Just buy the Triscuits and screw the Wheat Thins

If you're not ready to have a baby yet, DON'T COME WITHIN FIVE FEET OF ME! Honest to Kokopelli, enough of my friends are knocked up or ready to pop that I'm certain that by now some native culture has heard of me and has placed my image on an alter as a fertility symbol. Barren couples from miles around make a pilgrimage to it because they've heard that forging a friendship with me is like hitching a train straight to Storksville.

I've heard that you reach a certain age and all of a sudden everyone gets married. Then, just when your calendar slows way down to a wedding every other weekend, the first batch of newlyweds start popping out the critters. I'll be damned, but I must be at that age because I need more than one hand to count all of my dear friends who are expecting.

And so it is that they are all a-glow with bulging bellies and the cravings to match.

Of all the happy expecting couples, I am most concerned for my dear friend in Turkey. While there is no shortage of Turkish snacks to keep her busy, her cravings betray her latch-key childhood: Extra-crunchy Jif Peanut butter, Rice Krispie Treats, McCormick's Brown Gravy Mix, Betty Crocker Blueberry Muffin Mix (Just Add Water!), Triscuits and Wheat thins. Alas, the Sultan's homeland runneth over with meatballs and grape leaves, but what's a preggers girl to do when she needs a damn chewy chocolate chip granola bar??

Send her stateside best friend a shopping list, is what.

Yesterday she and I found each other in a splendid instant-messaging conversation, when she told me about her adventures of standing over her kitchen sink while eating an entire jar of pickles. I can totally picture her standing there, pickle jar in one hand, pickle juice running into her sleeve down the other, and my own craving to see her kicked in. So I bought a ticket to Istanbul, departing tomorrow.

Hurrah! This will likely be the last time I get my best friend to herself. God willing, none of my friends will turn into those parents who can't find time to talk to their grown-up friends. But just in case, I'm all about hanging out with her for my last week of unemployment and her last week of girl time, sans baby.

Two minutes after we signed off the IM, I got her email "re: shopping list." Neither of us are good at math, but I'm wondering if she knows that there are weight limits for luggage on international flights and I also need to bring pants? After a quick calculation of item poundage (translation: ask MIT boyfriend how much everything will weigh) I dash an email right back, telling her that I can buy everything, but space may be an issue. I wondered if I could take the crackers out of their boxes?

She must have been salivating at the computer, eagerly waiting for my reply. Thirty seconds after I clicked send she made the snap decision: "Sure, take them out of the boxes. That's how I usually travel. If it still seems like too much, just buy the Triscuits and screw the Wheat Thins. "

Screw the Wheat Thins!

Now there is a girl who knows how to get her snack on. It's good to have strong feelings about crackers. Priorities are important.

If she doesn't grow up to be the overbearing, baby-talking parent type, I'm hoping she can become a cool, Partridge Family mom. She's already found the perfect name for starting her own alt-grunge family band called Screw The Wheat Thins.

Hurtling dangerously toward employment

Of course I've been looking for a job. I've been doing everything a good job searcher should be doing; namely, applying for jobs.

Thing is, last time I was unemployed, I would send bazillions of resumes into a vast employment vacuum, never hearing from the company again. Every week when I claimed my unemployment benefits, I just checked "Yes" on the box that asked me if I've been looking for work and *poof* - a check would appear with my name on it. Days, weeks, months went by without a fear of having to accept a job offer because I was mostly convinced all the jobs I applied to were posted by the Unemployment Agency people themselves, just so those of us on the dole couldn't do nothing all day long.

This time? Not so easy. As soon as I thought I'd be let go I started submitting resumes with wild abandon. Why not? It's not like I was going to hear back from anyone for months, right? Wrong. Damn market is better now so when you apply for a job, people actually assume that you want it.

Good lesson to learn, I'd say. Because, through the process of hearing back from several companies with soul-sucking names like "Biotron" and "Avotistech," I realized how deeply allergic I am to "The Man." While I was grateful for the callbacks, when one glance at their web sites had me breaking out in hives, I knew that it wasn't meant to be.

Fortunately, it hasn't been too hard finding organizations that actually have a mission I can believe in. One company I was talking to writes software to help investment clubs manage their finances and tax forms. Another helps freshly graduated college students find jobs. And then, of course, there's the hospital I interviewed for that should win major "get into heaven" points when I'm eye to eye with Saint Pete. I'm hoping that just the thought of dedicating 50 hours of my work week to helping sick children will balance out some of my less savory acts of rebellion in my teenage years. Like that time I snuck out at night with some friends to rearrange the letters on a sign in front of the local ice cream shop so that all the flavors had dirty words in them. True, that's about as rebellious as I got and, true, the sign was locked behind glass so we couldn't actually rearrange anything, but hopefully my karma points are more in balance now.

So, after two full months of time off, I'm happy to announce I've accepted a job that will support people who want to make the world a better place by helping disadvantaged children. I wish I could tell you that's the only reason I took it, but I'm still trying to work out the algorithm to calculate the karma points for doing something good while also receiving a nice salary and a kick ass benefits package. It doesn't seem as noble if I'm not actually sacrificing anything to do it. Somehow, I'm okay with that.

The good news is that they don't need me to start for another couple weeks. Woo! More vacation! Time to adjust to the notion of working again. I think I'll need it. Today I rebelled against my impending employment by laying on my futon and watching 5 consecutive episodes of the Gilmore Girls. I ate all day long to the point of discomfort, but kept eating anyway. In renaissance times, I would have been considered among the wealthy elite for being so plump and oily. I think next time I work for a non-profit, I will try to find the people whose mission it is to bring that look back into vogue.

What's your secret?

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project
where people mail-in their secrets anonymously
on one side of a homemade postcard.
Check out the blog.

So, what's your secret? No, really. What is it?

What's the thing you don't tell anyone? What's the thing you think would keep people from loving you? How many do you have? If you found out that other people have the same secret, would you search for them? And if you found them, would you let them in on your own?

Everyone has secrets. Some of them are dark. Some of them are funny. Some of them are spelled out in anonymous blogs. Most of them go with us to our graves. Thanks go out to Baraka for sharing the link to the PostSecret project, where "people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard."

Here are some of my favorites:

• Over the image of a broken train someone wrote: "There was a train wreck by my house. I ran to the site and mingled with the other passengers, acting like I had been on the train. I received an $8000 settlement for pain and suffering due to my 'back injury'."
• Someone sent in a photo of a Buddha statue speaking the words: "I fed my family for free for about a year by simply wheeling filled shopping carts out the door."
• Someone else left lipstick marks all over a piece of paper and wrote: "This is me procrastinating on my suicide note..."

It's strange how a secret can hold power over you. And it's liberating when you tell someone what it is, then realize they're still sitting beside you.

Perhaps the coolest thing I've discovered in this life is the fact that everybody has them.

How do I know? About four years ago, in an attempt to make a few small personal repairs, I went to a weekend-long retreatish/cultish emotional boot camp called Landmark Forum. I went because I knew four people who had done it and who swore it had changed their lives in profound ways. Granted, I caught them immediately post-forum, when most people who go through the program experience a heighted state of elation from discovering why they were so messed up and how they can live from now on as a considerably less messed up person. The question then becomes whether or not they can sustain the changes they want to make, but that's another conversation all together. How the Forum manipulates the audience through the experience is also a topic for later. How the Forum recruits the audience is ethically questionable but, again, a topic for some other time.

To get a sense for what it was like, picture 120 people in a large room with no windows, sitting in 120 chairs facing a stage, where our inspirational speaker led us through a series of exercises designed to get us to sort through our baggage. We sat in this room about 15 hours a day for three days. And pretty much the only way you were going to experience any sort of "breakthrough" was to pay attention to the secrets your peers spoke into the microphones on either side of the stage.

In grand American over-sharing style, it didn't take long for the first person to get up to the microphone to talk about why they were there. You've got to figure that something pretty big inspired each of us to pay $350, give up a vacation day plus a weekend, and go through some sort of magic process that no one could quite describe before we signed up. The first guy at the mic told us that he'd been getting bad grades. The speaker led him, then his mother, through a short series of conversations that exposed some previously unspoken tension between them that led to a grand finale expression of love between them and a promise to be more studious from now on. Hurrah! We all clapped for them and from there on an endless stream of strangers took turns at the microphone to tell us their darkest crap.

And some of it was pretty dark.

And some of the people cried when they said it.

Sometimes I would ache while I listened.

And, yep. While I spent the first day grateful to the brave folk who dared to bare all in front of an audience, I writhed inside my skin at the thought of standing up there to share my own secret dark crap. Until Day 2. That's when I saw so many people actively letting go of years and years of baggage so successfully that I finally took my own turn at the mic, spilling my guts about why I was there and what my baggage looked like.

Sure, the whole thing sounds like a hippy-dippy, tree-hugging, love-in, but I didn't care. Listening to a high-powered executive tell us that he had been cheating on his wife for 15 years and a respected scientist confess her compulsive behavior was liberating. Every time we returned from a break we were encouraged to sit next to someone else, and every someone I sat next to had even more humiliating crap to share. Our leader encouraged us to think of people who had hurt us in the past and encouraged us to call them to talk about it. One by one, people around me started to have the breakthroughs we were promised when we wrote Landmark our checks on registration day. All of these people walked around as if they were Atlas, sans the weight of the world on his shoulders.

I wouldn't say that I had a breakthrough, but I would say I learned a whole lot. Through the bravery of people who were willing to share their stories, I realized that I was not the only one who did not have everything figured out. In fact, I finally felt like part of the majority, because no one really does. While some of the secrets people shared with us seemed like nothing to be ashamed of to me, I could identify with the humiliation that kept them silent. And if their stuff is no big deal to me, then maybe my stuff isn't such a big deal after all.

And if it’s not a big deal, why hold on to it?

While I’m not in a hurry to share every last thing I am ashamed of with the world, I suppose blogging is a small attempt to keep myself honest and real. It’s a constant decision to write or, more to the point, not write about people and topics that are important to me. I would love to have the gigunda balls to talk about issues that plague or amuse me, regardless of who I know is reading about them. David Sedaris is one of my heroes that way, having built his livelihood on hanging his family skeletons under a neon sign that screams “Yo! Over here!” He once said that he writes it like it is, and if those he writes about were honest with themselves, they would find truth in his words.

I dare you to be more honest with yourself and your friends, even for a day.

I’m going to take that challenge myself, and start with confronting the lady with the horrible 80’s hairdo and gem sweater on the other side of this café. Someone really has to tell the poor woman the truth…

A day in the life

• Episodes Smallville watched: 6
• Times almost cried: 3
• Times said "Just one more episode, then I'll do something productive": 5
• Times left house: 1
• Showers: 1
• Fun Size Snickers bars eaten: 3
• Devil Dogs consumed: 2
• Miles jogged: 3
• Epiphanies experienced while discovering gray sweat pants are sexy: 1
• Jobs applied for: 2
• Contacts made for new job opportunities: 2
• Hours spent on freelance work: 0
• Thank you cards sent for Christmas presents: 0
• Surfaces dusted: 0
• Floors vacuumed: 0
• Ziti noodles in bowl for dinner: 27
• Phone calls from dashing boyfriend: 3
• Comments made by boyfriend in reference to unhealthy Smallville addiction: 2
• Wishes that Gilmore Girls Season 6 was on DVD: 1672
• Degrees of unrequieted love for Lex Luther: 227
• Curses against bad boys' fathers who doomed them to lives of evil: 564
• Hours of sleep lost while fearing the acquisition of potential new job in development office of leading-edge hospital: 2
• Hours of sleep lost while fearing the possibility of not acquiring new job in development office of leading-edge hospital: 2
• Kiss ass thank you letters sent to interviewers:1
• Lucrative alternatives to desk jobs found: 0
• Hours practicing acoustic guitar technique: 0
• Hours writing Great American Novel: 0
• Words spoken to inanimate objects in apartment: 15
• Emails sent to friends regarding social opportunities in coming weeks: 8
• Replies: 2

A terrible, sinking feeling

They say when you're unemployed, your full time job becomes the search for a new job. Because I am a strong believer in work/life balance, I also add variety to my day, dedicating time slots my life-long pursuit of watching as many TV series on DVD as possible. And, being that unemployment can be an especially anxious time, I find that I become even more emotionally involved than usual with the Gilmore Girls, the Sex and the City ladies and the Smallville folk.

I really can't call it a day until I have cried at something that happened between my favorite peeps in Stars Hollow, New York City or Smallville. Today? It was the look on Lex's face when Clark/Cal-El stole back the little crystal he dedicated his life to find. Yesterday? It was when Loralai proposed to Luke after watching Rory take the first step to their estrangement as mother and daughter. And then there's always the quintessential tearjerker, sure to bring you down from even the highest level of elation: Aidan's proposal to Carrie.

But I digress.

I suppose it makes sense that if my full time job is to find a new job, then I would eventually have to dust off my powergirl blazer, creased trousers and pumps (aka "interviewing garb") and head into the corporate wilderness to be a chipper, go-getting, can-do job candidate. For me, today was that day.

I typically enjoy job interviews because I get to spend an hour talking about how great I am. While most people cringe at the thought, I am a natural marketer and just pretend I'm telling my mom about getting picked in class to read my book report as an example of excellence. True, I was never chosen by the teacher as the student everyone should try to be, but I always wanted to be that person, and job interviews are my little way of making up for the fact that Laurel Druid was always going to that much more creative, that much cuter and that much more worthy of being homecoming queen than I was. Each interview is worth about five therapy sessions in itself!

Today I took a little twist in approach and, instead of picturing my mom in the interviewer's chair, I made believe that I was in my very own "Behind the Music" video. I talked about my most successful marketing campaigns. I commented thoughtfully on the environments I thrive in. I paused and glanced heavenward, searching for exactly the right words to express my passion for writing brochures. By the end of the session, my interviewer had laughed with me, cried with me and was about to print an offer letter with a six-figure salary when she realized she needed to meet with four other candidates first. "Don't worry, Cella," she said as she wiped away her last tear. "In all my years here, I've never met someone as perfect for this job as you. In fact, you're perfect for my job and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I was reporting to you within six months! I hope you have room in your bank account for many, many more zero's!"

Okay, that didn't happen. But what did happen included listening to her speak for a solid half hour about her current projects, the level of frenzy in the office, the lack of process to keep things running smoothly, and the fact that it's a fun culture, though it definitely does not operate on a 9-5 schedule. Guessing from the number of projects on her corporate plate, I'm fairly sure she does not mean that she strolls into the office around 10, cuts out for a long lunch around noon, and hits the road by 4:30, which is how my work life devolved at my last company.

"But... but... how do you find time to keep up with emailing all of your friends?" I wanted to ask. Instead I smiled in a way that I hoped did not look like a deer caught in headlights and told her I was very impressed with all the good work she'd done on the materials she gave me at the beginning of the interview. I tried not to think about all the message boards she could not participate in, or all the "panic buttons" she never had to hit on entertainment web sites when her boss walked by.

I guess her office had never heard of the movement that has declared "mediocrity" as the new "excellence." One of the most shocking things about becoming a grown up has been the discovery that, in the corporate world, you don't have to work very hard to be considered an over-achiever. Apparently this concept does not extend to the development offices of leading-edge hospitals. Maybe it's because she doesn't work at a technology company, where intermittently-driven folks have learned that they can work really hard for a few weeks, followed by a few more weeks conducting "research," which really means they can surf the web eight hours a day.

Or maybe the lesson is all mine, as I discover that my last company was the only office in the world that was filled with apathetic workers, over-paid and under-challenged, spending their days refilling their coffee cups and collecting pay checks. Oh, the horror! I have a terrible, sinking feeling that my next job is going to require me to actually work for a living.

I've always wondered what that would be like. I've actually harbored a silent envy of my busy friends who take a few days to reply to the emails I send them. The friends who, supposedly, are so busy being productive that they hardly have time to eat lunch, let alone send smoke signals to loved ones informing us they are still alive. In my last job, when things would slow down, I used to click around from news site to entertainment site, daydreaming what it would be like to have a to-do list chock full of productive-sounding activities. I had a to-die-for to-do list in college, and while it's always nice to have down time, there really is nothing like coming home after a busy day, feeling good about what you contributed to the greater good.

Yes, I've had my glory days of feeling like I earned my keep as an employee. I've burned the midnight oil when I've had to. But, for the most part, I've worked at a place that respects the fact that employees are people too -- people with families to tend to, hobbies to enjoy, TV series to watch on DVD. I've been lucky.

Today was a bit of a rude awakening that I may not find another company that embraces goofing-off as much as my last employer did. In all seriousness, I came to depend on the fact that I could leave during the day to go to a doctor's appointment if I had to, or take a lunch hour to walk in the woods behind my office to clear my head. Are there other places out there that don't expect you to live, breathe and dream the company? Is it possible to find a cozy place that will give you the paycheck of the American Dream, without the American tendency to exploit their workers? Is this something I just have to deal with, grinning around the water cooler with my business casual-clad coworkers while daydreaming of what's behind the concrete garage blocking the view? Is it time to ditch office work and seek another career all together?

I wonder what pirates are making these days.