"Are you still coming?"

It was Mom on the phone, asking if I was still up for waitress duty.  "Yes, I'm coming," I said.  "When do you want us to be there?"

"We serve from 4 to 7, so by 4 definitely.  Is the Little Miss still coming?"

"Yes, she's ready," I said.  "Are you sure it's okay for her to come?"

"Sure," she said.  "If she gets too bored and wiggly we'll send her out with your Dad."

"Okay," I said,"do you want me to bring anything?"

"We're a little short on baked goods," said Mom.  "Anything you can bring will be appreciated."

"All right, I'll see what I can do," I said.  "Love you."

"Love you too.  See you there."

Mom and Dad's church has 2 fundraisers a year, both in late fall/early winter.  One is a rummage sale/brunch, and the other is a supper/holiday bazaar.  Church membership has really declined, as has the population of the little town.  Time was, the church hall was full of locals eating good Methodist home cooking and I was a teenager doing waitress duty.  These days there are no teenagers to do waitress duty, so we former church teenagers still get recruited.

I grabbed my trusty Betty Crocker and checked the contents of my freezer.  There were several bags of frozen berries.  "Oil pie crust," I thought to myself.  "Self-rising flour, check.  Salad oil, check.  Sugar, check.  Ground cinnamon, check.  Clean aluminum pie pan, check."  I measured and mixed and blended (the frozen bags were all partials) and baked and managed to produce an acceptable-looking homemade pie. 

The Little Miss and I made it to the church on time, barely.  I had remembered the pie and our aprons, and we arrived right at 4.  "Hi Grandma!" shouted the Little Miss as she bounced over.  "I have my apron, see, I'm ready!"

"Very good, sweetie," said Mom.  "Did you get anything baked?" she asked, turning to me.

"Just one thing, Mom," I said.  "I made a mixed berry pie."

"That's my girl," she said, obviously pleased.  As she set it out, she said in a low voice, "A bunch of the other pies are from Hy-Vee.  I'm setting them back.  I'm going to try to get the people who brought them to take them home.  It would serve them right."

"Hy-Vee?" I asked.  "For the Christmas Bazaar?"

"Yes," she said. 

"So, we're charging $10 a head for homemade food and people think it's okay to bring Hy-Vee?  If people wanted to eat Hy-Vee, wouldn't they just go to Hy-Vee?"

"I know," she said .  "It's very disgusting."

We tend to think we can have it all; do it all; be it all.  But we can't.  We're only human.  We have to focus.  We have to pick and choose what we're going to do, what we're going to commit to.  Here is my Christmas wish for all of you:  That you do nothing hollow, nothing that's just going through the motions, nothing that's meaningless to you but expected of you.  I wish you drive, desire, and passion for Christmas; and a world full of meaning. 

Merry Christmas!  (and Happy Hannukah, and Happy Eid, and good Festivus)!

I'm done.  I'm changing my party affiliation from Republitard to Democrat.  Not because I believe in bigger government or more social programs, but because my party makes me sick.

I'm sick of belonging to a party whose members regularly take over the state school board and attempt to teach my kids that dinosaurs came from Satan, that learning about your body causes you to get pregnant, that abortions cause breast cancer, and that the free market will properly regulate everything.  I'm sick of hearing about how health insurers have everyone's best interests at heart and that it's okay to deny human beings the kind of care you'd go to jail for if you denied your pet.  I'm sick of hearing about how the free world will collapse into a pile of flaming rubble if married homosexuals are permitted to exist.

I'm sick of Joe Wilson and Sarah Palin and all the other goddamn self-interested right-wing liars whipping people into a frenzy with half-truths and untruths and outright, blatant lies.  I'm sick of egotistical punks checking their Blackberries and shouting at the President while he's talking.  That's really fucking classy, people.  I would *completely* tolerate that from/by my co-workers.  Seriously.  I'm sure it would *never* cross my supervisor's mind to fire me for doing something like that.

I WAS a Republican.  But that's not a mistake I have to live with.

I would like to dedicate this post to Lori Drew, the MySpace Mom who has made all of us see cyberbullying in a new light.

We have a saying in Kansas:  Sometimes, a person's purpose in life is to serve as an object lesson to others.  I believe this holds true for Ms. Drew.

It's true that her criminal prosecution was, well, not exactly air tight.  And I think we all knew that her sentence would eventually be overturned and that she would be walking free among us again before long.  However, her business was ruined.  The daughter on whose behalf the cyberbullying was committed was humiliated and mortified to have her as a mother.  The family was ostracized from the community, and this whole business will follow them, forever, wherever they go.  Every once in a while, a journalist doing a "Where are they now?" story will catch up to them.  Those are consequences of a sort, although they are not what many would like them to be.

Why does this case fascinate us so?  Because most of us can't understand why any grown woman would be like Lori Drew.  It took a national spotlight and a criminal investigation to convince a grown woman that bullying a 13-year old neighbor was wrong?  Seriously?  Never mind that the girl had been fighting chronic depression since she was little.  Who does that?

It reminds me of those kinds of social exchanges that drive me, as a parent, screaming banshee wild.  Consider this scenario:  You have just finished explaining to your younger son, Michael, that he can only go to the school dance if he's good all week.  He agrees and departs to perform his chores.  Seven minutes later, his older brother, Jordan, comes in fuming and tells you that Michael has just stabbed him in the butt with the corn knife.  This conversation then occurs:

You, out the back door:  MICHAEL JOHN ELSWIRTH, YOU GET IN HERE NOW!

Michael enters casually, glancing at his furious older brother.

You:  Did you just stab your brother with a corn knife?

Michael:  Yeah, I guess.

You:  WHY did you do that?!

Michael:  I dunno, he was annoying me.

You:  YOU, Michael John, are grounded.  And you lose your game privileges.  And, tomorrow, before 8 a.m., you will mow the lawn.  All 4 acres of it.  With the push mower.  Not the riding one.  And not the self-propelled push mower, either.  And when you are finished, you will bush hog the fenceline until noon.  Do you understand?

Michael:  Yeah, I understand.  But Mom, can I still go to the dance?

This, I think, is Lori Drew.  "I enabled and encouraged others to bully a 13-year old.  My actions eventually led to that child's suicide.  But I'm not a bad person.  Can I still go to the dance?"

I have been pondering a question lately:  How strong is my faith?

I don't mean religious faith, or anything remotely close; rather, I mean the strength of my faith in my employer.

Don't misunderstand me -- this is the best job I've ever had, with the best co-workers I've ever had, doing truly interesting things and making awesome products.  The problem is, I think management is hosing up.  Badly.

I don't expect the Admins to come out and say that the company is struggling, or to give detailed financial information, or anything of the sort.  I do, however, expect us to be progressive.  And in being progressive, I expect the company to make actual progress.

Here are the happenings which raise red flags for me:

1. We operate in a locality where the other major employers are the state and federal government, yet we're cutting back on our standard benefits to become more like other corporate entities.
2. While other corporations and the above mentioned government employers move towards telecommuting and flex hours, we've disallowed both.
3. We have not had a trained professional IT department for about a year now; instead, we rely on consultants.
4. The experienced sales professional who got us in the door with our biggest customer left after less than a year, and the response from top brass was "good riddance."
5. We apparently have money to spend on business etiquette training, but we don't have money to spend on updating our analytical or production instrumentation.

There have been other red flags as well, such as differential enforcement of the employee code of conduct, inattention to financial details, constant changes to the 401K, and scapegoating.  I believe in my employer, my co-workers, and my product...but what do I do if I don't believe in my management?  What if I don't think we'll ever keep our promise to offer shares in the company to the employees?  Am I more stupid if I stay, knowing that I could be paid late again like I was before, or if I go and potentially miss out on us finally making it?

As I said, it's a question of faith.

I'm fat.

It's not that I haven't known this for a while.  I barely weighed over a hundred lbs when I started college.  Now, almost 20 years later, I weigh close to twice that.  Specifically, I'm 5'3" tall and I weigh 192 lbs.  Or rather, I did last week.

I weighed myself earlier today and was happy to see that I was down to 187.  That's nice and all, but I'm female and I suspect most of that 5 lbs was the water I retain right before my cycle starts.

Most Americans (60% +) are now officially obese.  At my height and weight, I am obese.  I know very well how I got here; I got into the habit of eating whatever was set in front of me and lost my dislike for rich food.  I suspect the rest of us know, too.

Losing weight is the most popular New Year's resolution.  Unfortunately, by February it's the most frequently broken.  When you quit smoking or nail-biting you can just stop.  I can't just stop eating.  I can, however, ask myself:  Is this particular item worth it?

I have a long list of reasons why losing weight is worth the struggle.  Fending off the diabetes and heart disease that plague both sides of the family are there.  So are lowering my risk of cancer, getting rid of my GERD, being more energetic, and staving off the arthritis I can feel developing in my upper back and wrists.  There are some reasons more specific to Mme. Cynica, like lessening my risk of developing boils.  I had my first one about 6 weeks ago when my adipocele ("hanging gut", as it's sometimes called) caused me to develop an angry, tender, Kennedy half-dollar sized abscess on the lower margin of my C-section scar.  Even though that area lacks innervation, I could tell the abscess was there.  I had it lanced at the doctor's office, where I was told that as long as I had the adipocele I would likely have abscesses develop from every pimple and every ingrown hair until such time as I A) lost weight or B) caught something antibiotic-resistant and became toast.

The weird thing about my obesity is how strong and fit I still feel, in spite of being fat.  I routinely refill the office water cooler while my male collegues ask me, "Isn't it hard to lift those water bottles?"  I can do a 4.5 mile walk over my lunch hour up and down the hills and not stop to rest.  I can still easily pick up my 40-lb 5 year-old and tossing my 18-lb 6-month old is a piece of cake.  But incapability is sneaking up on me.  My asthma bothers more.  My GERD bothers more.  My back is a little tender a little more often; my knees can no longer take the pounding of running, and that's not just my age.

So, enough explaining.  Now, what to do?  I joined Riley Fitness (our little 24-hr gym here with keypad access).  I've been drinking my coffee black or with cream alone instead of cream and sugar.  I've been drinking more water and snacking on fruit and nuts and popcorn instead of candy.  I've been eating my vegetables first; filling 1/2 my plate with them and consuming them before I start on my starch or my meat.  I've told myself, "You will no longer clean your plate at the restaurant.  When you aren't hungry, you will stop eating.  You will portion half of what you're eating out, and put it in a carryout box.  You will eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored or tired; and if you are craving something you will eat a small piece, savoring it, and then stop eating."

I strongly dislike the term, "lifestyle change."  This isn't a lifestyle change.  This is me feeding my body what it needs in the portions it needs, when it needs them.  This is me moving more to prevent disease later, like putting some of your paycheck into savings for when you need it.  I am banking some of the vigor I have now, so that I can be a vigorous old lady later.

And yeah, I'm fat.  So are you, probably.  So walk with me, and let's move more...together.