July 21, 2001

  • My apologies for posting this. There's dozens of great poets on Xanga. I am NOT a poet. I'm just in a very frustrated place today, and spewed out the following in a fit of frustration. Again, my sincere apologies to all real poets, most notably GudKarma, my current fave.

    You know my pain
    But you can’t help
    You see me writhe
    But you stay away

    There’s logic in there
    Somewhere for you
    I don’t get it, but then
    It’s not my logic, it’s yours


    Is this part of who you are?

    Denying what you want,
    What you need, what you feel
    As some kind of self-inflicted pain?

    I want so badly to say
    Fine, inflict pain on yourself

    But don’t involve me
    In your masochism

    I want comfort and concern
    But you can’t give it
    Because you’re so attuned

    To denying what you need

    If I could look elsewhere
    You know I’d rather
    Some understanding friend
    Bu there is none, for this

    I won’t try to convince you
    That I need you right now
    It wouldn’t help either of us
    I need you, not your pity or guilt

July 20, 2001


  • It’s A Done Deal


    The encouragement I got from all of you yesterday was AMAZING! Thank you, thank you.


    Well, I did it. I let her go. I had forgotten to mention what an incredibly over-sensitive person she is yesterday, and for this reason, I didn’t go into her flaws. She’s 47 and has been at jobs where these same issues have been presented to her, and she doesn’t see anything that needs to be corrected. I doubt that I, younger than her, could change her mind.


    She actually seemed sort of relieved. It’s kind of like when you break up with a boy/girlfriend, and it’s sad but a relief, because everyone involved knew it wasn’t really a good thing anyway. Know what I mean?


    So, anyway, onward and upward. Your words of advice, support and encouragement strengthened me. Honestly. Thank you.

July 19, 2001

  • A Thought That Changed My Life

    Many of us spend way too much time trying to convince other people to agree with us.


  • Pink Slip Time


    I need advice, fellow Xangans. I have to fire someone. I have no experience firing anybody unless they’ve only worked for me for a day or two, and were obviously grossly incompetent. This situation is a little trickier, however. Have you ever fired anyone? What do you say? How do you do it? Is there a firing protocol in business? Here’s the situation:



    1. She’s worked for me for 3 years.
    2. Her work quality is good, but her work ethic is not.
    3. She has no sense of urgency, and we work in a deadline-based business. She wants to wait until the deadline is almost up, then do the work, saying "Well, we HAVE until THIS time."
    4. She can see no further than the end of her nose. She’s interested in what will benefit her, rather than how we can make clients happier.
    5. She brings her child to work every day during the summer (ugg), and uses company computers repeatedly for personal business, even after being asked not to. Her daughter (age 13) uses one of the computers to surf the Internet when she’s here.
    6. Here’s the topper, for me: She’s been off for two weeks, and my business has made as much money without her here as it did when she was working. She talks a LOT. I’ve been doing her work, and spending the same amount of hours at the office as before, but now I’m making the money she was making, see? I’m just not as distracted as I was when she was here.

    So, I’ve been needing to take my business to "the next step" anyway, and after a meeting with some trusted friends and associates, it’s been decided that I need to let her go. But the problem is that she’s a very NICE person.


    Minor details: She’s a contracted worker. I don’t have to worry about the legalities of firing an "employee" for cause. I’m not paying her hourly, but rather per the amount of output she makes.


    Any words of wisdom on how to do this gracefully, from either the employer’s or employee’s point of view?

July 17, 2001


  • Let’s Be Friends.


    Someone, please explain this to me. I’m not being sarcastic – I’m serious as a heart attack here.


    When couples break up, a lot of folks tend to do the "Let’s be friends" thing. Now, maybe I’m just old and cynical, but it seems to me this isn’t a good idea in about 75% of the cases.


    As far as I can tell, reasons to think you should stay friendly with your ex might include:



    1. No one really did anything wrong, it’s just time to go your separate ways.

    2. There’s kids involved, and no one wants ugly scenes.

    3. The parties aren’t really ready to completely let go of the relationship.

    #1 kind of makes a little sense to me. #2 is totally reasonable to me, but being polite and being friends are very different things. It seems that #3 is the most common cause of people doing this "let’s be friends" thing.


    Reasons to NOT still "be friends," for me anyway, include:



    1. I’m not hard-up for friends. I have plenty of high-quality, fabulous friends.

    2. There’s a history there, emotionally and probably intimately. Going backwards in a relationship is almost always impossible. How do you go from knowing what someone looks like naked and knowing what makes them orgasm to waving hello on the street?

    3. It’s probably going to be uncomfortable for any new significant other in your life to have this other person around as a "friend."

    Feedback, please. I need feedback.

July 16, 2001


  • When Dreams and Reality Collide, Part IV


    So there we were, on the Bacon Brothers’ tour bus. Just me, Kelly the photographer, and Kevin and Michael Bacon. As of yet, I had not fainted. I was having a little trouble making eye contact with my idol-for-more-than-a-decade, and then suddenly a flash hit me: I was acting like I had in grade school, when I had posters of Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe up on my bedroom wall. I pulled myself together, and we began to chat.


    **Pause – Note: No other media outlet in town got an interview with the Bacons while they were in Austin. My husband claims that we did purely because of my nerves of steel.**


    I sat next to Kevin, with only his imported beer between us on the bus seat. Across from us were Kelly and Michael. Kevin’s voice is deep and resonant, and he’s genuinely funny. His brother has a more dry, sarcastic wit, which is hilarious in its own way. My big discovery was that…


    They’re just guys. Kevin Bacon is a guy, with two arms, two legs and is basically symmetrical. You know that walk he does in Footloose, A Few Good Men, and every other movie he’s been in where he’s just a little swishy? He walks that way for real. You know that smile with the dimples? He smiles that way for real. He’s just a nice, polite, funny guy that loves his wife and kids, but for two months out of the year he gets to play in a band with his big brother. ("How cool is THAT?", he says.)


    Michael, for the record, is a Grammy Award-winning musician in his own rite. Unlike the radio DJs had said, they were quite willing to mention movies. "We don’t pretend like there’s no famous movie star in our band," Michael says. "That’s why people bother coming."


    So anyway, Kelly asked if she could take a picture. "Oh, no!" they said. They weren’t ready for pictures! But they asked her if she’d like to be the only photographer allowed into the sound check, and of course, she said yes. She was the only "approved" photographer the entire night, so she got to climb around the stage and do whatever she wanted. This made her a happy girl.


    When the Bacons came onto the stage for the show, though, we giggled. They looked exactly like they had on the bus – same clothes, everything. What on earth wasn’t "ready" about them in the bus? We let ‘em slide. Ha.



    A t-shirt salesman saw us, also. "Oh, YOU two. You were in the BUS. Wink wink, nudge nudge. We know what THAT was." Yeah, that’s it. I was doin’ Kevin Bacon in the bus. You betcha. It’s ok. I had a pass.


    So we went home to our husbands at the end of the night (who were hiding out at my house, watching manly movies). I didn’t need Kevin for the whole weekend, after all.

July 15, 2001


  • When Dreams and Reality Collide, PART III


    I called Kelly in a hurry. As fate would have it, Kelly was an aspiring photographer and had just purchased a brand-new camera that had all the latest bells and whistles. It even had a nifty carrying case, so I knew it must be the Real Deal.


    "Kelly, can you get off work 30 minutes early? We have to interview Kevin Bacon. You’re the photographer."


    Insert a delighted squeal here.


    I heard her ask her boss "Can I get off a little early to interview Kevin Bacon?" There was much commotion. "No, this isn’t him on the phone. I have to photograph him tonight."


    I printed out the Bacon Brothers’ web page, so Kelly could read it to me on the way, hoping we’d have at least a smidgen of a clue about our subjects. We met up, swung by the hospital where I worked to "borrow" a microcassette recorder and tape, picked up breath mints and a Sharpie (for autographs) and were on our way.


    At the ticket window, we explained about our interview being at 7:30. "Ahh, the Meet & Greet is at 7:00." A M&G is where the celebrities sit at a table and the crowd can ask questions. We shrugged and said that would be fine, and sipped iced tea while waiting. We decided that being part of a big group interview would be even better, since we really didn’t know what we were doing anyway. Truly, we spent the better part of a half hour convincing ourselves of this. So shortly before 7, we returned to the window and asked to get into the Meet & Greet, please.


    "Oh, you’re SADZI. Oh, oh. Sorry. No. No M&G for you." Our faces fell. But she continued, "Your interview is at 7:30, with just the Bacons." Wahoo!


    At 7:25, someone led us through a twisting and turning bunch of ramps and stairs in the back of the concert venue. When we walked outside and it became apparent that we were being led to their tour bus, I began to falter. "Kelly, you’re going to have to do this, because I may faint."


    "No," she assured me. "You’re fine. You’re fine. This is your deal, you go in the bus first."


    Entering the bus, I was watching my feet so as to not fall. I reached the top step, looked up, and standing about 18 inches in front of me was Kevin Bacon, smiling. To prevent the aforementioned fainting spell, I quickly looked over at his brother and said "You must be Michael." Michael affirmed.


    "And I’m Kevin," the inexcusably attractive man in front of me said, smiling, as he put out his hand.


    To be continued later today...

July 14, 2001

  • When Dreams and Reality Collide, PART II



    So, my husband and I have this understanding, and it’s pretty much a joke between us. We laugh about Taylor Dayne, we laugh about Kevin Bacon. He swears that what does it for him about Taylor, though, is the combination of how she looks and how she sings.


    "So which is it, her looks or her voice?" I ask.


    "Both," he explains. "To do her, she’d have to be singing at the same time."


    I find this hilarious.


    My friend Kelly is also a Kevin Bacon fan, but sort of from a different era, as she’s 10 years younger than me. While I loved "Footloose" in early college, she loved it in elementary school. That’s alright, though... Bacon love is Bacon love, and we’re all equal.


    So I’m driving down the road one morning, listening to my favorite morning show. They interviewed "The Bacon Brothers." It seems Kevin Bacon and his brother, Michael, have a band that they play around with in their spare time. Before the interview, they said they were told to only talk about the music with the Bacons, and not Kevin’s acting, or the "Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game. It seemed like the Bacon management had possibly kinda been jerks about this, in fact.


    So the interview went on, and it was dandy, and at the end the radio host says "So, I got through an interview without mentioning the game!"


    "You almost did," Kevin mutters.


    It was then reported that the Bacon Brothers Band would be playing in our city the next Friday at Stubb’s, a local venue. ALRIGHT!, I thought! It’s my chance to see this band! Yahoo!


    So I got to my office, and called Stubb’s ticket office. I needed to ensue I get seats to this thing, ya know? But the office wasn’t open for another 30 minutes. While I waited, I piddled around on the web, and found the Bacon Brothers’ web page. Yahoo! Sound clips, pictures, stories... I was in Bacon Heaven. I was just reaching for the phone to order tickets when I saw a small button on the page that said "Media People - for an interview, click here."


    I chuckled and remembered the time I weaseled my way into interviewing B.J. Thomas when I was 17. Then it hit me like a bolt of lightning - I WAS a media person! Indeed, I was the editor of "The Zew News," a biweekly newsletter about the Austin Christian Music Scene. Ok, so that had zip to do with my lust for Kevin Bacon, but it was worth a shot. I clicked on the button, and asked for an interview.


    A week passed. No reply. It was only a few days from the concert. I called the contact number for the Bacon management, and spoke to a woman whose name escapes me, but we’ll call her Val. Val put me off. She said she’d call me back and didn’t, repeated times. She asked a lot of questions about my publication, and I answered them vaguely.


    Soon, it was the day of the concert. I had given up hope, but I decided to send a fax on official Zew letterhead. I sent a formal request, and as an afterthought, I scrawled at the bottom:


    VAL: WOULD CHOCOLATE HELP??


    My phone rang in five minutes.
    "Chocolate? Your interview is at 7:30 p.m., tonight." I nearly fainted. After I called Kelly, that is.

    To be continued...

July 12, 2001

  • When Dreams and Realities Collide

    Before we got married, my husband and I had a standing joke. Since the movie "Footloose," I've been crazy about Kevin Bacon.  I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but I just think he's the sexiest man on earth.


    My husband, on the other hand, has always had a thing for 80's pop-rocker  Taylor Dayne.  She did "Tell It To My Heart" and a bunch of other songs.

    So, we've always joked that if either of these folks showed up, we'd give the other one a "weekend pass." So guess what happened?

July 11, 2001

  • THE STORY OF IO, PART IV, AND FINI


    After the fire, both men recovered. James miraculously kept a fine sense of humor intact. People would ask him how he was, and he would respond with either "well done," or "crispy on the outside, tender on the inside!".


    We never did re-connect in a relationship kind of way. About four or five years ago we exchanged "How are you, hope things are good" e-mails. Then last night, after writing about him, I entered his name in Google and found his e-mail address. He responded, and we ended up talking on Yahoo Instant Messenger... and that turned into a 3-way voice conversation that included Paul. What a funny life it is.


    James is happily married and has a daughter, Sarah (3 1/2) and a son, Chase (2 1/2). We swapped pictures, which was fun, since last time he saw Jim (see picture below), he was three. Hee hee.


    So, what's new with you?