CMcL

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Posts Tagged ‘sunsets’

13 results.

Talking to the Wall

by CMcL on October 23, 2011 at 11:34 PM

Pictures from Inside

Lately there’s been a rash of people posting letters to their 16-year-old selves online. “Dear Me, It gets better.” “Dear Me, You will get through this. Don’t worry so much about your weight.” “Dear Me, He’s not right for you. He will destroy your soul and leave you thinking it was your fault. Run.”

While I’m no stranger to navel-gazing (People’s Exhibit A: THIS ENTIRE SITE), I can’t help but feel that the whole “what I would say to my younger self” conceit is, well, pretty useless, for various reasons. I mean, aside from the obvious fact that one cannot literally go back in time and change anything. Even if that were possible, and even in the highly unlikely event that teenage C had the capacity to take any such advice and encouragement to heart and act upon it — what then?

Is there value in considering what would have happened, what might have happened? The only possible utility I can see in such self-indulgent whimsy is cautionary example, but caution is ever wasted on the young. “Learn from my mistakes,” we say to the current generation, which in turn rolls its eyes just as we did.

Write your own letter. Would you have listened to you?

Dear C,

None of your suicide attempts will succeed, nor will they result in any effective mental health care or family support.

The police, the State, the psychiatric hospital, and the group home will do absolutely nothing but make your relatives resent you for embarrassing them.

Your father will never acknowledge that what he did was abuse. Don’t waste years trying to punish him.

Your mother is mentally ill. Don’t base your idea of normal on her.

Your siblings will always see you as the black sheep. Don’t give yourself a lifetime of grief trying to fit in and maintain relations with them.

You are, in actual fact, intelligent and attractive. Don’t believe you have to have sex with everyone who tells you so because no one ever will again.

God loves you unconditionally. Come to him sooner rather than later.

Sincerely,
Grownup C with decades of scar tissue.

P.S.

No one will ever care about your school attendance record. Don’t sweat the demerits.

└ Tags: relatives, sunsets, water

1 Comment

Go

by CMcL on October 14, 2011 at 1:14 PM

Conversations

The last words ever spoken to me by my own flesh and blood, after a large natural disaster left me homeless. (P.S. The Red Cross did not, in fact, help me.)

└ Tags: hurricanes, relatives, sunsets, vehicles, water

Comment

Sudden Memory

by CMcL on October 2, 2011 at 8:55 PM

Pictures from Inside

Although I have a good life and good friends and a good job and good hobbies, I still spend a lot of time alone. That, combined with the fact that my car radio doesn’t work, results in me providing my own life soundtrack much of the time. When I’m solo, I talk to myself, whether I’m driving or cooking or hiking through the woods on a photographic trek. Sometimes I sing. Sometimes I pray. Sometimes I try to be still (Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God”).

But stillness doesn’t come naturally to me, and so even when I’m quiet on the outside, my mind is often racing. Not like running a marathon, with a clear goal or finish line in mind, or even a logical progression from Point A to Point B, but much more like running away from something, running from some pursuing agent, running aimlessly with no direction other than away, away, away. During those times, when my thoughts are crashing blindly into the fruit carts that line the streets in my head and careening off passersby, memories intrude. Unbidden, they reach up and grab me like zombies coming out of manholes, and I can never shake them off. I have no choice but to stop, stop and remember.

And just like that, a sudden memory:

I was eleven or twelve, sleeping in one day. I never had a real bed. Throughout my childhood, I slept in what I later learned was an institutional cot. It was small, smaller than a twin-size bed, with a foam mattress a couple of inches thick, and a wire spring. I could lift it up on one end to make more space in my bedroom, like Linda Hamilton in Terminator II doing chin-ups in the insane asylum, though this was long before that movie came out. I vaguely knew that other kids had real beds, but still hadn’t quite grasped the fact that we were poor and that’s why we didn’t have things like other people had.

From my room that day, I heard my mother’s and sister’s voices downstairs, thought I heard them say the word “boiler.” Groggy with sleep, I remained in bed, but soon got up and realized that I was alone in the house. My mother seldom went outside. The addled abacus of my mind started adding things up, and I imagined that there was something wrong with the boiler in the cellar, that it was about to explode and my mother and sister had left the house, leaving me there. I was in a panic and called my brother across town, wanting to know if anyone had heard from my mother, if they knew whether something was wrong.

It didn’t occur to me that day that my mother would never, ever leave me alone in the house if she knew there was any danger. I loved my mother and I knew that she loved me (my sister, not so much), but for some reason in that moment, I was afraid that I had been left alone to die. Those were the sort of thoughts that I had, all the more bizarre because of how specific they were. Those were the places my mind had learned to go, before puberty and the craze of hormones could be blamed for anything I thought or did.

Not long after, my mother and sister came home. I don’t remember where they had gone. I only remember the terror. Perhaps tellingly, my paranoid ideation went unremarked. In more than twenty-five years, this memory has never left me.

This is the new Sunday feature: Glimpses into my head. Be afraid. Be very afraid. But enjoy the bigger pictures.

└ Tags: birds, relatives, sunsets, water

2 Comments

Tales of the BossLady: Bliss, Ignorance

by CMcL on July 3, 2011 at 8:43 AM

Tales of the BossLady

Come and listen to my story ’bout a BossLady,
Poor woman almost had a Master’s Degree,
Then one day she would place a classified,
And I was dead broke so I happily applied.

For the job, that is. Real estate. Property values.

Well, the first thing you know a hurricane blew through
BossLady said, “Let’s work from home! You too!”
Said, “You’ll be comfy in our dirty living room!”
So I gritted up my teeth and settled in with gloom.

For the job, that is. Too close for comfort.

A while back, I posted a story entitled Ignorance, Bliss in which BossLady tried to convince me that my “complicated” filenames made it difficult for clueless AOL users to retrieve files when we email them. She persisted with this theory in the tale entitled When The Assistant’s Away…, maintaining her erroneous belief that this is an ongoing and severe problem.

Meanwhile, all this time I have been blithely nodding and “Mmmmmm”ing along to these comments and continuing with my own filenaming system and my own method of dealing with AOL users: Including an HTML anchored link in the body of the email. As I mentioned in Ignorance, Bliss, I resolved not to bother mentioning this to BossLady as I’m far too busy during the day to explain basic HTML to her.

So nowadays, when we email .pdf files to people, there are really only three occasions when the recipient can’t access the documents:

The person does not have Adobe Acrobat/Reader installed on their computer (and is too stupid to be walked through the process of installing it);
I was out of the office, so BossLady attempted to send the email herself and screwed it up by sending an attachment, which a lot of these people can’t or won’t open; or
I was out of the office, so BossLady attempted to send the email herself but didn’t include an anchored link because she doesn’t know how to do that, and the customer was too stupid to understand “copy and paste the link into your address bar.”

Unfortunately, this past week, the subject (“Lots and lots and lots of people can’t access the files we send and it’s because of the filenames”) came up yet again. See, we had a long holiday weekend, and I realize how much of a jerk I sound like here, but when I’m not there, things just don’t get done right. Electronic files don’t get saved; manila folders get filed in places they don’t belong, or worse, stashed in a pile on BossMan’s desk and buried under junk mail and newspapers; BossMan (only marginally tech-savvy himself) eschews the streamlined process of emailing documents altogether because I’m not there to handle it for him, so he sends faxes instead, which builds up mounds of unnecessary paper volume and makes all the documents impossible to read because they’ve been faxed back and forth repeatedly; and BossLady spends literally HOURS rearranging my carefully formulated systems FOR NO REASON other than the fact that she is an admitted control freak who can’t let go of things.

Another thing that happens when I’m not there is BossLady attempting to email people herself. And this past week she regaled me with yet another tale in which a poor clueless AOL user was unable to retrieve the document she tried to send, and couldn’t open the attachment either when she tried it that way, and the natural solution to this “ongoing problem” was obviously for me to just start using her filenaming system already. Because things like capital letters and underscores are confusing and blah blah blah blah SHUT UP, I screamed in my head.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and explain anchors to her at that point, knowing that it would waste a large chunk of time, but hoping that in the end she would just give it up already and stop harping on the filenames issue.

And I was right — it took me at least forty-five minutes to get through the whole spiel, because she constantly interrupts and starts down another path because she thinks she knows what you’re about to say, and then interrupts to interject comments of the “Oh, well, yeah, I knew that, I’m just a little out of practice” variety.

Come on now. Basic HTML. is for bold, starts a new paragraph, and <A HREF=> makes an anchor, or link. They teach you this right after “Hello, world!” for heaven’s sake.

So here’s BossLady: “You really need to stop putting underscores in the filenames and stop using capital letters because people can’t see the underscore and they try to type it in the address bar by hand and –”

Me: “Well actually, I’ve started adding an HTML anchored link to the files in the emails I’ve been sending out, because AOL parses the HTML in the body –”

BossLady, who “almost has a Master’s Degree in computer science,” who has dozens of domains registered, who allegedly worked as a tech contractor and a DBA for a famous hardware company: “Anchored…?”

Me, a person who has had almost no formal post-secondary education: “…You know, ‘A HREF,’ an HTML anchor?”

BossLady’s Brain: You’re trying to confuse me with technobabble to make me go away. I’ll call you on it.

BossLady: “What is an anchor?”

BossLady’s Brain: Ha HA! Check MATE, Audacious Assistant!

I really do feel, sometimes, like BossLady thinks she and I are engaged in a battle of wills in a technological Thunderdome, and the battle will be to the death (“Two techies enter. One techie leaves”).

After I showed her a printout of what an AOL user sees when I email them a link, she became enthralled with the concept and wrote down the syntax so she wouldn’t forget to use it herself in the future.

Again, this is basic HTML. Hello, world! This text is red! <A HREF=”http://cnn.com”>This is a link</A> to my favorite site!

And the BossLady Priceless Comment of the Day, after I demonstrated that this method actually works for emailing AOL users: “Wow, you really did a lot of research on this!”

└ Tags: birds, bosslady, sunsets

4 Comments

See a Dolphin

by CMcL on May 4, 2011 at 9:51 AM

Conversations

Pay no attention to the headless dog, you should be lookin’ for dolphins.

└ Tags: sunsets, water

2 Comments

SAT Results

by CMcL on February 11, 2011 at 1:00 AM

Conversations

This was in the olden times, when the top score was 1600 and they didn’t let you use calculators and your relatives made a point of reminding you how you weren’t as smart as the rest of the family.

(Housekeeping note: I went back and added tags to all my old posts, so in the event that you’re looking for a particular comic, say, the one with the cat making a hilarious face, you can check the cats tag.)

└ Tags: relatives, sunsets, water

1 Comment

Tales of the BossLady: Adventures with Norton

by CMcL on February 6, 2011 at 1:00 AM

Tales of the BossLady

Tales of the BossLady: Adventures with Norton

Tales of the BossLady are anecdotes from my brief career assisting a rather frustrating woman in her real estate business. She claimed to “almost have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science,” but as the months wore on, I wondered increasingly how true that was. This all happened (and was written) a long time ago, but not, as you might think, in a galaxy far, far away.

At one point, while I wasn’t there, BossLady rather arbitrarily decided that she was going to “get rid” of Norton Antivirus on the computer that I use. She had gotten it into her head that Norton was somehow screwing up the email program. (In fact, the email program was fine, but BossLady simply does not know how to configure Outlook Express at all.)

However, after she uninstalled Norton, she found that the computer no longer had access to the Internet. She assumed that she had somehow gotten a virus. And she spent all night and all morning trying to figure out what was wrong, and she downloaded (via dialup) a new, free (and most likely crappy) antivirus program that took three hours to run, only to turn up nothing at all. Duh, she didn’t have a virus. But she was convinced that Norton had fouled something up and allowed a virus in, and she never liked Norton to begin with, yadda yadda.

So she was freaking out, and BossMan was getting pissed off, and BossLady’s shrieking at him that there are “three different problems!” I think one problem was the loss of Internet on my computer, and problem two was the fact that “email doesn’t work on any of these computers,” and I am not sure what the third one was.

I did what I believe was the right thing by just sitting there in my chair and listening to the bickering, knowing that the two of them would be going to lunch soon. Sure enough, they left, with that stupid free program still running. (BossLady is ALWAYS downloading free programs all over the place, using them once, and forgetting about it. The taskbar is chock full of quietly-running programs that open on startup. No wonder the computers get fouled up. I hope the Nigerians never find her email address, because badness will ensue.)

So after they were gone and I had the run of the place for a few hours, I went to the second computer, the one that’s brand new, and configured Outlook Express to run BossMan’s email. And it worked just fine. BossLady just didn’t know what she was doing.

After my computer had finished running the free antivirus program (turning up nothing), I spent a little while poking around in the logfiles, looking at the Event Manager, seeing the exact moment when Internet access was lost the night before when BossLady uninstalled Norton. I couldn’t figure out what to do, so I went to the second computer and did a simple Google search. In a couple of minutes, I found a site that talked about this very problem. Turns out BossLady was right, in a way: When you uninstall Norton, it leaves a few things behind that cause problems like this. But the solution was simple, I just did some stuff in the network connections and my computer had Internet access again. And then I configured Outlook Express to work on my computer too, so by the time BossLady got back I was all, “Yeah, everything’s back to normal again.” And she was grateful, but the fact remains, she didn’t know what she was doing, and still doesn’t.

Just how hard is it to “almost” get a Master’s Degree in Computer Science, anyway?

Let me hasten to point out that no, I don’t know everything. You might get the impression that I think I’m smarter than everyone else; a lot of people have felt that way about me over the course of my life, but it’s not the case. I’m confident in my own abilities and knowledge, but most importantly, I know when I don’t know what I’m doing. I know when I don’t know something, and unlike BossLady, I don’t BS and try to act like I know what I’m talking about when I don’t. I acknowledge my limitations. If I don’t know something or don’t understand something, I will admit it. And I am always willing to learn, hence the Googling in this case.

Of course, I realize that it must be difficult to admit one’s limitations to an employee. But still. Think before you leap, or in this case, before you uninstall. And learn how to use Google.

└ Tags: beaches, bosslady, sunsets, trees

1 Comment