You Might Be a Hotel Maid if...

I recently went back to work at the same motel where I worked in high school.  This Memorial Day weekend has been a typically busy holiday weekend, and I will have worked three cleaning shifts by the time the weekend is up.  I will say this: cleaning motel rooms does not get any easier, cooler, or less disgusting after college.  It does, however, leave me with a LOT of time by myself to think (I keep forgetting my iPod, so talking to myself happens), and I have come up with a list of idiosyncrasies that occur among hotel maids.  And so, a la Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a hotel maid if:

1. You can make a queen bed in under four minutes, but the bed you sleep in hasn't been made since you last washed the sheets (quite possibly a while ago).
2. You come home from work with pockets stuffed full of used dryer sheets that got folded into the laundry.
3. When staying at a hotel, you always tip the maid.
4. You haven't dusted your own home for the better part of a year.
5. You have a favorite cleaner for wood, tile, stainless, fiberglass, and carpet, but none of them are made by the same company.
6. You can spot a hair on the floor at twenty feet.
7. You can't accomplish anything if your hair isn't in a ponytail.
8. When staying at a hotel, you refuse to brush your hair unless standing on carpet (because it's easier to vacuum it up than wipe it off the bathroom tile).
9. You want to physically harm anyone with the audacity to actually use the in-room microwave.

Thank God I don't work for a chain.

I wear jeans and a T-shirt.

Any fellow maids out there?  What did I miss?

Be safe this Memorial Day!

Ruining Reading

My nephew is only 3, and ever since he was a baby, he has devoured books.  Every book is fascinating, and if it's fascinating enough, you will read it over.  And over.  And over.  To the point where some books get hidden under a couch or a table because there are only so many times you, as an adult, can read the same twenty-seven words before you want to strangle children's authors and their effective repetition.

A favorite of my nephew's.

At least the kid has taste.

I miss that.

I had a professor in college who taught  my writing courses, and he would always say that what college prevented was reading.  It seems asinine, considering there were days I would read 60-150 pages, just for one class on one night.  But, God, it's true.

As soon as I could, I began devouring books.  I was my nephew, and it didn't stop in junior high, like it does for so many kids.  I LOVE books.  When everyone asked what I would do after graduation, "read for fun" was at the top of the list.  But college has turned me into such a skimmer.  If you've been to college, you've been there; you search the article for words that stick out because of length or font or stylization or bullet points, you read the first and last sentences of paragraphs to pick up on main points, you look for the places with howevers and even sos and thus or in conclusion because, quite frankly, there aren't always enough hours in the day.

The thing about skimming is that once you start, you can't stop.  I know I'm horrible about it.  The professor in my Contemporary Drama class gave quizzes on things that were written in the stage directions, not the dialogue, and damn if I didn't miss half of those questions pretty much every time.  Reading novels, I catch myself skipping from dialogue to dialogue and missing important details like entrances, exits, and secret revelations (side note: some authors like Louise Erdrich [whom I have met] don't necessarily use quotation marks in their novels, and boy does it drive my brain wonky).  As a writer, I know how agonizing finding the right word can be, how the rhythm and flow of prose create or destroy a passage, and yet I cannot make my brain savor the words on the page.  It is the voracious, cannot-put-it-down feeling of being enraptured by a wordsmith that I miss.

The missing is a reminder to slow down.

I live life as fast as I can, cramming, multi-tasking, doing and going and making, trying to fit every experience into one day - trying to make room for everything, and instead, gaining nothing.  Numbness and apathy are the symptoms, not the disease, and the symptoms point to a surface-level skimming of life.

It's time to feel.  It's time to savor.

This is Not a Eulogy

My grandmother is amazing.

Grandma raised 10 children.  Her husband and four of her sons were soldiers.  She lived through the Great Depression, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and this War on Terror or whatever we call it now.  She baked bread and cookies every week, cooked, gardened, grew flowers, watched birds, sewed, crocheted, quilted, sewed, and played 500 every week with her gal pals.

This is not a eulogy.

My grandmother is still alive.  I am privileged to be one of the few grandchildren who lives near enough to have spent most Sundays of my growing up years at her house, watching quintessential 90s movies, helping snap beans, stealing cookie dough, and playing the lost game of Rack-O.  I still live near, near enough to go over and see her and talk to her.  But that woman is not my grandmother.

The 94, almost 95, year old woman who inhabits her body is not my grandmother.  That woman has been lost, in part, to dementia.  I will not use this space to rage and cry against the disease which I only somewhat understand, the helplessness that is inherent in the progression, or the unfairness of being the youngest grandchild and losing this woman before I reached my milestone.

This space, this eternal bit of ones and zeros, will mark permanently for the world what I have always known: this woman is amazing.  She has shaped me and written on my memory things that I will someday, unfortunately, most likely, lose.  I accept that my fate may be very close to hers, and so I write in this place that no one can take away:

The dress she made me when I was seven still hangs in the closet.
The quilt she made me as a baby still covers my bed, and me, as I type.
No one made bread, especially cinnamon raisin bread, like my grandmother.
I will never make taffy as well as she did.
I don't even really like Cowboy Cookies, but I loved them because she made them.
I used to sit at her side on the white spinny chair and tug on her yarn while she crocheted.
I always think of her when I see a hummingbird.
She always won at Rack-O because I was too young to strategize.
I never saw my grandmother sit still until she got sick.
She is responsible for my addiction to Days of our Lives.
I hated that she put butter on peanut butter sandwiches.
She taught me how good butter is on Saltine crackers.  Especially the wheat kind.
She knew unconditional love.

This is not a eulogy.

This is the memory I will keep.

Garage Sales, or Making Yourself Feel Better about Getting Rid of Things

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a hard time getting rid of things.  I am sentimental about everything, and I also suffer from that frequent female "I'll wear that again someday" delusion.  I also happen to have a ridiculous number of books, very few of which I want to get rid of.  All this tumbles up into overcrowding, lack of space, and the necessity of getting rid of things.

There are a lot of ways to get rid of things: giving them to friends or relatives (usually I'm on the receiving end of the relatives part, which explains why I have some old lady clothes in my goodbye pile); donating them to some sort of worthy cause, whether it be thrifting, a homeless shelter, whatever place seems acceptable; or outright throwing it in the trash.  However, I will be having a garage sale.

Google Images is pretty accurate.

I'll be the first to admit, I don't really even enjoy going to garage sales.  I never seem to find anything good, unlike most of my relatives.  I hate the inanity of people trying to quibble over fifty cents (I am not a haggler.  Just pay the price and be done with it).  And generally there's a fair amount of heat and sun involved, which is no good for a pasty person like myself.

Now, I'm just out of college and flat-broke, which explains most of my reasoning behind having a garage sale rather than donating all of my stuff.  But as I was preparing for the garage sale (I'm not going to lie, I'm still not done and I only have about two days to finish.  Whoops.), I realized a garage sale really has more to it.  A garage sale, and the act of a random stranger purchasing that which you no longer care for, validates your caring for it in the first place.  Someone else's desire for an item means it was okay to hang on to the item, because at some level, it has a value.  It's a lot easier to give something up if it means someone else wants it.  At the end of the day, that's all most of us really want, right?  Validation, appreciation, affirmation - it's an emotional human need, and it carries weight.

Even from a stranger at a fifty cent price tag.

A Favor for a Friend

I knew a girl in high school named Anna.  Actually, I went to school with her little sister Katie, and I didn't know Anna that well except for the fact that she took my gorgeous senior pictures.  Anyway, through the magic of Facebook, we've kept in touch (because what else is Facebook for but talking to people you barely talked to in high school in the first place?).

Anna is one of those inspirational people, the kind you never think you'd actually know - she works for Feed My Starving Children, runs ANOTHER non-profit organization to help abandoned children in Africa, and at 25 years old is in the midst of adopting a Ugandan orphan with her husband.  Talk about being stretched thin, right?

Except it gets thinner.  Anna and her husband David thought their adoption process would take a couple years, so they planned out how they would go about raising the $30,000 it would take to rescue a child and grow their family.  Except the years of waiting they thought they had only lasted about five months.

Anna and David have a little boy waiting for them.  For them, specifically.  They have seen his picture, they know his name, and they have decided that this is their son - now they need to go get him.  The $20,000+ they have left to raise, they now need to raise by June so that they can travel to Uganda and pick up their son before the Ugandan courts close for a time.  They have come up with a simple idea to raise the money called Donate 2, Invite 25.

Anna and David are asking that you donate just $2 toward their adoption fund, then invite 25 friends to do the same.  The results would be exponential - if just 25 people invite 25 people, who in turn invite 25 people and all those people donate $2, their adoption will be fully funded.  There are other ways to help: their website features jewelry, shirts, and Ugandan-made gifts that all support their adoption, and there are instructions on how to donate Delta Skymiles you won't use (the airfare alone will cost them over $5000).  

So consider this my invitation to however many see this page; everyone is invited to help save this child.  Donate as you can, but please, please, share away on Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, wherever.  Anna and David just want to meet their son.

Graduating and Packing and UNpacking, Oh My!

Well in the blog description, I wrote "I firmly believe something about life is always changing."  Or, in this case, a lot of somethings.  I graduated from college four days ago.  Six days ago, I was quite literally still taking tests, and now I have gone through Baccalaureate and Commencement, packed up ALL of my things, scrubbed my apartment (which is now no longer even mine because I signed the papers and handed in my keys), driven 250 miles back to my parents' house, and begun the ridiculous process that is moving an entire apartment's worth of crap into one bedroom.  Oh, and begun truly fretting about the whole finding a job thing.  Update: In between drafting this post and posting it, I actually DID get a part-time job and some other opportunities opened up as well.  More on that another blog.

The unpacking thing is miserable.  Because I have so much crap, I cannot merely unpack the boxes/bins/bags and put things away.  I  have to go through everything in my room and clean out, throw out, donate, and reorganize.  Typically, I would be okay with that as I love organizing things, but in this case, I've had to face some ugly truths about myself, including the following:

1. In the past several years (while earning my Bachelor's degree) I have spent, at most, four months at home.  My theory throughout that time was apparently "stick it in a pile and clean it up later."
2. I have an obsession with Post-Its/mini-notebooks/notepads that is bordering on dysfunctional (I already knew about the addiction, I just didn't realize how bad it was, as demonstrated by the picture below - and the picture barely does it justice.).
3. I get WAY too emotionally attached to things.  It's a bit insane how much crap from elementary, junior high, and high school I have saved.  At one point, I apparently thought saving every test and paper with an A on it was a good scheme.  Believe me, I do not have the space necessary for that.  Also on the list of things that are weirdly hard for me to throw away are socks, journals from sixth grade, jewelry I have never worn, and any movie stub.
4. I cannot get rid of anything that I, my nephew, or my future children might want OR that may have another useful purpose after a bit of refashioning.  I am certain this is one of the genetic quirks passed on by my mother, as she often joins me in my reusing pursuits. (I'll blog more about this later - make your own notepads; this combines basically everything I love).

It starts to feel a bit like I should have my own episode of Hoarders.  Four bags of garbage later, I swear the piles have not gotten any smaller.  As much as it annoys me to no end, I can't really be mad about #3 or 4.  Being thrifty and frugal in the economy can only be good, right?  And at least if I'm attached to something, it means I care.  Finding ways to mesh all these sides of myself and situations together is just part of the beautiful mess.

My stash from #2.  This doesn't even include the DIY ones.

I haven't finished unpacking yet either.  Who knows what I'll find?