Talk Thursday: There's A Light At The End Of The Tunnel...

...and it's a backscatter X-ray machine.

Really, even though it's Talk Thursday, there's only one topic allowed by the general media this week. If you're CNN, MSNBC or even some random blogger in Nowhere, Texas, the only thing anybody's talking about is airport security, or lack thereof. It's like there's a ban on all other subjects. Or worse, if you're going to talk about anything else you need to submit to a backscatter X ray and an enhanced pat-down before you can--oh, wait. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Sorry if you're reading this over breakfast, but over to the right here we have a scan of Mr.

Naked Guy. I wish I knew his real name because I'd apologize to him for using his, uh, nudidity in my blog without permission. This is apparently what the average traveler looks like in a full body scan, aka a backscatter X ray, aka the nifty new screening machines that are appearing in airports everywhere. The idea is to see if you've got anything hidden under your clothes. As you can see, Mr. Naked Guy doesn't. As you can also see, he carries slightly to the left. I'm sure you didn't need to know that to let Mr. Naked Guy board his flight. In fact, you probably could have gone the rest of your life without knowing that. I certainly could have. But never mind. Obviously Mr. Naked Guy is not a terrorist and letting him on an airplane will not threaten the lives or safety of the American flying public. In short, Mr. Naked Guy is okay-fine with us.

Now, the TSA has repeatedly assured us that the backscatter X ray is perfectly safe, carries a low dose of radiation and won't make anybody sick. What's more, the nude pictures are viewed in a remote location by one guy (for some reason I'm sure it's a guy) who doesn't know you and who deletes the photos as soon as he's sure you don't have any contraband stashed under your breasts or in your crotch. However, if you're not sure you wanna be viewed naked and/or you're concerned about the whole radiation thing, you can Opt Out (this being America and all). If you do, you're given an "enhanced pat-down." What this basically means is that a TSA agent, most of whom work for a little above minimum wage and get essentially no training, will grope you lots of places that your mama said only the doctor could touch you, and even then only if mama said it was okay. Horror stories abound, from the three-year-old (yes, they grope three-year-olds) who couldn't stop screaming to the celebrity magician (Penn Gillette) who was roughed up and then suddenly treated like royalty once they realized who he was.

(Pause here to contemplate the appropriateness of sitting in a Middle Eastern restaurant writing about airport security. In fact, I wonder if it's even legal. There's a police station across the street, too. If I abruptly break off in the middle of a paragraph, you'll know what hap

So what's it going to be then, eh? Nude-O-Scope or public sexual assault? If you think those options are scary, listen to TSA head John "The Pervert" Pistole go so far as to acknowledge that the new screening procedures "may challenge our social norms." He just don't get it, people. I don't know about you, but I'm a lot more afraid of my government right now than I am of terrorists. I haven't been on a plane since July and I may never get on one again at this rate.

Fortunately, there's a backlash starting to happen. This brilliant guy has started "National Opt Out Day," a day of protest scheduled for (naturally) the day before Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year. Rep. Ron Paul, who is by no means my favorite person, has introduced the American Traveler Dignity Act, which states only that the TSA employees who perform the searches are not immune from U.S. law (as in, laws against assault, child pornography, etc.) -- something that would do a lot to stop the kind of overreaching I've been hearing about all week. And Janet Napolitano, whom I met once back when she was a mere lawyer in Arizona, has indicated, at least a little, that there may be some room for compromise here. So there may be hope.

In the meantime, though, we still have to pick. Nude or groped. At this point I'd probably opt for nude. It'd be safer for everybody. That darn purple belt in karate and plenty of post-traumatic stress makes it entirely possible I might forget myself and deck the poor TSA agent who drew the unpleasant task of feeling me up, which would land me in jail and her (presuming it's a her) on the sidelines with an ice pack. If I opt for the Nude-O-Scope, the only person in any danger is the guy in the back looking at the pictures, and if he passes out, it's not like anybody's gonna notice.

Here's a bunch of nifty t-shirts you can buy to get the point across. And the ACLU has free stickers (they always have free stickers) - request yours now for the busy holiday travel season.

Late breaking news! We have a verdict in the Burns case and it's in our favor!! Whoo hoo!!

Talk Thursday (on Saturday): Wide Open Spaces

This is gonna be a short post because I'm about to run out the door to have a pre-Thanksgiving meal with Joan and her cow orkers. Sorry for lateitude, by the way. Trial starts Tuesday on the Burns case and things have just been a little crazy around here. Er, more than usual.

I live in Texas, which despite Montana having stolen the title, is Big Sky country. Seriously, go outside on a Dallas morning and take a look up. Unless you're completely hemmed in by buildings, there it is. Nothing but sky for miles and miles. Well, and the occasional airplane. And, yeah, there's the pollution from all the cement plants down Midlothian way. But still. Lots of sky. And how it does go on.

I kind of keep an eye on the Texas sky. I'm not exactly a stargazer, but I'm familiar with the planets (Jupiter's been particularly bright the past few months) and other wanderers through the solar system (pretty sure I saw a meteorite a few weeks ago, streaking across the night sky and fading out somewhere over my head). This time of year, when the clouds start piling in from the south during warm fronts and the north during cold fronts, we get weird spats of rain and blanketing fog, which make for great sunsets right around evening rush hour. Pink and orange and gold with little accents of purple as the night closes in. Good stuff. Better than the old San Diego sky, anyway, which was always clear and sunny and completely devoid of stars because there was so much light. No variety, in other words.

The concept of wide open spaces, and particularly, emptiness, gets discussed in Buddhism a lot. Not to be annoying, but true emptiness is empty even of your idea of emptiness. (Yes, I know. Don't think about it too much.) In fact, form is emptiness, and emptiness is also form. Emptiness is the pure potentiality of the universe, its ability to become anything. Ironic that the subject of wide open spaces should come up in the Talk Thursday circle, because Bro. ChiSing, my favorite Buddhist monk, just did a dharma talk on this very subject a couple of weeks ago. Here's a link to the audio version, and another link to the transcription (done by yours truly, in my lighting-fast fingers mode) for the hearing impaired. Not that I can

promise the whole concept of emptiness/wide open spaces/form/ pure potentiality will make any more or less sense after you listen to the dharma talk, but I enjoyed it, anyway.

To the right here, we have an image of Buddha among the stars, his mind grown so vast (and empty) that he's become the entire universe. This is from the Osho Zen tarot deck, which is gorgeous to look at but kind of hard to use as far as telling fortunes and all that. But it's a great illustration of pure potentiality and the Zen of emptiness. Remember, kids, an empty head isn't always a bad thing. I'fact sometimes it's the thing we all aspire to.

This Blog Post Does Not Have A Title.

So I heard from my ex coworker the other day. He has a new job, which is much better than the old job and pays a lot more. And he's happy. Which is good. Everyone should be happy, especially at work, because we all spend a lot of time at work. If you're miserable at work you're going to be miserable in general, and life is just too short. Quit a job if it's not fun. My job is fun, even though it's sometimes a little stressful. But certain jobs take certain personalities and not everybody's right for every job. I was miserably unhappy as a credit card collector for Bank of America, for example, even though I was shockingly good at it. (Why? Because I believed everything a cardholder told me, and if they said they could only send me ten dollars I said that was fine. In short, I was easy. I was also cheap.)

Something else about my ex coworker. He stumbled across this blog. My fault, I accidentally sent him an email from the account that has the address in the .sig instead of the Serious Professional One that just has a Serious Professional .sig. And, uh, he's kind of not exactly happy about how he was portrayed here.

Remember back a couple of weeks ago when I stated that I didn't know how safe it was to be writing about this stuff? That I might attract the attention of somebody important, somebody who might give me a hard time? Well, case in point. I go to some lengths to keep Work Life separate from Writing Life. I don't "friend" the Law Firm on Facebook, I don't deal with things literary on work time. I don't even talk about Writing Life during Work Time, unless somebody else brings it up, and then watch the ensuing (and amusing) scramble as I change the subject as quickly as possible. Plenty of reasons for that but the big one is I'm just used to it; it's been a semi-secret for years. Besides, when Writing Life and Work Life bump into each other the consequences are usually messy.

In this case it's safe to say I really screwed up. Yeah, yeah, First Amendment, white American child of privilege, freedom of the press and all that. Glenn Beck has freedom of the press, too. Doesn't mean he uses it well. My point, and I do have one: I either should not have written about my ex-coworker, or I should not have stupidly sent him the link to this blog. I can't exactly take it back at this point, but I can and should apologize. So, ex-coworker, if you're still reading, I am sorry I hurt your feelings. I do like you, I'm glad you are happy and I hope your future days are warm and productive. Namo amitabha Buddhaya.

Talk Thursday: The Story Of My Life.

For today's Talk Thursday topic, I'm instructed to "think of the Smashmouth song," which of course being practically Methusthelean in age, I have never heard. So I "googled" the lyrics. Here they are. While I can't say all of that happened to me, I can still relate to quite a bit of it. Like the part about one's checking account being overdrawn. Well, mine isn't--yet--but let's just say it would be really really awesome if Joan's pay check hit early this week. And the part about finding the car and then not being able to find my keys. Half the time I'm positive there are car key gnomes that deliberately sneak your car keys out of wherever you put them and hide them places you could swear you haven't been in a week. The rest of the time, though, I take my meds.

Today I ended up at the pool with a neatly packed backpack full of all the stuff I needed EXCEPT for my little bag of jewelry. For this avid beader, walking around with no jewelry feels like what an ordinary woman would probably feel like walking around stark naked. Yet I could swear, I packed up my little black and crystal netted necklace and my little black and silver earrings and my wine colored bracelet that matches my wine colored pants, and tucked it into the outer flap of my backpack with my little pill box and my lucky coin and my hairspray. Still, when I got out of the pool, I found the pill box and the hair spray but no lucky coin and no jewelry. When I got home, I found out that I'd left the little bag on my dresser, next to my lucky coin. Why I remembered to stuff my pill box in there is beyond me, but it's a good thing I did or I'd have been even later to work than I already was. One Does Not Go To Work Without One's Meds. It's noisy enough in my head with the volume control fully engaged, if ya get mah drift.

And yeah, okay, the Jen as absent minded professor thing is amusing, but I like life more when I'm calm and mindful and deliberate and doing things slowly, one at a time, like Thich Nhat Hanh says. Which isn't all that often, but at least I try. And occasionally patience is rewarded. After all these months with my annoying coworker, putting up with his endless sad stories about how patently unfair it was that he had to work for this crummy law firm, he suddenly up and resigned. He gave actual notice, by which definition he could have stayed a week or so longer, but oddly enough, management didn't want him to. Indeed, they could hardly wait to get him out the door. And the lack of having him around has been almost dizzying.

Have you ever lived with something unrelentingly negative for so long that it just becomes part of the atmosphere? And then all of a sudden it's gone, and only then do you realize how bad it was? I can come up with two analogies, one lofty and one mundane: Clinton winning the Presidency in 1992, and getting new tires and a spin balance on my old Toyota pickup. Watching the Democratic convention unfold in North Dakota, thanks to my uncle's brand-new (at that time) satellite TV, I saw Mr. Clinton come to the podium amidst a surge of energy that was palpable and said to myself, "There's our next President." I realized then how utterly draining the last twelve years had been. Likewise, dealing with my temperamental truck that had needed new tires for months since I'd been in a wreck: Pulling out of the service station, I felt like I was gliding along on a pane of glass. "Wow, it must have really been bad before," I said to myself.

That's kind of what this is like. Sure, I freaked out six ways to Sunday when I thought I might be handling a double case load again, but my boss Dave has put my mind at ease about that; "Who told you you were handling both case loads? Nobody? Well, then why did you assume that? Okay, then calm down." I'm really starting to like the guy, which is funny considering how much we didn't hit it off at first.

Incidentally, here's a pic of (right to left) Indiana Jen, boss Dave (as the Joker) and his case manager Sal (as El Mariachi) on Halloween. See why I like the guy? That costume took some serious work. Plus, he stayed in character, to the point of greeting one of the suited partners (just come from a hearing) with, "We meet again, Batman."

Anyway, other people in the firm are now coming and talking to me and telling me they had the exact same issues with him that I did. Not that he did a bad job or that he was slow or anything like that, but just the unrelenting negativity. And the lack of getting it. As in, this is the reality of working at this particular law firm at this particular time in this particular century; accept it or get out. As I believe I've stated a couple of times before, I was and still am fine with it. My only real complaint, and it is minor, is that they aren't paying me as much as I want. I made more at a former job, so part of me still thinks I should be getting paid that amount, but the rest of me has pretty much gotten over it because jobs are scarce right now and this is a really good one no matter how much they're paying me. Ever heard the expression, "my way or the highway"? Well, it isn't my way because it's not my law firm, but that's the gist of it. And I could go into the whole doctrine of nonattachment and walking the middle way thing here, and quote Buddha half a dozen times, but I won't. Let's just say it's better for everybody that my annoying coworker and the law firm have parted company. I hope that if I encounter somebody like him in the future, I will find some way to simply not deal with him, rather than let him suck my energy like a vampire. Stregoi. Whatever.

(Hey, it came to my attention yesterday that the word that means the closest thing to "vampire" in old Romanian is "stregoi," and the word that means the closest thing to "witch" in the same language is "stregoica". Now, in Italy, there's a form of witchcraft called "strega", so what is the common root of all of those words? Streg? Strego? And what does that word translate as in the original Latin/Roman? Inquiring minds want to know.)

So coming back to the original point (and I do do that, occasionally), one might wonder how I became the dumping ground for my annoying coworker's complaints in the first place. Well, my friends, people will do that to me. Normal people. Weird people. Any people. On airplanes. In offices. On jury duty. In libraries, even. They walk up to me, sometimes without even introducing themselves, and begin talking about their many woes. After years of this, I have determined that it has to be the tattoo. The invisible one on my forehead that says, "Your sad story welcome here." And that, ladies and germs, seems to be the story of my life. Rock on.

Jen, Jimmy Carter and A Lachrymose State of Affairs

I notice I often start out a blog post with, "Most people don't..." and then go on to explain how I am not most people. Well, we already know I'm not most people, so let's just skip all that and get directly to the point. Yesterday I met President Carter, took some lousy pictures of the guy with a shaky cell phone cam and made a public mess of myself. Okay? Okay. Moving on:

Mr. Carter has a new book out. It's called "White House Diary" and even though I'm only into early 1977, it already has my vote for

the next Book O' The Decade. There's what you remember, there's what you think you remember, there's what they told you in school, and then there's what actually happened. Jimmy Carter was the first President I was aware of, the first campaign I followed, the first time I picked a favorite, and the first time I announced anything remotely resembling a political point of view. According to my mom, I walked into a dinner party around the time of the Democratic National Convention in 1976 (shortly after the Freedom Train blew through town but before Mr. Carter clinched the nomination) and announced that I liked Democrats better than Republicans because they didn't wear suits and they were real people. I was, I think, about eight. Well, look, folks, I probably wasn't talking about Walter Mondale or Teddy Kennedy. I was talking about the guy who would eventually walk from his swearing-in to the White House, the guy who started out as a peanut farmer in Nowhere, Georgia. Mr. Everyman Himself. James Earl Carter, Junior. Jimmy to his friends. And we were all his friends.

Okay, say what you want about his presidency. He was in a bad spot from the get-go (a bit like Obama) and he didn't get a lot of cooperation in making the bad situation better (a bit like

Obama). Foreign relations stuff distracted him from very real

battles at home (a bit like Obama). But was he the worst president in history? Hardly. Harding. Jackson. Hoover. Just to name a few. And has a better man ever held the office? Uh, no. (Sorry, Obama. You're close, though.) And has there ever been a better ex-President? I don't think so. Hard to imagine George W., or even George H.W., spending his retirement time making sure the poor have a decent place to live. And has he retired? No, he has not. He's got to be in his late eighties/early nineties, and it doesn't appear as though the guy has even slowed down very much.

All of these were reasons that brought me to Sam's Club (of all places) in Grapevine, Texas (of all places) yesterday evening. Not being a member of Sam's Club, I'd snagged a copy of the book from a local Barnes and Noble. I got unbelievably lost on the way there; my directions sucked, traffic was insane and I ended up driving around a hospital parking lot going, "It has to be right here someplace" until I chanced to see the Sam's Club sign. On the other side of the freeway. Naturally. I finally got there just after they'd let the crowd (and it was a big crowd; probably two hundred people by my guess) go in. We were all shepherded through a fire door in the back of the building, guarded by Secret Service guys (very obvious in their formal black suits) and local police.

Now, a quick word about me and Sam's Club, or any big box store, or pretty much any situation with large quantities of people, goods and noise all crammed together. SO not a winning situation for me. I tend to have meltdowns. Had one at the State Fair a couple of weeks ago, in fact, on the Midway. Too hot too loud too many colors too many people too much noise too much everything arrrgh. Usually when this happens I freeze up, Joan notices and says, "Is everything okay?", I say "NO!" and start flapping my arms like a deranged penguin attempting flight and Joan grabs me and steers me to someplace quieter before I completely freak out. If Joan isn't there, of course, the freezing-up is not interrupted, and I just get steered around by whoever's there and say "yes, ma'am" and "no, sir" a lot until it occurs to me that if I got out of here I would not be freaking the hell out and then I find a door and run for my life to someplace safe, generally the car, where I lock myself in and hide until I calm down and can once again act like a rational human being.

So there I was at Sam's Club, already a stressful situation, made worse by the layers of security, and about to meet Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter was on the other side of a row of barrier tape, some ten or so feet away from the crowd. His minions took the books away from us, and the Secret Service guys checked them to make sure they weren't loaded before they took them to his table. He signed the books while the minions indicated which person they belonged to. He looked up from each book to the owner and thanked them for coming. I'm already well into the "yes, ma'am" and "no, sir" phase at this point, and I probably looked like a scared rabbit across the barrier tape when I said, "Thank you" to Mr. Carter, got my book and let myself be herded over to the little section that was set up for the taking of photos. I was still

standing there, blinking a lot and clutching my book as though someone was going to take it away from me, when I realized that I didn't get to say what I came there to say. Which was a shock. Up until that moment, I didn't know I'd come there to say anything.

So I got back in the line, which was shorter now. The Secret Service guy tried to take my book and I held onto it. "I just need to say something," I said. He started to frown. "Nothing bad," I added in a hurry. He was still frowning, but he went up to the table and said to Mr. Carter, "This young lady wants to say something."

Young lady. Dude. Ya flatter me.

So I leaned out as far over the barrier tape as I could go without falling on my face and I said, "Mr. Carter, you've been a hero of mine since I was nine years old, and a lot of people breathe a lot easier because of everything you've done. Thank you."

He looked surprised. He blinked. He said, "What a nice thing to say." And then he smiled at me. Pa rum pa pum pum.

I managed not to really start bawling until I was locked in my car. But it was a close thing.

Talk Thursday: Things That Make Me Go, "Hmmm ..."

• Why did they name them the Texas Rangers when plainly the whole state does not root for them? I mean, there's the Houston Astros and the Fort Worth Cats and who knows how many other local teams. Course, the Arlington Rangers sounds kind of wordy and the Dallas Rangers is just plain geographically inaccurate, but still.
• Why does the main pitcher for the Giants look like a 17-year-old surfer dude? He's gotta be at least 26 in real life. Plus it's awfully cold to go surfing off the coast of San Fran, though I imagine people do it. (Heck, I did it in San Diego and it was pretty cold there too.) Seriously, a nice haircut and maybe some facial hair and he'd look much more mature. Give it some thought, my prepubescent pitcher friend.
• Why is it, exactly, that I've been feeding feral cats in my back yard for like six years now, and only in the last month have I managed to attract the attention of raccoons? I mean, not that there's anything wrong with raccoons, I just don't want them in my yard. Or my house. Or my attic. Or...
• Is there some ratio of amount of annoying your annoying co-worker is to amount of time they spend with you? Ie, if they can only spend a little time with you, do they ramp up the amount of annoying to maximum, whereas if they're going to hang out in your vicinity for hours, they dial the annoying back to a moderate amount?
• Why does calling in sick so you can sneak off on a job interview make you feel so much more guilty than calling in sick to sneak off to a ball game?
• Observation: Both Lutheran Christianity and Buddhism teach that attaining nirvana and/or going to heaven are obtained by doing very little; in Lutheranism, by accepting God's grace, and in Buddhism, by sitting around, doing nothing, and looking at the floor for a long time. So if I was once a Lutheran, and am now a Buddhist, am I theologically consistent, or just lazy?
• Observation: Cats are not allowed on the table at my house. Yet, I let my big boy, Caesar (@carpefelem) sit on the table behind the laptop when I'm writing. So does this make me a bad mom? And if so, can I get around it by promoting him to chief editor?
• Observation: Everyone in the waiting room in my psychiatrist's office is, by the sheer fact of being there, a little bit crazy. Why, then, do we each slouch into chairs and hunch into little individual bundles of mild hostility and distrust and eye each other as if we might attack at any moment? I mean, it's not like it's exactly a contest. We'll all be the same amount of crazy when we come out the other side. Maybe it's to scare the normal people.
• Do the fish in the aquarium in my psychiatrist's office gradually go insane as they're exposed to so many crazy humans, or does the aquarium glass protect them? And how can you tell one way or the other, seeing as they're, you know, fish?
• Why, in the name of all things holy, am I incapable of going to the post office like a normal human being? Yes, I know, I'm not a normal human being. There's no need to rub it in.
• If there really were an Antichrist, would he be tall and have horns and a tail, or would he be more subtle and crafty and look more like, I dunno, Karl Rove?
• What is it about office parties that causes everybody to revert to their high school personas? We have the grumpy intellectual, the handsome but vapid guy who says "dude" a lot, the girl who'll do it with anybody, the quiet girl who wishes she was the girl who'd do it with anybody, the rebel, the popular kids, the losers, the band kids who sort of hover on the fringe of acceptability, and then the office manager, who somehow ends up being kind of the den mother, I guess. Me, I'm the one with the behavior so unpredictable people say "Hi" and then flinch, not sure if I'll say "Hi" back or suddenly feel some pressing need to run straight into them or, worse, the nearby wall. It's like I never left.
• If meditation is really good for the brain, why aren't I cured yet?

Okay, I'm out of hypothetical questions for the time being. If anybody has an answer for the one about the fish, I'd like to know. Sincerely, I'm feeling bad for the clownfish and the loach.

Mini-post: Raccoon Update

Just thought y'all might want to know I no longer have a raccoon in my back yard.

I now have two raccoons.

Thank you, thank you. Be here all week.