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The troll mirror 

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Remember the magic mirror at work?  The one that makes this aging wrinkling expanding lady feel a little bit pretty?  Well, I found its evil cousin this week.

Prior to the beginning of my two-day meeting I used the public restroom at the Residence Inn hosting us.  After washing my hands I went to check that my dress wasn’t tucked into my tights.  There before me was a fat squat version of myself.  I gasped and checked to see if I had an evil ugly twin sister standing behind me, but no, this reflected troll was me!  I raced out in horror, but did check to see if my troll underware was showing before I fled.

It was a scarring experience, but I am brave so immediately told a friend, “I am either a hideous troll person or the mirror in that bathroom is horrible.”  She is brave too and went to investigate.  Thankfully she also reflected a squat version of herself.  (Well, I was thankful anyway.  I don’t think she was.)

For two days I warned all the women at the meeting with whom I had even a passing relationship.  Why?  Because this was one of those dress-up meetings.  A meeting where you try on your outfits at home before you pack, and bring coordinated accessories.  A meeting where you check a bag because you want your full sized products.  It wasn’t a beauty pageant or a meeting about how we looked, but it was a business meeting with posturing and politics and one of our female weapons is looking good. Nothing can diminish that power like the fear that our carefully prepared shell is ugly.  No one else deserved the self-esteem hit I took.

Something magical happened with the sharing.  The mirror became a joke, “the troll mirror.”  A joke shared only between the women of the group.  The men heard about the horror, but claimed they had no portal to the bizarro world in their bathroom.  We would laugh with each other in the restroom as our features gently expanded, stretched and shrunk if we moved in front of the mirror.  We all celebrated that we didn’t really look like that.

In the sharing of our secret worries about how we look and our insecurities we grew closer. The inside joke will make us evaluate mirrors at future meetings.  The experience made me bolder at the meeting: more willing to ask hard questions and risk embarrassment.  The troll mirror had a different kind of magic then my office mirror.

In the end, it made me really brave.  Brave enough to take a troll picture of myself and post it on my blog.  In my hipster troll outfit of jeans and my winter coat the effect is diminished, but not entirely.  I am not this squat.

Oh, and the sunglasses I have on?  Those are my rose colored glasses.  So while I might look hideous, the colors were bright and beautiful to my eyes.  Tomorrow I’ve got to get a picture of myself in the work magic mirror in the magic sunglasses to heal my self image.

My parenting mantra?  Sit on your hands.

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized16 Comments

If you could hear inside my head you would hear the mantra repeated over and over.

Sit on your hands.  She’s doing fine.

Sit on your hands.  You already know how to sew.

Sit on your hands.  She is feeding herself and who cares if there is applesauce in her eyebrows?

It takes literal physical restraint for me to let my daughter do it herself sometimes. I see her struggling and I just want to reach out and help her, to get her past the hard part, to do it for her, but I don’t.  My hands start to move from my side toward her and I stop them.  It is the hardest, most important parenting lesson I teach myself over and over: she will only learn to do it for herself if I stay out of her way.


Friday night she decided she wanted to learn how to knit, again.  This will be the third time I have taught her.  Each time I have knit to show her, then sat behind her and knit with her hands over mine, then sat on my hands and let her knit, and by knit I mean drop stitches, make stitches with an accidental yarn over, created twisted stitches, knit the same stitch twice and finally give up in frustration.  So we put the knitting away for another time.

This time we started the same way, but at the end of the night when she had eight stitches, instead of the twelve I cast on, and a couple of large holes in her work, she didn’t get frustrated.  She just said, “That’s okay.  This one is just practice.”

Then she put her work down, kissed it, and said “I’ll see you in the morning knitting!”

I didn’t pick it up for her.  I did not go back and fix the mistakes.  I walked past the five rows on her needles and saw what I might be able to teach her to make her work better but I did not do it for her.  I sat on my hands, because I already know how to knit.

Saturday she picked it up again.  Now she has three holes and fifteen stitches, but five inches of something that looks like knitting.  She’s so proud.  She wants to take it to our friend’s house today, because that mom is a knitter too, and she wants to show off.


We hauled out my first knitting project, a lovely burnt orange…thing, and looked at my holes and my wonky first attempts next to hers and talked about why they were different and how they were the same.  As she watches me finish my first adult size sweater she understands that I started, twelve years ago, with something that looks just like what she’s making now.

“Mom, you’ve only been knitting for twelve years.  If I start now, imagine how good I’ll be when I’m your age!”

It’s true, but she’ll only get that good if she does it for herself and I keep sitting on my hands.

It’s beginning to look a lot like springtime!

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Here in Aftheadville we’ve had a few weekends of 70 degree weather and just enough moisture to convince our spring bulbs that it’s time to pop out of the ground and look pretty.  Thank goodness for these random spring days in February, or I might not make it to May when spring finally decides to settle in and stay.  Here’s hoping you are getting a break from winter wherever you are!
 

I am a Stalkerish Blogging Friend

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized13 Comments

Don’t think I’m not paying attention to you, blogging friends.  Don’t think that I don’t walk the aisles of Target thinking about you and your blog posts about your childhood dreams and your strange obsessions, because I do.  I think about you all the time.

@whereshappy, You remember your post about the Barbie head?  I commented on it, because like you, I never got the disembodied Barbie head as a child. I confessed that I can also can’t do hair now, and shared my deep dark secret that my mother dared to buy my daughter the toy she wouldn’t buy me.  Maybe that just seemed like a normal comment to you, an innocent exchange, but it wasn’t.  Months later when I was at Target I saw this doll, complete with “Cut & Restyle EXTENSIONS!” and hands with fingernails and I took a picture just for you, so that you would know I was thinking about you.  I didn’t send it to you, but I took the picture…just…for…you.

@amiewrites74, I know you haven’t been able to find Cadbury mini-eggs until just recently.  You’ve been blogging about them over and over and over and over.  I’m not as good a friend as your friend Violet – see I even know your friends names and how nice they are – so I didn’t send you a box of them, but I did take a picture of the monster display in the aisles of Target for you.  You can’t really tell, but there are normal mini-eggs, white chocolate mini-eggs and dark chocolate mini-eggs.  You’ve never talked about the dark chocolate ones, so I told you in the comments of your most recent post.  I hope my news offsets the creepiness of my actions.  (I don’t want to let you know that I really don’t like Cadbury mini-eggs for fear I’ll chase you away as my blogging friend.)  #Minieggsallyearlong

So blogging friends, don’t worry, I’m paying attention, and maybe the next time I’m at Target I’ll be thinking of you…

Flataloes of Happiness sculpture on 16th Street Mall in Denver CO

The Flataloes of Happiness

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Last week I had a meeting in Denver.  Having worked for years downtown, but now working in Golden, I always enjoy the opportunity to spend time in the city, especially when it is 70 degrees in February.  All my old parking lots have been turned into buildings, so I grabbed an expensive underground spot – when did parking start costing $20?  Thankfully I was rewarded by the beautiful weather and The Flataloes of Happiness when I emerged from my subterranean price gouging.

The Flataloes, so called only by me, are an outdoor public art exhibit that has been in Denver for as long as I can remember.  The colorful two dimensional herd currently roams down 16th street.  I never miss a chance to mosey among them, petting their thin backs and admiring their calves while anyone with me rolls their eyes in impatience.  I love them!

One of the things I love about blogging is being able to delve into random research about things that have always fascinated me but I’ve never bothered to learn about, so time to tell you what I learned about the Flataloes.

Nothing.

In this crazy Internet age my searches turned up nothing about my beloved sculptures…or basically nothing:

  1. I learned that Bill Gian created the Flataloes, if Getty Image captions are trustworthy.
  2. Some angry guy who hates Denver’s public art gave them a slight mention at the end of a ranting blog post, but has less information about the artist or the work than I do, because I learned the artist’s first name.

Therefore I take this opportunity to claim the Internet space for the Flataloes of Happiness sculpture by Bill Gian on the 16th street mall in Denver, Colorado which has been delighting my afthead since I was a wee child.  Let the urban legend propagate until I learn the truth.

Long live the Flataloes.

No one cares that I’m sick

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Oh man, I have been so sick.  I’ve had this nasty cough and cold for 10 days and haven’t been able to write or blog anything.  My mind, a haze of sleep deprivation and germiness, just couldn’t come up with anything anyone would want to read.

At 2:30 a.m. I’d lie awake in a stupor and think, “I’m going to blog about how much this cough syrup I bought sucks.  I’m going to tell my readers about how it’s left me stuck between sleep and awake and hasn’t even calmed my cough as it promised.”  Thankfully I had enough awareness to know that no one wants to read that.  Also the cough syrup had caused my fingers to become detached from my body floating lazily near my hands, but immovable.

Standing in the shower using the gross NeilMed sinus wash bottle to rinse out my nose – must avoid a sinus infection – I ponder how much money this peddler of squishy bottles and salt packets is worth.  Maybe he’s one of those people who makes $99,000 every two weeks.  My mind wanders to why so many salt packets come with each bottle I purchase, because I know I have an entire shoebox of salt packets in my linen closet: enough to rinse my nose out every day for years.  I’m distracted from my revery by the green snot crab that has just landed in the bathtub and squiggles down the drain.  After I dry off I realize that I should not blog about rinsing out my nose, because no one wants to read that.

This morning I woke up and knew I was feeling better because the words and stories returned to my brain.  Soap day, my pretty fingernails, the flat-aloes I saw yesterday and the beautiful weather all poured into my head as likely blog topics I needed to write.  Then my mind jumped to the critique I received on my novel from an agent and I longed to go downstairs and start removing the piles of “He smiled, he walked, he looked” worthless phrases from my novel.  She said it made my story plod, and I don’t want to plod, I want to fly.

It’s such a relief to have the story gates open again and be able to step away from the sickness induced drivel that was drifting through my head the past ten days.  I can’t wait to get started, but first I’m going to post publish on this post.  I hope it doesn’t go viral.

Ba dum bum, ching!

The $99,763.68 Mistake

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Something strange happened in my bank account last week.  In addition to my normal paycheck, a much larger, more significant deposit was made: $99,763.68 showed up in my account.  Before I even noticed the hugely increased balance I was notified by my employer that there had been an error and that they were fixing the problem.  I was not going to get to keep this unexpected windfall.

It got me wondering though.  How much would I need to make to get regular paychecks of $99,763.68?  I get paid 26 times a year, so that would be an annual net income of  $2,593,855.68.  Assuming that puts me in the top tax bracket, and assuming that tax bracket is 36%, that means I would have a gross pay of  $4,052,899.50.  That doesn’t include things like saving for retirement or dental insurance, but I think if I made this much those types of payments become negligible.

So who makes $4.05M?  The obvious place to start is athletes.

If this was my regular paycheck I would make about the same as:

The 170th top paid NBA player,  Lavoy Allen from the Indiana Pacers

The 321st top paid NFL players, Kory Lichtensteiger from the Washington Redskins and Brandon Fusco from the Minnesota Vikings

The 194th top paid NHL player, Jake Gardiner from the Toronto Maple Leafs

All of these players have an annual salary of $4,050,000

The MLB 279th highest players are Jeurys Familia from the New York Mets and
Ivan Nova from the New York Yankees with an annual salary of $4,100,000

Now, I’m not a huge sports fan, but I live with a huge sports fan and I watch shows on ESPN at least weekly and I’ve never heard of any of these players.  Maybe they are big names, and I’m just ignorant, but it makes me wonder where a $4.05M annual salary is in the rankings for each of the pro sports.

In the 2014-2015 season, Business Insider reported

NBA average annual salary: $4.58M

NFL average annual salary: $2.11M

NHL average annual salary: $2.62M

MLB average annual salary: $4.17M

So I’m going to put this in perspective.  The epic, mammoth mistake of a check that I received this week is about the size of an average MLB player’s paycheck and less than the average NBA player’s paycheck.

The average MLB and NBA player takes home over $99,000 every other week.

It’s staggering to think about.  It makes me understand, a little bit, why professional sports players are draped in gold, put diamonds the size of marbles in their ears, have huge mansions and drive amazing cars.  They make a staggering amount of money.  So much, that it’s almost hard to conceptualize.  So here are things you could do with that much money.

You could buy a new Tesla 90D, my dream car, every other week at a cash price of $97,500.  That’s twenty-six new Teslas a year.

Mortgage calculators show me that buying a $5M house, and putting down one bi-weekly paycheck as a down payment would lead to a $31,000 monthly payment, easily doable with a $198,000 monthly salary.  Heck, you could probably swing two $5M houses and still have plenty left over for groceries.

Your daily paycheck would be $7,106.  You couldn’t quite afford to buy a new 65″ OLED TV every day – the  most expensive I could find on Best Buy – but you could come close.

Every single hour of your year you would be making $296.  Even while you were sleeping.  That’s a 32 GB iPod Touch and a $50 iTunes gift card to go with it every hour.  (Okay, maybe only a $25 gift card if you include tax.)

Now if you ever find yourself in a lucrative career, say as an average MLB player, and are offered $4M annually I hope you find my analysis helpful as you decide how to spend your new found wealth.  Sadly my windfall disappeared from my bank account, but we’ll see if the mistake shows up again next pay day!  If so, I’ll be better prepared.

 

Depression and the circle of sadness

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized9 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, my husband struggles with depression.  His is a disease that comes on strong and hard and completely disables him for months, only to lift leaving him the same vibrant man he was before the episode hit.  It is really hard for me, who has never experienced the depth of his anguish, to relate.  Thank goodness for animated movies!

We saw Inside Out when it was released, and were blown away.  It was such a great movie and gave us such an age appropriate vocabulary to talk about feelings with our daughter.  (Cause, you know, two engineer parents don’t necessarily excel at talking about feelings.  We excel about talking about Excel, the spreadsheet tool.)  It’s great to be able to say to the seven year old Afthead, “Hey, what’s going on?  It seems like Fear has taken over the control panel.”

But the most enlightening conversation came about with my husband.  We were chatting about a specific part of the movie when Joy tries to ensure Sadness won’t interfere with Riley’s first day at a new school.  Joy gives everyone a job (Fear has to come up with the worst possible scenarios, Disgust has to help with friends) and Sadness’s job is to “stay in the circle.”  Joy draws a circle on the floor and pushes Sadness into it.   Of course, Sadness doesn’t stay in her circle and causes Riley to cry at school.

My comment to my husband was, “Too bad your Joy can’t shove  your Sadness into a circle.”

He replied, “Oh, my Sadness always stays in his circle, but when he escapes he’s impossible to get back in.”

It was an incredible vision into my husband’s brain.  He is a man guided by Joy, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, but Sadness isn’t really his thing.  I’ve only seen him cry once, and it was when he was depressed.  He doesn’t really do sadness, which just makes his depressive episodes that much more disconcerting.  But it makes total sense when viewed in the Inside Out context.  Sadness gets out of his circle, and takes hold of the controls and only he and Fear run my husband’s brain.  His normal forceful Anger, Joy and Disgust are gone, pushed aside by Sadness.  Eventually time and drugs wear Sadness out and he heads back to his circle to hibernate for years, decades if we are lucky.

Still, I don’t understand his depth of anguish.  Still, I can’t put myself in his shoes, but finally, I have a metaphor for his pain, and a wish.  I hope his Sadness stays in the circle for a long, long time.

 

Knitting Knews

On By aftheadIn Knitting, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I know you are all dying to know, “But Johanna, what’s going on with your knitting?”  Well let me tell you, the thrummed slipper is coming along magnificently.  The sole of the first one is done.  The outside, or bottom is the brown side with the yellow v’s.  The inside, where the bottom of my foot will go, is the side with the fuzzy yellow caterpillar looking thrums.  Next I just need to knit up the foot and then add more thrums to the top of the slipper.  I’m expecting coziness for one foot soon.  Sadly, since I’m on the road, I had to abandon my slippers for a bit.  Thrums are cool, but not travel friendly.  I’m hopeful that with a Sunday of football ahead of me I can get the first one done.  Then we’ll see if I make the second one next, or make a pair for my demanding daughter first.


One more update on the hat I knit for my friends with the sick little girl.  I heard back from them.  They love the hat and it fits perfectly.  I was so worried, but then a friend at work said, “Of course it was going to fit.  It had to fit.”

img_1210

She’s right.  Sometimes fate, or God, or the powers that be make sure that things work out.  The hat had to fit.  It has been called, “The coolest hat ever” by several admirers.  The pom pom is also adored.  This makes my heart happy.

There, feel better?  You are all up to date on the knitting news…except, there may be another hat in the works.  This time for me!