Call of the Wild

Or: On the Eighth Day, Let There be Leggings!

Walking into an oil town pub or a camp dining hall is sortof like having a bear encounter: in both scenarios, you are aware of being relegated in status down to mere "meat". I mean, no matter how tarted up I am in downtown Calgary I barely get an occasional second glance, but I can be just as grimy and sweaty and "practically" (i.e., strangely) attired as you please in, say, Fox Creek, and it is openly lascivious ogling all around. My friend (or, more specifically, her butt, in some leggings) nearly caused a riot at a hotel breakfast bar. Every female colleague of mine has experienced the same phenomenon, and I don't think any of them finds it flattering. At best, it's mildly amusing; at worst, disturbing - and even a little bit scary.

Bear, cool, I get it man, I'm in your space and I'm (slowly!) getting the hell out of here. Men, though: what the hell? Is there something about oil town living away from home that causes these fellows to go a little feral, or - as DH suggested - is it just that they were the dregs of society to begin with and have been unnaturally concentrated in oil towns due to their professions, so's that one notices them more?

Neither hypothesis seems very generous. Handily, I do a lot of living away from home during the field season, so I might have some insights into the phenomenon of going feral due to this bizarre natural experiment I conduct on myself every year.

I know I definitely start to get a little weird after a long field stint in the boonies. Weirder still if I'm working alone, as if the lack of human contact decalibrates my social compass. I spend hours every day fantasizing about real food - I probably spent a full two weeks near the end of my field season last year daydreaming about cooking myself a lasagna, then eating said lasagna. Every day the fantasy would get a little more elaborate - no! Not the farmer's market! I will use vine-ripened tomatoes from my own garden to make the sauce! Unnhhhh...

I do make a mean lasagna but I usually don't have the attention span to agonize over the origins of my sauce tomatoes, so this is pretty strange behaviour for me. Feral? Perhaps I was a short distance down that slippery slope... but when those men are leering at you while you eat your mashed potatoes as quickly and unsexily as you are able to, it is clearly not lasagna they are fantasizing about. I figured I was not quite feral yet.

Right at the end of my field season last year, I was standing around on a project - I don't fully understand it but there is somehow a LOT of standing around that is done in pipeline construction - just dreaming about lasagna and wishing we could get around to actually doing something at some point that day. One fellow broke up his standing activities by removing his sweater, which bunched up his t-shirt slightly and left a small sliver of hip bone exposed between his jeans and shirt. Just a little peek. Just a one-inch sliver of taut, tanned, male flesh...

I literally could not take my eyes off of it. The two weeks I had invested in an emotional affair with homemade lasagna were forgotten in an instant. I wanted to eat this guy instead.

Suddenly, I was off the deep end. I really needed to go home.

So when my friend was innocently causing the complete mental breakdown of a roomful of breakfasting riggers with her leggings, I flashed back to my deranged hip bone moment of the year before and I had an inkling of comprehension of how these fellows were feeling. She does have a great butt, after all - and everyone goes a little feral eventually.

Good Grief

The 7 Stages of Dealing with New Government Policies

Disbelief
"They can't possibly mean what they're saying here."
"This is going to take forever to do."
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."

Denial
"My project is clearly grandfathered in."
"Nope. Nope, nope, nope. There is no way I'm doing that."
"This guy has no idea what he's talking about."

Anger
"The guidance documents aren't even internally consistent!"
"How can they possibly expect this of anyone?"
"You've got to be fucking kidding me!" 

Bargaining
"Can't we just throw some money at this?"
"Maybe if I just try this instead..."
"If You just get this application through, I swear I will never do another one ever again. Amen."

Guilt
"I have a bad attitude."
"I don't even care about the environment anymore, I just want this project to end."
"I wish I had measured the diameters of those shrubs better."

Depression
"I am so over budget."

Hope
"Hm, this report is pretty sexy... maybe it will go through after all..."
"Well, at least we have a template now."
"Aaaaaand - invoice submitted!"

The term "stages" is somewhat misleading, as it implies a stepwise progression. In reality, these are more examples of emotions a consultant may experience when dealing with New Government Policies, and not all individuals may experience all of these reactions. Conversely, some consultants may feel much more Anger than others. It is common for an individual to fluctuate wildly between the different "stages" as they learn more about the New Government Policies and how they are being randomly interpreted by different people in the same damn regulatory body implemented.

If New Government Policies are troubling you, you may find venting over a bottle of wine with a colleague helpful. I'll drink pretty much anything red. Call me.

Small Town Saturday Night

I don't have super high expectations of motel stays in small towns - I've learned that aiming low generally seems to be a decent way to approach most of life's slightly sketchy situations. You're much less likely to be disappointed (or disgusted) and much more likely to be thrilled about things that others with higher expectations of the world might have erroneously come to view as standard, like a working mini-fridge, say, or pillows that don't smell like they've been deep fried.

Come to think of it, lowered expectations may well be one of the key reasons I’m such a happy person. A more particular individual would have to write a scathing online review instead of a cheery blog, plus pay a lot more money for a better room somewhere else. Maybe somewhere they don’t fry their pillows.

But some things fall short of even my low bar. For instance, there is nothing quite like checking into a small-town motel at the end of a long day, only to discover popcorn and “hairs” IN the bed. I didn’t even know what my low bar was, exactly, until that moment of discovery, but it was immediately clear to me that IN the bed happens to be precisely where I draw the line.

My second thought after discovering my low bar setting was, “Aw, that guy must have been lonely.”

Another moment of clarity: apparently I feel like I can divine a lot about someone by the motel room debris they have left behind. Just imagine what the folks who actually clean (or in this case, “clean”) the rooms must know about their temporary tenants!

Third moment: I solemnly resolve to be more aware of the forensic judgement opportunities I present to cleaning staff.

But if I were to leave behind motel bed fillings for some other plucky traveler to find, what would really speak to my motel experience, in the way Mr. Prolly Jerking Off While Watching a Shitty Movie’s popcorn and pubes seemingly spoke to his? I’ve given this some serious consideration the past few days, and I propose that my motel story would best be told with Triscuit crumbs and dessicated plant fragments: 

Ms. Late Night Botany Session.

Ohmmmmmm...

The nature of impermanence: parenting edition*.

a. Amount for eligible dependant - check.
b. "You're the bestest Mommy ever!"
c. Age 4.**
d. Chores Chart.
e. Fresh batch of cookies.
f. "Everyone empty their bladders before we leave."
g. Wow, no one is sick right now.
h. "This is my favourite food!"
i. "My Legos are all picked up!"
j. The house is clea... aww.
k. The laundry is d.... aww.
l. This will be a fun craft.

* Decreasing exponential scale.
** Perceived time may be significantly greater than actually experienced.

Parent Hacks

Parenting hack: do stuff with your kids.

Actually, that's not really the hack. Here's the hack: you don't need to be crazy about it or anything - stuff you were already going to do in the first place works just fine. It'll take way longer and you'll need a glass of wine to cope with it the first couple dozen times, but eventually your efforts will pay off.

Oh, I guess that's my second hack for you today: wine. Lots of it.

I find cooking and baking are some things that are good to do. (You needed brownies, right?) My hope and expectation has always been that, eventually, the kids would gain some basic safety, common-sense and, heck, maybe even cooking skills. Maybe they could get themselves breakfast one day... pack a lunch without help... cook a meal for the family once in a while... not die of malnourishment in college. Y'know, the basics. I had a long game to meditate on when they were splashing pancake batter all over the damn place as toddlers.

Interestingly, I've noticed over the years that there are a ton of knock-on educational benefits associated with cooking that I had never even considered in my long game:

There's literacy: because "cookies" is an excellent motivator for sounding out that tricky word in the recipe, as is learning the deceptively big difference between cinnamon and cayenne.
Chemistry: proteins denature, carbon dioxide bubbles form, what the heck is Teflon anyway?
Math: fractions, measurements, conversions, ratios
Physics: phase changes, conduction, convection, surface tension, gelling
Biology: bacteria/safe food handling, nutrition, yeast, PMS

Yup, even PMS: the fact that we had chocolate-chip pancakes for supper once a month growing up was how my brother learned about the menstrual cycle. Kudos to him for noticing there was a pancake cycle; I filled him in on the back story. I'm certain he will make some lucky gal a fine husband one day - he learned early on to be very supportive of any female initiatives involving chocolate.

Final hack for the day: HERE is the easiest, kid-helper-friendliest, PMS-iest recipe I have on file.

Just think of how educated your child will be after helping you make these once a month for their entire childhood. You are an excellent parent. Go ahead, have some wine.

Aim High! ... Er, Not Quite That High

Small Fry emerged from the womb with a sort of natural athleticism that is completely foreign to me. If you show him something physical once, he immediately masters it and will forevermore be the world's best monkey bar swinger, two-wheeler rider, snow shoveler, whatever. (I'm not kidding - he has excellent shoveling form. He's like a textbook snow shoveler.)

I am not like that. Medium Fry is not like that, either - although it doesn't really seem as if it should be a heritable trait, this is clearly something she gets from me. We were both embarrassingly old when we finally learned how to ride a bicycle. We can't skip rocks, or catch frisbees, or ever really "get" team sports. If there are "fine motor skills people" and "gross motor skills people" in the world, I fully acknowledge that I am waaay over on this end of the spectrum doing some crocheting. 

Which brings me to Zumba. I mean, not in any logical way - in retrospect I'm very poorly suited to it. It's just that it kindof looked like it might be fun, and the promotional materials would have one believe that it's "for everybody and every body" so I decided to try it out at the community centre one night.

I didn't have crazy high hopes for myself or anything - I picked a spot in the class near some senior citizens just in case. And good thing, too, because I was even worse at it than I had expected. One of the senior ladies stopped me after class and gently said, "Have you tried crocheting, dearie?"

Haha, just kidding, that was only what she was thinking - but she did pat me on the shoulder and tell me it took her a few classes to catch on, too. Her friends nodded sympathetically. "Oh yes, us too, just keep trying!" Point being that the seniors were not only clearly out-Zumbaing me, but also that my performance was so pathetic that it engendered grandmotherly instincts in a gaggle of complete strangers.

But whatev. This many years in, I'm more or less accustomed to being really terrible at most things involving more than a modicum of coordination. I'll just keep attending class, and I'll improve with time. That's how these things go, right?

Week 2: Right??

Week 3: Isn't it how they go?

Week 4: Okay, seriously. Tell me this is going to get better one day.

Week 5: What?! Did they just change the songs again?!

Week 6: Wouldn't you know, right in the middle of La Zumbera: illumination. I have been conditioned, through a lifetime of inspirational messaging implicit in everything from office posters to family movies, to believe in the underdog - the overcoming - the breaking through. Perseverance, right? Motivation! The ragtag team gets their shit together and wins the championship! The fat kid finally catches the ball! The middle-aged lady's limbs miraculously begin working in graceful, rhythmic tandem for the first time ever!

I had been waiting for my Disney moment. Unconsciously, of course - my rational brain certainly knows better, it was just being circumvented by... well, by false advertising, really. Ah - so I can't be quite anything I want to be? I'm actually probably going to plateau somewhere right around "good enough", or maybe even "middling" or "half-assed" at some things? Several things?

Man, that takes the pressure off! Thank goodness. Now I can finally relax and enjoy my Zumba classes. 

Week 7+: Happily doing fukken terrible Zumba.

I Also Hate the Park

So I read this article the other day that purported to confess all the ways in which the author, a mom blogger, didn't "do it all" as a parent.

I am all about confessions. Confess away. Sometimes it's nice to get things off your chest. But I took issue with the article, because this woman's "confessions" were 100% Grade A horse puckey.

She confessed to not wearing makeup every day. Gasp!

To occasionally feeling too sick to play with her kids. Uh - gasp?

To not answering the dryer immediately when it buzzed, with such regularity that she had never folded a basket of warm towels.

Okay - I can't even fake surprise anymore. Or interest. These things have nothing to do with anything - not parenting, not "doing it all", not even just being a regular ol' human of any stripe. You fold warm towels? That's fine. You don't? That's fine, too. But to pretend it was ever somehow the goal is ludicrous - this was clearly a humblebrag in the skin of a confessional, and I just won't stand for it. Most parents are doing the best with what they've got, and they deserve better.

I would like to offer up some of my own parental musings to counter the false perfectionism that some folks seem to want to stuff down other people's throats:

• Subsequent Child Ambivalence. Ohmygawd I can't believe I'm starting this all over again.
• Incremental Returns of Freedom. Buckling their own seatbelts. Zipping their own jackets. Packing their own lunches. Tiny wins, but by golly they're like a gulp of fresh air when you've been immersed for so long in the daily grind of little humans. 
• Outsourcing. Homemade has never felt as good as sane. 
• Difficult Truths. Sometimes, your kids will be real a-holes. It's okay to notice this.
• Adulthood Fatigue. When is it my turn to throw a tantrum?
• Gentle Tyranny I. They stay up later than you, every night of the week. You will never have a moment alone again. 
• Gentle Tyranny II. Or sex - you will never have that again either. Nothing kills the mood like knowing your teenager is quietly doing math homework in the kitchen, directly beneath your bedroom.
• Reducing Entropy. I fantasize - actually, truly fantasize - about the day the kids move out and I can live in a clean house. That stays clean. In fact, some days I think DH can just go ahead and move out too - then NO ONE will walk on my clean floors ever, ever again, and I will be able to die happy.
• The Sound of Silence. I misses it so.

And if this is not enough for you - if you are really having a tough go of things this day (or week, or year) - and all you want is to know that someone out there is doing just as lousy as you feel you're doing right now, or maybe even worse ('cause sometimes that makes one feel a little better)... there's always the Scary Mommy Confessional. Plus wine.

Go in peace.