5/3/23
I am not ashamed of...
2/27/20
I broke myself...
Today, started much like any other day. Finished up with morning communications and coffee, and having a bit of extra time available, and being increasingly eco and health conscious, I decided to ride the bus for a meeting. With springtime upon us, I was excited to get a jump start on increasing my step goals. Laptop slung, cell phone squarely in my jacket pocket, wearing my ridiculously furry ushanka hat, trodding along, my mind started to wander. I was looking forward to finishing out paperwork following a great offer for a remote opportunity with Creighton University (out of Omaha, Nebraska) as a Senior Drupal Architect and pondering some details leading up to a scheduled session with a new mentee this afternoon.
Imagining Tulsa's beautiful green rolling hills during spring and summer, though somewhat, decidedly, a lack of sidewalks along S Memorial Dr that I failed to notice a perfectly symmetrical depression and found the land had suddenly fallen out beneath me...
10/17/19
Everyone has a bean and a brain
I'm always open to connecting with awesome people and I tend to surround myself with artists, thinkers, entrepreneurs and dreamers.
People that are up for a healthy intelligent debate, can take and dish out jest, and are also willing to trust and talk about their fears, their ugly side, their aspirations and their strength.
In this crazy world, we have all become experts at building walls between each other... but, I believe that defeats the purpose of life... I came here to connect... touch... hold... and feel...
How about you?
6/9/19
In a Nutshell: My Spiritual Journey
My life history is.... Unique.... My mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia before I was born. My father, a Vietnam vet seduced her and, POP!, there I was living in a shack in northern New Mexico. Not long after my birth, my father abandoned us, and my mother had to carry me 5 miles to the nearest highway in late fall to hitchhike back to Grandma in Los Alamos. We moved into an apartment in Albuquerque, while she tried to goto school and hold down a job. But is was no more than a year before is became clear that she was not capable of caring for me. So, off to live at Grandma's house I went. My Grandma was raised Lutheran. However, lost the desire to attend church several years prior. Because her life choices were limited by religion, she thought it would be best that I wait to be baptized by whomever ended up adopting me.
I remember having my first thoughts about spirituality around age 5. I have vivid dreams, you see. Some would say that I am an astral plane walker. And I started having dreams about my purpose in this life. Many "questions" people have, I just felt like I "knew". I knew I had done this all before (Reincarnation), many times before. So many times that I was more "in control" of my "spirit" than most anyone else. I had this "universe view", as if I were a powerful Guardian Angel sent to help the people. But, I realized it would not be clear cut and was somewhat frustrating. Because Evil & Death also serves its purpose and is beautiful in its own way. So, I let the topic melt away for a while.
Because my father continued to be a manipulative nut, it took until my 9th birthday for Grandma to have guardianship. But we were already considering whom I would goto beforehand. So, soon after that final trial, I decided to live with my Aunt, Uncle and Cousin in my father's side.
Unfortunately, things did not turn out well with them. I was so desperate to be loved and accepted and was so afraid of being abandoned, that I blamed myself when she would tell at me or when my cousin would touch me. I accepted that she thought I was a Rogue when they found out he was sneaking into my bedroom at night. I cried a lot. I cried when they laughed when I had night terrors and sleep walked. I cried when she tossed me in the shower to wake me up. I cried when she hated me and found someone else's daughter to spend time with. I read a lot of books and spent as much time as I could at school or with my head in my computer. Then, at 16, after my cousin had a shotgun wedding and the new wife moved in and he went to boot camp, I left.
Around that time, I had started exploring what other people thought about spirituality, again. Some of my friends were Wiccan, some Christian.
Once, I went to an "accept God into your heart" ceremony at a non denominational church. That was the first time anything anyone else believed made any sense. When I approached the steps, and closed my eyes, it was as if the Universe was watching the humans, like it was some sort of comedy. "Look! They think we are gonna "save" them. Hahaha! Awww... Don't they realize they have the spiritual power within themselves? That they created their Jesus?"
And all I could do was smile and shuffle back to my seat.
Similarly, the Wiccans, were often simply "finger pointers", throwing pretend lasers of power in random directions.
Many years have passed since those formative ones. But, I always come back around to the same thing. We are electric squishy beings in a Universe full of awe and wonder. We are creative and destructive, a perfect reflection of the star stuff we are made of. If only we could find a way to accept each other for our kaleidoscope of differences, for just one moment, just to breathe. Maybe is wouldn't seem so scary after all.
2/10/19
Adulting: 20 Years of Self-Discovery
A few weeks ago, after having a lengthy discussion with a friend on facebook about forgiveness and reconciliation, I held my breath, scrunched my eyelids, and jumped into an abyss. I had no idea what to expect when I sent that initial message. But, I knew I had to. It was time.
When I finally got the courage to peek through narrow slits and a haze of eyelashes, I was greeted with a pleasant extended exchange with a person I thought I had lost forever. After several weeks of conversation, today, I was asked a relatively simple question. One that you would think would have been asked and answered during the first couple of minutes. They wanted to know what I had been doing with myself for the last 20 years!
I found it impossible to explain in brief and sitting here writing this now, I realize that I have spent much of my adult life telling close friends and loved ones about my childhood. To be honest, I still can't believe that I have lived more years since leaving Rocklin, CA in January of 1998 than when I was born in April of 1980. But, the numbers don't lie. After regurgitating my journey, I felt it was important to capture the story here. After all, at some point, I intend on writing a memoir, just like my grandmother did, and I need to keep some notes. Here is that accounting:
At that point, I decided I needed to get out of retail sales, and ended up as a cashier for Home Depot. After the holidays, they laid me off, so I enrolled in the Work Information Network program through the Department of Economic Security and went back to school, this time at Maricopa Community College for an Associates Degree in Computer Science. Unfortunately, the state failed to inform me that they would only be paying for the first semester and I had to apply for federal aid to continue with the program. At which point, I also started working through several temp companies and found myself jumping around several Admin Assistant and Inbound Customer service positions in the Healthcare and Financial industries, finally ending up working as a technical support representative at 2Wire, an internet router/modem manufacturer. I started there when there were only 50 people at the center and watched it grow to over 300 agents, survived a buy-out by HSBC as the "Home Networking" division.
While working these "temp" jobs, I lost interest in the Associates Degree due to lack of quality instructional design and after taking a break for a while, after I started tech support at 2Wire, I decided to try a Technical College, finally deciding on an Art Design school that had a technical program, called Collins College out of Tempe, AZ. This time, I tried very hard to keep my work and school lives separate. But, when the Career Center got wind where I worked, they must have reached out to 2Wire, as they started attending career days at the school. Soon, I was surrounded by people that went to my school & my workplace. Needless to say, despite all the policy & procedure changes that took place at 2Wire, I had worked my way onto a specialized "fiber" Senior level team within 2 years. But, I hit a glass ceiling. They kept promising to send me to CA to do special work with the Engineering department, etc. Then, one day, my supervisor "wrote me up" for getting 0's on 5 out of 10 User Experience Reviews in the previous week. After two years of excellent service, this new manager decided to write me up for a bogus reason. Let me explain. They just implemented this policy to grade employees performance based on User Experience reviews. Being on level 2, most of my calls were escalated from the overseas call center in India. So, most people who gave bad scores to level 2 agents were actually marking for their experience with the level 1 dumb shit they first talked to. To top it off, they had me "selling" the surveys to the customers, encouraging us to beg for high scores at the end of the call.
So, I started looking for a different job. Through a different staffing agency, while I was at the Maricopa County Animal control, rescuing a 2 year old male Husky, I got a call from a Manager at Universal Technical Institute, an Automotive Educator, to come to work in their internal Help Desk. I gladly accepted the position and right before finishing my Bachelor's Degree in PC Networking Technology in 2006, was offered an entry-level development position on their in-house team. I continued to work for UTI for another 3 years, working on their internal Student Information System, embracing changes and improvements within the company and system. For most of my stay at UTI, I lived in Arizona City, which is a 70-minute drive south of Phoenix. And those first 2 years were the craziest, working full time, school full time (in an accelerated program, 3 years to complete the Bachelor's degree) and driving ~150 mi per day. I remember four nights a week, only getting 5 hrs of sleep at night. It was TOUGH. For years after, I would say: "I'll never do THAT again!"
Of course, I was excited about the opportunity. However, I was asked to keep it secret. I should have known then that something was wrong. About a month later, I emailed in sick. Midday, I got a surprise knock at my door from my boss, worried because he hadn't heard from me. I found the email had gotten stuck in my drafts, and sent it, thinking nothing more about it. However, the next day, I was called into the director's office and fired. I was devastated. I remember having to fight for my Unemployment benefits, going through an Audit process with a phoned-in hearing, where they were found to not have sufficient evidence to support a "justified" firing.
And I even accepted going back to the External Technical Support group, continuing to advance under that umbrella, enrolling in the Remote team program, a new group where agents worked primarily from home.
So, there you go. (Congratulations if you made it this far, btw!) There are a lot of details not covered here and you can read about them here on my blog. But, really, this was more a review of my professional journey, with a few personal bits mixed in.
If you have made it this far, I am interested to know more about you too! How many of you have been adulting longer than you were a child? Do you feel old? I'm not sure I do, at least yet. Also, do you plan on writing or have you written an autobiography?
8/23/18
Agendas: Everyone's got them
"What I invite you to consider is that there are many circumstances where we can withhold our agenda for others just a little bit more. Perhaps you allow your staff to share more of their own ideas; in school, you allow your students to bring their agendas forth more; or at home, you allow your child greater room to take risks, get messy, make mistakes and learn through them."
6/17/18
When life gives you lemons.... write about it!
Here is my first post:
And after, I saw another creator's post where it seems I am not the only one who is seeing this stuff:Beautiful, Brilliant & Talented: Another facet of Homeless life in the PNW
My husband & I are currently living out of our 1986 GMC Suburban in Vancouver, WA and became houseless last year near the end of July, because of a predator, a person who was supposed to be family, who claimed to need roommates to help afford his apartment and once discovered that he was illegally subletting low-income housing that he did not qualify for, proceeded to misuse the local authorities to get us thrown out on the street.
It is good to hear others are seeing the same problem I am.
It is good to hear others are seeing the same problem I am. If people would just stop & listen, sit with each other, embrace each other, see each other's value.