.SOMETIMES RAW.

So, I was waiting for a return email and at the same time I could not log into my account anymore. I simply could not. The password was still the same, didn’t need to be changed but I wasn’t able to log in and register for all those mandatory online trainings. So much pressure.

I contacted the IT/admin/systems office to get some help. “Well…. this happens all the time”, the IT person told me. “But don’t worry. It is easy to fix!”

Here are the instructions I received from the IT guy on how to log in to the portal:

1. Go to the URL provided in the email that was sent. I could just put it here again, but that would make it too easy.

2. If you can’t find the email, check your spam folder.

3. If you still can’t find it, call the IT office again. But first you’ll have to look up the number.

4. No one will answer the phone because no one’s in the office yet. We are all out for breakfast, brunch, lunch or simply coffee.

5. Leave a message.

6. Wait for someone to return the message.

7. Realize no one is returning your message.

8. Text your friend who has the number of the guy who works there.

9. Log on to the website.

10. Forget your login.

11. Click the link “FORGOT LOGIN.”

12. Receive a message that your email is not on file.

13. Congratulate yourself on writing down your login from last year.

14. Try again.

15. Fail to log in.

16. Drink two cups of coffee.

17. Try to read the instructions on the website for how to access the portal.

18. Call IT again.

19. Speak with someone. A human being, not a machine.

20. Wonder if it is actually the person or if it is just a coincidence.

21. Think about the other famous actress whose kids go to your kid’s school.

22. Briefly entertain fantasy about becoming best friends with her.

23. The woman from the school office says she will email you.

24. Check email.

25. Check spam folder.

26. Realize nobody is going to email you. They are probably busy fielding anxious phone calls from 75 other people.

27. Try to log on to the website again.

28. This time, you think you know your username but you forgot your password.

29. Click “FORGOT PASSWORD.”

30. Receive message that your email is not on file.

31. Bang your head against your computer. Hard.

32. Go to the Facebook group for these computer issues and post that you cannot access the portal.

33. Receive helpful tips from other people.

34. Try helpful tips.

35. Give up.

36. Try again.

37. Wonder if you read the instructions on the website too quickly.

38. Read them again, slowly.

39. Try logging in again, the same way you did last time.

40. Meet with failure again.

41. Look at the login information you wrote down from last year again. Begin to doubt its accuracy.

42. Decide you need to look elsewhere for the ID number you need to log in. Did they change it at some point?

43. Search email for “Log-In ID.”

44. Find 100 emails that are not relevant.

45. Get distracted by other emails.

46. Delete emails.

47. Respond to emails.

48. Do some online shopping after following a link in one of the emails.

49. Focus!

50. Try searching again with “Log-In ID” plus the name of the department.

51. Find a copy and open the file.

52. See the work ID at the top corner of the page.

53. It has one more digit than the number you’d written down.

54. It has TWO zeros in it, and not one.

55. Log on to the website.

56. Login using the CORRECT ID number.

57. You will be prompted to change your password.

58. Change your password.

59. Write it down, you idiot! CORRECTLY this time!

60. Find the information for all mandatory trainings.

61. Realize the information is incorrect.

62. Look around for a way to correct this information.

63. You will not find a way to correct the information on the website.

64. You will need to call IT again.

65. No one will answer the phone.

Good luck!

Sincerely,
Your IT support team

A lot of people who know I am writing books ask me, “So, do you think it is going to be any good? Well, do you?”

It is hard to tell how successful or good anything will be. And, to be honest, it makes me a little nervous. That is why I decided to do the ooooooooonly rational thing: go to a psychic. I mean, what is the use of putting in a lot of hard work if the book is going to be a flop? I could better use my time doing other stuff, like becoming a professional ballerina or flossing my teeth. The first psychic I went to wasn’t that good. I went to a student psychic. It was this little place in a mall between a video store and a frozen-yoghurt place. The psychic name was Chris. He first said to me, “You are at a crossroad and confused. There are many questions you want to be answered.” “Well, yeah,” I said, “that’s why I am here. Why else would I go to a psychic?” I should have gotten suspicious when he said, “How am I supposed to know?”

Chris said “Ooooooooo” and raised his hand in the air every time he made a prediction. I guess he thought it looked like he was communicating with powerful entities in the spirit world, but to me, it looked like he was auditioning for some talent show. I knew he was bad because he wouldn’t say anything without first consulting his book on unexplained phenomena.

His predictions were kind of vague, to say the least. “I see you’re pouring some kind of liquid into your mouth out of cylindrical objects. This object, it’s made of….. glass. After your pour the liquid into your mouth, you will no longer be thirsty.” “There is someone important in your life whose name starts with either the letter E… C… B…..F…. or M through W.” “You have a brother or a sister. Either that or you are an only child.” I told him I had a brother and a sister; he seemed proud of himself. “Your brother knows how to drive.” As a matter of fact, he does. Who doesn’t? My brother is almost allowed to fly a small plane but he didn’t mention that. I asked him about my past lives, hoping that I had been Cleopatra or, at the very least, someone who once had lunch with Cleopatra. He told me that once I had been a monkey, but that in my last life I was a spring roll at a Chinese restaurant. Now that is ridiculous, even though it does explain a recurring nightmare where I am held upside down over a dish of hot mustard sauce.

The student psychic finally admitted that he wasn’t very good. He was, however, able to predict where I would find a good psychic. The session wasn’t a total waste because he gave me a dollar-off coupon for a frozen yoghurt at the place next door.

You could tell the woman he referred me to was good because she opened the door before I rang the bell. Then she said, “You must be Daniela.” Well, that was the point I liked. Because Daniela is my name and all. Sure I had an appointment, and she could have been looking through the keyhole, but I prefer to think she had finely honed psychic powers. The psychic knew that I was nervous about writing my book. This might be because the first thing I said to her was “I am nervous about writing a book.” She looked me in the eye (or possible both eyes, I don’t remember) and without raising her arms or saying, “Ooooooooo,” she made her predictions. The good news, she said, was that my book is going to be on bestseller lists for over twenty-five years and win a ton of awards (literally a ton; they’ll actually weigh them at one point). The bad news, though, was that I was going to have to sit down and actually write the book. I was kind of hoping that elves would come in the middle of the night while I was sleeping and write a best-seller for me; the psychic told me that though it wasn’t impossible (she claimed one or two of Danielle Steel’s books were written this way) in my case it was highly unlikely. Bummer.

Then she took out her tarot cards. She wasn’t able to get a very good reading, so then she took out a deck of regular cards. An hour and a half later she had won $190 oo of me playing rummy. So you can see, she is a very good psychic, even though what she really wants to do is deal blackjack in Vegas. The good psychic would pick up the phone before it rang. Of course, it is possible there was nobody on the other line. Once she said, “God bless you.” I said, “I didn’t sneeze.” She looked deep into my eyes and said, “You will, eventually.” And, damn if she wasn’t right. Two days later I sneezed. It felt eerie. Not the sneeze, just that she predicted it.

When I was driving home, the phone rang. This was weird in itself because the psychic had predicted that I would get a phone call later in the day. As it turned out, it was my psychic calling. While we were chatting, I got a phone call from my turtle psychiatrist. A turtle psychiatrist isn’t an actual turtle; that would be ridiculous. He is a human psychiatrist who dealt with my turtle’s problems. My turtle’s name was Speedy. You just call him up on the phone, tell him what’s bothering your turtle, and he tells you how to deal with it. He is a bit cheaper than an actual psychiatrist so sometimes I call him up with one of my problems and pretend that is one of former turtle’s problems. Actually, I don’t even own a turtle anymore. Speedy passed away.

So, I called the Turtle Psychiatrist. “Well, my turtle is thinking about starting a new relationship. The problem is that this other turtle reminds him of somebody else, somebody who had hurt him in a previous relationship. My turtle had been rejected and didn’t take it well. He drank a lot of fermented turtle food and didn’t go out much for a long time. And when he did, he took out his pain on other turtles”, I said. I continued, ” Speedy had an interesting dream recently. I sense the dream. I know him well enough to pick up the dreams, but not well enough to actually help him. That’s why I called you. He had this dream that he was being held upside down and dipped into a dish of hot mustard sauce…”

The Turtle Psychiatrist responded, “Oh, I see, he probably was a spring roll in his a past life.” I put on the answering machine, so I wouldn’t get any more phone calls. I felt content. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that I have a good feeling about writing my books. That’s what you asked, right?

The other day I had an epiphany while eating a bag of potato chips. The bag was full of air, I had to burst it like a balloon to open it, and inside were only five or six crumbled chips. It got me thinking about how people fill conversations with trite expressions and phrases, creating the illusion they have said something significant, just like a deceptively puffed-up bag of chips.

Well, not really. What actually occurred to me was that snack food is a huge rip-off, but that is beside the point. My point is… and I do have one (which, by the way, is all explained in my last book – if you haven’t read it you really should, but please finish this article first) is that we no longer say what we mean or mean what we say. Do we honestly think interjecting “Every dog has its day” or replying with “Is that so?” contributes to the conversation? No, all it does is prolong the meeting, party, or intervention, cutting into time that could be better spent at home zoning out watching clouds passing by.

Than this overused phrase: “Honesty is the best policy.” Is it? Honesty is good, yes, but not always. Up to a certain point, you should be honest, but just imagine if we were all honest all the time. The world would be terrible. It would be a cold, cruel place.

“G-sus, Christine. Have you gained a lot of weight, or what? You are so puffy.” “Boy, that breath of yours is something else. I am about to pass out. Seriously, that has to be the worst breath ever.” “Has your ass always been that flat or am I just noticing it now for the first time?”

I will tell you what is really bad – going up to your friend whom you haven’t seen in a while and saying, “Oh my God, you are pregnant!” and they are not. I have done that, and I will tell you – the look on his face! He looked at me blankly and said, “As far as I know, men cannot have babies.” I tried to cover, but it was no use. “Oh, I thought I read somewhere these days they can.” How many people can honestly say they are completely honest? Not too many. That is why people in the U.S. have to put their hand on a Bible and take an oath to testify in court. Everyone just assumes that people lie. We have to say “I swear to God” or “I swear on my mother’s life, may God strike me dead!” if we really want to be believed. I really never lie. I don’t- I swear to God. (Like you have to – like God doesn’t know the truth!) Okay, I do lie at the Cardio machine at the gym. It says “Enter Program and Age” and I punch in “35” and I push Enter. I don’t want the machine to give me a workout for a forty-one-year-old.

When it comes to clear communication, these useless phrases, expressions, and cliches aren’t really up to snuff. Whatever that means. Let’s just say that people say a lot of things that are ridiculous.

For example, how about those:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
2. Adversity builds character.
3. God doesn’t give you anything you cannot handle.

I have revised those saying to make them more accurate:

1. What doesn’t kill you puts you in a whole lot of pain and makes you cry a lot and want to crawl into a hole forever and live with rodents.
2. Adversity builds character. Translation: You become bitter and angry and then people hate you even more.
3. God doesn’t give you anything you cannot handle… unless God is on it and doesn’t like you either.

What’s even worse is the new trend of saying “You know what I mean?” Often, people say it after each and every sentence. “You know what I mean?” It is used so much it has become one word “YouknowwhatImean?” People who use it seem unsure if they are being understood correctly. I admire that. I always repeat back what they have said to ensure I have comprehended.

That would be me: “Now, what I think you are saying is that you are thirsty, but I am only saying that because you just said, you were thirsty, but I might have misinterpreted. You could have cryptically explained to me the genetic code of the common housefly, and if that is the case, no, Idon’tknowwhatyoumean.”

So for the good of all humankind, I suggest that we liberate ourselves from these empty expressions and wasted words. For your reference, here’s an incomplete list of phrases I kindly ask that nobody say around me anymore:

“Stop and smell the roses.” – Well, what if you are allergic to roses?

“Wake up and smell the coffee.” – What if you drink tea?

“Happy as a clam” – Okay, if clams are so happy, then why do people “clam up” when they get mad?

“For the love of Pete”, “Heaven’s to Betsy” – Who is Pete? Who is Betsy? Do they know each other?

“Take care.” – This is short for “Take care of yourself”. What does this even mean? Where’s the care? I will take it. Pretty soon it will be just “take”.

“Have a nice day.” – Cashiers and other service-industry people are forced by their supervisors to say this to every customer. The cashiers don’t mean it. What they are really saying is, “Please, I don’t want to get fired.”

“He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” – Everybody hurts flies. Someone realized the hatred of flies is so universal that they actually came up with a device to kill them. Who likes flies? Or wasps? What’s the purpose of those two anyway?

“The sun will come out tomorrow.” – Yes, but only if you are the one who wrote the lycics to the theme song for the musical Annie. In that case, the sun comes out for you every time you receive your big fat royalty check. Otherwise, rain.

“Nothing is forever.”- However, diamonds apparently are forever. They also happen to be a girl’s best friend. Hint.

“You win some, you lose some.” – Although, someone I know does have the habit of saying this one during sex.

Well, that’s “the long and short of it.” See what I have done here? I have wasted your time by using that phrase: “the long and the short of it.” If I have included it as a way to quickly wrap up this chapter I have defeated the purpose. Not to mention the words I am now using to explain this to you. On top of that, I haven’t made any sense. How can something be long and short? It can’t. It is physically impossible. You cannot be fat and skinny or hot and cold or ugly and pretty. In the eighties, my mom had this super orange wallpaper with cubes on it that was pretty ugly but is not considered retro, vintage, and cool, but that is another whole can of worms.