Alex B

If you have been paying attention, you will probably have realized by now that I've been struggling a bit lately with my brother's death.  I'm quite convinced that the reasoning for this is because the ten-year anniversary has been looming, and, though I shouldn't put stock in such things, that milestone has made me more cognizant that he's gone.

And so, without further ado, the day is finally here.  Yep, you guessed it.  Happy Freaking Thanksgiving.  (hear that?  It's the sound of salt being rubbed in an open (albeit decade-old) wound)

Yes, he is fishing for boxes of beer.  Bet he caught them, too...

So, in an effort to cope with what ten years ago became my least favorite holiday, I wrote down the things that, even though so much time has passed, routinely remind me of my brother.

Alex, I remember you when:

• I make Ramen but dump the water and just flavor the noodles.
• I make a wreath out of my spaghetti to heat it evenly in the microwave.
• I see any number of movies, including: The Sandlot, The Rock, Con Air, Big Trouble in Little China, Waterworld (remember the part when he drinks his own pee?), Cool Runnings, The Lord of the Rings, etc. etc.
• I say "oshwam" and really mean "ice cream."
• Someone says, "indubitably."
• I see any kind of graffiti.
• I see Lauren's dog and think "STU-EEEE" with that inflection you made famous.
• Someone talks around the cigarette in his mouth.
• I see pictures of people in the 90s rocking uppercuts and baggy jeans.
• It's Thanksgiving.

Now that the day is finally here, I feel a release.  For whatever reason, the milestones sometimes get you (think about your first family functions or holidays after losing someone you love), but it's the everyday memories that are the strongest and that live on.  These are the ones that bring you comfort.

Today, I'll think of him.  I'll miss him.  I'll repeat.

And then I'll play "Smoke on the Water," grin despite myself, and all will be well.

I will not say, "do not weep," for not all tears are an evil.

-J.R.R. Tolkien

Closet Overhaul

There has been a dress-code crackdown at work.  We are technically a business attire environment.  Not business casual.  Business.  That means that many of my male counterparts (and certainly superiors) wear suits everyday.  As you can imagine, the new enforcement has led to the normal rumblings bordering on revolution and some epic co-worker bonding over why "booties" are not professional.

Examples of appropriate workplace wear

For me, it meant a necessary upgrade.

Now, not everyone will experience my luck.  My mother-in-law happened to retire right before I started here, and she gifted me with dozens of pieces from her years in banking and financial loans.  Not everyone is lucky enough to have an MIL as giving or stylish as mine is, but there are some ways to nearly replicate the hand-me-down effect.

1. They give you the chance to take risks at no cost.  No, I would not normally wear floral print pants, but Beckie handed me some for free.  At that price, it's definitely worth trying once.  (And I wasn't shocked when they weren't my thing...)
2. You know the fit.  I can't tell you how many times I have found something I really liked, only to find it was too tight once washed.  To combat this, I started buying things a little bigger, and then it would just be too baggy after a few wears.  The best part about hand-me-downs is that you already know how they will look and fit after a few (or more!) wears.
3. You don't feel too badly parting with it.  I have spent years trying to keep my STUFF at a manageable level.  Clutter, particularly of un- or under-used items, is both difficult for me to manage and something I am desperate to master.  I have seen many different anti-clutter strategies suggesting that you dispose of one piece of clothing when you bring home a new one, and the easiest way I have found of doing this is to have clothing that didn't cost you too much money in the first place.

So, what do you do if you aren't lucky enough to inherit clothing (especially the good stuff)?  My number one suggestion is to go to Goodwill.  Or any other kind of donation-based resale shop.  A Goodwill just opened up down the street from me, and it's been awesome.

My friend Ann sent this to me... can you tell I do a lot of Goodwill?

I like Goodwill for all the reasons I like hand-me-downs (it's so cheap, it's almost free...).  Most resale shops also benefit a good cause, but that's just an added bonus.

Now What?

So, what do you do with all this clothing now that you've got it?  Well, for a few weeks, you fumble around with grabbing shirts at random and wondering if they are work-appropriate before you realize that there has to be a better way.  That's when you sneak a peak at your husband's closet.  It's full to bursting because he's too lazy to get rid of anything, but you know from years of putting his stuff away that it's divided into sections: T-shirts, Polos, button-down work shirts, long sleeve sweaters, casual long-sleeved shirts, and (my personal favorite) sweater vests.  Because Kevin is an inherently organized individual, he knows where all these things are without having to give it a second thought.  For someone like me, this does not come automatically, and so any time I adopt a system, I need to back it up with structural support before I can master it.

I decided that there were two really important distinctions I needed to make: what kind of clothing each piece is (t-shirt, sleeveless, etc) and whether or not I can wear it to work (casual, formal, work).  I ended up with the following list (and yes, I made a flow-chart of my closet; and no, it's not weird):

I bought relatively cheap clothing dividers online (less than $10) and then labeled them up with the different sections above.  However, I went a step further, bought hangers, and color-coded the entire thing, too.  Now, anything that's hanging on a silver hanger is the "formal" category; anything on a white hanger is "casual"; and anything on a black hanger is newly-enforced-dress-code-appropriate.

The "formal sleeveless" shirts getting the silver hanger treatment

Isn't it GLORIOUS?

It wasn't expensive, either.  I had a lot of mish-moshed hangers already; it was just about using them differently.  I had to train myself a little to remember the hanger color when doing laundry, but it saves me so much time on the other end that it's completely worth it.

What would your closet overhaul look like?  You might decide to organize differently, go bold and use green, yellow, and purple hangers, or have funky dividers like these:

Post pics if you decide, like I did, that it's time for a change!

Metafiction

It is an underlying principle of my life that stories have great meaning.  John Green clearly agrees with me:

This note, from his successful novel The Fault in Our Stars, pretty much summarizes how I felt every time one of my students would ask if something we read was based on a true story.

I partially blame Hollywood.  The fantastic phrasing "based on real events" and "inspired by the amazing true story" have led people to believe that the only thing worth seeing, reading, knowing is what really happened.

But, as we all know, there is no "what really happened."  You hear it in many different iterations, and one of my favorites has always been that there are three versions to every story: yours, theirs, and the truth.

How does one capture truth?  More importantly, why does one try?

One of my very favorite movies ever is "based on a true story."  Remeber the Titans chronicles the journey of a high school football team as they undergo the painful and difficult process of racial integration.  It is a spectacularly made film and one that has always resonated with me because of that and because of its message.

One day, after watching an interview with the actual coach of the team, I thought it would be fun to find out how accurately the movie portrayed the events.  I found several websites (like this one) indicating that the screenwriter created several characters from thin air and mostly exaggerated the racial tension between the players.  Which is basically the point of the film.

So, did I give up on the film and decide it was worthless?  No.  I didn't even feel put-out that the film wasn't accurate.  If I had wanted to know what race relations were like in the 1970s, I could have watched a documentary, read a textbook, or asked a family member.

The point is that I found the story compelling because it was a well-told story.  Just because it didn't happen this way doesn't mean it couldn't have.  Just because someone decided to stretch the truth to make something powerful and meaningful doesn't mean you shouldn't see it as powerful and meaningful.

Because being real is far less important than being meaningful.

(ok, I'll step off my soapbox now...)

A book is a portable kind of magic

--Stephen King

#staymarried, etc.

This is not what you would call a "happy" post

It's funny how a memory can sneak up on you when you least expect it.  Last night, I dreamt about my brother, who died suddenly when I was 18.  (spoiler alert: he died in the dream, too)

In my dream, he was lounging in a pickup truck (it wasn't actually him, but the person in the pickup truck morphed into him at some point; you know how dreams go) in one part of my dream.  And then I walked around a pool, surrounded by family and friends (think Troop Beverly Hills (If you've seen it, you know what I mean)) and was horrified to see a body floating facedown in it, legs well below the surface, clearly dead.  He was dressed in a white tank top and gray lounging pants, the way I remember him best, and he was being held up by his good friend, who was dressed in a black T-shirt.

I screamed, "Who is it?" and it seemed that everyone else already knew.  It was the friend who finally said, "It's Alex," and though I knew it would be, I felt my heart sink into my stomach and woke up sobbing with the same deep, heavy feeling I had almost ten years ago when I had actually discovered his body.

I sobbed my way toward the bathroom, and because it was just a few minutes before my alarm clock, I continued my sobbing through my morning routine.  Through brushing my teeth, putting dinner in the crockpot (maybe that's why I forgot the lid and it ended up looking like some half-raw monster), and getting dressed.  I sobbed so much that even 15 minutes later, when I had finally calmed down, my husband got one quick look at me and said, "wow, you cried a lot." (but at least he had the grace not to use his favorite term: "ugly crying")

My uncovered crockpot dinner.  I'm convinced it could have been fantastic...

By now, you've realized that this post isn't for you, dear reader.  This post is for me, and I wrote it because I spent all day yesterday thinking about my brother.  Not his laughing face or his sense of humor, but his lifeless body.

Truly, this post isn't for him, either.  When I think of my brother, I remember him sitting on the front porch with an entire summer's day in front of him; I remember him pretending a hose was his penis while he sprayed me with his "pee"; I remember him actually throwing a urine-filled balloon at me, which was hysterical, albeit traumatic.  I remember the bad, too: the tequila night, when he was so drunk he almost broke my arm; the years we used a club lock on our cars so he wouldn't steal them; the day he pawned my (father's) laptop with the first novel I had ever written on it.

Alex and my sister, Lauren, with her new car.  Sadly, the Alero is no longer with us, either.

But, this dream was not about any of that.  This dream was about me and my feelings.  The reason I was even more upset to find that the dead person in the pool was Alex was because in a moment when I feared the worst could happen, I realized it already had.  Perhaps this is most true for those who have sustained traumatic loss, but when I imagine a worst-case scenario, I'm extra leery because I know how easily it can become a reality.  And, as I learned last night, I know that it never really goes away.

In the end, there's value in having these memories, no matter how painful, pop up.  They make you stop, analyze, remember.  They make us remember that with pain, there is healing.  They put us on guard for what could happen and, if we're looking at them as an opportunity rather than a burden, appreciate the value of what we have a little more.

This is not what you would call a "happy" post, but I did warn you...

"Keep some sorrow in your hearts and minds,

for the things that die before their time."

-Counting Crows

Pixel Scrapper

As someone who has scrapbooked for years (including during high school, before they actually made materials for it), I found a problem when I moved out of my Mom's--I moved away from my supplies!  My mom, bless her, kept my sister and me well-stocked with essentials and more.  She even created a Scrap Room (which we lovingly dubbed "The Crap Room").

So, when I was cut off from my resources, I was faced with a dilemma: how would I continue my scrapbooking obsession?  I came to the conclusion that I could scan in a lot of my mom's stuff and then digitally scrapbook.  I tried several times to make this work before resorting to using pre-made online templates which were nice but not unique and not my own.

Then I discovered pixelscrapper.com.  An online scrapping community, Pixel Scraper has a ton of materials, and they give you a free download a day, which is more generous than a lot of sites.  I was going like this for awhile before I discovered the "Outdoors Assets."  When I saw this, I realized I needed more than one download a day.  I needed them all.

So, I became a "patron" of the site.  For $10 a month, I receive unlimited downloads of some of the most amazing elements for some of my favorite pages.  I use Microsoft Publisher (I know a lot of people are more into Photoshop, but Publisher is simpler to use) and I am able to complete pages in minutes rather than hours.  I do sometimes miss the therapeutic aspect of actually gluing something to a page, but much less than I would have thought.  Mostly, I find great satisfaction in being able to actually keep up with archiving the many photos I take.

I strongly recommend Pixel Scrapper.  Below are some of my favorite pages, created mostly or entirely with elements from the site.  Feel free to visit and poke around yourself!

(click here)

Ah, friends, it has been so long.  In the months since I've written, I've started a new job which brings me back to old stomping grounds, Arlington International Racecourse.  I missed the atmosphere and the people, and I'm now relishing the fact that I have a not-so-grown-up grown-up job.  I mean, seriously, who gets to work at a place that looks like this?

The more I get into my position (Guest Services & Expo Event Manager), the more I realize that it's a bit like Disney, which is just the way my bosses want it.  So, technically, I work for Disney.  Awesome sauce.

No, I'm not delusional.  I know that I don't actually work at Disney.  But, I'm getting a lot of advice from that amazing empire.  It started with web searches and has blossomed with this book from the Disney Institute.

Of course, Pinterest is helping greatly, too, as there are many resources there for customer service basics, team-building, and the much-needed workplace humor.  My Pinterest board strives to be a combination of them all!

I'm also falling back on my own experiences and the experiences of people around me.  So, I have to ask, what keeps you coming back to an entertainment venue again and again?  (love research!)