Saddam

We're running, little hamsters on the hamster wheel. All worshiping at the alter of beauty and health. In skin tight leotards, or running shorts. Muscle tees or sports bras. All moving fast, travelling fleetly, getting nowhere.

And before us are our goals. Pop stars in form fitting dresses shaking their perfect asses to the beat. Rock stars in jeans so tight every curve of every muscle pops the seams. Our gods, our perfection, our unattainable goals.

And next to the screen pumping my eyes with a blond woman naked to the dawn is a picture of a man stepping up to the gallows, bowing his head to the noose.

A picture of a man who might be sleeping, but is really dead. A murderer. A killer. Murdered. Killed. Dead.

And we keep running.

Mele Kalikimaka

It's 60 degrees outside. People are ice skating in their t-shirts. Outside.

It's also two days till Christmas.

Luckily, I'm good at the warm weather Christmas. Growing up in Hawaii my Santa wore bermuda shorts and a hawaiian shirt. Our Christmas mornings were spent with a trip to the beach and a B-B-Q. We had sand, not snow. We drank iced tea, not hot chocolate.

So I should be perfectly able to get into the Christmas spirit in a tank-top.

But I'm not.

What I need, what I really want, is two scoops rice. I want manapua and guri-guri. Mix please. With the strawberry under the pineapple. I want ukulele's and na mele's. I want to stand with my friends and sing Surfin' Santa.

I want lumpia and poi. Lomi-lomi salmon and chicken long-rice. I want my Christmas pine to be a Cook pine, and I want my presents wrapped in hawaiian print. I want to sit outside on the lanai and talk-story with my ohana.

In short, if it's gonna feel like Hawaii, then I want it to be Hawaii.

I miss home.

Plastic Stocking

I love stockings. As a kid I adored my stocking. I liked that it had a pretty ornament sewn on just for me. I liked that my mother had painted my name on it with glitter. I love that she had spelled my name correctly, which when you're name is Kathryn is a big deal. I loved all the candy my Dad filled it with, and the fruit, and the fruit cake. I loved the nuts in their shell and the toys we'd get every year, yo-yo's and silly putty. I loved the little books we'd get (I always got a "Pokey Little Puppy" book) and I like the penny dolls, the jewelry, the hair barrettes. I even liked the socks and underwear that would find their way into my stocking. I loved all the little things in it and I loved that it would take me days and days to get through it. A week at least for the chocolate santa.

Now as an adult I'm the one who's carrying the stocking tradition forward. But my first attempts have not been as spectacular as my childhood memories. Often I'll forget the oranges, or the chocolate santa. I never really get the right mix of toys and candies, it's usually heavy on one side or the other. I often get more stuff than will fit in the actual stocking too...so stocking toys end up becoming under-the-tree toys and lose some of that stocking charm.

Worst of all I never have the same stockings every year.

Instead of the lovingly crafted stockings my Mother made us, complete with our names, our special colors and our special angels. Instead of that musty, old feeling on each one, come from sitting in a box all year. Instead of that feeling that you have something that makes you part of the family, something that's your own but connects you to everyone else. Instead of all that nostalgia and romance we have brand-new stockings. Every year. It's not by design. Every year I break out all the ornaments, old stuff from our parents, new stuff from our newly-wed days. All the same and familiar. The same lights, the same blanket under the tree. The same angel at the top. But even though I pack everything away together, every year the stockings come up missing. So every year I buy new ones.

This year I found a set that were not quite my norm. Instead of furry topped stockings, or lace and beads, I picked out a set of needle-point stockings. Each with a different character on it, and each lined in a different color. Blue for my husband, red for me. They were very cute and I spent a good deal of time trying to decide just which ones I truly wanted. A good deal of time being at least 30 minutes of comparing and contrasting each and every one.

Finally, deciding on the gingerbread man and the deer, I took my two dearly found stockings up the register. So close to Christmas I expect long lines at stores and it doesn't bother me too much to hang around, even if I'm already carrying tons of bags of stocking stuffers. But just as I got up to the register, it broke. As did the one next to it. I waited while someone searched for a manager. I waited while they discussed the fact that the manager was at dinner. I waited while they fiddled with buttons and stared at tape. And while I waited the line behind be grew longer and the bags in my hands grew heavier. So heavy, so hot and so tired was I that I finally gave up, left my stockings and walked out the door with a plan to get my stockings at Bed, Bath and Beyond like I do every year. Bead, lace and all.

And I did in fact go to BB&B. I looked at each stocking carefully. I found a set I really liked. And standing there, carrying a number of bags, filled with stocking stuffers, I lamented the fact that I couldn't justify buying a second set of stockings when I'd already purchased my needlepoint set.

And under this short-tern memory loss (induced I'm sure by going to a hundred different stores in less than two hours) I walked out of BB&B, to my car and drove home. And it wasn't till I was getting ready to make up my stockings with all my goodies that I realized I had no stockings to stuff.

This year we'll be unpacking plastic bags. I might write our names on them for nostalgia's sake, but I'm afraid Santa is shaking his head at this very moment.

Shame

Walking into my office building I start off well. My shoulders back, my spine straight, I step out of my car gracefully and strut myself up to the door. I look my best in the morning, my make-up is perfect, my hair curls just right, my clothes are pressed and fit just the way they should. I like the sound of my heels clicking on the pavement and the sound of my clothes swooshing as my hips swish. The beginning half of my walk from car to desk is the time when I really like being a woman, when I really feel confident and ready to face everything.

And then I hit the halfway point, and with it, George. George is an older man who works in our warehouse. He works the night/morning shift so when I'm coming in to work he's just about ready to leave. He takes his last ten minute break just a little before 8AM and he spends it standing in the hall with a cup of coffee and a comment.

"Well isnt it just my lucky day. Good morning beautiful."

"Good morning sweetie. I like that skirt on you, gorgeous girl."

"Now my days complete since the stunning Katy has come in."

And so on and so forth. Everyday there's George with another comment, another adjective for pretty, another crooked smile and another lascivious, but hidden, stare. And everyday the instant I see him I deflate. I feel my shoulders fall in an effort to hide my breasts. I try to walk on my toes in order to keep my heels from clicking on the floor. My eyes hit the floor, my arms draw in close and cover me. And for the rest of the day I have to fight from slumping down in my chair and hiding my face under my hair.

It's a feeling you can't name, but you know it's there. All George has ever done, to my face, has greeted me and given me a compliment. Every interaction we've ever had seems benign, safe, nice even. What woman doesn't want to be told that she's lovely? That she looks nice? Why on earth would I spend all that time with make-up and hair if I didn't want people to notice that I was a pretty girl.

And yet his comments make me feel small. They make me feel like hiding under my coat collar. Is it the way he looks at me, or in the way his voice sounds, something about the way he is always there that makes me feel frightened, little, incapable? Suddenly being attractive, even being noticeable, is a hindrance to everything. Not just to my competence, my intelligence, but to my ability to walk down a hallway.

Sometimes I think it's because I know what men say when women aren't around. I know what George talks about when he stops watching me walk down the hall and turns to his buddy. Sometimes I think that's just a cover up. The fact is I'm harassed, diminutized, violated - and it's worse because know one can see it. No one would ever know, or believe, how bad it feels.

And I can't blame them either. I've been that woman who scoffs at harassment charges. I've turned down my nose at girls who just don't know how to take a compliment, or worse, don't know how to play the game. I fear being the same woman I turn away from, I fear the fact that I could define myself as the "politically correct bitch" if I ever spoke up.

But after I smile shyly, say a hurried good morning to George, I feel my chest constrict and tears prick my eyes. I feel bound inside myself. It's as though he won some battle over my position, over my psyche. He even managed to influence my body - and he has never touched me. I can fantasize, outside of work, turning around and telling him to stop. Using my loudest, strongest voice to chastise him. Let him know it's just not acceptable, that I'm not his to look at, I'm not his to want. But in the building, he has me - there might as well be a gun stuck down my throat for all the words I can create.

So instead I go into work early. I look for his car when I'm walking through the parking lot. I wear big coats to hide in. I take the long way around the office to get to my desk. When I see him I panic, when he has his back turned I have to fight the need to run.

And it makes me more ashamed of myself than anything I've ever done. And even more afraid.

Those City Folks

Just recently my husband and I have been shopping at an organic market more and more. It's something we've both wanted to do for a long time. I like the fact that they get a lot of their food from local vendors and we both like the idea that our food is a little less "tainted."

We did occasionally shop at a small market in our old neighborhood - but having to drive all the way over there just to buy over priced food was a little more than our schedules could take. Luckily, MOM's (My Organic Market) has opened near our home and it's a very pleasant trip down to the store.

Amoung the many treasures we've found at the market, such as fresh baked breads, whole spices and grains, and beautiful, luscious, sweet and firm apples right from the tree, we discovered real milk. Milk that comes from happy, well-fed, well-treated cows near to our home. Milk in thick glass bottles. Milk that could have come straight from the bucket. Real-true-milk.

Of course we bought some. Whole milk, all the fat, all the goodness, true milk. The kind of milk you remember as a kid. My mouth watered at the thought of it and we both couldn't wait to break out the bottle as soon as we got home.

Now as a preamble, both of us grew up with some "farm" experience. My home had small animals, I raised chickens for eggs and ducks for...well being ducks. We had a goat for awhile and I took care of sheep for the neighbors. It wasn't a farm-farm, but it was "ag-land" as it's called in Hawaii and I did get my hands dirty. My husband grew up on a real farm, his mother raised horses and he has many a story about chasing the chickens and getting chased by the chickens. I don't know if he had cows or not, but there were a lot of large animals around for him to get his hands dirty too.

However, as you can imagine, it's been awhile. Years of city and suburb living (not to mention supermarket reliance) might have wiped out a little of our rough-and-tumble dirtiness. So much so that when we cracked the seal on our bottle of milk I went immediately to pour it into tall glasses...

And nothing came out.

I shook it, I twisted it...no milk. Gingerly I stuck my finger into the neck of the bottle and touched a white, somewhat slimy but very firm substance. I looked at my husband, and in my city-like ignorance worried that perhaps we had bought a bad bottle of milk.

He took over, hero that he is, he shook the bottle, he twisted the bottle - and nothing came out. He finally gingerly stuck his finger down and touched the same firm, slimy substance and looked just as puzzled and disappointed as I did.

"Maybe it's wax, like a seal." I suggested.

"Maybe it's just not mixed together." He suggested.

We both looked down the bottle. Finally, we reached for a knife and plunged it in, sliding it straight through as easily as a knife through butter.

Of course people who have lived with cows and worked on dairy farms know what it was. Cream separated from the milk and floating to the top.

Once we scooped out enough to pour we savoured the sweetest, smoothest, softest milk we'd had in decades. It had all the weight and flavor that milk should have. It went straight down our throat and slid satisfyingly into our tummies. Filling us up far better than any of that white water they pass off for milk at Foodland. It made you think of being in the sunshine, the smell of sweet grass and dry hay, the feeling of good, clean dirt under your nails and that soft calm of cows in the pasture, soaking it all up and making milk for their babies.

And you.

After a long discussion on the goodness and joy of milk we finally had to giggle:

What a silly picture we made, screwing up our sophisticated and over-intelligent foreheads over a glass bottle of milk. We'd make a pretty good joke for a real farmer; us and our city folk ways.

Purr

I'm a definite and decided "cat-lady". If not for my marital status and the amount of restraint shown by my husband in the face of cute, cuddly, fuzzy kittens with big soulful eyes and little mews I would be a "crazy cat-lady". And I'd probably be single for the rest of my life and I'm sure that when I died my cats companions would do me the service of eating my face before anyone noticed I was gone. (It's true, it happened to a friend of a cousin of a an ex-boyfriend aunt twice removed!)

Anyway, though I don't have a lot of real-live cats nipping at my heels and planing the big death-day feast I content myself with cat like things. Lots and lots of cat like things. In fact I have so many cat boxes, cat calendars, cat statues, stuffed cats, cat pill-boxes, cat pens, cat jewelry, cat vibrators (just see if your paying attention - I don't really have any cat-sex toys...yet) that my collection has over flowed beyond my home office, to my bedroom, to my kitchen, to my car and finally it's grow sneakers and hiked three miles to my office.

And I'm not alone, there are many of us who have cat like obsessions evident in our cube decorating styles. We're mostly boring-married-people and we are all women. We also are the most likely to coo over the latest picture of fluffy and mitzy chewing on a piece of string or looking quizzically at the toilet seat.

We're just that way. No one else is, they think were cracked. My bosses especially pick on our need to snuggle small furry things. Not a day goes by when I don't hear some disparaging remark about my feline proclivity. Likewise I never tire of hearing how "real men" don't snuggle little cats.

But I've found a way of including everyone in my cat fancy. In addition to the pictures and the figurines I have one giant, fluffy, white stuffed cat. She (because my one live cat is a girl I tend to refer to all cats as girls, I think it is the same with all pet owners) sits right above my computer on my "decoration approved" shelf and watches me type. She also has a secret, which everyone in my department is interested in. She holds my keys. The keys to my drawers, my files, and certain offices. She has them all deep inside her furry, cuddly belly.

So whenever one of my bosses comes up to get the key to such-and-such cabinet he can be seen giving the big fluffy white cat a hug while he rubs her tummy.

One of Us

When I was in kindergarten, before I really learned how to write a "p" with a pencil (I've always had trouble with 'p', I don't know why) I and my classmates were lined up boy/girl and trotted off to the computer lab where Mavis Beacon and the "alphabet alien" taught us how to type. This was back in the day when floppy disks really flopped and your choice of font color was orange or green. Later, in the third grade I, along with four other students who happened to be chosen as the "gifted and talented", were sat in front of the first five Macintosh's ever to live in an elementary school in Maui, Hawaii. There the "alphabet alien" turned into the "mouse alien" and we learned how to point AND click. I've been pointing and clicking ever since.

What I'm getting at here is computers have been an important part of day to day life for me since I was five. That's almost twenty years ago. I learned to type my name before I learned to write my name. Shoot, I learned to type before I learned to read. A computer, to me, is not some newfangled toy. Not some novelty that has come in to replace my calculator. It's is THE tool. If you really want to get along in the western world, you're gonna have to start using it. And using it a lot.

Which is why it annoys me that out of the 20 people in my department I'm considered the only "computer person". The term is thrown around with equal parts awe and disgust. As if it's a betrayal for me to know how to create a spreadsheet, and my pointing and clicking skills make me dangerous. I'm the new species, I'm the computer-kind.

Likewise, it's become common to hear people beg off tasks by saying "I can't do that - I'm not a "computer person". Again in the same tone as someone saying "I'm not one of those people. I would argue that I too am not one of those people. I'm not a "computer person". I happen to be a regular person. My brain is made of mushy stuff, not processors and chips. My bones are covered in skin, not cheaply produced plastic. And you certainly won't find a sticker anywhere on my body that says "Intel Inside". I am in fact a person who uses computers, just like the other 19 people in my department do.

I could accept the fact that some people have been doing this work for longer than 20 years. I can accept that at some point in the past the work I do now was done with pens and papers and adding machines. I know adapting to moving a mouse around in a virtual picture can take a little getting used too. My mother still has trouble looking at the screen instead of the mouse when she's "pointing and clicking". But I cannot accept that a person who uses a computer for various projects 9-10 hours a day five days a week cannot actually do computer "things". They use the computer - they are computer people. They live in the computer age.

And it's time to act like it. If you can turn on a computer, open a program and type in a command - you my friend use a computer. If you can input random data and use the computer to produce information from it - you are part of the Information Processing Cycle. If you can navigate your web browser towards some chicks random web journal - you my friend are a computer person.

You are, in fact, one of us.