Can't you see I'm trying, I don't even like it.

Meetings, meetings, meetings.

At 9:30 I was scheduled to go out for coffee with the boss to discuss the review. She got in late, and we didn't leave until nearly 10. It was fine and dandy and I got a little bit of a needs-improvement speech on some areas but for the most part thanks-for-your-help and despite massive budget cuts in many areas, I will be receiving a 6% raise which I certainly won't turn down. I have plans for using the retroactive paycheck for a security deposit when I have to move at the end of the summer.

Stop. I have to move at the end of the summer. I keep forgetting this yet simultaneously I've thought of it constantly whenever I'm in other people's neighborhoods and apartments. At this time I could get anxious about it since in two months I should begin the search, but why? I have two more months.

Then I just got out of a staff meeting which was fairly short but seemed endless because I had way too much coffee this morning. Now I'm back at the desk and preparing a to-do list. Who am I all of a sudden?

I still hate my job. But I'm still partially motivated to get my isht together, if only to improve the feng shui of my work area which is overrun with archive files that need to be organized and put away.

You keep bumpin' me against the wall.

I left my checkbook at home so rent is delayed another day, but it reminded me to check my account and see what exciting checks and balances have cleared so I can antipate any possible deficits. A large amount was unexpectedly missing from a recent cashing of an item that had numbers vaguely familiar, yet I couldn't place the expense. The check wasn't available for viewing yet and since I didn't have the carbon copies in front of me, I started panicking. I was convinced for a whole five minutes that I had been robbed. I wanted to go home immediately and tear through everything to find out the truth so I could start making the phone calls to the police and the bank and whatnot.

Then I remembered my huge electricity bill I paid off last week. All is settled in my world again, at least as much as it can be.

During these moments of panic, I was humming like a mthafcker. Or more accurately, I was making a repeated "umm" noise while swallowing. Or more accurately, I have a throat tic.

I don't know when exactly it started. Though I have a memory of working quietly at my desk on a fourth-grade social studies project and hearing my friend across the desk making strange repetitive humming noises. I was fascinated and started emulating them later in the privacy of my bedroom. It seemed foreign and familiar -- chances are I was already doing something similar at the time, so I was experiencing the satisfaction of mimicking someone else's tic.

When I was younger (age four or five), I briefly had a facial tic. I'm not sure how long it lasted as my memory has conflicting information. I maybe only did it for a week but it took months and months and years to get over it. To this day my face twitches when I think or speak of it. The twitching is not the tick, but rather my avoidance of making the face. There were two parts to it, the first involving scrunching up my nose and the second was flattening my bottom lip. When I make the full face, I imagine it looking a bit like the face of an Inuit mask. To help counteract the urge to repeat the tic (and risking "having my face freeze like that"), I would either only do the second half of the face involving my mouth and/or flair my nostrils. I still regularly flair and stretch my nose when nervous or agitated or anxious or just having an urge to tic. I often combine it with licking my lips and furrowing my brow, as if deep in thought.

My throat tic escaped detection for years and years and years. Even to myself. It's barely audible, though it can be noticed by people who spend enough time and in close proximity. Sometimes it's more of a repeated exhale, forcing air through my throat and nose, like a controlled hiccup. I tic more often when I'm having allergy problems (post-nasal drip), sometimes after smoking a lot, when extremely tired, or during moment of anxiety. Though my tic can be a sign that I'm relaxed or relaxing, for example, while watching a movie or television, much like how my leg muscles twitch involuntarily as I drift off to sleep or even as my body just uncurls from the day as I lie in bed.

I have other sporadic repeated movements, like occasionally rocking in bed, either alone or with someone else there. I've also engaged in knocking my head repeatedly against walls, or more often, my shoulder. I'll stand with my feet twelve inches away from the wall, lean diagonally, then straighten my body before falling back against it with a thud. Stand, thud, stand, thud, stand, thud. I do this on train platforms.

A couple years ago I read David Sedaris's collection of essays Naked and he has a whole chapter on his tics -- it was the most validating and maddening thing I've ever read on the subject. I appreciated his honesty and humor and the accuracy with which he describes the experience, but I had to restrain myself intently throughout to avoid doing my own tics or even taking on the ones he described because they sounded so satisfying. No matter how weird it is to touch one's tongue to every mailbox on the walk home from school.

Since then, I've talked about mine more, though still I'm relatively silent and passive on the issue. I'm fascinated by the cause and practice, but fear if I research them too much, I'll spiral downward into a ball of twitches while rocking back and forth on the floor and tapping my head against the wall, even though my own are supremely mild and nearly imperceptible. I just feel extremely prone to developing them further. Then I'll later require taking muscle relaxers to keep my body in check, or perhaps a doctor will prescribe botox to my face so I can just poison and kill all the nerves while looking younger.

For now, I'm thinking about going to sit in the men's room and hold my knees and press my forehead against the cold tiles of the wall, trying not accidentally give myself a concussion. After all, it is my lunch break.

Hate to say I told you so.

I may become Don Quixote battling windmills for the rest of my life, but I refuse to get off my horse when it comes to two issues. Both of these I written about before, so I won't go into lengthy detail, but don't think it's easy to resist this temptation. They are both linguistic peeves.

Factoid
Miss Miriam Webster is here to inform you that the meaning of factoid is NOT little fact, or trival fact, or small fact. No matter what CNN tells you. Instead, it means: "A piece of unverified or inaccurate information that is presented in the press as factual, often as part of a publicity effort, and that is then accepted as true because of frequent repetition." [Courtesy of www.dictionary.com] Therefore, the common assumption of what factoid means, is in fact, a factoid. Another example of this phenomenon is the factoid of lemmings commiting mass suicide over a cliff as part of their "nature". In reality, a Disney filmmaker induced a mass suicide on film with his crew and filmed it as part of a documentary (For more info, go here: http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm). The image and idea has been repeated so much we assume it to be correct. To be honest, the use of this as a metaphor doesn't bother me since most folks understand the implication, but it's certainly not a true biological phenomenon.

Ghetto
I know I revist this topic every six months or so, but like I said, it's a never-ending quest. Let me just give you the short version. Don't say "ghetto" when you mean "cheap". Just say cheap. Or shoddy. Or craptastic. Also, don't call anything hip-hop related "ghetto", or worse, "ghetto fabulous". Don't call anything criminally-related "ghetto". In general, just stick to using ghetto as a noun and never an adjective. And if you don't or have never lived in one, perhaps it's just best to keep the word out of your mouth all together.


Please adjust your vocabulary accordingly. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

( it's flashback Wednesday in Raybear's world -- click here to read what I dug up )