I missed the memo about kid lit, kindles and Katniss Everdeen.

I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t love to read.  As a child, I enjoyed wandering around libraries and losing myself in the words and the pictures of books, glorious books.  Still,  I suppose I was just dabbling  until I was introduced to A Wrinkle in Time and The Arm of the Starfish in elementary school.   Madeleine L’Engle was my gateway drug.  Once I figured out that novels were this marvelous form of transportation, I was totally hooked.  Then I started pretty much inhaling all the Judy Blume books in the school library, then graduated to the dark, incestuous world of V.C. Andrews, and then I was swiping my Dad’s Stephen King and Robert Heinlein novels.   Yeah, I was a book junkie.

As a grown up, I’ve continued to be a pretty voracious reader.  But in recent years, it’s been mostly code books and Sandra Boynton.  I always read a bit for fun, but the leisurely trips to libraries and bookstores were an infrequent treat.

But now…. I got one of those schnazzy kindle fire thingys for Christmas and I’ve discovered a whole new world of multi-slacking.  In addition to using it for Facebook-stalking old boyfriends and watching cute cat videos on YouTube, I can use my kindle to read actual books!  I’ll admit I’d initially been kind of resistant to the whole e-reader thing.  The brave new world of publishing had vaporized my husband’s old job at a magazine, so I admit I held a grudge.  But the kindle fire was seductively cheap for its capabilities, so I reluctantly started coveting it.  And now there’s no turning back. All the books I could read in multiple lifetimes, lots of them free or really cheap,  at a mere flick of a touchscreen.  I’ve seriously died and gone to nerdy girl heaven.

One of my first acquisitions on my new gizmo was The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.  I’d been hearing about these books for the last year or so, but dismissed the thought of reading them since they were technically “young adult” novels.  I don’t have my AARP card or anything, but I somehow thought anything with the YA label was somehow beneath my undeniable  sophistication.  Boy, I am I ever glad I got over myself and read these books.  I can’t remember when I’ve been more engrossed in a story or more neglectful of the laundry.

If you haven’t read any of The Hunger Games books yet, I won’t give anything away.  Just suffice it to say, I want to be Katniss Everdeen when I grow up.  She’s a complicated, tough little bird and I’ll be thinking about her a lot, for a long time, I think.

It seems kind of fitting that my love affair with books has been rekindled (sorry, couldn’t resist) by the very sort of books that got me hooked in the first place.  There’s usually something pure in adventure stories for and about the young, and there’s extra magic when a book bridges generations, as The Hunger Games seems to be doing.  When the first of the movies comes out in a couple of months, I predict I’ll be queuing up giddily for my ticket along with lots of people both older and younger than myself.  With so many fans out there, the line might be kind of long.  But I’ll bring my kindle so I’ll have something to read.

Memo received.

I missed the memo about smiling.

I’m technically a native Californian, but I spent most of my formative years in The South.  Say what you will about Southerners, they’re friendly folks.  When you walk or drive down the street in a small southern town, it’s pretty much expected that you will smile and wave at just about everyone you encounter along your path, whether or not you know them.  That’s just what you do.

So imagine my confusion and discomfort when I moved from a small town in Virgina to the big city of Los Angeles.  I persisted in my smiling (though I dispensed with the waving) and people in the City of Angels responded strangely.  If passersby made eye contact at all, it was usually with a blank or slightly angry expression.  More concerning was when my smiling resulted in guys turning around and following me down the street.  It wasn’t my intention to look flirty, but I suppose when all the other women were walking briskly and averting their eyes, my smiling seemed pretty alluring in comparison.

So quickly I learned, don’t smile so much.  And when I stopped smiling so much, I think I got a little less happy.  Maybe it’s one of those weird connections between the mind and the body that Ph.ds are still trying to sort out.  All I know is that much like Buddy the Elf, I just like smiling.  I smile when I’m happy, but I’m finding more and more that smiling makes me happy.

As part of my recent job change, I’m now one of those urban clichés in opaque black tights and Steve Madden walking shoes, hoofing it from the train station to my office.  Now that I’m out of my car, I’m actually seeing people, and I’m trying to get back into the habit of smiling at them.  Maybe it still makes me look flirty or crazy, but I don’t care.  Not to get all Mother Teresa on you, but…

Smiling is kind of like an open door…it is inviting.  It might sometimes invites people to follow you home, but I think it more often invites good things, like friendship and warm and fuzzy feelings.  In this way, smiling is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I could explain, but Deano sings it better than I could say it..

Merry Christmas and memo received.

I missed the memo about regrets, regrouping, and student loan debt.

After being a practicing attorney for nearly seven years, I recently resigned from the private law firm at which I had been working for nearly six years and took a job with the city.  My new job did not require a law degree, though my legal education and experience will probably come in very handy.

With my new job, comes a bit of a pay cut, but it’s a small price to pay for my mental health.  In recent years, I was getting pretty miserable in private practice.  As a defense attorney, the business model required me to keep track of my work day in six-minute increments, with lots of pressure to maximize the total amount of time I billed.  The elephant in the room with this business model is that what’s good for business isn’t always good for the client…this inherent conflict of interest weighed on me increasingly in recent years. 

I was also finding that so much of civil litigation was just posturing;  I would spend months and months going through the literal and figurative motions only to reach a conclusion that was pretty much foregone from the outset.  I started feeling that I was wasting a lot of life force in this process, and so many factors in litigation seem to unfortunately militate against people doing the right thing sooner rather than later. 

So, I’ve made this big transition, and so far so good with my new gig.  Now I’m left with trying to make sense of the last decade and I’ll admit it’s been a bit trippy.  As I was beginning to struggle in private practice, I would find myself cursing the day I ever decided to go to law school.  But then, as an eternal optimist, I tried to talk myself out of the conclusion that law school had been a mistake.  And because I’ve gotten some transferable skills out of the deal, my legal career hasn’t been a total loss. 

But…and it’s a big but…I’m left with the collateral damage of tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt.  How I kick myself as I contemplate what other less expensive routes I could have taken towards a meaningful career.  In recent weeks, some of us within the 99% have been calling for student loan debt forgiveness, and for me, that is a delightful daydream.  I will honor my student loan debt, but the thing that kinda bugs me about it is that it’s one of the only forms of debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy.  If you max out your Visa on Jimmy Choo’s or buy a dream house that turns into a nightmare, you can waltz into Federal Court and say “oops!” but if you mortgage your future on an educational endeavor that turns out to be completely misguided, too bad. 

Forgive my crude artwork…

Ever read the Guy de Maupassant story, “The Necklace”? Here’s the short version…a vain social climber is married to a petty bureaucrat. He wrangles an invitation to a glamorous ball at which she can rub shoulders with all the beautiful and important people. She’s delighted only momentarily, until she recalls that she has no gown befitting such an occassion. Her husband scrounges together the money she needs for a beautiful new dress, and still she is not satisfied, as now she recognizes she has no jewelry to go with her dress. Her husband suggests she borrow something from a well-to-do friend, so she goes to her friend and selects the most elaborate diamond necklace in her collection. They go the ball and have a glorious evening, but as they enter the car to go home, she realizes the necklace is gone. Rather than admit to her friend that the necklace has been lost, they borrow every penny they can, burdening themselves with an unthinkable amount of debt, and they buy a replacement, which is returned to the friend.

For decades, they work tirelessly to repay their debt. Then one day, the social climber, who is now old and weary from over-work, meets her old friend in the street. Her friend is shocked by how changed she is and feels pity. But the social climber feels pride and tells her friend the truth of how she lost the necklace but has worked all these years to repay the cost of the replacement. The friend is horrified and tells her, “But my dear, the necklace was a fake!”

So yeah, that’s kinda how I feel about my law degree.  I’m paying dearly for something that turns out to be fake.  Well, not fake exactly, but you know what I mean.   Some memos are really, really expensive, but memo received.

I missed the memo about Oktoberfest.

My first name is Jamie, the feminine of James, as in King James, the old dead white guy.  My maiden name is Walker, like the shortbread. Short, white bread, that is.  So yeah, I’m ridiculously caucasian and I’ve always been a little embarrassed about that.  I once dated a very inappropriate Italian guy, whose shortcomings in character I forgave because I had always daydreamed about marrying someone with a last name that ended with a vowel.  I thought it would make me a more interesting person.

But turns out that the love of my life is named Ryan Ball.  Aw, c’mon!  Not only did I trade one boring Anglo name for another, I get one full of crazy pun potential.  Fine.  Fantastic.  “Jamie Benevento” would have been a little more colorful, but after all these years, I find that “Jamieball” suits me pretty well.  (And that’s no typo…people tend call me “Jamieball” like it’s all one word, but that’s another memo.)

So yeah, I’m white. And even with all of the benefits society affords me as a consequence, I’ve always felt like a woman without a color, and thus without much culture.  Just plain vanilla.  That was, until,  I attended my first Oktoberfest celebration. 

I polka’d . I yodelled.  I drank beer and downed shots of Jagermeister. There were seriously joyous people in laderhosen and drindl who were unapologetically corny and unironic in their enjoyment of all the festivities.  I loved it.  It was the first time I’d ever gone to a party and not felt tragically unhip.  I feel I have reasonably good social graces, but I am not and never have been particularly cool.   So it was so awesome to be around a whole gaggle of people who were likewise cool-challenged, but nonetheless, having ridiculous amounts of fun. 

I’m not sure I can parlay Oktoberfest into a cultural identity (at least not without starting to sound like a skinhead), but at least I’ve got an inkling of what it feels like to have a distinct heritage, and I suppose it kinda feels like a good buzz. 

So far I’ve only been to Oktoberfest events here in the States, and it’s on my Bucket List to get to Munich one year.  I think it’s a testament to the fact that Oktoberfest people really are my people that when watching the following video, I was laughing with them rather than at them (mostly). 

Roll out the barrel and memo received.

I missed the memo about Dark Energy. 

This past week a trio of sexy uber-geeks were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for their work which has advanced the understanding of a phenomenon called Dark Energy.  Oversimplified, Dark Energy explains why it is that the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace.  There were some crazy sophisticated telescopes and supernovae involved in figuring this out, but since I was about a C+ physics student, I’ll tap out now in trying to explain it any further. 

When I heard about Dark Energy, I kinda got the heebie jeebies. I mean, I’m already freaked out by entropy, so now I have to deal with the idea that not only are things falling apart, they’re falling apart faster than expected.  Am I the only one who is totally freaked out by this?

The concept of Dark Energy invites the inevitable discussion of The Force, as in, “Use The Force, Luke.” 

In the Star Wars mythology, The Force has a light side, a dark side and it holds the universe together, kind of like duct tape.  Turns out the true state of cosmological affairs might not be too different from Star Wars.  Gravity draws stuff together; Dark Energy pushes stuff apart. And apparently the universe is comprised of a whole lot of Dark Energy.  No wonder I am so tired trying to keep body and soul together.

Another thing about Dark Energy that kind of rocked my world is that it apparently comprises three quarters of the universe, yet until a few years ago, no one knew it existed. Talk about your missed memos. The idea that something can be ubiquitous but somehow imperceptible is pretty trippy.  But here’s the thing…maybe Dark Energy wasn’t discovered until recently because its existence doesn’t fit neatly into  what we already understood about cosmology.  It’s hard to see something that’s not supposed to exist, even if it’s right in front of your face.  My brain isn’t wired to understand these things, but apparently the discovery of Dark Energy represents a revolutionary shift in the way we’re to understand the universe.  I’m not sure what that means, but if permits the advent of teleportation technology like in Star Trek, then I’m totally down with it. 

I’m not sure what my point is here, and maybe I don’t really have one.  I’m just looking at the stars a little differently these days.  And knowing that there’s a lot of dark energy out there makes me a little more grateful for the light. Stargazing, and memo received.

I missed the memo about feminism and the failures of the English language.

The other morning, I shared an elevator with a man who appeared to be in his 40s and another woman who was probably rounding the corner on 60.  In the time it takes to ride up 17 floors, you can have some truly fascinating conversation about weather, how good coffee smells, and the general suckiness Mondays.  I mean, I thought we bonded.  So I was a little dismayed when the man exited the elevator and said: 

“Have a good day, girls.”

“Girls.”  I don’t think I’d ever really taken much notice of being addressed as a “girl” but for some reason, it  bugged me.  Maybe it was the tone.  Or maybe my knickers were already twisted that morning.  Or maybe it really is inappropriate to address two women who could buy cigarettes without showing ID as “girls”. 

It’s a weird thing to work in a male-dominated environment in the age of political correctness.  Most of the time, male colleagues mind their manners, but often the strain of self-censorship is evident.  They don’t want to put a foot wrong, and I don’t want to seem thin-skinned and defensive, and the result is men behaving more politely than is natural for them and me pretending that I don’t know that it’s a total farce.  It’s weird.  I don’t want to be “just one of the guys,” but at the same time, the kid gloves aren’t necessary. 

All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, I’d like to think that most men have a fairly enlightened attitude about women as their partners and peers in both the professional and personal realms.  So maybe it’s just our language that fails us.  If Mr. Elevator had been chatting with a couple of other men, he may have said, “Have a good day, guys.”  And the word “guys” doesn’t seem to have much of a charge to it, and indeed it’s become nearly gender-neutral.  So what’s the appropriate feminine counterpart to the word “guys”?  Is it, in fact, “girls”?  Certainly, it isn’t “gals”.   (I mean, who says “gal”?)  Is it “doll”, as in “Guys & Dolls”?  I sure as hell don’t know, so I do cut Mr. Elevator a little bit of slack. 

When it comes to gender-specific language, I presume a dissertation or two has been devoted to the exploration of why we have the words we do and what the use of these words does to advance or undermine the cause of gender equality.  These are probably bigger thoughts than I can ultimately get my girly head around.  That’s why I usually just refer to everybody as “dude.”

I don’t really abide, but nonetheless…memo received.

I missed the memo about slowing down.

Ever feel like the universe is trying to tell you something? The other day my darling boy started expressing some curiosity about why we have night-time and day time and so I did what all good, modern parents do: I went looking for videos on YouTube.  Amongst the gems I discovered, this one turned out to be our favorite:

Seriously, the tempo of this music is such that I could actually feel my heart slow down as my son and I watched and listened. This is the closest I’ve gotten to meditating in a long, long time.

Then, the other day, as I was rushing back to my car during a lunch-time errand, I noticed this bumper sticker:

The video and the bumper sticker kinda seemed like a 1-2 punch reminding me of the merits of slowing down.  I have spent so much of my life rushing around like a crazy person.  I walk fast.  I talk fast.  I am impatient with microwave ovens.  I used to think this was a sign of my industry and efficiency, but I’m giving this a second thought.

I hurry, hurry, hurry….theoretically moving forward, but towards what? I suppose what I’m contemplating is something like this:

I have goals, ambitions, plans, and sometimes it feels like my life consists almost entirely of my schemes and machinations designed towards achieving those plans, but that brings me to yet another bumper sticker:

Incidentally, here’s me at my 26th birthday party, blowing out the candles on a cake on which I had asked that the above-referenced quote about life and plans be inscribed…

So here I am, twelve years later, still trying to figure out the difference between planning my life and my actual life.   At this rate, it appears I’ll be mulling this memo over for some time to come, but in the meantime,  I’ll just try to slow down.  Memo received.

I missed the memo about San Diego, also known as, my Happy Place.

This past weekend I made the quick trek down the 5 freeway to spend a day at the BlogHer Conference.  Before a few weeks ago, I didn’t know that BlogHer even existed, but as I have begun dipping my toes into the weird, wacky, and sometimes wonderful universe that is the Blogosphere, I’m learning more and more about a fascinating community of people who blog for fun, for a cause, for business, or for all of the above.  It was a fantastic learning experience and I met some really lovely people.  Good times.

Being relatively new to the world of blogging and virtually unconnected within the blogging community, I was a little nervous about attending the BlogHer conference all by myself.  But the fact that the conference was being held in San Diego pretty much sealed the deal.  Because you see, San Diego is my Happy Place. 

Since living in Los Angeles, I’ve visited San Diego a bunch of times and every time it seems like  I make happy memories there.  There was the time my husband and I took the Surfliner down to San Diego and enjoyed a ridiculously and hilariously unexpected display of public nudity as we happened to be riding the train on that special day every year when hundreds of people line the fence and bare their bums as the train passes by. 

And since my son has come along, I’m grateful to have a family-friendly vacation destination relatively close by.  We’ve taken him to Legoland (which is technically north of San Diego) and to the World Famous San Diego Zoo and on both trips we had ridiculous amounts of family fun.  If they would build a  Dinosaur Train World in San Diego, they’d have a perfect pre-school trifecta and we’d probably go down there and never come back. 

I feel really lucky to have a gorgeous place like San Diego just a car ride away.  And when I’m itching to escape my every day life, all I need is half a tank of gas.  For those of you who don’t live near San Diego, I’m a little sorry for you, but guess what?  I bet you there’s a Happy Place near where you live, too.  All you need to do is to pick a place you like and do a little magical thinking.   You just have to tell yourself that your Happy Place is special and happy things will always happen there.  It really is amazing what a self-fulfilling prophecy that can be.  Happy blogging, fellow BlogHers.  Maybe NYC will become our new Happy Place next year? 

Memo received.