Hi, nice to meet you. I'm Betsey. Oh, you recognize my voice? Ha ha, I get that a lot this time of year. I'm somewhat of a celebrity come the holidays. Maybe you have heard me on the radio? Why yes I AM the voice of Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey! Good job! Here, this one's just for you: "Ee-ahh, ee-ahh"
Despite how obscenely commercial Christmas is, I love every bit of it: the bright colors, the flamboyant lights, the music, the constant eating and drinking. It’s like
Night would fall on Christmas Eve, and our parents would try to hustle us to bed with the classic “Santa won’t come if you’re not asleep” threat; this is not helpful, however, when you’re a seven-year old insomniac. Instead of struggling to stay awake to see what happened, I remember actually throwing myself into a sheer panic fearing that Santa Claus would know I was awake and skip on to the next house.
In the end, it'd all go off without a hitch, and come Christmas morning we’d be up before the sun was. Partly because we were early risers in our youth, but mostly because I’d feel a presence, open my eyes, and see my sister’s eyeballs no more than one inch from my face. She’s now 21 and has yet to relinquish her role as the Christmas Day family alarm clock. Once she managed to successfully awaken her first victim (me, since my room was the closest), she then sprang into full-speed action, bouncing up and down and off the walls like a super ball. My sister is also the one person who shot into super ball mode not only opening her own presents, but when everyone else was opening theirs.
Finally, the parents, freshly showered and yet back in their pajamas for the sake of the pictures (when every opened present was followed by "ok, now hold it up" and a flash), would slowly emerge from their bedroom as if they were ethereal beings gracing us with their presence. My sister, still bouncing, would squeal “Can we go down yet?” and before we even heard an answer we would be scrambling down the stairs and sliding across tile floors until we reached the family room.
To our delight, the carrots had always been nibbled, the milk was always gone but for a few drops, and just a few crumbs were sprinkled on the plate where the cookies had once sat. Some years, Santa would leave behind one half-bitten Oreo, and we’d marvel at it as if it were the freakin’ holy grail.
So while we're no longer kids and we now know that our parents - and now we, as well - suffer through daunting credit card bills, Christmas is still Christmas. Plus, our presents are still signed "from Santa".
... by a semi-disgruntled worker
Caffeine
Between coffee, diet coke and an occasional tea, my intake of various caffeine-infused libations essentially sets the structure for each work day. For example, 11:45am means time for a 1/2-hour coffee at the bar downstairs. If it's the start of the day and you don't yet see a mug of steaming energy in my hands, don't even think about asking me to get elbow-deep in html code, repetitive price tables and commercial writing jam-packed with enthusiasm, cheesy adjectives and an obscene amount of exclamation marks.
Post-its
While I have spent a lifetime practicing the art of writing notes on my hands, post-it notes bring all sorts of joy to my life. Even when we were young'ns playing office, the best parts were easily: 1) speaker-phoning each other, 2) ignoring the phrase "no, don't touch that", and 3) rummaging through my dad's supply closet and swiping legal pads, pens and post-its. At work, post-its literally frame my computer screen and part of the wall. Plus, making bulleted lists in pretty colors gives me a false feeling of productivity.
Snacks
Here at my job, we eat our feelings. Stress, boredom, frustration... all roads lead to cookies.
Facebook
What better way to procrastinate than by compulsively clicking refresh to see who, in the past 45 seconds, a) has gotten hitched, b) has broken up, c) has popped out a few puppies, d) blacked out last weekend, e) has posted new pictures, f) has changed jobs, g) has joined facebook... and so on and so forth. It's essential that I know, since we are clearly so intimately close that I don't know first-hand.
Sense of humor
That way, when wintry days arise in which neither the heat nor the internet work (kind of important, when you work in the company's internet department), you can just say 'hey, if penguins have no need for heat or functioning technology, neither do I.' Rad.
9:25am. A middle-aged woman slowly limps her way down the sidewalk. She leans heavily on a cane with each step she takes... yet she wears 4" stiletto heels.
Spanish women's obsession with heels hits a new - and potentially dangerous - high.
With newspaper spread over the entire floor, the coffee table pushed to the side, three different knives and spoons of various sizes... we carved the best jack-o-lantern EVER. For the record, Alfonso was an excellent first-time scooper.
Despite the sad and inevitable day each year when the local Dairy Queen would close for winter, I have always loved fall and everything that it entailed. Picking out pumpkins. Leaves in deep shades of red and orange. Apple-picking and haunted hay rides at the town's orchards. Chilly walks and running from the frigid waves at the beach. Cider. Brand-new fleece jackets. Lighting the fire in the fireplace for the first time of the season. Launching ourselves, kamikaze-style and giggling, into giant piles of fallen leaves... much to the dismay of a certain dad who may or may not have just spent hours raking all the leaves in the yard into orderly piles to be bagged up and discarded.
Fall, of course, culminated in the biggest event of the season: Halloween. When I was growing up it was FANTASTIC. I think it's what led to the chocolate binges that I still succumb to from time to time... well, replace "from time to time" with "on a daily basis." I don't know until what age I trick-or-treated, but it was probably pushing that limit when adults open the door and think to themselves, "hmm, aren't we a little old for this?"
Our little pint-size posse - the Matternlets and the Walkerlets - would always meet up first for pictures at the request/ demand of our camera-toting mothers who would somehow each manage to use up three whole rolls of film on a mere six costume-clad kids. We have envelopes upon envelopes jam-packed with snapshots of smiling superheroes, angels, clowns and cats, all of us armed with our pillow cases and pumpkin buckets and with a clear mission ahead of us: sugar.
The best years were the ones in which, after the picture-taking frenzy finally wrapped up, we managed to coerce one of our dads into pulling us around from house to house, us crammed into a wagon hitched up to the back of a tractor and sticking our tongues out as we passed the neighborhood kids who had to trick-or-treat on foot, while the moms stayed behind to hold down the fort and shower the arriving princesses, monsters and devils with ooh's, ahh's and candy. To this day my mom still lives for Halloween, her jack-o-lantern lit in the front window hours in advance, a big bowl of candy waiting in the foyer and a pen and piece of paper set out to keep a tally of the number of kids who come to the door. I will bet money that she'll give me the official 2007 stats during our next phone call.
Once we made it to the very last house on Village Drive, a route which at the time seemed to last for hours and hours, we piled back into the wagon - our once-empty sacks and buckets now bulging with sweets - for the voyage back to our respective houses. This is when - well, in our house at least - the business part of the evening commenced.
My brother, my sister and I would each rip off our costumes and claim a separate parcel of the family room carpet, where we then conducted inventory with a surprising degree of organization and formality. This is also when we'd find out that there were really cool neighbors (the ones who handed out king-size chocolate bars) and very, VERY uncool ones (the neighborhood grinch up the street who insisted on handing out free samples of toothpaste each year).
Candy was sorted into their respective piles and rows. KitKats lined up side-by-side. Packs of Bubbalicious gum. Ring pops and Skittles. Tootsie rolls, M&M's and gummy bears. Then there was of course the designated "junk" pile, where things like Sugar Daddy's, little boxes of raisins and the annual tubes of toothpaste were quickly discarded. This was subsequently also the pile we allowed our parents to choose from.
We'd spend at least a half hour with our stern business faces on, bartering our candy and trading with each other, our energetic negotiations fueled by a steady consumption of one of everything. The family room quickly turned into a microcosm of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. One Snickers bar for 2 tootsie pops. Three bags of Skittles and one of Sour Patch kids for that king size Hershey bar. I imagine it must have been quite the eyebrow-raising spectacle for our parents.
Once the trades were complete and we began to come down from our sugar-induced highs, we'd place the candy back into our buckets, which were then placed on top of the refrigerator. However, I'm relatively certain that once we were all tucked into bed with stomach aches, sticky hands and traces of paint still on our faces, our parents would sneak our pumpkins down from their high perches... and deviate from the junk piles we so graciously gave them.
1 chocolate JellyBelly
+
1 toasted marshmallow JellyBelly
-----------------------------------------
= S'mores party in my mouth!
I understand that everyone has gripes about their boss, I really do. However, we are dealing with an extreme case here. Until you actually spend time - albeit just an hour - in our little Internet department, you will never be able to truly grasp what we're dealing with on a daily basis. Whenever I've tried to describe, I've ended up coming to the conclusion that it is impossible to really convey him as a concept. However, a coworker recently managed to do the seemingly impossible by summing things up with just a few words:
"You ask him what time it is and he tells you it's raining outside."
I was lying in bed last night thinking about how while commercial website stuff is easy as pie, sometimes I have a really hard time being creative 8 hours a day at work whenever I'm assigned to do a travel guide. I mean really... there's only so much you can do to make 13th-century history "come alive," a dusty archaeological museum seem like a "can't miss" or a Spanish language course (the one commercial page and therefore whole purpose of each 100-page guide website) sound as exciting as a wild night of debauchery on the town. I myself prefer to limit my vacation to non-educational activities like eating, drinking, snapping a few photos and being a haughty American tourist.
So somehow that led me to thinking about how I used to write stories non-stop as a child. At the time I thought I was destined for awards... that my novels would line bookstore shelves... that people would cry over the heart-breaking dramatic scenes and chuckle at my witty way of describing amusing encounters between the well-developed and devilishly attractive characters. The words flowed from my magic marker onto the construction paper like fudge onto an ice cream sundae.
Back in the care-free days of Flanders Elementary School, we even got to publish our own "books." Basically, we scribbled the stories down in our still-in-the-works chicken scratch. Some volunteer mom would type these stories up, leaving the majority of each page blank so that you could grace it not only with your literary opus, but also with your artistic talents. Then, you picked out the fabric that would be on the cover and voila! A few weeks later you had, in your hands, a published hardcover book to bring home and show off.
So then I tried to remember what stories I had written... which is when I realized that my imagination was a bit on the strange side, even at the tender age of 8. Here's the plotline of one of my childhood stories. I remember my teacher actually sat down like, hmm Betsey this isn't really your best work, are you sure you don't focus on a different story? But I published it anyway. What can I say, I was dedicated to my craft.
Basically, it starts out with a woman who, to my recollection, has no name but is in the hospital because she's pregnant. She realizes she has to go to the bathroom, so she makes it there and is doing her business when plop... the baby falls out into the toilet like a turd. I was clearly a bit confused at the time regarding certain parts of the anatomy and their corresponding functions. Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes... I actually employed the word "plop."
She names her beloved newborn bundle-of-joy Diana, and after a few days they go home to embark on their lives as a family. Diana has a happy childhood, it would seem, but then one day she wakes up and her leg hurts. So her mom brings her to the hospital, where they discover she has a broken leg. So they give her a bright pink cast and she's all pumped because people get to sign it and such. Then, you turn the page....
...and the one line reads "The next day, Diana died." (I'm pretty sure this is when my teacher started raising her eyebrows.) So they have a funeral and her mom is a wreck. Then she decides to get four cats. The end.
Who smells a Nobel Prize for Literature in my future?
So I have dreams a lot when I sleep... and not of the unicorns or lottery-winning variety, either. Ironically, the earliest dream that I can remember involved my entire family getting eaten by alligators that circled in a dark pit located just inside the door to the local Cumberland Farms (ironic because they had gone in to buy Powerball tickets). I was 8.
My most consistent dream is being in a train that goes over a cliff due to a collapsed bridge. Freefalling. It's the dream I have every time I get into that "just falling asleep" stage when you randomly jump back awake.
Well, last night I had a dream that I was in the USA but trying to get back to Spain. For some reason the possibility of a plane flight didn't come into play, and yet a magical crosswalk did.
Basically, an otherwise white-striped, run-of-the-mill crosswalk in (whatever city I was in) took on the ability to transport people to other countries. All you had to do was pinpoint the exact moment at which this phenomenon would transpire, and then cross the crosswalk running at full speed... and bam! You'd end up in the destination of your choice. Kind of like Back to the Future.
However, I missed "the moment" because the crosswalk light didn't turn green in time, and I began running frantically back and forth across the crosswalk until I had to get dragged off the street by on-lookers. The crosswalk light had turned red again, and there was oncoming traffic.
WTF?
Oh and by the way, my apologies to Alfonso but I've fallen head over heels in love with Clyde.
Collective "awwwwwwwww."
The other day, I was involved in - and by "involved" I obviously mean in the passive, "just listening while I eat" kind of way - a conversation in which I'm pretty sure the general consensus was that the workplace in the United States is more laid-back than in Spain. Something along the lines of how, in the US, it seems that employees have more dress down days or don't have to go as fancy-shmancy to work to begin with. IIIIIIII disagreed (in my head), but decided to mull the idea over in the event that my mind was severely biased or otherwise warped. Nope, still disagree.
So then yesterday I came across an article in the NY Times talking about the American obsession with work, this time regarding taking vacation (or rather lack thereof). Two lil tidbits:
Simplified a bit, it runs as follows: a nation of remarkably productive, often well-paid workers who are becoming increasingly reluctant to pause from their labors and refresh their souls — a nation whose cash-drenched corporate employers typically don’t pay for much time off (less than two weeks annually, on average), a nation whose globe-gripping federal government is the only one in the whole industrialized world not to legally require generous periods of paid kick-back-and-hang time — is a nation that’s socially screwed up, particularly in comparison with European countries like France, which orders its citizens outside to play for the entire month of August and a few other weeks spread through the year.
The most widely cited diagnoses of our allegedly harmful undervacationing can be found by searching the Internet, the same Internet that even the dwindling number of full-vacation-takers are purportedly using to elevate their stress levels by logging on from beach resorts and national parks — where, according to concerned observers, they would be better off restricting themselves to restorative, out-of-cellphone-range pursuits like brisk morning swims and sunset nature walks. That fewer of us are doing so, it’s said, is a symptom of either anxious overcompetiveness; upward-mobility addiction ; the breakdown of the family...
The article then lists the following stats:
Legally required paid annual leave around the world, by days:
France: 30
Sweden: 25
Spain: 22
Australia: 20
Germany: 20
UK: 20
Canada: 10
Japan: 10
USA: 0... ZERO... ZILCH... NADA!
I'm sorry, but I can't see how any industrialized country that can legally bind you to your cubicle every single day, all year-round and expect 150% productivity can ever be called "relaxed." In fact, one of the reasons I'm drawn to Spain in the first place is the overwhelmingly relaxed atmosphere, at least by comparison. People enjoying life, meals that last for hours, people-watching from the hundreds sidewalk cafés, Sunday strolls, staying out all night (despite my geriatric ways of late) because you can and, yes, more vacation days to let you kick back and remember that there is more to life than alarm clocks, clients, reports and pesky coworkers.
So sure, Madrid is undeniably a big, bustling city, and granted I don't have, nor am I interested in, some hot-shot corporate job... but to me the vibe is a billion times more laid-back than anything I've known. Hell, it's more laid-back than the Student Center at Holy Cross. Does New York City, Washington D.C. or even Topeka, Kansas empty out overnight for an entire month during the summer? Negative. American cities are non-stop, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Right now in Spain, however, as Spaniards are off traveling, sleeping, hanging out with family and frolicking at the beach for a month, the capital city of Spain is so quiet that at night as I'm reading with the window open I can hear the chiming of the crosswalk light from a block away.
Now I love opening up my gmail and seeing that I have an email or two just waiting to be torn into. Oh, and by "something" I mean something other than the New York Times "Today's Headlines" that I signed up for or Myspace friend requests from 17 year old boys in the Dominican Republic who I don't know. Now if that something, on the other hand, happens to be an email from Emily Pereira, well... it's pretty much guaranteed to be an entertaining read.
During our Holy Cross year in Sevilla, Emily was always the comedic relief of the 8 of us... and undeniably everyone's favorite little Portuguesa. Now in D.C., I can only imagine that she's the life of the party at the State Department, where she's " ridding the world of AIDS from my position as assistant to the ambassador." Well, I don't know how many parties are to be had when you're dealing with AIDS legislation and such all day, but... you know what I mean.
Emily and I email back and forth EXTREMELY irregularly, meaning we'll go for months at a time without a word and then bust out a string of emails trying to out-funny each other. So after not hearing from her for ohhh 5 months I get a gem of an email that, before going into the usual string of funny anecdotes and life updates, starts out with:
little miss betty, where have you been?
out in the barn, playing with the hen?
are you still in spain, you crazy nut?
wearing pointy high heels and a layered hair cut?
by,
emily pereira
Hell, any email that starts out with a poem and ends with a "you are my soul sister girl. my souuull sister" is the way straight to my heart. Well, that and maybe pie.
Aside from folks of the geriatric and/ or disabled community, who waits 5 minutes for an elevator only to get off on the first floor?
Some say that a successful career is personally rewarding. Others contend that having a gaggle of diaper-wearing screamers running around and knocking things off store shelves is the cherry on top of the sundae of life. Me? I'm a whole hell of a lot simpler- well, that and I'm a whole lot less ambitious (shrug) and a whole lot less pregnant (shudder, gag, choke). The first three things that come to MY mind when I think of life's rewards are: 1) 2 scoops of moose tracks ice cream, 2) popping open a brand-spankin'-new cannister of tennis balls and, finally, 3) a good stretch.
I'm not referring to the "Doctors recommend that you stretch for at least 15 minutes before and after exercising" type of stretching, either. That's just damage control- head out for a run sans stretch and risk destroying the perfect muscles of your lithe gams. Kind of like buying flood insurance when you don't anticipate the flooding of any nearby bodies of water. You naively bank on maintaining an incident-free streak while running the risk of flooding your basement, thereby destroying great-great-grandpa's wooden leg or anything else deemed worthy of saving but not worthy of ground floor status.
When I say stretch, I'm talking about taking multiple minutes in the morning upon waking up (after you finally shut the snooze alarm off on the 4th, 5th or 6th round of infernal beeping) to just stretch out like a cat, writhe around and contort your body in ways that, should they be spotted, would land you a quick appointment with an exorcist.
During high school, for example, my morning routine was: wake up, call Mark and wake him up, and then - en route to the shower - throw my upper body over the edge of the bed, my legs still sprawled up top, and then stretch out in all directions until I slid into a heap of limbs on the floor. Then, I'd stretch there too, taking advantage of the floorspace. My parents would walk by my room, find me hanging upside down off the bed and - naturally, I suppose - wonder what the frijoles their daughter was doing.
This morning, due to an early wake-up to travel across the city by 8:30am, I missed out on my morning stretch. So what did I do when I got to work? Locked myself in the bathroom and went to town.
Alfonso: (insert string of unintelligible complaints) Ugh it's too hot in Sevilla... it's an inferno! Nobody likes it here... these aren't liveable conditions. Don't you hear those birds? They're making all that noise because it's so %&@$ing hot out here... (etc.)
Betsey: (rolls eyes)
...2 minutes pass...
Betsey: Hear those birds? You know what? They're HAPPY. They're HAPPY birds who LOVE Sevilla... they're SINGING with glee, not complaining because they're hot.
... Silence...
Betsey: Oh... Ok so that's the noise of the crosswalk light... but EVEN so...
Now every person has their fair share of childhood peculiarities that they may or may not share with their friends. My dad, for example, used to play a game with his neighborhood chums back in the good ole days in which they competed to see who could hit their head the hardest on a driveway. Due to a stray pebble, he still has a literal dent in his forehead from this wholesome childhood past-time... but gosh darn it did he win.
Mine? Well other than the whole ambiguous gender issue, there was my obsession with sleeping with all my stuffed animals because a) I really did feel bad if I didn't pay equal attention to all of them and actually feared a revolt, and b) I needed to keep them protected from the mask-wearing robber who was surely on his way to climb up a ladder, in through my window and straight after my beloved stuffed critters.
Then there was my massive sticker and keychain collections, both of which I am still incapable of throwing out. Not to mention my unwavering refusals to put jelly on my peanut butter sandwiches, try new things, and eat anything white (milk, coconut, cheese, etc.). My love of turning a bike upside down and pretending it was an ice cream maker. The "Roadrunner" game I used to play with my sibling, which consisted of running around in a circle in the family room saying "meep meep" "meep meep" as we ran. Then there's my steadfast aversion towards change, as demonstrated by the puffalump show-and-tell incidents as described 2 posts ago; dressing up as a cat for 6 straight years for Halloween; requesting that my mom make me the exact same birthday cake - the one with flattened gumdrop balloons and licorice strings - 4 years in a row... trust me, the list is endless.
Anyway, the Matterns are clearly not alone. By far the best part of my week, thus far, has been learning about Joanne's favorite childhood hobby. So, without further ado, enjoy the inner workings of a young Egnatchik, as narrated via gmail chat:
me: im imagining the egnatchik household
