Author Archives: Murphy

reader appreciation week

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It’s that thing everyone is saying:

KIDS these days!

They want a trophy for everything. Their helicopter parents hand out ribbons and awards, so they expect it. They are bursting with self-esteem.

…except they aren’t. A lot of them know that those trophies are meaningless. What are they really good at amongst all the accolades? Who are the real friends among all the likes and followers.

My Dad likes to tell the story about his college professor telling him, in the 1950s, that he and his classmates were part of a very very few who were going to college.

At the time he said it, it had ceased to be true.

The 15 minutes of fame isn’t true anymore either.

We are all nobodies in broad view.

Step out the front door like a ghost into a fog
Where no one notices the contrast of white on white

What matters? And how can I make sure that I do?

In this highly and lightly connected world, we are like dandelion fluff, beautiful all together until the weak wind separates.

No! please don’t go!! We had something here…

Publishing a book, or a weekly column, used to be very rare. But not anymore. ISBN numbers are proliferating like weeds.

That nasty inner voice seems to be right. This thing that I am doing, that I am compelled to do because I am who I am, doesn’t matter.

I have almost 100 subscribers to the Weekly Wonder. 100! When Paris Hilton has 11 MILLION people following her tweets. I have shy of a hundred.

And most of the people subscribed do not read it.

That bums me out.

Until I see that some 30-odd people do read what I have to say. And they think it’s important, they listen and tell me that it makes them think.

Some of them read my week’s writing more than once.

That matters. That’s a connection, not a fluff passing on the wind.

Small town, tiny stage. Like It’s a wonderful life, that movie that says how one man made his mark on the world, ordinary and untraveled. He was nobody important to anybody but the people to whom his life’s actions had changed everything.

They say that kids these days want to be famous. And we forget that we all already are, to the people who love our faces and have since forever.

That’s enough. In fact, it’s quite a lot.

The universe forgot the concert tickets

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The universe did not align for me to go to the folk music festival today. Dammit. I had been thinking I wanted to go. I didn’t find out when it was happening or anything, but I was still thinking I wanted to go.

Now it’s happening and I am not there. I am at home finishing a load of dishes. I could be spontaneous and just GO!

“MOMMEEE!!! I CAN’T FIND MY PRINCESS!”

no. no I cannot be spontaneous anymore.

So, what I really want to do is drive around and listen to Dido and Johnny Cash and cry.

I am woman hear me weep

I will roar if someone asks me what’s wrong.

 

Do not break the melancholy enchantment of a fine and pleasant self-pity.

We’re always changing

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J. Ruth Gendler’s Book of Qualities addresses ideas and emotions with illustrations and personifications. Here is something she says about despair:

“She is persuasive, eloquent and undeniably well-informed. If you attempt to change her mind you will come away agreeing with her.”

If you look for them, there are a lot of facts. There are facts for anything.

But a little bit of leaven raises the whole batch. And maybe that’s the faith that raises me out of despair. Despair is easy. Somehow it’s easier to believe in bad things. The bad things seem to linger.

I feel the wind.  I hear it. I see what damage it’s done. I see all the disasters that almost happen and feel a flash of terror and pain as if they just did.

But the wind doesn’t blow forever. The vane says the wind is changing. There are no facts for what’s about to happen; good things are always possible.

The sun is always there and it will show its face.

what’s the prize?

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It’s Chris’s birthday. We started they day at 4 am…*I* started it by a request for water. I handed child duties back to daddy at 4:30. At 5:15 we had an exhausted contest.

DO NOT challenge me to an exhausted contest as YOU ARE WALKING BACK TO BED and I AM GETTING DRESSED FOR WORK.

Plus…the exhausted contest…even if you win, it’s not a prize you want.

and this is his birthday. I shall probably have to wait to tell him we should not get into exhausted contests in the middle of the night.

Happy freaking birthday.
I need coffee

the value of quality

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during my brief stint as a consultant during a merger, I was talking to a director, explaining what needed to happen to keep the department running well.

He said “Maybe we dont want it to run that well.”

I burst into tears.

What had I been working for? What had I been breaking my back for?

Fastforward. In the Project management book of knowledge they define ‘quality’. It’s what is desired by the person/group paying for it.

your opinion doesn’t come into it. Do what your told.

Thats the lot of the modern knowledge worker.

So John Henry went up against the steam engine. That stupid stupid steam engine that plodded along, doing nothing but driving nails into the railroad track.

My project manager mind says, I bet there was a whole new step with this steam engine nail-driving technology. I bet it drove in a lot of crooked nails.

I bet John Henry did not.

but quality was not what was desired.

I wonder. i bet there is the boss-ego in the industrial revolution taht can’t be ignored.

 

Where is that road headed?

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Had to make a long haul drive for work today in an old company van. Because he felt sorry for me, my sweet husband burned some music CD.

“Nothing that makes me think,” I said. “I have to drive for four hours starting at 5 AM. “

I started with the Isley Brothers, which was some good funk. On to Van Halen (because I might as well Jump), and through Shirley Brown.

No man should give his lady a Shirley Brown album. I was loving how good she was, and grateful that Chris had introduced me to her, but men do not come out looking good after she’s done singing.

It was a long stretch of highway. Let me tell you.

Now, the next one. “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.” At Folsom prison in 1968.

I know two things about the next week or so. I will be listening to this music wherever I drive and I will not be wearing mascara.

You could fly around the world on a jet plane in 1968. But Johnny Cash was playing the guitar like a railroad train. A train. And everything about it made sense. It still does as I am driving the interstate.

Who made this interstate? Some high school dropout making Davis Bacon?  As the white lines flick past me making a trip for a boss I don’t like to fix a machine that nobody uses and somebody broke on purpose—the story of John Henry is making me cry.

John Henry killed himself to prove a point nobody believed, but everyone hoped could be made.

Everyone.

Trains take you places. Maybe it was your idea. But once you are on it, it’s not a choice anymore.

Chugga chugga Chugga chugga

The highway, now, that’s freedom! On the Road! Great Gatsby

aaOOOgah

Once you are on it, though, maybe it’s not a choice. Keep up with the flow of traffic, stop and go or break your neck.

This automobile that we don’t even know how to fix anymore without calling in a specialist, that we pay and clean and park and house—we think it’s independence.

At least a train would let you ride for free if you were fast enough to catch it.

I’m not saying that we should go back to trains—as if we could! That train left the station even before Johnny Cash and the other country and blues artists made it a symbol.

In 1968 Johnny Cash was singing to the rhythm of the train tracks. The same radios were playing songs that led to protests and “damn the man!” and “Fight the power!” and teaching people to resist the establishment.

That’s not what’s on the radio now.

We are products of our times. Shall we admire the jail cell with GPS that we spend the teaspoons of our life on–maintaining and paying for? Yes we shall. Yes, I do. I do not always recognize that Automobile and that interstate and that parking space as the non-choice it is.

I don’t know what the answer is. I’m so sorry for all the John Henrys. But I do not want the guitar music of the train tracks, as my car bumps over the potholes and jagged asphalt to be lost on me, even if I don’t know what exactly to do about it. Even if I can’t make as many choices as I’d like right now.

John Stuart Mill, I have to drag you into it again,

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”

I am not asking for a revolution. I can’t do a revolution right now. But I don’t want to forget the other sides of the question.

playing on the internet

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it seems like it’s been a while. And now I’m finding some tools that might actually help me do what I want to do with my ife.

See. I have been feeling as if I have no control. But I think I might.

I think I do.

I am not hiding under a bushel. I don’t have to find under a bushel.

It’s not a secret, this trick to life. But it is possible.

Good and Lucky

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There is a guy going making the rounds in storytelling circles. He had a horrible thing happen to him; he was attacked and stabbed during a gang initiation in New York City.

Thing is, he had just started doing some really cool stuff, he’d been working to start a business, and was making it happen when
BAM
He got jumped. And stabbed. And in a hospital and not gonna live. Then he did live and had all the terrible things happen when you cannot take care of yourself. He had a heaping pile of bad luck, on top of trying to come to terms with living in a world that can unexpectedly try to kill you.

At a very dark moment, he sat in the park and watched a man in a beautiful suit and briefcase walk by. He saw that man, and had to use all his self-control not to run after him, beat the crap out of him and tell him “YOU THINK YOU HAVE ALL YOU HAVE BECAUSE YOU ARE GOOD. YOU ONLY HAVE WHAT YOU HAVE BECAUSE YOU ARE LUCKY!”

I got a chance to volunteer for career day at a south central elementary school. A dynamite woman, a friend of mine, is the principal at this school, and she asked for people to come and tell her students what their jobs are like.

The school is surrounded by steel bars—painted yellow to be more cheery. But they are almost three stories tall, to protect the children.  The children were very cute, so earnest and just like kids everywhere. They asked me questions, and my biggest regret was that I hadn’t prepared better.

We were given snacks in the library, between our sessions. I met the other volunteers. There were people from Caltrans, road workers in hard hats. There was a lot of law enforcement. And a criminal defense attorney.

The principal said to me “They probably have not heard about your kind of work before.”

Really? My super ordinary IT tech work? Graduate from ITT tech and keep computers running?

I overheard her talking with the defense attorney, who said,  “I asked the kids if they knew of anybody who was in a gang. They all raised their hands.”

My friend said, “If I could make all the gangs go away right now I would.” Her face was steely and so ready to defend her students. But she could not. She was already doing what she could.
It’s an unlucky day to be born into that neighborhood. It’s a bit of bad luck to have to go to that school, with the bravely painted concrete walls and carefully swept asphalt yard.

30 miles away, my town prides itself on grassy playgrounds, yawning luxurious trees, SAT scores and college acceptance. My lucky daughter gets her pick.
I told these kids, in the steel barred school that I hadn’t expected to have the career that I did. That I didn’t know about videoconferencing and computer networking when I was their age. What I did know was that I loved reading and finding things out.

So when I had the chance to learn about this technology, I read, and I learned and I am still reading and learning. They listened.

Life is full of good luck and bad luck. It’s full of chances. Lord knows, I didn’t have to end up in my town of trees and PhDs. Plenty of people from my town are on government support.

I don’t know what’s going to happen for those kids. I feel for them. But to be real, I don’t know what’s going to happen for any of us.

Luck doesn’t always come, and it isn’t always good. But I can try to be good. I can try, and keep trying.

And I can fall, feel sorry for myself, and then get up and keep trying again. Because that’s life. I can’t wait for the luck.

welcome to the alley

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The blind alley.

I’m tired.

I used to dream of parkour and climbing the walls. UP! UP AND AWAY

pant pant

I can scale this

Screams non-stop only maybe for sleep and not enough of that

I WILL SCALE IT

but I’m tired.

this corner

starting to feel comfortable.

This corner has  my back.

It’s cold

maybe wet

or hot in other weather

damn, I know this corner really well

like I said, it’s got my back

Watching the mouth of the alley for the monster

they call it a mouth for a reason