Mostly Safe For Work

Customer Service Is Getting Out of Control

Over the past week or so, I've had a couple of odd customer service experiences in which I felt that I'd been over-serviced. Since the opposite is usually the case, one would think this would be a welcome change, but instead the experiences left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. The first was at Tom Thumb. I had just finished checking out with two carts worth of groceries when the bagger took it upon himself to give me carry out service. I wasn't presented with an option. He just began pushing one cart while dragging the other along behind him. When I tried to help by pushing one of the carts I was quickly and sternly dismissed. Now thoroughly flustered and a little annoyed, I led the man to my car, where I tried to help load the bags into the trunk. Before I could get ahold of the first bag, however, I was once again sternly dismissed, so instead I stood aside and awkwardly stared at my shoes while my car was loaded. Once he was done, I offered a half-hearted thanks and moved on.

The other incident was more recent and occurred at the dry cleaners. I've been using the same cleaners for nearly two years, and in that time I have always followed the same routine - I park, grab my clothes, and walk into the store to drop them off. But the last two times I've gone, everything's been different. A man now races to my car before I can even open my door to steal my clothes from me, and when I check out he walks my clothes to the car and hangs them up in the back seat. That by itself doesn't seem all that strange, but today it was raining, and when the man went to my car to hang up my clothes he ordered me to stay inside the store to wait for him. When he returned, he grabbed an umbrella and walked me to my car. Oh, and the walk was all of ten feet. I felt very uncomfortable. In both of these instances I felt like shouting, "I can do it myself!!" like a cranky toddler. Oh, well.

-T

I don't think that word means what you think it does

By J:

Had to go to training seminar at work led by a HR lady last week. She'd decided to base her presentation on the concept of ambiguity. Only it soon became clear that she'd confused the meaning of the word with that of ambivalence. Awkward.

So...I'm Married

Yeah, it still feels wierd to say, though I am beginning to get used to it. Just a month ago I had no plans to get married beyond the vague, but growing notion that it would be sometime in the not too distant future. My girlfriend wife and I had been together for three years, and between years two and three I had reached the point where I felt reasonably confident that we would wind up together, but I still wasn't comfortable with the thought of betting on forever in a general sense. How the hell is one supposed to feel certain in this age of the 50% divorce rate?

Anyway, around October I began to graduate from that stage into the "I think I may actually be ready" stage. I don't know how long people usually linger in this middle ground before finally taking the leap, but that's where I stood for about two months. The problem was, now that I felt ready to commit to the idea of us, I realized I had significant doubts about myself as a partner. I began to dwell on all of the reasons why by marrying this person, I could be condemning them to a lifetime of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. I'm not someone generally crippled by self doubt - I think I know my shortcomings and am mostly at peace with them - so this experience was new to me, and it wasn't fun. Ultimately I expressed my fears to my wife, and by working through them with her I began to feel reassured.

Since our talk, I had felt increasingly comfortable with the idea of marriage. We started talking about the future in terms of "When we get married" rather than "If..." much more so than before, and it wasn't accompanied by a wave of anxiety like it had been before. I thought marriage was close at hand, but no plans had been made or even serious discussions had.

So fast-forward to December 19. I had just found out that my grandparents would be in town over the holidays, and with my grandmother's health in steady decline, it may be the last time I get to see her. Then a thought occurred to me, since my grandma may not get a chance to see it otherwise, why don't we get married while they're here? And since I was ready for the committment and planning ahead has never been my strong suit, I picked my girlfriend up from work and began driving to the county clerk without telling her where we were going.

The drive itself was less than fun. My wife was exhausted from a long week at work and was far from enthusiatic about endulging me with whatever nonsense I was up to. The drive was peppered with complaints such as, "Just tell me where we're going!", "We better not be going to look at another house!", and "I just want you to take me home!" As my wife grew ever more annoyed, we finally arrived at the clerk's office, which caused her to turn and stare at me in utter disbelief, as I hadn't prepared her even for the possibility of this happening so soon. Fifteen minutes later we had finished the required paperwork, confirmed that we were not brother and sister, and were officially licensed to marry (pending the three day waiting period).

Originally, my plan was to wait until we returned from our holiday trip to Key West, and then head back to the county clerk to get married. But after receiving our license and seeing how generally depressing the atmosphere inside the clerk's building was, my wife suggested we find someone to marry us on the beach in Key West instead. So on December 23, a Unitarian minister pulled up to our hotel wearing a Santa Hat and driving a car covered in bumper stickers that said things like "Visualize Whirled Peas," and proceeded to marry us in a ten minute ceremony on a public beach. 

Though I am thrilled to be married to my wife, my strongest emotion in the aftermath of all this has definitely been a profound sense of relief that we went about the whole affair in the manner in which we did. One of my wife's friends is currently planning a wedding with nearly 400 people on the guest list. I'm telling you, if I were her fiancee and the planning didn't kill me, standing before four hundred people in full wedding regalia while gazing into my wife's eyes in some manufactured moment of sentimentality, and then reciting vows guaranteed to make my stomach turn with their saccharine sweetness would have done the trick. I would have fucking died. Cynical? Maybe so, but I'm still counting my lucky stars that ours was so quick and easy.

-T

Life at a Prestigious Private School

On our recent 5th grade campout, I was asked a question that could only be asked in a place of such affluence. The campout was being held at Lake Bridgeport, which is about an hour and a half northwest of Dallas and thirty minutes from the nearest thing that could reasonably be called a town. While standing at the soda machine before lunch, a student behind me opened up his wallet, frowned, and then asked me, "Is there any place around here I can exchange Euros?"

This is probably the biggest drawback to teaching at a private school. Overall, it's a wonderful environment. The kids are pretty well behaved, the parents are mostly friendly, and teachers are given tons of freedom and support from the administration. Despite all that, though, the sense of entitlement and sheltered existence these kids have can be very frustrating. This year's group of students is an exceptionally nice bunch of kids. They try to do the right things and they don't have much conflict at all between different cliques, but the way they expect to have things handed to them and to be immediately catered to is alarming. They are very put out if they don't get what they want right away, and that sort of behavior originates at home. My girlfriend recently had a second grader tell her that she didn't do any chores because her maid does them all. It's great to have the kind of money that enables you to give your family whatever they want, but I'm surprise that many of these parents aren't more concerned with teaching their kids some responsibility.

The most jarring example of a student's reality being so skewed from that of the average person happened last year while grading a vocabulary homework assignment. On one question they were asked which of four options could be the object of a seige. One option was a lake, and when I didn't include that as one of the correct answers, one student raised his hand to argue because his family has a house square in the middle of a private lake, therefor the house, and the lake surrounding it, could be beseiged. That was just his reality.

I suppose my biggest worry over this problem is that some of these students are going to be expected to make it on their own at some point. Others will have trust funds ready for them upon finishing college and won't ever have to work a day in their life if they so choose, but those who do are going to have a very hard time successfully becoming independent of their parents becuase they have never learned the responsibility or discipline necessary to do so.

-T

I Know It's His Fault For Not Being More Careful, But Poor Kid...

After hearing about Gov. Palin's pregnant daughter, all I can think about is that no teenager has ever been under more pressure to marry the girl that he knocked up more than her boyfriend. I hope it works out and they stick together and raise a happy family, but if the kid has any reservations (not about being a father to the child, but about immediately getting married as a result of the pregnancy), good luck saying no to not only the girl, but also the Governor of Alaska, the Republican presidential candidate, all of their handlers, and the millions of Americans who feel it is his duty. Talk about pressure.

-T

A Recovery Milestone

Last week I experienced a feeling I had yet to feel in my three three years or so as an active and recovering addict. It began with my weekly visit to my therapist, during which we somehow wound up discussing opiate inhibitors, specifically Naltrexone. As is the case with all recovering addicts, I've been struggling with anxiety, and as we were talking it occured to me that maybe if I began taking the inhibitor it would ease my anxiety by removing the option of using. It was an unorthodox strategy since the drug isn't used for anxiety but to detox from opiates, which is something I did months ago, but the doctor agreed that it couldn't hurt to try and he wrote me a script, warning me that the most likely side effect would be mild nausea.

The next morning I took my first dose (one-half of a pill, or 25 mgs) and set out to play a round of golf. But as soon as I arrived at the golf course, I was hit with a barrage of side effects that very closely resembled withdrawal symptoms. There was no nausea, but I was alternately burning hot or having cold sweats, I was extremely lethargic and my mood shifted from upbeat and happy to depressed in an instant. I struggled through the front nine and then dropped out of the group to go home and rest. I spent the rest of the day feeling awful and decided that I'd much rather deal with moderate anxiety than feel that shitty, so I made up my mind not to take any more of the medicine.

The next two days were much the same as the first. I was depressed and irritable, and I hardly had the energy to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, let alone to leave the house to do anything prouctive. My doctor has theorized that the drug was probably restoring my still whacked out opiate receptors to some semblance of narmalcy, which cause me to go into a period of belated withdrawal. The ironic thing was that because I was feeling so bad and because my symptoms were similar to those of withdrawal, I felt the strongest urge to use that I've felt so far in my then forty-four days of recovery, all because of a drug that's supposed to help you get off of drugs. But this is what led to the recovery milestone.

In my experience as an addict, and I'm sure in most every other addicts' experiences as well, there are a few different types of drug cravings. There are those when you know you're going to use; you may just give in and do it or you may try to fight it briefly, but deep down you know it's going to happen. There's the times when you feel like using, but you have enough willpower to fight the urge even though you are in significant danger of relapse if you don't handle the situation right by using your support system (which is what I've been experiencing throughout my recovery). And then there's another type of urge that I had never experienced  before last week, and that's when you have the strong urge to use but you know you're not going to do it. Not because you don't want to get caught and not because you're worried about hurting someone, but just because you're strong enough and committed enough in your recovery to sit there and bat away the urges strictly for yourself, because you want to.

That feeling was a first for me. To sit there and feel completely in control even though my body was screaming at me to use was a great feeling. Actually, at the time I was just getting through it, but looking back and realizing what had taken place and thinking about my reaction to it was a great feeling. I'm still a work in progress, as is every recovering addict, but that is a really encouraging and invigoratingly tangible sign of my growth and progress. I'm now at 50 days and counting and I feel great, anxiety be damned.

-T

I Saved a Life

Ordinarily, when I go golfing I do nothing more than leave a trail of massive divots, say lots of bad words, and occasionally send a five iron to the bottom of the lake. I did all of these things when golfing earlier this week, and though my skills leave much to be desired, I did at least have something to show for my round. Right now there is a little frog swimming in a creek near Lewisville Lake that would no longer be part of this world if not for me.

The story began as I was preparing to chip up from in front of a creek that ran in front of the green (Incidentally, water and sand are the two places you are most likely to find me on a golf course). As I was lining up my shot, I noticed a strange and unusual sound coming from somewhere behind my. The sound itself is hard to describe, but it was something like the sound a kazoo would make if you just breathed lightly into it. This kazoo sound kept repeating over and over, so I turned around and scanned the bank of the creek to see if I could find what was making this strange noise. When I finally located the source on the far bank, I was at first shocked to see that I had discovered a strange creature that appeared to have the body of a snake and the head of a frog. It's black body was half in it's burrow and half out on the bank, and from it's frog head emanated the pitiful kazoo sound.

As I moved closer I soon realized that the snakefrog was in fact a snake and a frog, with the former in the process of making lunch out of the latter. I immediately felt sorry for the frog. What a way to go - eaten alive and unable to do anything about it. But, I thought, it's the natural way of things, and to help the frog would be to hurt the snake, so it's best to just let nature take it's course. So with this thought I finished out the hole and began to move on.

But as I got back into the golf cart I could still hear the frog begging for help as the final seconds of its life ticked away, and I was compelled to circle back and try to help. I drove around to the opposite side of the creek and cautiously began inching toward the bank. Before I could get within reach, however, the snake saw me coming and panicked. He leaped from his burrow (snakes can't leap, can they? Oh well.) and dove into the water. And as it fled, the frog was freed from it's jaws and hurried off in the opposite direction. The frog had been halfway down the throat of its mortal enemy and lived to tell the tale. I just hope I got the credit I deserve when he told the story to his frog buddies later that day.

-T

My Narcotics Anonymous Experience

Back in January I wrote about my addiction to prescription painkillers following an overdose that landed me in the emergency room. Since then my recovery has been going pretty well as a whole, but it became much more difficult once summer break arrived and I suddenly had a great deal of free time on my hands. From the time of my overdose through the the end of April I was working nearly twelve hours a day and I always had grading or comments to work on over the weekends. The intense work schedule made kicking my habit relatively easy because I was just so busy.

Once all of that ended though, all of the psychological aspects of recovery that I had never had to deal with hit me like a freight train, and I found myself overwhelmed by the urge to relapse. I began to get severe anxiety when I found myself sitting at home with nothing to do. Every second seemed like an hour; I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin and I just wanted to take something to settle myself down and make the day run smoothly. So after consulting with a psychiatrist and researching my treatment options I decided to begin going to Narcotics Anonymous instead of enrolling in an intensive outpatient program. I've been wanting to write about NA ever since I started going to meetings two weeks ago, but I haven't been quite sure what to say. But now that I've been to eight or ten meetings and I'm starting to get the hang of things, I think I'm able to crystallize my view on the situation and write about it somewhat coherently.

Before I began going to meetings I was simply treading water in my recovery. I was avoiding falling headlong back into my addiction, but I wasn't getting any better by white-knuckling it. The support from my family, girlfriend and friends was helpful and important to me (and it still is), but I didn't have anybody around who could not only be supportive, but also relate to everything I'd been going through. NA offers just that sort of fellowship and support. Having a group of people around who are all in the same position as me and who are all committed to getting better has strengthened my recovery exponentially, and it's helping me actually get better rather than just avoid relapses. I've had to make peace with the spiritual aspect of the program because I'm not a spiritual or religious person by nature, but I've come to understand that my "higher power" is the support system offered by the group. It has given me strength in my recovery that I didn't have on my own, and it's been the keystone to building a foundation of not just sobriety, but mental health as it relates to my addiction.

Thanks to the group, I've become proud of the progress I've made and I look forward to reaching my next milestone, which will be my 30 day keychain. Obviously some people need a more intensive program to detox and get a foothold in their quest for sobriety, but for anyone who is at the point where they are ready to get healthy but aren't quite sure how to do it, I couldn't more strongly recommend giving NA a shot. Just go to a meeting and see how it feels; you don't even have to say a word. I feel better today than I've felt in nearly three years. My anxiety is starting to subside, I'm happy most every day now, and I'm finally starting to feel comfortable in my own skin, but without NA I'd still be hanging on by my fingernails, just trying to find some way to make it through each day without using. It's a great program and I encourage anyone who's trying to get healthy to give it a shot.

-T

Rediscovering Maury Povich

You know, I've been going to NA meetings for almost a week now in addition to seeing a counselor to try to maintain my sobriety during the long, boring days of summer break, but I just rediscovered something that I think could be more beneficial to me than anything else. For the first time in years I saw one of those Maury Povich "Are You This Baby's Daddy" shows, and I can't believe I ever forgot how hilarious they are. I get so engrossed watching the guys and the girls cuss each other out as we all wait for the results that if I could watch those all day long there would be no chance of me ever relapsing. My favorite's are when the man turns out not to be the dad. I know it's cruel, but for me it doesn't get any better than when the woman goes into hysterics as the man jumps up and down laughing and taunting her. Also, I'm genuinely surprised that none of the men have ever punched the women when it turns out they are the father. In those cases, the woman's first reaction is always to bum rush the guy and get right in his face talking shit and gloating. How can there never have been an instance when one of those lowlifes just snapped and sucker punched the mom? Not that I want that to happen, I'm just surprised it hasn't. I can't get enough of Maury either. Unlike other hosts like Jerry Springer, he doesn't pretend that his show is anything other than the trash than it is. He just sits back with a "do you believe this shit" smirk on his face as the drama unfolds. I love that guy. I wish my cable on-demand had the Maury Show.

Also, I'm desperate to be a contestant on Wipeout.

My First Comedy Show

Last Thursday I went with my girlfriend to my first comedy show. I've been to some open-mic nights at dive bars before, but this was the first time I ever bought a ticket to go see someone famous, or at least notable. That person was Eddie Izzard. He's not as famous in America as he is in Europe (he's British), but he is still very well known. He was also voted in a poll taken by many other noteworthy comedians as one of the twenty most influential comics ever. One of the things he's best know for is that he's a transvestite who frequently performs in drag, and he plays the dad on FX's "The Riches."

Anyway, ever since I saw his comedy special "Dress to Kill" on HBO about five years ago I've been practically obsessed with this man. He is so fantastically funny and so entertaining that even though "Dress to Kill" is nearly three hours long (how in the hell does one put together a three hour stand-up routine?!?!), I never once checked my watch and was genuinely disappointed when it was over.

So when I discovered he was coming to Dallas I immediately pulled one of my patented "impulsively spend an enormous sum of money that I don't really have" moves and spent over $700 dollars for two tickets in the second row, right in front of the stage. And you know what? It was worth it. He was absolutely terrific, as expected. The show he is touring behind isn't quite to the standard of "Dress to Kill," but it's brilliant nonetheless. I could not recommend going to the show strongly enough if you have the opportunity. And I also recommend anyone who likes to laugh to buy "Dress to Kill." The first half hour is very funny, but the remaining two hours or so are absolutely brilliant. What a great night.

-T