I used to have this list of personal guidelines for Twitter — my personal preferences, not rules for everyone else.  Over time, I’ve bent and/or broken a couple of those guidelines… like, I now follow more than 100 people. I used to think that following more than that wouldn’t allow me to personally interact or catch everything. But, I’ve found that not to be true, so I’ve upped my follow list. There are a lot of interesting people out there and not all of them tweet consistently, so it’s easier to follow more, but I’ll never be that person who follows thousands of people. I still believe in quality over quantity.

And to that end, I won’t just follow someone simply because they follow me. I’m not tweet-easy… tweasy? And I treat Twitter the same way I treat prospective shags — with a thorough once-over.  No one is getting into these twitter pants without an evaluation.

I don’t like Follower’s Remorse; I prefer to be more selective with my follows rather than explain an unfollow later on.  If you talk to me via @reply, I always answer back (or try to, I might miss one or two here and there), regardless of whether or not you’re following me. It’s how I decide if I’m going to follow someone new.  Unless your tweet stream blows me away with it’s awesome wit at first glance, chances are I’ll wait for a few exchanges between us.  Then, if I’ve decided we have rapport, that your twitter stream has info that interests me and you don’t overtweet, play incessant hashtag games or tweet for Jesus, I’ll usually follow you back.  If I don’t, it’s not personal, it just means I haven’t gotten a chance to know you well enough yet or we don’t have a lot in common. Or you like hashtag games. *groan*  (Yes, I’m looking at you, friend of mine who likes hashtag games. Fortunately, yours are actually funny. *wink*)

Yesterday, I was unfollowed by some random guy I’d never heard of, never met and didn’t even know was following me… and he had a handle that begged for mockery.  Upon further inspection he appeared to be, in my opinion, kind of a douche. That’s just my superficial, knee-jerk reaction.  No big loss, but I made a snarky comment about how I was so sad to lose him. Nice? No, probably not.  I’m not perfect.

He replied, “Its Follow For Follow In 2010 Buddy”.  (The lack of punctuation and rampant capitalization speak to my “douche” opinion — but if that’s not enough for you, check the photo.)   It wasn’t so much that he replied — I kind of expected that — it was more the tone, sort of shaming, because I didn’t follow back someone I didn’t even know was following me, though his tone could have been due to my snarky tweet in his general direction.  I don’t care what he thinks, but I don’t understand the “follow or be unfollowed” philosophy, I guess.

I follow a lot of people who don’t follow me back. Quite a few, actually. I follow them because I like their tweets, not because I’m trying to “network” (read: hoard followers). Again, quality over quantity.  Why aren’t they following me back?  I don’t know — they may not realize I’m even following them, may not know who I am, may not care who I am.  That’s ok.  I’m not following them to make a new BFF, though there are some people I follow that I would love to know better. I follow because they’re funny or smart or talk about stuff I’m interested in or… whatever.  I’m not going to throw my sucker in the dirt and unfollow simply because they don’t reciprocate.

After posting those tweets, I got a few surprise “unfollows” from people I was actually considering  following back. We’d shared a few exchanges, they seemed cool, I always replied to them… I was just getting to know them before I made my move.  But before I could reciprocate, I was unfollowed.  That’s ok — to each their own. I wondered if it was my bitchy tweets that made them unfollow or they just lost interest in my shenanigans.  Either way, it’s fine — I’m not going to stop being who I am or tailor my tweets to please other people, though I can see where my response to that guy might have made other as-yet-unfollowed folks a bit incensed.  That was unintentional, but I made my bed… they’re just not in it.

I have no idea where I’m going with this. But I guess I’m just wondering — do you unfollow people because they don’t follow you back?  It seems demanding. I have a ton of spam bots and businesses and things following me, but I don’t follow them back… because that’s what they want. And they never interact with me, so why should I bother? Eventually, they unfollow me… and I’m ok with that. But if you’re a real person who adds me only to unfollow me within a few days simply because I’m not following you back yet — well, I clearly did the right thing in not following you immediately, didn’t I?  Give me a chance to get to know you first!  If you unfollow me because I tweet about bunnies and booze, well… that’s your prerogative, but don’t do it just because I’m not following you back yet.

I won’t follow you simply because you followed me.  I’m not that kind of girl.

We’ve been back online for about a month now and I’ve been enjoying posting there almost daily, so if you are interested in food/fitness reviews, day-to-day weight loss whatever and generally anything to do with food/fitness and healthy lifestyle, check out Put Down the Donut.   You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

I just don’t know what to blog about here right now, things are pretty mundane.  Aside from working out, my life consists of primarily lots of work, which I’m really grateful for.   I do have another site or two up my sleeve slated to launch this year (I hope!).  There are also some major changes happening in the next few months and I’ll certainly need this space to write about the weirdness sure to ensue there.  I hope you’ll stick around!

Over the last several years, I’ve managed to reacquire much of the weight I lost back in 2003… you know, my magnificent achievement and all that jazz.  In fact, I must have lost and gained that same bunch of pounds a few times over during the last 7 years. I’ve eschewed carbs, I’ve counted Points, I’ve made half-hearted attempts at the gym and I’ve continuously, non-stop, talked about when I would reach my goal weight or how I would reach my goal weight, but the bottom line is… I never actually did anything about reaching my goal weight, at least, not with any results that stuck.

I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been so, so busy I’ve had no time for myself — believe me, I really would — but I have to admit: that’s a crock of crap.  There’s time if I make it. There are boundaries I can set with my work and my personal time. I don’t need to DVR every show on the planet. I don’t need to grab take-out, even if it’s Subway, because I’m too tired to grill a chicken breast.  And I’m tired of making excuses not to hang out with people I care about because deep down, I’m embarrassed about the shape I’m in and maybe moreso, ashamed about my failure.

Dun dun DUN. I said the F word. Failure. I lost 97lbs back in 2003 and I failed at keeping it all off. I failed. Failed, failed, failed. They say a fear of failure is the greatest motivator.  But what do you do when the fear of failure is no longer an incentive? What do you do when you’ve already failed? You could get the hell over it and remind yourself that failure is just a result of trying and not trying is worse than sucking. You could say failure is just a word to describe an experience that ultimately builds character and shows that, at the very least, you tried, right? Right?!

So, I’m accepting the failure. I think. I’m working on it anyway. I don’t think anyone welcomes failure, but I have never been one to not accomplish what I set out to achieve for myself. I’ve survived a lot of things, I’ve accomplished a lot of things, but this… this has been my albatross.  I want to let go of that initial “journey” of weight loss (ew, how touchy-feely). It’s been tough because I never reached my goal the first time… I made great strides, but I never actually got there.  My first experience on Weight Watchers was like a Chicago song from the 80′s: good for the first 3 minutes, then trailing on indulgently until fading out interminably.  In hindsight, I’ve been desperately grasping at the success of that first weight loss and well, it’s just over. That chapter is over. I’m almost a decade older, I’m a different person now and I need to start anew.

That first success/failure is a learning experience and a lesson in humility… because I seriously thought I would never go there again! (Oh no, not me!)  A fear I’ve had in losing weight is that I would be a statistic… gaining all my weight back and then some. I’m thankful I didn’t gain it all back — around half of it — but that half is enough to remind me that I need to do something about it. Believe me, I live on the top floor and after 4 flights of stairs I recall fondly my glory days as a size 12. (An aside: since when is 12 a plus-size, by the way?  I’m going to bust my ass to get to my goal weight and still be plus-size? How is that fair?)

I wasn’t going to blog this because it’s… well, rather mortifying… but this weekend, I was in a parking lot and a small child loudly exclaimed, about me, “WOW, mommy, that woman is FAT!” I don’t think I need to explain how I felt.  But if you think that I wished the earth would open it’s giant maw to swallow me and that I hoped that maw would be big enough to accommodate my massive ass, you would be in the ballpark.

I couldn’t be upset with the child. Kids are honest. He was only stating the obvious and while his mom admonished him for saying impolite things, the bottom line is, he’s right.  What am I supposed to do? Go home and cry about it?  Ok, yes, that’s exactly what I did, but then I pulled up my big girl panties (no pun intended) and decided that if I didn’t want children humiliating me in public, perhaps I should quit my whinging and do something about it already.  I refuse to be emotionally undone by a toddler.

I’m so tired of trying. It’s exhausting to spin your wheels. So, then what are my options? Stop trying, get a few dozen cats and become like that woman whose ass fused to the couch? Or shut my proverbial piehole and get on with it? What am I waiting for?  I feel like I’m always waiting for something — I’ll start on Monday, I’ll start on the 1st, I’ll start when I finish this client or that project.  SHUT UP AND JUST GET ON WITH IT.  Cripes.

“Failure is not falling down, but refusing to get up.” — Chinese proverb

He’s always been super friendly. My front door is right at the top of the stairwell, so I often see him walk by through my ‘ice cube glass’ windows near my desk.  When I moved in, he complimented me on the happiness my yellow hibiscus brought him when it bloomed.  And I thought how nice it was that someone even noticed besides me.  He looked like a nice old man, what I envision a “grandpa” to be.

Cut to a week or so later, when I’m tempted into downloading a Sex Offender Locator app for my iPhone. You can see where this is going.  Grandpa indeed.

Not only are there a handful of the usual within a 5 mile radius, there’s one right on the floor of my building. A couple clicks later and I’m looking at the nice man who likes my flowers.

I made sure to read the offenses because I know there are issues with some of the placements of people on those lists — some 18-year-old’s girlfriend was 17 and she had a vindictive dad or… whatever.  I’m familiar with that set-up, but I knew in my heart it wasn’t that. Not only was he old, the offenses were all… icky. It made me sad to think that this seemingly normal man is a pedophile. Or was a pedophile –  have no idea of that sort of thing gets cured, but his mug shot wasn’t from 40 years ago, that’s for sure.

So, I decided that since I didn’t know the whole story (not that one could really defend that kind of behavior, but I don’t know the particulars and don’t want to), I would pretend I just didn’t know this tidbit and continue to be pleasant.  I’d avoided him through some stroke of luck and only saw him once or twice in the last few months since I found out.  Except…

Recently, it seems like I’ve run into him a lot.  Since the new year, I’ve been crazy busy with work and not left the house much. I’m a hermit lately and one day a couple weeks ago I was getting into my car for the first time in a while and the Friendly Pedophile was just getting out of his.  “Oh there you are!  I’m so glad to see you — you know, I almost stopped by your place the other day to see if you were alright.”

Puzzled, I asked, “Oh? Why did you think I wasn’t alright?”

He smiled that big grandpa smile and said, “Well, your car isn’t always here. I usually see your car come and go a lot more and I noticed your car hadn’t moved in several days. I thought you might be ill. I almost came by to check on you, but I thought that might be presumptuous.”

I wasn’t sure how to take that. If I didn’t know what I knew, I would still think it a bit odd though kind, but knowing “grandpa has a magic lap”, even though I’m not his type chronologically, made me a little weirded out.  I smiled and said, “Thank you, I appreciate that. I’m well, though, thanks! I just work from home.”  DOH!  I mentally smacked myself in the face for divulging that bit of information. What a maroon.

About a week later, I was sitting at my desk with my headphones on, singing at the top of my lungs. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a shape walking past my ice cube windows, which I generally ignore, but the shape paused, backed up and stood there for a sec, then waved at me.  It was the Friendly Pedophile and he’d caught me singing Taylor Swift.

A few days ago, I was down at my car, digging through the mail I keep throwing in the backseat, looking for a missing 1099.  When I got in my car, I noted that FP’s car was in his space, but he was not around.  Yet suddenly, silently, he sidled up to me with his grandpa smile, holding an armful of cheap dishtowels from Costco.  “You better clean out that red car there, missy!” he jovially chided.

A little startled, I turned and laughed politely… like you do.  It was like he saw me go to my car… or maybe it was a coincidence.  But he proceeded to tell me how he got all those towels for only $10 at Costco, that they’re thick and what a great deal!  I told him I’d check them out the next time I was at Costco and let the conversation trail off with “have a good day” as I continued to look for my paperwork.

Normally, I’d think he’s just a nice old man who doesn’t get a chance to talk to very many people. I never see him with anyone else. And it makes me a little sad for him, as a fellow person. But then I’m reminded of his mug shot and how gross and abhorrent those things are, that I figure he’s made his proverbial bed.  I can only assume he thinks I don’t know and I probably won’t ever let on that I do.

So, for now I’ll just keep my eyes peeled for him and continue being polite. He’s a human being, after all.  Though I do feel like I’m observed more now than I’d like or realized.

Oh! There he goes… past my window.   This time, no wave, but then, I’m not tempting him with the siren call of a teenage country singer.

What I don’t love is the “new” Target store brand, up & up™.  Target Home products, their former store brand, used to be so good. I could buy any Target knock-off of the fancy brand and know, quite certainly, that it would be just as good.  Since they re-branded their store brand to up & up™, everything’s gone down & down.

Take, for instance, the toilet paper — I used to buy the blue label Target Home brand premium paper, compared to Quilted Northern Ultra.  Not the pink one, compared to Charmin Might-As-Well-Be-a-Towel Ultra Premium, just your garden-variety mid-range bathroom tissue.  It was totally the same as the name-brand, as advertised.  I bought the same brand for years… and a lot of it. Not because I have some weird bathroom habits or I’m a hoarder, but because I have a very staunch 6-roll minimum rule in my house.  At 6 rolls I have to start reminding myself to buy more — if I go below 6 rolls, I’m down to the last square on the roll before I remember to get more.

Sometime, last year I think, they changed to up & up™ and when it came time to buy Ye Old Faithful TP, it was replaced by what I assumed would be the same product in a different wrapper — more like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  This paper is a mere suggestion of what it once was.  It still says “Compare to Quilted Northern Ultra”, but it was like they took one-ply paper, peeled it apart and called it two-ply.  It was like half-ply. I wouldn’t TP a house in this paper, let alone my business.  After enduring it for a full 12-pack, I grudgingly bought yet another 6-pack because it was that or Scott Tissue and sandpaper ain’t my thing.

The next time, I bought the actual Quilted Northern Ultra and found it to be the toilet paper I knew and loved. I just have to get over paying a little more for it. But, in my opinion, I’d rather pay a little more for a quality product.  I believe ‘generic’ store brands can be awesome — take Costco’s Kirkland brand, for instance. Fabulous, especially when their vodka is rumored to be Grey Goose.  It just seems like when Target changed brands, they may have changed manufacturers.  So far, I’ve not tried an up&up product that’s been decent — not the “compare to Glad Forceflex” trashbags (flex? yes. force? laughable.), not the “compare to Ziploc” sandwich bags (the bags separate from the zipper constantly or the zipper is inside out), and certainly not the toilet paper.

I’m curious to know if anyone else has experienced this, or if perhaps my ass is just spoiled.

I skipped the intro about not listening while operating a forklift or whatever, and got down to the business of relaxing. That part of the program was actually quite nice and similar to my own meditation techniques — when I remember to actually use them.  I was way into his soothing, guided affirmations when he said, “You do not want any fatty, greasy, salty, savory, crispy, fattening foods.  You choose to forego sweet, decadent, frosted, sugary, fattening foods.”

I actually started to get a little uncomfortable. First off, when you describe them like that, hell yes, I want them!  But what got me was his Scottish accent.  Every time he said “fattening foods” it came out “fottening feuds”, which kept pulling me out of my relaxation and making me squirmy. “You do not want any shugarrry, sweeet, crrrreeameh FOTTENING FEUDS.”

After a few giggles, I guess I got over it because I don’t remember anything after that for who knows how long until he said “You are now fully awake.”  That prompted me to open my eyes and I put my phone on the nightstand and immediately fell asleep.

I think I slept pretty well — I didn’t dream of Sean Connery like I thought I might.  But I woke up this morning wanting a grreeeasy, sallllty, saaavory, fottening mushroom quesadilla, so I guess it’s not working yet.

When I moved in, I was given one covered parking space on the end, very close to my stairs. Score! To my right is parked a white Miata, circa 1992 or so. It’s in 1992 condition… not bad, but certainly not cherry.

The day after I moved in, while I was unloading things from my (2009) Matrix, a man in a pith helmet with the mullet flaps on the back sidles up to me with this hands clasped behind his back, like he was ice skating in a Rockwell painting.

“So you just moved in, huh?” he says.

“Yes, just yesterday,” I replied.

And then, with a weird knowing grin and the tone of someone hosting a children’s storytime, he said, “Ok, well, don’t you go dinging my car now.”  (wink) “I keep a close eye on my baby,” gesturing to the Miata.

I laughed politely and ribbed him a bit back, assuming he was just trying to be cute. “It’s a deal. Wouldn’t want to mar such a classic!”  Then I wished him a good day and off I went up the stairs.

A few weeks later, as I was pulling into my spot, the man was at this car and we did the neighborly “wave, smile n’ nod”.  He picked up his stuff and headed back to his side of the building, but not before he leaned down as I sat in my driver’s seat and wagged his finger at me through the passenger window.

“Ah- ah- ah!” he chided and motioned toward his car.  He was smiling, but still… mention it once, it’s cute… a second time, it’s a bit odd.  I smiled, then quickly acted busy until he left before I got out of the car.

Several months went by and on occasion, I would see Mr. No-No (as I started calling him after the finger-wag) walking to or from his car and he’d harp on the same joke.  After a while, I started becoming a bit incensed.

Before Christmas, I was out at my car, unloading the groceries and Mr. No-No strolled up and said, “Watch the paint job there, little lady!” with a joking tone.  But you know, I don’t know this guy. I know nothing of him other than his penchant for safari attire and lame sense of humor.  I was over his ‘ding’ obsession, so I turned to him, arms loaded with groceries:

“What exactly is it that you think I’m going to do to your car, sir?  I’ve lived here for months now and we have a good three feet between our parked cars. In case you haven’t noticed, I drive a brand new car.  So why, on this green earth, would I be negligent about my own paint job let alone yours?”

He kind of blinked at me, clearly not expecting me to say more that I usually had. “Well, I… uh…”

“I figure you must have had a poor parking neighbor in the past, but once — it was funny, twice — it was noted, but the tenth — it’s insulting. I appreciate your concern, but please… do not wag your finger at me again.”  I smiled to take the edge off, but he looked positively vexed.

I think he’s one of those nice guys that’s a little overbearing, like someone’s crazy Uncle Ned or whatever, that people indulge way longer than they should and so he doesn’t realize he’s a pain in the ass.  Someone needed to tell the man!

I’ve not seen him much since then… just in passing and both of us are clearly avoiding each other, which is just fine by me. I do wave and smile when I see him, but we don’t really exchange words anymore.

There’s also another parking lot issue I need to address with management today: there’s some motorcycle guy (parked on the other side of Mr. No-No) who leaves at 4:30am for work (I assume) and when he goes, he revs the engine SO loud that it sets off someone’s car alarm.  This alone rips me of out of a dead sleep (and I’m close to the front of the building — I can only imagine what the bedrooms facing the parking lot must hear) but the car alarm sounds so similar to mine, I’m forced to get up and go check it out. I have to get out of bed, go to the door, open it, shove my hand out, push the button on my keys. If that doesn’t work, I have to get dressed, go outside in the cold in my robe and physically go look to make sure it’s not my car and test the locks.  By then, I’m awake.

Then it takes another 30-60+ minutes for me to fall back to sleep, so I may as well just stay up.  This happens at least 2 times a week, sometimes more.  Vroom, Vroom, VRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM, HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK…. and on and on and on.  I am so over it.

However, I do take solace that Mr. No-No probably has his face pressed against his bedroom window whenever this happens, making sure no one is touching his precious Miata.

Like many other non-practicing bloggers, I figured I’d blow the dust off and see if I can post more often this year. I live such an exciting life of bunny-petting and pajama-wearing that I’ve not felt I had anything post-worthy for a while that wasn’t work-related, but there are enough changes coming in 2010 that I might as well bring back the blog.  Twitter is awesome, but viva blogging!

I do like this design, but I could do with a new look around here… it’s time.  Something a little cheerier, don’t you agree?  I’m taking the Muse back to Expression Engine, as well. It turns out WordPress was just a fling for me — thrilling at first, but ultimately mediocre.  So thanks for the interminable upgrades and incompatible plugins, WordPress, but you never forget your first love.

I was reading through my archives over the holiday break. It’s bizarre how different I sound 7 years ago when I first started this blog.  I don’t even know what I was complaining about most of the time.  In hindsight the majority of it is so… cranky.  Funny, sure… but certainly, a collection of unwarranted gripery in the grand scheme of things.

I lost about a year or so of posts during one of my many domain name changes. I’m not sure what possessed me to change my domain name not once, but twice over the last 7 years — boredom I suspect, a desire to reignite the blog spark — but I don’t recommend it. I still have the database those posts live in, I’m just not sure how to get the content out… maybe someday I’ll figure it out.

But of the posts I do have, my favorites are the ones about the various encounters with people I’ve had.  I meet weird people — I can’t help it. I’m one of those people who weirdos gravitate to and I somehow can’t help but engage them myself.  It’s just part of who I am… and I’ve accepted it because it makes excellent blog fodder.

So, here are some of my favorites for your reading enjoyment:

• Love Me Tender
• Fiddy Wouldn’t Front (I think this is Daniel‘s favorite)
• Debbie Diapers and the Amazing Technology Craptactular
• Burgess Fisherman and the Discount Diaper Cream
• Like They Do on the Discovery Channel

If you like those, you can find more under the Characters tag.

Happy 2010!

I remember being about 3 or 4, wearing footie pajamas and standing on the precipice to the living room from the hallway, with my hands clasped together in utter delight, marveling at all the stuff that Santa had brought. I don’t recall much of it now — I think there was a drum that I promptly stuck my drumsticks through and I remember there being a cowgirl hat and boots and one of those little horses on wheels.  But what I distinctly remember is seeing the plate of cookies we’d set out the night before, missing 3 or 4 bites, the milk half empty and the carrot nibbled just enough.

We’ll just gloss over the fact that one of my earliest Christmas memories revolves around food.

On Christmas Eve, my mom and I made cookies together, cutting them out with cookie cutters, cooling them on racks and eventually frosting and decorating them just so.  I remember mom helping me pour Santa’s milk in a smoke-colored highball glass and setting everything out on our rattan coffee table.  I remember so clearly my mom leaning in and the way she smelled like sugar cookies and Jergen’s lotion, reminding me that these cookies were for Santa, as a thank you for my Christmas gifts, as a snack on his long journey. And while I really wanted that green-frosted Christmas tree with the little silver balls that later in life cracked one of my molars, I remember looking wide-eyed at her as I tucked my hand away, nodding in agreement.  We wouldn’t want Santa or Rudolph to go hungry.

In hindsight, it seems all the other reindeer were left to fend for themselves.

Dad would read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, as Rockwell-esque as that seems. It didn’t last forever, perhaps on the first handful of Christmases and a few scattered over the years after that, but I fondly recall him wearing a very red v-neck sweater with a wide-collared shirt underneath, sitting with his leg crossed in a big 70′s velour chair, reading from a thin hard-cover picturebook with little tears in the sleeve.  And when it was over, he’d scoop up my little PJ’d self and tuck me in, allowing sugarplums to dance accordingly, while mom was in the kitchen, pouring the grown-ups some Benedictine in snifters.

Of course, eventually I realized that Dad also enjoyed green-frosted Christmas tree cookies with little silver balls on them and that Rudolph was really my mom, but there’s something distinctly tactile and emotional about that memory of seeing the cookies on Christmas morning, half eaten, milk glass half empty.  I truly believed that Santa had been there, that he’d brought all these wonderful goodies for me, because I was such a good girl.  It was a time that I never questioned anything about myself or my self-worth, about faith or politics or reality.  It encompasses all the wonder I think Christmas should be for little children… pure and wonderous and magical. It makes me happy for Reilly and Carter, that they’ll get a chance to experience that.

It would nice if the holidays could still be like that for everyone.

Doesn’t that sound like every boss you’ve ever hated?  When I remove myself from it and look at it as an observer, I feel like now, if I were in a traditional office, I’d be that boss that no one invites to anything.  Except… I’m usually the girl that people do invite to things, that coworkers and colleagues want to have around. It occured to me the other night that, now that I’m my own boss and I hire people to do things for me,  I’m totally Chandler when he gets his promotion in Friends.

“Perfectionist” ranks up there with “she’s got a great personality” in terms of desirability, and it makes people think you’re an overbearing pain in the ass, but without perfectionists in this world, the Earth would be (and sometimes is) one giant orb of mediocrity. It drives me crazy when the opportunity for greatness presents itself and it’s met with “good enough”.  Why be good enough when it can be great?

Of course, we’re only human and sometimes things won’t be perfect. And I know I am imperfect, despite my many creative efforts to blind you all with my glorious gloriousness.  (*clap clap*  Look over here!  Awesomeness!  Shiny!)  I don’t think that means I should stop trying to excel, to go beyond and to achieve something greater than was there before.

But it can be… well, a little exhausting.

Along with accepting responsibility for own my quirks and shortcomings, I blame my detail-oriented, perfection-seeking, boss-man-type tendencies on the former Boss Men in my own life.

While I loved my dad very much, I wouldn’t exactly call him a mentor per se… but he’s the one who may have started the perfectionist movement in my life, at least when it comes to my brain.  (Body image is an entirely different can of worms.)  I was not permitted to get anything less than a B on my report card in school and even then, those were to be sparing.  All A’s is the goal of every parent, but when I didn’t excel (like in math, for instance), I got a lecture about what “C” stands for (it’s “cruddy” and/or “crappy” in case you didn’t get the memo).  When I would argue that “C” stood for ‘average’, my dad would say “What does ‘A’ stand for?” and I’d sigh and say, “Superior.” and he would reply without missing a beat, “So, is my daughter average or is she superior?”

You can’t exactly tell your father, “Dude, when it comes to math, I’m average. Embrace the reality.”

I’ve had two ‘official’ mentors in my life, aside from the obvious, though short-lived apprenticeships with my mom and my grandmother — my high school choir director and my former creative director. And while I may not have known it at the time — perhaps even resented them at the time — I value and am thankful for just about every anal retentive tendency they instilled in me.

My high school choir director was (still is, I’m sure) a really great man.   Some other kids didn’t like him or thought he was too hard on us… but overall, I really liked him, even though it was sometimes uncool to admit. He recognized talent in me, he nurtured my abilities and he gave me positive affirmations about my music where I had little to none at home. He provided me opportunities to grow as a singer, to recognize that I have a gift and sometimes, he made me cry and want to throw sheet music at him because he pushed me so hard.  At the time, I thought he had it out for me, but by graduation, I realized that he saw something in me that made him want to make me a better singer, a better performer and perhaps by simple consequence, a better person.

A little less than a decade later I was fortunate enough to meet my former creative director at the haircare company I used to work for. I was churning out Powerpoint presentations for the salon division and basically doing administrative work, which while I was really good at it and loved my job, I longed to be doing something more creative. I’d been dabbling in web design, building my own sites and I started bringing that creative panache to my Powerpoint work.  I think I can safely say that I had some pretty rockin’ Powerpoints… full graphics, lots of color, they didn’t really resemble anything remotely Powerpoint at that time and the creative director of the graphics department noticed.  We became friends and when he left the company we kept in touch.

When I was laid off less than a year later, I contacted him and he worked really hard to get me a job as a freelancer in his new department and kind of threw me into the deep end. I had little to no experience in Photoshop, had a gentle handle on basic HTML and couldn’t use a bezier tool to save my life.  But he kept throwing work at me and giving me more responsibility and even though I wanted to take that one pixel he wanted moved and shove it up his ass sometimes, his need for perfection rubbed off.  Within 2 years, I left the company and here I am, doing what I do.

He told me once that when he met me, he knew I had ‘star power’ (I think that was the term he used).  He said he knew I would be something amazing, do incredible things and otherwise make something wonderful of myself.  He knew, even when I didn’t.

Both of these men… well, Dad included, all of these men, knew that I was capable of so much more than just ‘good enough’. And their standards were very high, so they made mine high.  And now… now I admit, I kind of expect that level greatness from other people, especially when they work for me.  It’s not always fair to do that, I realize, not everyone can handle that kind of stress — even I can’t.

And while I’m grateful for the lessons my mentors have instilled in me, sometimes I feel like it makes me not very likable in the boss department, especially as a woman. A man can demand perfection and that makes them “tough” and “ballsy” and “ambitious”.  As a woman, it can make me a “bitch” and “difficult” and “high maintenance”.  I like to be likable, I really do — I like it so much it conflicts with my need to be perfect and then?  Then I need a cocktail. Or three.

I was told something so brilliant the other night that it made me rethink a lot of things. A friend told me it’s ok to piss people off once in a while.  I can’t control how someone else feels, I can only control how I react to it.  I knew this, but something about the way she said it or the timing at which she said it, but suddenly, it clicked.  I worked really hard to get where I am in my life — not just professionally, but emotionally and even physically.  And I didn’t get here by always being liked, though did try.  And I was far from perfect.  So, so far. Sometimes I make  mistakes and sometimes I make bad choices and my decision to learn from those mistakes and choices is where I grow  and not only accept my imperfections, but allow myself to shine in ways I didn’t know I could.  And there’s perfection in that, I think.

I didn’t have to like my mentors, I just had to listen to them, to learn from them.  And while I didn’t always like them at the time, I did always respect them.  So, that’s one more thing they’ve taught me about being a boss — you don’t have to like me, but if you work for me you have to respect me. And if you don’t, that’s ok because I respect me and you can be replaced.

So sayeth Boss Man Bing.