Hobbling and being a good friend.

Yesterday Kirstin and I spent a large part of the afternoon helping Kris move. She bought a great new condo; the first place she's owned and not rented, and is very excited about moving in. I can understand her excitement! It's a lovely condo, with a sweet, secluded little garden in the back.

I grunted and hobbled, and smiled and hefted, and tried very hard to act as a person and a half when in fact I probably should have been benched for the day due to injury. Oddly enough, it led to self-discovery. I realized in the process of hefting a heavy computer monitor, that this is part of who I am. I *do* things for my friends.

I don't consider myself to be the best friend in the world to have. I don't get very emotional; and I'm more prone to advice-giving than sympathetic listening. I love people, but I'm full of facts and ideas and actions; and am not very physically or emotionally expressive. I *am*, however, always willing to go the extra mile for them. (Or in Wayne's case, the extra 400 miles.) I'll buy the extra ticket, I'll heft the box, I'll provide the ride. I've got an extra room they can use, or I'd be glad to help them move their couch.

These are ways I show affection. Maybe it's strange, but it's me.

I hope this is something Kirstin will learn from me. She was actually a very good helper yesterday, packing things as assigned for Kris, and carrying things to the car many times, without one word of complaint. She ended up very tired, though, and slept for a solid hour in the car after all that moving!

In the meantime, I drove to North Lansing to see how Forest was doing with the car. The answer was: not very well. He and his brother and our friend Josh were out there cursing up a storm and trying to remove the engine. It was a serious job, and took all three of them an entire day, spent lying in oil slicks and mud puddles. They were all miserable, and when I got there Forest was so out of sorts that he hardly noticed my existence. I ended up climbing back in the van and shaking my head in dismay. Sometimes I don't think they're EVER going to finish that car. I remarked to Forest this morning that I was wondering if we would be better off to spend the thousand dollars it will cost to replace the engine on a downpayment on a new car.

He has wondered the same thing; but per his usual cleverness, he is thinking a few years down the road, and doesn't want to have car payments while he's student teaching. I guess I have to agree with him there. I've been thinking the same thing about the van. I'm just not sure I can stretch the life of the beast out that long. Still, I could trade the van in on a very nice used car without much of a loan at all if it came right down to it. The van doesn't depreciate very much because of its usefullness and reliability.

Forest's Neon isn't much of a concern, because it will have a nice new engine, transmission, and so on; basically it will be a new car when they're done with it. Both Sean and Josh work on Neons all the time, so they're pretty confident they can keep it running for a few college years.

They probably don't know the first thing about my van, though. Maybe I should trade it in on a Neon. Hee hee.

After checking in with poor Forest and his poor broken car, I took Kirstin to Jackson, where she had been invited to a rollerskating party with her friend Catherine. I made one last-ditch attempt to find shoes at Kohl's in Jackson, to no avail. Much to my frustration, it seems that shoe design now makes even less sense than it did last time I bought the silly things. I am nearly 5 feet 9 inches tall. I do not WANT to wear platform shoes. I want flats. I also want slip-on shoes without elastic in them, because I know the elastic will discolor and wear out in no time flat. Silly me, I also want soles that are made with a combination of traction and comfort. The one shoe that I found that didn't completely offend my sense of style was so uncomfortable that it felt like a brick strapped on the bottom of my foot. Yuck.

Kirstin, however, had a grand time at her party. By the time I picked her up the kids were all skated out, and spending their tokens in the arcade. Without so much as a word from me, Kirstin went straight to her room when we got home and cleaned it. It looks REALLY nice up there.

When Forest got home, covered in oil and goo, sneezing and sniffling from a discouraging day spent lying in mud puddles, I was so glad to see him I didn't care how dirty he was. It was a long weekend spent largely without him, and I was pretty seriously craving some 'us' time. We ended up just curled up on the couch, snuggling until we couldn't stand it and shared a shower together. I swear, if it weren't for collective showers, we would never have gotten so far in our relationship. We spend some of our best quality time in there.

Today my mind is virtually itching with things I want to do, but have to wait for other people to move forward. I want to order the invitations for our wedding. Before I can do that, though, I want Forest to check the proofs, and he probably won't have a chance to do that until after he's done with his car.

I also want to get my registration at MSU done, but I have to wait on Mr. Bigelow to call me, and he has been unable to do that all day, apparently. I've now been trying to reach Bigelow for a full week. It's irritating.

I'd like to check my email, but the server isn't up right now. My coworkers are tinkering away at it.

I'd like to call my mom and discuss holiday scheduling with her, but she's in class.

I'd like to jump up and down and scream because despite the huge pills I'm taking, my knee still hurts, just from sitting at my desk. I've taken to changing the position of the seat every few minutes. We'll see if that helps. All at once I'm grateful for the really expensive office chair my boss's boss insisted on buying. I still don't think it's worth $800, but it's nice, I guess. Other than my expensive chair, I don't have anything that will make me feel better until Wednesday, which was the earliest that I could get an appointment with my physical therapist.

All in all, it leads to a very cranky, antsy Wendy. I don't like waiting on things, and I'm not a patient person to begin with. Pain only makes things worse.

On a more positive note, they are planting trees outside my office window right now. I'm not sure why they are doing that; it was a little woodchip-and-shrub garden before; nonetheless, I'm a big fan of trees, and I'm sure I'll enjoy the new one immensely.

Right now the sun is shining in through the window and warming my back, making me feel like a cat. I want to stretch and yawn a lot, and perhaps take a little sunspot nap.

Forest called, and seems to be having a reasonably good day. Sometimes I envy the flexibility of his schedule. When he waits tables he works 6 days per week, which pretty much sucks; but he tends to work these little 4-hour weekday shifts, and often earns an entire day's salary in those few hours. He doesn't have to get there until 11 AM, and often enough he's out of there by 2 or 3. It leaves him with a fairly consistent patch of spare time and the beginning and end of every day. After a couple of years in the 8-5 world, a schedule like that sounds appealing to me. Then again, I know what it's like to have a job like his, and it's not all it's cracked up to be. The flexible schedule thing means that a new manager *will* screw up your schedule twice a year, and once in a while you'll have a week without enough hours. Flexible schedules also mean flexible weekends, and flexible days off. "Ooops! You mean you didn't want to work that day? Well, you'll have to cover your shift."

I remember that it was hell, but every now and again I envy the freedom of it. The grass is always greener.

I don't think there's anything about my job that Forest would envy, though. He doesn't like to sit still all day. I don't think he'd enjoy being closed in an office all alone all day, either. I don't mind it too much, because I go out and work at the Store on the weekends and get my 'people' fix; but even I have to admit that it gets lonely around here on occasion. It's also very quiet, and there's no opportunity to express one's own personality. The jobs that Forest likes require him to positively *resound* with personality. Waiters with personality get good tips. Teachers with personality get the attention of their students. (Heck, I don't think I had a single teacher without an overabundance of personality, spewing everywhere around them. )

I think I'm looking forward to having a job someday which requires me to be full of personality and presence. In my current job, I must have a 'professional appearance and disposition'. It says that in my job description, I'm not kidding. I went on TV once to answer questions about a new project, and realized that I couldn't be myself, I had to act like someone somewhat like me, with a smaller sense of humor and a carefully honed non-profit-think-tank vocabulary.

I think a lot of the required personality drain is defined by linguistics. My workplace has its own language. We have acronyms for everything, and people who work here communicate with each other using all that lingo which an outside would perceive as gibberish. We also speak in corporate metaphors; for instance, we are always saying we will be 'leveraging technology' for use in blah blah blah; as if we plan to pound technology into a long bar, and use it to pry something open. We continually 'elevate standards' (as though we could move them up to the 23rd floor) and 'actualize data'.

When I find myself using these phrases, I know I've really been suckered into personality-free status, just like someone out of a Dilbert cartoon.

Then I rebel, and use the phrase 'what in blue blazes is he talking about?' during our departmental meetings. Things like that just pop out. It's non-professional, and makes people giggle, but I'd rather have them snickering and remembering me, than being bored and forgetting my name.