Paws for Reflection

Random Photo

Ok, totally random post tonight.  I'm at the firehouse again, so no new pics of the pups, but I brought my new camera (the Nikon D70) along, and I've been taking pictures. Granted, it's been pretty slow, so there hasn't been much to shoot...but here you go - my favorite picture so far:

  

Yeah, weird, I know.

Enjoy.

Brief Post - Big Excitement.

As many of you know, both my birthday and my mom's are coming up, and in what is becoming a fabulous tradition, my mom and I are hitting the road.  This year's destination is the Emerald Isle, and we are going to spend eight fabulous days rocking the Irish countryside. Last year was Costa Rica, next year may be the moon, but this year's birthday trip will find my rather substantial self firmly planted on a (hopefully padded) stool with a pint of Harp clutched in my hand, listening to the skirling at a ceilidh somewhere and making new friends.

It's been a good while since I've been this excited - I truly only feel really alive when I'm traveling off to unknown places and facing unknown situations - I'm one of those people that defines myself externally, by the things I do, the people I meet, and the places I go, and I need constant mental stimulation to grow.  I love to be in environments that require my best, where my mind is almost overwhelmed with sensory input. 

I've done a bit of research on Ireland, and I'll freely admit I'm having a hard time deciding what to see and do.  I want to see IT ALL, but have time to stand for a pint.  I want to cram as much living as possible in the eight days I'm there, but I don't want to rush.  (If anyone has a fairy godmother for rent, text me immediately, please.) It's going to be heartwrenching to cut my 25 page list of things into a more manageable 8 day itinerary, but it's got to be done.

I'll also freely admit to preconceptions.  I've got this picture of Ireland in my mind, a land of misty green hills and soft morning light, of friendly innkeepers and farm wives baking soda bread.  I'm sure that the reality is closer to downtown Detroit with a large bit of country in between, since the unemployment rate in Ireland is astronomical, but I can't wait to experience it firsthand. 

On the other hand, here's something I DON'T want to experience firsthand, but is apparently common enough over there as to have its own sign:

 

Um, yeah.  I won't be driving into the sea, thanks. 

It's been a long day at the fire department, but I've gathered a ton of information and picked the fine minds of the Irish around me, and I think I've got a good start to planning a truly fabulous trip.  I'll keep you all posted as it develops, and you know I'm good for a photo or two!

Cheers, and Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I've had it...

I'm a technology junkie. I admit it, I own it, I've thought about seeking help for it, and then been distracted by something shiny in the window of Circuit City.  Occasionally (Ok, maybe a little more than occasionally) this leads to me buying things that are brand new on the market, which come with a built-in "frustration factor" as everyone tries to work the bugs out.  It's OK though - you know that nothing is perfect, you know that sometimes things hiccup, but eventually it will work itself out, and you don't worry too much about it.

The Blackberry Storm is the exception to this rule.  The phone has only been out on the market in the US since December, and I have already been the not-so-proud owner of TWO handsets, one of which died completely, taking all of my data with it. 

So, while I'm not normally a hard copy letter writer, as I usually prefer the softer and quicker touch of email, I actually got so FED UP with my Storm that I sat down and wrote a letter - copy that, WROTE A LETTER, like with post it notes and an outline and everything - to Mike Lazaridis, the President of Blackberry.  I mailed it on Monday, so we'll see what kind of response I get.

I actually got a lot of my frustration out in writing the letter, and I was relatively carefree about the whole thing, until I got up at 6am this morning for a conference call, and my Storm decided to reset itself at 6:28.  Since the call was at 6:30, and it takes about 15 minutes for the phone to boot back up, I think you can imagine my expression. >-<

(Dora, btw, gave me "the look" for interrupting her beauty sleep with my cussing.  Sorry doll!)

In any event, I thought you guys might enjoy the letter, so here it is:

March 6, 2009
Mr. Michael Lazaridis
President and
Co-Chief Executive Officer
Research in Motion, Ltd.
295 Phillip St.
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3W8
Canada

Dear Mike,

Let me begin by saying that I am a longtime BlackBerry fan, or at least I was until I made the mistake of purchasing the BlackBerry Storm.  We are BlackBerry users here in my family – the Curve, the Pearl, and my mother’s darling – the BlackBerry World Edition.  Our BlackBerries have conveyed the details of our family events, kept us in touch from foreign countries, and allowed us to run our own businesses seamlessly, even from the road.  Imagine my delight and anticipation when I heard the BlackBerry Storm was coming. 

I waited for months, Mike.  I told all my friends, especially those friends that had iPhones.  I soldiered on through the disappointments of release date delay after release date delay, and stood without complaining in line for almost six hours on the actual release date – finally getting to hold the Holy Grail of touchscreen phones in my shaking hands.  I almost heard angels singing, I was that excited.  I got weird looks from people walking by the Verizon store, since I sat in my car for an hour after signing a two year agreement and shelling out several hundred dollars, just pushing buttons and playing with my new phone. 

But it was a dream, Mike, a sweet, sweet dream that’s destined not to last.  The kind of dream where everything is gumdrop showers and endless rainbows and fluffy bunnies romping in fields of four leaf clover, but where you wake up hung over with your tongue stuck to the pillow and your hair defying gravity, wishing someone would turn down the sun. The speed with which my BlackBerry responded was gone by the end of the first day, as if setting up my email account and my Facebook account had exhausted it.  “Please, God, don’t add Contacts – I’m spent!,” it beseeched me.

My phone became a drag, Mike.  A week in – 7 paltry days – and I had reached a zenith of frustration previously only obtained as a teenager while talking to my mother about why I should be allowed to drive her car on my brand new license.  Luckily for my blood pressure, the phone only lasted another two weeks before dying completely and taking all of my phone numbers and emails with it.  That’s right Mike, ALL of my phone numbers and emails.  I thought that they had backed up to my BlackBerry desktop application when I performed the recommended backup, so I wasn’t too worried when the Verizon technician couldn’t recover any information from the handset. 

For the next part, Mike, I’m going to need you to use your imagination a little bit.  Imagine that you are living in a technologically advanced society where everyone is literate and they all have a fairly extensive vocabulary.   You have good friends whose company you enjoy, and you have deep conversations with these friends – you talk about literature, and philosophy, and the economy, and with some of your less volatile friends you even discuss religion.  Now – and here’s the part I need your help with – imagine that you were locked in a small, dark box with one very small speaker in the front of it, with the button on the outside of the box.  You know your friends are out there, Mike, and you’re pretty sure they’re having some great conversation. They may even be talking over wine, or making plans to meet up and have fun.  You know they’re out there, Mike, but unless someone pushes the little button on the front of your box, you can’t talk to them.  You can’t reach them from where you are, Mike, you just sit in the dark and practice your alphabet.  That’s how I felt when I got home and found out that my broken handset had not actually transferred the data to my desktop, and all 958 of my phone numbers were now lost to me.  Lucky for me that I remembered my mom’s phone number off the top of my head, Mike, so I had someone to call when the full import of the data loss hit me and I felt like locking myself in my room and crying myself to sleep. 

I don’t want to bore you, Mike, with all of my complaints about the BlackBerry Storm.  I’m sure you’ve heard about the incredible lag in the camera, the inaccuracy of the SureType, the software updates that don’t load, or the accelerometer that takes it own sweet time changing screen orientation (or not, as the case may be).  I’m fairly positive I don’t need to tell you about the impossibility of typing one-handed on the Storm, or how you can’t simply click a word and change one letter to get around the spellcheck instead of erasing the whole word and starting over, since I’m sure you’ve heard it from a million people and are already working on something in your super-secret lab of mad scientists that will not only solve these problems, but will fix global warming and the American economy in the meantime. 

I will tell you about one thing though, Mike, one crucial issue that has taken my relative dissatisfaction with your product to the next level, and transformed it into a true love/hate relationship.  Yes, Mike, you read that right. Love AND hate.  I love the phone’s look.  I love the touchscreen.  I love the ability to check my email and surf the web and watch YouTube (although no other java applications actually work) and text my mom and even to take really grainy and blurry pictures of my dog when she’s sleeping.  I love the IDEA of the BlackBerry Storm – it’s a masterpiece of theory that resembles a functional touchscreen PDA the way a dilapidated shack in the backwoods of America resembles a gleaming mansion in Beverly Hills, but the resemblance is there, trust me. 

So there’s the love.  Let me tell you why the love has a flip side, Mike.  I’m a volunteer in the Fire Department.  I have been for over a decade, and I’ve seen some incredible things.  I’ve seen the wonders and the tragedies and the fragility of life firsthand, and I’ve developed a healthy respect for fate and circumstance in the meantime.  I love cell phones, Mike, as they dramatically increase the public’s access to emergency care.  They allow us to save the people that wreck on back roads, they allow our dispatchers to provide CPR instructions in rooms where the phone cord won’t reach, they let us call the hospital from the back of the ambulance to tell them we’re coming so that they can be ready.  I hate your phone, because I can’t rely on it to do any of those things.  It doesn’t have the auto key that dials 911 like your other BlackBerries, and when I try to activate my phone, all I see of the “effortless transition” mentioned in your brochure is the endless clock that tells me my handset is busy. 

I see a lot of that clock, Mike.  I see it when I want to dial a phone number (from memory, since my contacts are empty). I see it when I want to open an email. I see it when I want to access my browser, I see it when I want to return to the home screen, and Holy Smokes do I see it when I want to use my camera.  I’ve actually put the phone down, gone and made a pot of tea, come back with a beverage and still had to wait for my phone to finish whatever it was doing in the little tiny boiler room in its stygian electronic depths.   Let’s not even talk about when I have to reboot the phone – I’ve knitted afghans in the time it takes the Storm to reboot back to semi-functional normalcy.

So, here it is in a nutshell – your phone is like a bad boyfriend.  Every girl wants a boyfriend, Mike, that will keep all his promises, do cool things for her when she wants to show off to her friends, and be there when she needs him most.  I guess with the BlackBerry Storm I just got the one that does what he wants, when he wants, embarrasses me in meetings by making inappropriate sounds, and one day just might leave me bleeding in a ditch somewhere. 

Sincerely wishing I could afford to switch to an iPhone,

Melody Miller

The Nature of Forgiveness

I've been watching DVD's of old TV shows for the last few days while I scan some boxes of old photographs I found in the house, and one of the episodes tonight sparked some deep thought.  It was an episode about the end of a relationship, and the anger and betrayal that sometimes accompany that end. The heroine was angry, and quite acerbic in her anger, fuming that her ex didn't deserve forgiveness, and one of her friends turned to her and said something that stuck with me:

"Forgiveness is an act of compassion, you know. We don't give them forgiveness because they deserve it, we grant them forgiveness because they need it."

Perhaps it struck me so deeply because at that moment I was scanning old pictures of my father - the one person in my life whose transgressions I have never been able to forgive, and with whom I no longer have a relationship. 

I have struggled all my life to have a relationship with my dad - my parents divorced when I was an infant, and have been unable to reconcile into civility in the years since.  I don't have any memories of them together, and have very few pictures of them, although family lore holds that they were very deeply in love, which turned to poison when they couldn't work it out between them.

 

My dad's presence was pretty sporadic throughout my childhood - looking back as an adult I realize that he was working through some pretty big issues, and just wasn't able to step up to the responsibilities that came along with a wife and two children.  He would get it together sometimes, and we'd spend time together and have a blast, and then he'd leave again and it would be back to normal.

Luckily, my dad's family maintained a strong presence in our lives, giving my mom alot of help and making sure that we didn't lose touch even though my dad wasn't around.  They were, and still are, super fabulous, and as a result I am much closer to my dad's side of the family than I am to my mom's side. My mom was, and is, amazing, and somehow managed to hold it all together, a teenager with two kids, no marketable skills and no higher education.  She's come a long way since I was small, and though we sometimes spark, she's an incredible woman who I admire very much.

I can't, unfortunately, say the same about my dad.  His presence has never been constant in my life, but it has been powerful.  My dad is an incredibly charismatic man, a good time Charlie that always has a joke at the ready and has never met a stranger.  Jovial and mostly amiable, it is rare that his temper shows, though it is legendary in it's ferocity.  He's also highly intelligent, borderline genius, with a tendency toward paranoia and conspiracy theories.  I can't say that he's really accomplished anything in his life, and none of his children currently speak to him, but he has shown me very clearly through his life all of the things that I do not want to be.

I don't have much pride in my dad, and precious little admiration, but I have resentments aplenty. I resented him as a child for not being there when I needed him, not being the dad to hold my hand on the first day of school, the dad who I could talk to about boys, the dad to threaten my dates if they didn't bring me home safely (not that I dated!).  I resented him in high school for making me feel unwelcome in his house - thank God for my stepmother, though I didn't appreciate her until years later.  I resented him in college for never coming to visit me, for never telling me that he was proud of me for getting into Georgetown, though I was the first person ever in my family to go to college.  I resented him when I got married, since he refused to come to my wedding because he didn't like the ethnicity of my husband, whom he had never met.  I resented him at my divorce, since some of the things he had said when I told him I was getting married turned out to be right. I resented him for leaving my stepmother just days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, for the woman who introduced him to my mother.  I resented him at my cousin Danielle's graduation from high school, since he didn't have the courage to come and talk to me, though I had driven up to NY from DC in order to be there.  I resented him at my little brother's graduation from high school, when he made my 17 year old brother walk across the stadium to talk to him, so that he wouldn't have to approach the bleachers where me, my stepmother and my stepsister were all sitting.  I could go on, but I have come to realize that they all stem from the same source: shame and fear.

I am ashamed that my dad is not a more honest being, not only with himself but with those around him. I am ashamed that he has passed up almost every opportunity to be a better man, and that he has allowed the adversity he has faced in his life to defeat him, and turn him into an angry, bitter shell. My father is 54 years old, and when I saw him at my brother's graduation two years ago, he looked 70. I am ashamed that the incredible promise he holds as a human being has been wasted, and that the world is poorer for it.

But mostly, I am afraid.  I am afraid that in the ways that count, I am just like my father.  I have his coloring.  I have his temper.  I have his intelligence, and as I grow older I have discovered a tendency towards bitterness in myself that I am fighting as hard as I can.  I look just like my mother, but deep down, I hold the parts of my father that I scorn the most.  He began as we all do...

 

...but somewhere along the way he lost his focus and became a angry, twisted man.  How do I prevent that from happening to me?  Will I recognize it, if it begins?

The older I get, the more I miss my dad. Or more accurately, the more I miss the man my dad might have been.  Every day that passes is one more day that he won't be the man I've always hoped he would be, and the father I needed him to be.  I've been trying, for the last year or so, to bring myself to reconcile with my dad - we haven't spoken in about 15 years, and I'm not even really sure where he is.  I worry though, that by the time I'm ready, it might be too late.  I feel like it's a fragile balance - I'm not ready to talk to him, but I somehow feel as if time is running out and every passing moment weighs heavy on my mind.

Forgiveness is sometimes defined as the process of concluding resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived difference or mistake, and ceasing to demand punishment or restitution.  To hear it defined today as an act of compassion shook me a little - I'm not particularly known for my compassion, and in fact I often think my biggest flaw is that I lack too much of it.  It also made me think a bit, to hear that sometimes we don't grant compassion because someone deserves it, but because they need it.  I wonder if, instead of my dad needing the forgiveness, if I'm not the one that needs to grant it?

I don't know that I can reconcile all of my resentments towards my dad, or if we'll ever reach a place where we can have a relationship again.  I don't even know that I'm ready to try and give my dad the forgiveness we both might need, but I think I'm ready to think about it, and that's farther than I've ever been before.

 

We Had a Snow Day....

  ...and it was FABULOUS.

Mom decided to work from home (yeah, front wheel drive and a BMW convertible is not so nice with 8 inches of snow and ice) and since the coffee pot is broken, we decided to run our errands on foot.  Then we decided to take the pups, and the adventure began. 

 

It took about 2 hours to walk a quarter mile there and a quarter mile back, to get coffee and stop by the bank, and it went a little something like this:

Two universes mosey down the street
Connected by love and a leash and nothing else.
Mostly I look at lamplight through the leaves
While he mooches along with tail up and snout down,
Getting a secret knowledge through the nose
Almost entirely hidden from my sight.

We stand while he's enraptured by a bush
Till I can't stand our standing any more
And haul him off; for our relationship
Is patience balancing to this side tug
And that side drag; a pair of symbionts
Contented not to think each other's thoughts.*

* Poem excerpt from "Walking the Dog" by Howard Nemerov.