i completely geeked out today in front of a nine year old patient and his mom today.
i saw he had harry potter book V in his hands in the waiting room...and i, before introducing myself as dr j, fell all over myself spastically blurting, " are you reading book five again so that you can be ready on july 16th?!?! me too! for the third time! who do you think the half-blood prince will be?"
mom and son paused. mom politely smiled. son said in the most bored, waaaay too cool for school voice, "uh, i have no idea".
no matter how many fancy degrees i get, how much stage time i log, how many decades i have witnessed...i can still be shamed by nine year old boys. they will always be cooler than me....
the supermall and i are going to have a throwdown. it is me and my increasingly odd shaped body against all work-appropriate clothing.
i realized this week that i'm looking less and less like dr. j at work (whatever that means). the surprised look i get from my patients when i come in the room and introduce myself as dr. j was mildly amusing for a long time, but i'm growing weary of working twice as hard as my colleagues to prove myself as competent.
i have long long long hair that i have a Samsonian* attachment to. that already puts me in the hole for the 'professional look'. i think, gulp, i'm going to buy some power suits.
(my mother taught me many years ago the lazy-man's way to wrinkle free clothes...a few minutes in the drier on high heat with a damp washcloth. i love this trick. don't expect a pressed pleat or anything, but it does the trick for most girly clothes)
literally. seattle has made me so thin skinned that i can't tolerate heat of any kind.
i'm here for a work related thing. actually, i just got back from my very first focus group. this consisted of six audiologists who dispense hearing aids being quizzed by a room full of software engineers and developers, taking frantic notes on all we said. occasionally, one of us would say something or make a suggestion, and the guy heading up the software development said to the lady taking notes, "did you get, that?"
each time one of us came up with something that was different from what was already in the software...you could feel the software guys behind us tense up a bit...because they knew how much work these "little tweaks" would translate into. made me feel bad for them and their deadlines.
but, as they say...if you don't want to know, don't ask.
anyway, i was just shuttled back to the hotel "to freshen up" before the "reception". the "reception" will involve "liquoring up" the "audiologists" in order to get "secret information" about their clinics.
any kind of socializing with sales reps is usually strained anyway...but socializing with sales reps from a company who's products you stopped using several years ago because it fell way behind it's competitors...it just might make me vomit into my gin and tonic.
my sales rep comes complete with questionable breath and a flash of chest-hair poking out the top of his unbuttoned, company emroidered golf-shirt.
You've all seen the OnStar commercials with the actual recordings, right? I always thought those were kind of interesting. Kind of like reality television for commericials. I could appreciate them.
Now, perhaps you've seen their new fear/guilt campaign that has little kids asking questions of their parents straight to the camera, essentially suggesting that their parents are putting them in danger if they don't have OnStar. "you wouldn't do that, would you?"
I've read a few things in the blog world making fun of these commercials but I'm surprised no one has latched on to the one line that literally made me drop my food and fall on the floor laughing. The handsome, pleading children asking "who is going to help us when..." listing off various common things like keys locked in car, breakdown, even a car accident.....
but then but then but then (and this is an actual quote) a kid looks in the camera and says:
"Who is going to help when my mom's car is carjacked...with my little brother inside?"
!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
indeed. who is going to help us?
have you seen this? i've only caught it twice, both times i was watching tv alone without witnesses.
so, i guess i'll start writing again. (how's that for enthusiasm?)
funny what brought me back... i was doing some random google search, looking for some random quote, and it turns out i wrote about it forever ago...here. i read through one cached page of this site and i didn't recognize the writing style or even some of the life events as my own. it was a little unnerving. i suppose i was startled into trying this again.
i'll have to change the site name, maybe, as the dissertation is long since shelved and my maiden name on the binding sounds foreign already. maybe i'll keep the site name. it still sums up the spirit of my deep and unending procrastination (example: full and awful awful disclosure...i never finished writing thank you notes for our wedding...gulp).
i probably just would have poked my head out for a just one little second (just like kaiser soze!) had it not been for Rob's welcome back. Thanks kindly, sir... i'll give it another go.
