might add. Oh yeah. I just *love* daylight saving time), I realized that perhaps I’d been overdoing it a bit. We still managed to go our six miles, but by the end, my legs and butt were letting me know, in no uncertain terms, that they were not happy with me.

Sore muscles not withstanding, we’ve done 30 miles so far this month. And we’ve been driving around, checking out other possible routes. The abundance of little two-lane back roads that surround this place are just one of the benefits of living in such a small town, so there are still lots of places we’ve yet to ride. And, I’m sure, thousands more gnats to ride through.

It started with the garage, and that was only because stuff was starting to pile inward, encroaching from either side and forcing us to either park closer to each other (and thus cause me to whine about how he didn’t give me enough room in the garage), or forcing us to park right next to the stuff. This was no big deal for Richard, because he parks on the right, but for me, this meant smacking my car door into everything every time I opened it.

So Saturday morning, after we returned from our bike ride to Starbucks, we tackled the garage. First, all the recyclable stuff went into Richard’s car (they don’t do curbside recycling pickup here, alas). While he ran off to drop everything off at the recycling center, I loaded up my car with all the things that have been piling for months in the far corner, needing to be donated. By the time he came back, I’d gotten most of it into my car and had begun the process of going through the rest of the miscellaneous clutter. Between the two of us, we threw out a bunch of things, loaded more stuff into the ‘donations’ pile, and organized the rest of it. When we came back from dropping all the donations off at Goodwill, we could both park easily, with plenty of space on the sides and in between.

Flush from that victory, I marched upstairs and started in on the guest room. First we went through the few remaining boxes and figured out what to keep and what to put away. There really wasn’t all that much stuff to sort through, so that went pretty quick, and what remains is simply to be moved into the attic the next time we feel inspired to drag the ladder into the house and move the litter boxes so one of us can climb through the hole in the closet ceiling to get them up there. Then it was time to do a little rearranging.

When we built the bookshelves in the bedroom, the old shelf moved into the guest room and has been lurking there for weeks, waiting for this moment. Today I finally transferred all the books from the smaller shelves to the larger one. And with two smaller shelves cleared and suddenly available, Richard now has a new spot to store things on his side of the office, and I was able to move all my cookbooks out of the cupboard in the kitchen and into the dining room, which meant I could then move all the stuff on that kitchen counter into the now-empty cupboard and voila, suddenly there was a completely clear counter (which makes up for the fact that the other two counters are now covered in things I brought in from my car, which I finally cleaned out as well).

I still need to rinse off all the plastic crates and drag them upstairs into the guest room so I can organize all the sewing stuff (which requires going *through* all the sewing stuff to begin with, and by the way there’s all that fabric I’m supposed to be turning into curtains for the office, yes I know), but the key thing here is that we are, finally, completely unpacked. Okay, so we’ve been in this house nearly a year now, but I’m still pretty proud of us anyway. Phew.

Random Acts of Journaling– February:

People lose people. I don’t know why we are all so damn careless. Folks lose their kids, men lose their women, even friends get lost if you don’t keep an eye out. I look through the windshield at the houses going by. For every person sitting in them houses, watching TV or eating a ham sandwich, there’s someone somewhere wondering where and why they lost them. All those lost people, carrying on their everyday business like the air’s not full of the sound of hearts breaking and bleeding. (Billy Dead, Lisa Reardon, p. 1)

Because my coworker’s car is in the shop, I’ve been driving her to and from work the past two days. It’s not much out of my way to stop and pick her up on the way there, and as much as I sometimes enjoy the ability to just zone out and put the car on autopilot in the morning, it’s been a rare pleasure to have someone to talk to.

She and I have a lot in common though – this coworker of mine. She came from a similar background (in computers) into technical writing, and has been struggling with some of the same issues I’ve been struggling with lately. In fact we’ve found other odd links as well; things we were both involved in when younger. In the car this morning, and then later this afternoon, she echoed what I had been thinking – that it was such a relief to be able to talk to someone who understood. I can rant to her and know that she knows exactly where I’m coming from, and she can do the same right back.

It’s not like I can’t talk to my husband, or my family, because that’s not the issue here at all. The issue is simply that I haven’t had real girl talk in a very long time, with another female who understands the things I’m going through. I have friends, but they are scattered too far away, or too busy to get together very much anymore. Calling someone on the phone isn’t the same as face-to-face, and even then, my friends and I are slipping further and further apart as they travel into the land of parenthood where I have no wish to follow.

I miss having someone I can call at any hour of day or night, to go to an all-night diner and drink coffee; to laugh over things no one else could possibly find funny; to let our voices mingle in a rush of sharing and combined understanding. I am losing my friends slowly, to this thing called life. It is no fault of theirs or mine that they are slipping away, but that makes it no less of a loss to be the one who watches it happen, and realizes that there is no way to stem the subtle erosion of what used to be.

Random Acts of Journaling – March: You are given a gift of 1 million dollars. There are some restrictions on how you can spend some of the money, as follows:

$100,000 must be donated to charity. What charities will you support?

SPCA ? I?ve been involved in the local SPCA now for over ten years, and know the tremendous amount of time and effort that is put in on behalf of the animals. I would donate $25,000 to the Yolo County SPCA to be used in their spay/neuter efforts for people who could not otherwise afford the surgeries.

Habitat for Humanity ? This is a charity I?ve wanted to get involved in and never could due to lack of time. I’d give one third of the money to the local chapter, and do my best to join in the next time they have a building project.

Literacy Programs ? Reading has been one of the extreme joys of my life. I cannot imagine how I would have survived growing up as a shy child (yes, I really was shy!) without the ability to escape into books. Volunteers who have the time and patience to tutor adults in learning to read are wonderful people and these programs need to be supported. Being able to read makes the difference for someone to be able to get a better job, perhaps escape public assistance, or even just read to their children. The world must be such a strange and terrifying place to those who cannot read.

$100,000 must be given to one person that you know. To whom do you give it? What would you expect him/her to do with it? Would you put any restrictions on its use? Would it make a difference if you could make the donation anonymously?

It?s hard to pick just one person. I?ve always thought it would be marvelous to have enough money that I could give gifts to friends ? always anonymously. Perhaps pay off their bills for them, or set up a college fund for their kids so they wouldn?t have to worry. Truthfully, if I had my way, I?d much rather make any sort of large monetary contribution anonymously, simply so that the person wouldn?t feel somehow obligated to me.

But if it has to be just one person (or entity ? I?m fudging the rules a bit here), I?d give it to my parents, with no strings attached. I know they?d put most of it into retirement savings, but I?d like to think they?d do a few fun things too, like maybe take a trip.

$50,000 must be spent on a public beautification project. You can build a park, commission artwork, etc. What do you do, and where do you do it?

I would find a space to establish a community garden, where people who don?t have yards of their own could have a ?garden? and grow whatever they wanted ? whether it?s fruits and vegetables, or simply flowers. If there was money left after buying and setting up the garden, I’d spend it on seeds, to get people started.

$50,000 must be spent studying something you have not formally studied. What will you study?

I want to learn how to be artistic. Since I wasn?t born with any artistic talent, I want someone to teach me. I would pay for someone to train me how to do basic interior design, and how to draw simple things. I also want to learn how to sew ? better than I currently know how. I would take classes to learn to modify patterns, and figure out how to fit things when I?m making them.

$200,000 must be spent doing as many things as you can on your “lifetime to do list.” Always wanted to see Alaska? Take a boat trip on the Rhine? What things would you do first?

We?d go to Europe. I would take a few months off (maybe three or four) and tour Europe. We?ve been planning to take our honeymoon (rather belatedly) in Ireland, on bikes. I?d skip the bikes and make it a grand tour, staying at Bed and Breakfasts throughout, and taking as long as we wanted at each stop.

The rest of the money is yours to do with as you see fit. What would you do with it?

The majority would be saved, simply because I have a burning desire to retire as early as I can. However, we would definitely take a small chunk of that remaining $500,000 and get a few things done to the house. For example, we?d landscape the backyard the way we want it, with the gazebo, and the fountain pond, and the ivy-shaded arbor over the flagstone patio with stone benches. We?d expand the back deck, build the cat run, and screen in the porch to create a sunroom. We would also put the solar panels on the house, and have fun splurging on all sorts of things to make the house even more energy efficient than it already is.

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Okay, so this is sort of late for a March entry. Oh well.

Friday my company provided us all with lunch and a movie – Office Space. Because Richard hadn’t seen that one either, he rented it, and so Saturday we watched it (again, for me). If you have ever worked in a cube maze, or dealt with big-company politics and corporate business practices, you need to watch this movie. Of course, it was hard to get motivated to do anything productive after watching it Friday afternoon at work, but I have to admire my company’s sense of humor. Small companies have politics too, but nothing quite like big ones. The movie only reinforced my relief at having left the Big Fish. Anyone pondering making the switch from small company to big company should watch this movie. You might think they are making this stuff up. Trust me. They aren’t.

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Saturday morning we woke up and hopped on our bikes for the weekly trip to Starbucks. It’s getting easier and easier to make that six mile round trip now, after a month of riding. For one thing, my butt is completely used to that bike seat now, and I’m keeping the gears on one of the higher speeds for most of the rides. And after our ride on Saturday, we actually passed the 50-mile mark on our bike odometers. 50 miles ridden in March! It’s not much when compared some people, I know, but considering we’ve only been at this a month, I think I’m entitled to be excited about that total.

Flush from a successful bike ride, we returned home to clean the house in preparation for the arrival of dinner guests later in the day. I yanked the sheets off the bed and took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather (low 80’s, in April! Please tell me this is not a sign of how the summer will shape up!) to hang a few loads outside. We then converged on the kitchen, to wash and chop a huge pile of potatoes and onions and leeks and other assorted white or green vegetables, dumping them into the crock pot for the evening’s dinner. I plugged the pot in, wandered off to do a bit more cleaning, and then the power went out.

The power stayed out a few hours. During that time we hopped onto our bikes again and took a quick trip downtown. The plan was to grab lunch at one of the local shops, but downtown was out of power too. And when we rode back home to get the car and try a restaurant across the tracks (because sometimes only our half of the town shuts off, it being the older side), they were out of power too. There were police swarming all around the power station, and the fire trucks would occasionally rush by with lights and sirens blaring. It was the height of small town excitement, I tell you!

Thwarted at our in-town lunch plans, we were forced to go to Davis for sushi (gee, shucks), where we inhaled many plates of seaweed-wrapped rice and fish concoctions and pondered alternate dinner plans for our guests. Fortified by copious amounts of sushi, we returned home, where we were greeted by the flashing lights on all the digital appliances. I broke out the bread machine and whipped up dough for some incredible rolls, and stirred up a batch of brownies. The power was restored, the crock pot was turned up to high, and dinner was saved.

Sunday was just about as hectic. The choir sang at both Easter services (although luckily the director hasn’t pondered making us sing at the sunrise service yet. I think he knows we’d probably declare mutiny if he ever suggested it). Richard and I ducked out after the anthem the second service, then hurried home to change before heading down to his parents’ for Easter dinner. We did stop at the grocery store on the way out of town (at my insistance) so that we could have the required Cadbury eggs. To my regret, I allowed myself to be tempted by the Snickers egg instead (which was nothing like a real Snickers, despite it’s claims to the contrary). Next year I shall know better.

I left work Friday feeling extremely frustrated. In retrospect, I suppose it’s kind of amusing – after all, it took five months for the first spark of job stress to emerge, and when I compare the situation to the things I dealt with on a day-to-day basis with the Big Fish, it’s quite minor. But still, when one is in the throes of extreme frustration, wanting to lock one’s self in an office with the perpetrator and yell really loudly while brandishing the assignment in the aforementioned perpetrator’s face and demanding to know if they had actually bothered to find out what we were *told* to do before they decided to rip our work into shreds because we couldn’t read this person’s mind, it’s kind of hard to do a calm and rational comparison.

But anyway, once out of the office, I got to rant to my invisible friends in the car all the way home, where I sat on the floor in the kitchen and alternated between petting cats and doing a speed-skim of Ladies Home Journal (which didn’t have a single article that peaked my interest – sigh). So when I made it to the church for the warm-ups, I was much calmer. And once we began to play, it all melted away and I started having fun.

It was a Taizai service. I’m not sure if I actually spelled that right, but basically it’s where the choir sings a fairly simple and short melody, over and over and over, but with variations, and one or more people taking a different harmony, or improvising. I didn’t sing; instead I played oboe and my dad played recorder, and we had a blast. We would just randomly grab parts, harmonizing with each other. It was simultaneously exhausting and invigorating, playing like this, finding ways to mingle the sound of our instruments with the voices of the tiny choir. When one of us got tired the other would play solo for a bit, and then we’d link back up. We were sitting in front of the choir director so we couldn’t see a darn thing that was happening behind us – the most important part of that being that we never quite knew when we were supposed to stop playing – but somehow it worked out.

By the time the service was over I was drained of energy, but in a good way, able to look at the work situation and shake it off. It’s no less frustrating, of course, but I’ve put it in perspective. When I worked for the Big Fish, I saw the dark side. If this is the worst I have to deal with at this job, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

In the next aisle over, two developers are working on what is apparently a difficult problem. One of them keeps singing, babbling, and making little cheering noises when they get something to work. Further down my own aisle the noise alternates between the tuneless humming of someone singing along to whatever music is playing through their headphones, and the tap of someone else’s fingers on their desks in time to some rather erratic beat. Two rows down from that, where the real offices begin, one of the managers is taking yet another phone call on speaker phone. Heaven forbid he actually shut his door, resulting in the sound spilling out and echoing all over us lowly peons in the cube maze outside.

The speakerphone man I have been working on through silent training these past few weeks. The second I hear his phone click on and the voices hollering out, I get up from my desk, walk over, and shut his door firmly. I do not slam it – the point is not to be rude – I merely give him a tight little smile and say nothing at all. And my tactic does appear to be working just a bit. I’ve noticed him actually holding the receiver to his ears the past few times I’ve walked by. Perhaps he’s started to get the message that it is REALLY ANNOYING when the rest of the building is forced to hear every word of his conversations.

But the rest is not so easy to get rid of – the incessantly ringing cell phones, the hollering in the break room, the humming and pounding of desks, and over-loud discussions of their latest fantasy football pools. I am slowly going insane.

Richard says I should learn to work with headphones and music on, and I’ve tried – honest I have. But I get too distracted by the music. It doesn’t matter if there are no words – my mind latches on to the melody, and then busies itself working out all the various harmonies, determining which instruments are playing which part, and all the while I’m trying desperately to concentrate on the assignment I’m supposed to be doing. It’s the curse of having a musical background as a child that I am completely incapable of hearing music, without actually *listening* to the music.

And I suppose I’m getting better at tuning out the miscellaneous discussions that occur around me, especially once I finally manage to get myself completely immersed in my work. The problem is that that immersion doesn’t happen all that often at this job. On the one hand this is a good thing because there is absolutely no stress whatsoever. On the other hand, I’m perilously close to getting bored these days, and when I’m hovering on boredom, I start noticing things; things like all the noise.

I realize that with my choice of career, my chances of ever getting an office with a door that can shut out all the noise are pretty much nonexistent. I realize that I just need to suck it up and learn to live with it, and that just because today I’m ready to leap over the cube wall and rip someone in half because they keep resetting the ring on their cell phone, this doesn’t mean that it’s this bad all the time.

It’s just that on days like today, when I have little to do, and the sun is shining and I’m desperate for the day to end so I can take advantage of the nice weather, sometimes it’s hard to remind myself that this too shall pass.

It’s been a fairly unexciting week. I’m posting an entry anyway, however, before I get accused of being a slacker again by certain people (and you know who you are). So. Um. Let’s see.

Work has been the usual – short bursts of energy followed by longer periods of pondering, which this week has involved pestering people to give me information, repeatedly borrowing the same VB book from one developer over the course of three days to search for definitions, and staring cross-eyed at outlines until they finally decided to play nice and become full-fledged documents all on their own. Oh, and trying to avoid murdering the person who keeps making kettle corn in the company microwave and filling the air with the aroma of baking cookies. This is considered cruel and unusual torture by the little cluster of us Weight Watcher types.

Speaking of Weight Watchers, Wednesday I whipped up another batch of vegetable soup to take with me to work for lunch, and looked up the Points value of Cadbury eggs. I believe that is also the day that I become unreasonably addicted to the latest in a string of Shockwave games, for which I blame those who keep posting links on The Usual Suspects forum, but I digress. And so far this week, despite the presence of an entire bag of M&M’s and mini Hershey bars (including my favorites, Mr. Goodbars) in the Food Cube, I have managed somehow to not only stay in my Points, but to start accumulating a few extra in preparation for the aforementioned Cadbury egg-eating-festival this weekend.

Oh, wait. Something sort of exciting did happen. Well, almost. When I was turning onto the street where my office is yesterday morning someone behind me started honking, and then they not only followed me down the street, but also pulled into the parking lot and parked right beside me. Fortunately it wasn’t a crazed stalker, but someone who I knew from the last project I was on when I worked for the Big Fish (hence the reason it was only *almost* exciting. If it had really been a stalker it would have been much more exciting. I’m sure of it). Turns out he was taking a class at the office right next to mine, so we decided to do lunch (well, not right then, but later. At lunchtime. Of course). Lunch ended up being a laugh fest of ‘remember when’s’ from the project, and some catching up on kids (his), new marriages (mine), and other assorted odds and ends. Plus there was Indian food involved, so it was a good time all around.

That’s all I can think of for now (and that should teach certain people to quit calling me a slacker too. See what you get?).