They don’t use flat sheets here.

Your mattress is covered by a mattress pad, just like home in the US, and then covered by a fitted sheet, just like home in the US. You sleep on top of that one. And then, there’s a duvet (comforter), in a duvet cover. Except…

YOU MISSED A STEP.

For the benefit of those reading from Europe, in the US we have two sheets. There’s the fitted sheet over the mattress, but then there’s another sheet, called the flat sheet (or top sheet, but usually flat sheet, because it’s “flat” and hasn’t got elasticised corners like the fitted sheet), that goes over you. Depending on the weather, there may be a blanket or two (or six, if you live in Minnesota) over the flat sheet, but before the duvet (or comforter). In some places there is no duvet at all, but just blankets and then a quilt or bedspread. But there is always a flat sheet. The sheets get laundered, the blankets and duvet (or quilt…especially not quilts, especially-especially if they’re real hand-sewn quilts) get shaken out once or twice a year but don’t get dumped in the washer, like, ever. Because you don’t have to wash them if you have sheets!

But there’s no flat sheet here in Europe. It’s just you and your duvet cover. Need a thick blanket? Great! Don’t need a thick blanket? Uhhhh…. well, shit. The duvet cover gets laundered, which is great, except for the part where (a) MY FEET ARE COLD and (b) have you ever noticed what a total pain in the ass it is to stuff duvets into duvet covers? Because it is, and I have.

Now, I’ve had a nasty headcold, verging on flu, for the past few days. (Don’t talk to me about Sudafed. It’s banned here. If you talk to me about how awesome multi-symptom cold-and-flu decongestant tablets are right now, I will fly over and cut you. And then I will go to CVS, get out my ID and buy the most Sudafed I am allowed to buy, and fly my ass back home to Holland and rest assured I will not have to be a total mouthbreather next time I catch a cold.) It’s meant some fairly unpleasant hacking coughs, the kind of constantly running nose that results in Kleenex Nose — you know what I mean, when you’re blowing your nose so damn often your nose-skin gets chafed and painful and you dread every single time you have to reach for the kleenex because you know it’s going to hurt, but you can’t put moisturizer on your nose because the skin is already so sore you know no matter how For Sensitive Skin your moisturizer is, it’s going to sting like you’ve just dunked your face in a vat of acid — and a bit of feverish hot sweaty attempting-to-sleep nights where you can’t stand having the covers either on or off. Without the flat sheet, there is no middle ground. And I’m here to tell you, I MISS MY FLAT SHEET. Because I usually sleep nude, unless it’s super cold out, and there has just *got* to be a middle ground between “holy mother of god, it’s broiling under these covers” and sticking-your-leg-out “JESUS IT’S THE ARCTIC CIRCLE OUT THERE.” In the summer, that was one thing. Duvet cover alone was fine then, it was 35°C and no one cared. Today? Last night? I feel like I need to sleep wearing some tights just so I can stick my foot out when I get too hot, and not get the shivering shakes as a result. I mean I literally tried to sleep one day in some loose cotton capri pants (that was a quick fail. Nobody sleeps in button-up capris, for a reason). Guys. The flat sheet is a miracle of engineering that lets you keep a tiny bit of insulating air around your poor overheated leg, so it can cool down slowly, and gently, in a controlled fashion, without freezing your extremities off. It’s a tiny gesture of civilization in an uncivilized world.

Look, Europe. I don’t ask you to take much as an example from America. Not our wacko two-party politics, and certainly not our tipping-the-waitstaff confusion. But the flat sheet. Seriously. It’s a thing of beauty. It will transform your life. Just do it.

One class is just so bad I don’t even want to talk about it because it’ll wind up devolving to the point where I’m writing in all capital letters using far, far too many exclamation points. I will say, however, that since about week 3, my notes from class have all been about what I am going to write on the end-of-term feedback form. It’s unfortunate, because I really thought the class was going to be helpful and I was going to take away a lot from it; sadly, what I am going to take away from it is that I just spent about $1800 for no damn reason.

The other class… man, I dunno. I thought it was going to be sweet. I emailed the prof for the syllabus months before the quarter, so I could see if I wanted to take it. I had planned to take another class to address the credits this one does, but I thought this class sounded better and so I went for it. The first problem was when it turned out to be a hybrid — half online, half in person — course. I took one of those previously, and I didn’t like it at all. It felt really distant, and there was no feedback, and although I did like that other course well enough despite the hybrid impediment, I decided that I wouldn’t take any more hybrids. I swear this class was not listed on the timetable as a hybrid when I signed up for it. But the first week, we got an amended syllabus and the professor announced it was a hybrid. My heart sank a little bit, but I decided to stick with it rather than drop it and find another class at that late date. This was possibly a strategic error on my part.

But I still thought the class was going to be pretty cool, I really loved the topic (writing about Chicago! I can write! I love Chicago! I bet I would love to write about Chicago!). I did all right for the first two weeks, though I wasn’t entirely happy with the first assignment. I rocked the second one, and read it out loud in class — the class was structured to have four essays with one to be read aloud in either week 5 or 9, student’s choice, so I chose week 5 to get it over with early, which was a really brilliant move because… well.

The third assignment absolutely broke my head. It was to write about a liminal or sacred place (though it was set out as “liminal/sacred” space, so I thought that meant both), and since I would say I don’t actually have any particular “sacred” places (or even “reasonably special” space), I tried focusing on liminal, but the explanation really cut me off at the knees. In class, liminality was explained as a “border” or invisible place, or “a place where heaven and earth meet.” I’m sorry, I tried, but that means literally nothing to me. Heaven does not exist, ergo heaven never meets earth. That sounds like something that I would find on a Hallmark greeting card. There’s a reason I don’t buy greeting cards and I just hand-write notes to people: I hate cornball, nonsense greeting card sentiments.

So I tried to be a good student. I said to myself, ok, so go do some research, read about it, it’ll clarify it. This was a mistake. Reading about liminality just confused me more. For example, according to Wikipedia:

Liminality is…a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes[.] … The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed – a situation which can lead to new perspectives.”

What? Are you kidding me? And I gotta go find some place in Chicago that embodies this and write an essay about it? Oh, hell no. But I tried. One of the parts of the hybrid course is that we have to post our ideas for the places we tour to Blackboard, and so I brainstormed and came up with three ideas — three ideas that I thought were really stupid, but they were all I had, so I posted them. But it’s not like you get to have a real discussion about the ideas, so that was basically that. I still hated the ideas, didn’t see how they worked, and now I had less than a week to pick one, tour it, write it up, and then write an essay on it. Grrrrreeeeeat.

In the end, I punted. I tried to flip over to the “sacred” angle, so I thought more about places where something special happened. Other folks were doing ideas like writing up why their car was a sacred space to them, or why fishing is sacred, and honestly I don’t get that at all. But hey, at least they had something, which was better than me. I spent way more time on this than it deserved, and wound up thinking back to when I was living in the dorms at UIC, and me and my friend R. would sometimes go to the lakefront, behind the Adler Planetarium, to watch the sunrise over the lake. I thought, okay, that’s sort of a special, transient time and place. So I looked up sunrise times, set my alarm, and biked to the lakefront to watch the sun come up on a warm, clear morning. I wrote an essay, which I immediately hated, and which I couldn’t actually relate to the assignment because I didn’t frigging understand what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Hated it, hated it, oh, hated it so very much. It gutted me, too, because I was so frustrated by this abstract concept that made no sense to me, and I am really unaccustomed to things not making sense to me. I actually was so pissed at one point I was sitting there going, “This is stupid!” like a five year old throwing a tantrum because math is hard. I very nearly threw my laptop, which is saying something because I really like my laptop, and I don’t actually wish to smash it into bits. I just wanted to smash that godforsaken assignment.

Class came around, and I dragged myself there though it was the last thing I wanted to do. And then we were talking about it, and someone mentioned the ideas I’d posted and was curious which one I’d gone with, and I said something like, “Actually, I didn’t go with any of them…,” and then the floodgates opened, and out poured all this frustration and “I DON’T GET IT” and “I HATED THIS ASSIGNMENT” and “NO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, I DON’T GET IT” and “I ALMOST THREW MY LAPTOP” and raaaaaaar and splah and I kind of think I really surprised the professor with the amount of frustration towards what she probably thought was an easy project, which I feel moderately bad about. But sadly, I still just don’t fucking get what the hell we were supposed to write about. And then class was over, for two more weeks.

This week’s assignment I thought would be a fun one — it was to pick a place and then write a short story set there. I knew immediately where I wanted to set my story. I thought about what the plot was, and first it was going to be a heist movie sort of story, and then it was going to be sort of noir, and then it settled into a tale of crime. And I worked out the basic plot and whodunit and all that, and as I was merrily writing along, I realized I don’t actually have the stomach to kill little old ladies, even in a short story, and that shifted it into a sort of gag thing. I dunno if it really worked, and it was much longer than I’d intended — something like 3300 words — but I was at least OK with handing it in, which made it light-years ahead of where I’d felt about assignment 3. Except…

The last assignment for the class is to turn in a portfolio of your collected essays from the class, with one seriously revised and lengthened. No problem. Except…you have to submit it to a publisher. Like, not, you have to prep it as though you were going to submit it to be published, but you have to actually go out and find someone who accepts submissions for pieces like yours, write them a cover letter or email or whatever, and submit it, and in your portfolio, you have to turn in proof that you have done this. And here we reach another oh hell no moment: while I really don’t have much problem blathering happily away in most any other situation, and while I would have no problem at all writing up a whitepaper for a conference and submitting it, or writing something for a technical magazine, what have you, … the idea of turning one of these things in to some anonymous capital-letter Publisher just makes me feel this really unspeakable dread. I’m really not kidding, it’s visceral, and it makes me physically cringe – my shoulders curl inward, my arms cross, I hunch over. I dunno why this is, it’s not like some literary editor is going to come pluck all the limbs from my body and then light me on fire if she rejects my submission, it logically should not be a big deal, but. Just take it as writ: I do not want to do that. Full stop.

And so in tonight’s class, the last class, after we get done with other people’s readings and we’re talking about the project, and the professor is talking about all kinds of places we can submit to, and I’m just getting wound up tighter and tighter and I can feel myself tensing up, and I’m fiddling with my pen like I’m singlehandedly generating electrical power to the entire city of Chicago each time I flip it over. And frankly, it’s really unpleasant to be there feeling like this. And the professor says something about how blogging is really scary and personal, but submitting to publishers is nothing, and so I finally spoke up. I said something like, “No, I don’t get that, it’s exactly the opposite. I can blog about whatever, no problem, doing it for years, but the idea of submitting to a publisher fills me with so much horror that I’m pretty much at the point of deciding it’s OK to blow off that part of the assignment rather than do it.” And I think I totally shocked her, again. It’s like there’s some sort of bubble she is in, and maybe the other people in my class, where writing is easy and impersonal and artistic, whatever, share it with the masses, life is good, no fuss no muss, just submit to a publisher, no big. And I am standing on the outside of that bubble, looking in, confused, going, “Why is this so hard? What is my problem? I know I’m a good writer, what the hell is going on? And why do I suck so bad at this?” The problem is that talking logic to yourself doesn’t really work — saying “they’re not going to light me on fire, chill the hell out” — doesn’t actually do anything at all to relieve illogical anxiety, it basically just makes you feel like an even bigger failure because now not only are you feeling helpless for damn near having a panic attack about something lame, but now you’ve just called yourself a moron for doing it.

And I really feel let down. Because I thought this class was going to be awesome, just a chance to explore places that I love and write up about how fantastic they are. And there are really so many places I love, I feel like I could have written some good stories. But it didn’t turn out that way at all for me, and I’m at a loss to explain why. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if my other class hadn’t been such a soul-sucking disaster (ironically, I expect to pull an A in that class, no problem!), and I’d had something enjoyable… but it was, and I didn’t, and it’s really disappointing because all my other DePaul classes have been virtuous if not enjoyable, and mostly they were enjoyable, so this summer has been just terrible on the school front. I kind of hope it’s just the frigging curse of my doomed 2010 continuing, because that means it’s got an expiration date and I can go back to liking school soon. I liked school for a while there, I was really getting into it, and it’s really bumming me out that this summer quarter has been so bad to me. Anyways. Screw you, 2010! Man, when 2011 gets here, we are going to completely rock this place out and you’ll be all wishing you’d been good to me back when you had the chance!

So, anyway. I dunno. The professor did give us an out, and allowed that we could publish our pieces on our blogs if we have one. So maybe in the next few days you guys will get to read one of my little essays, and nobody will comment because after reading this you’re probably worried I’m going to completely wig out if you point out I dropped a comma or something, but that’s okay. (I probably won’t wig out. I may respond in a lecturing fashion as to why I chose to leave that comma out as a stylistic choice, but if you’re throwing down for grammatical/syntactical pedantry with me, you should see that coming.)

Or maybe I’ll just post some other inane bullshit, and trick you into thinking that you’re reading my homework – ha, ha!

My relationship with running began, and ended, early: when I was in the fifth grade, I discovered I really loved running through the halls at school. I started doing it when completely unnecessary, when I wasn’t even late for class; I started running around outside; I made my mom buy me a pair of Reeboks so I could have “real” running shoes. I had loads of fun. It was fantastic. I loved it, just feeling like I was going really really fast. And so I decided to try out for the track team. Pudgy, shy, not athletic at all, but I knew I wanted to run a lot more, and the track team seemed like where you went if you wanted to run around a lot. So I tried out. And, for whatever ridiculous reason I cannot even imagine, it turned out that our middle school track team full of all the little nerds at the nerdy magnet school for the “gifted,” … this team was competitive. Which meant they actually only wanted little fifth graders who were good at running, not just anyone who was willing to show up. So I didn’t make the team, because (then as now) I was pretty crap at running. I just liked it, I wasn’t fast or anything. But little skipped-a-year nine year old Sabrina was not good enough to win races against zomg ten year old fifth graders, so I couldn’t even show up for practice even if I never ran in a meet. Once the tryout results were announced and I felt like “LOSER” was stamped on my head, I threw the running shoes in the back of my closet and I really don’t think I ever put them on again. I certainly never tried out for another sport until high school, never entertained any thoughts about track or cross country through the rest of my school career, and I never tried running on my own. So, thanks, there, Mr. Powers — your dedication to fielding only the finest fifth grade track stars killed my interest in group sports for many years, and killed my willingness to try running again (since obviously I’m just crap!) for a long, long time.

I’m really good at holding pointless grudges, y’all. (Mr. Powers, though, seriously? Kiss my ass. I really really liked something harmless, and in the course of about two days you killed it dead, dead, dead. GOOD WORK, THERE, MR. EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATOR. Seriously, would it have killed you to have a kid, or ten, on the jv squad who only showed up for practice and maybe, I dunno, improved over time? Jackass.)

Anyways. I dunno, like ten years ago or something, I started doing some stuff at the Y in Evanston and I wound up working with a trainer who would have me on a treadmill for half an hour doing intervals, and eventually we did enough hateful frigging intervals that it got so I could jog on the treadmill for half an hour. Not long thereafter I moved to Hyde Park, joined the Y there, and … I don’t remember what all, workout blah blah blah nothing to write home about, but I remember there was this one day I was just incandescent with rage at someone at work for being passive aggressive to me for like an entire week, and I went to the Y after work like usual and got on the treadmill and I kept turning up the speed higher and higher, and I ran and ran and ran for like an hour, until I couldn’t think angry thoughts anymore (because mostly my brain was full of “1 – 2 – 3 – 4″ and “ow” and “water nao pls?”), and — although, don’t get me wrong, I can do without the passive aggressiveness — sometimes I think back on how incredibly freaking effective that was to talk me down. I stopped running after I gave up my Y membership (along with cable and everything else not directly related to paying off my credit cards), and never really started back up again. But I still kind of miss it. Even if, just as when I was nine, I am still crap at running.

Last summer I wanted to try again, so I went out with a local group that my friend B. hooked me up with, a couple times. They’re a non-competitive running group — the slogan goes “a drinking group with a running problem.” I don’t really know how long the trails were, something between 3-5 miles, I guess?, but I couldn’t run the whole course so I walked a lot of it, and it was taking me a really long time to finish. There’s actually someone who’s designated to “sweep” up the last of the group, to make sure no one gets lost, only I was actually slower than them, I think, because only one time did anyone ever meet up with me. One time I was so far behind, B. called to make sure I wasn’t lost. So I kind of lost heart a little. Even though it’s non-competitive, it sort of sucks being the last person dragging in every week. (I got better about laughing with everyone else about being DFL again, but that was me faking it. Truthfully, I would much rather have preferred to have slunk in unnoticed and certainly not be recognized as Dead Fucking Last.) I bought new shoes with all the intention in the world of getting better and maybe someday not being DFL, then I just never managed to go back. I kept meaning to; it would just roll around to Thursday again and I just couldn’t quite overcome the “I suck at this” enough to do it.

Which is all a very, very long winded way of explaining what a REALLY RIDICULOUSLY HUGE, ENORMOUS, BIG DEAL it is for me to have decided to try and run a 5k. Even if it’s not really a competitive race (this particular race doesn’t even really time you), it’s still. You know. Running. A Race. In Public. With Other People. Who Are Better At This Than Me. Lots. Who Probably Made *THEIR* Stupid Fifth Grade Track Teams. It’s scary. And I’m still crap at running!

But I am trying. I go outside and run around and frigging seagulls shit on my head as though there weren’t many miles of perfectly good lake to shit upon just ten yards away, and I go the gym and run on the treadmill listening to the voice prompts of my little app that tells me when to run and when to walk, and on my off days I’m doing a little trifecta of 100 pushups/200 squats/200 situps (their little companion 25 pullups program can, to be perfectly honest, kinda bite me a little), and I have, God help me, a 7AM appointment with my personal trainer on Thursday so she can kick my ass up the wall and down again. And. As God is my witness I am going to run that stupid 5k race, and I am going to finish it, and if I ever have the misfortune to see Mr. Powers again I am going to blow the biggest raspberry the world has ever seen right in his smug, pudgy shy fifth grader-hating, stupid jerky face. BECAUSE I CAN.

(And then maybe I’ll go back to the hash again and maybe someday I won’t be DFL.)

Lest you think that maybe it was just iced on one side and thus leaked a little oil there: no, the entire sack was soaked all the way through.

In fact, it reminds me of those art projects you do as a child, when you color something and then soak the paper with vegetable oil to turn it into a mock stained-glass window.

Caribou, you must be keeping the vegetable oil industry aloft single-handedly just through your pastry sales. This is pretty gross. What, was the lemon so sour that you had to temper it with an entire gallon of canola oil?

Also: Yeuuuuuuuccccchhhhhh.

The first thing I said in our small-group discussion was, “I can like figure skating without having people assume I’m gay.” Which is true. Figure skating is totally safe for women to watch or participate in without it casting any homo-aspersions on their character, regardless of the amount of sequins. But a guy who wants to wear said sequins and twirl about on ice is pretty much just assumed to be, as they say, light in the loafers.

(Incidentally, what the hell does “light in the loafers” come from, anyways? Gay men have teeny dainty feet as they flounce down the street? Here, let me introduce you to my friends, at Bear Pride. There will be very little flouncing.)

Much of the other suggestions in class were along the lines of — “As a white man, I’m privileged that I can go walking around in Englewood and people assume I’m a cop and don’t mess with me.” (That particular student is, in fact, a CFD fireman.) There was a brief digression about whether or not it’s “privilege” for women to have doors held open or be allowed to board elevators before men, with one female student vehemently disagreeing, saying that it’s not privilege so much as it is etiquette. (Really? It’s not a privilege to have an entire section of the proper-behavior standards written, and actually enforced by the subservient class (as a man in class emphasized his negative opinions of men who do not let women go first, and as I have seen men lecture other men about at work), just because we have a particular set of chromosomes? What on earth is privilege, then?) Then there were the obligatory gags, like, “I’m privileged that my wife allows me to sleep with her!” (That from a dapper gentleman who works in theatre, who is likely more qualified than I am to speak as to what irrelevant qualities make people assume men are gay.)

By the time the whole-class discussion rolled around I’d refined the figure-skating line a little. I said, “as a woman, I can wear makeup or not wear makeup, dress up or not dress up, and whichever way I roll does not automatically make me gay or not gay.” I mean, really. It’s a privilege men don’t have. Show me a man who wears product in his hair and I’ll show you a “metrosexual,” which is a term invented just to identify grooming with homosexuality. I can go around in steel-toed boots and it makes me a goth; I can work on cars and that makes me either cool or sexy depending on who’s asking; I can work in a male-dominated industry and that just means I’m smart ‘cos I can keep up with the menfolk. But put a guy with nice hair in ice skates and sequins, and watch the instant transformation to someone that Deadspin is going to have to create an entire section about people euphemizing his gayness. (Bad example, perhaps — yeah, yeah, I know, it’s Johnny Weir, and hell yes I watched this and loved it! — but, really, people. Quit being little bitches about queers on ice.)

As I was walking home after class, I was extending and polishing the argument a little more. Basically it boils down to: Women can do non-traditionally-feminine things with little likelihood of it affecting their perceived sexuality or status. Men who do non-traditionally-masculine things have their Friend of Dorothy Club membership card handed to them after, like, the second offense.

So here I was getting all wrapped up in my excess of privilege as a woman, and feeling guilty about my own transgressions along these lines, when a car pulls out of a parking lot and a sketchy older guy in an eyepatch, in the passenger seat, leans out his window and shouts to a couple of cute young college girls walking a few steps ahead of me, “Hey girl! Come here and sit on my lap!”

They snickered (“ha ha, look at the drunk moron!”) and walked on, and he kept hollering, “Come here, girl!”

Meanwhile, a cute young college guy also walking down the street laughed his head off and chortled encouragement to Eyepatch as the car pulled out onto State Street.

Thus endeth my feeling guilty about the unfair privileges I enjoy as a woman.

Score: Gay men: 0, “girls”: 0, drunk shitheads: 1.

So, the other day, in my Organizational Communications class — for which the homework was, as usual, some seriously dry chapters to read (seriously, guys, you could not have made this textbook drier if you’d buried the manuscript in an arid desert, or perhaps on the Moon, for forty years before publishing), but also as usual turned into an interesting discussion — we talked about diversity in the workplace, and integrating cultures therein. One of the questions our group was assigned to discuss and do a short presentation to the class about was this:

On the basis of the descriptions of the four different age groups provided in the chapter (Traditionals [Greatest/Silent Generation], Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials) what sort of problems do you anticipate occurring as these different groups interact in the workplace? What sort of advantages of opportunities exist in combining people from these different groups in one department?

The descriptions they referred to encapsulated each generation with a short blurb on birthdates and some tendencies they embody plus the feelings they hold toward others. One other woman in my group and I sort of took over the group discussion and talked about our perspectives; she, the Boomer, and I, the Gen Xer. As it happens, I have pretty pronounced opinions on the topic of Boomers and GenXers, which I know will come as a massive surprise to all of you reading this blog.

What the textbook says is this:

Baby Boomers … created [or] grew up under the influence of the 1960s counterculture. They regard Generation X as selfish and manipulative, and Millennials as lacking focus.

Generation X … are also more likely to view work as a means to support their current lifestyle interests … versus viewing work as a means to support retirement activities. They … regard Boomers as disgustingly “New Age” workaholics, and see Millennials as too optimistic and insufficiently rule-governed.

Although they are children of the counterculture, Boomers nonetheless tacitly accepted many conventions that Traditionals hold as bedrock principles of work life. … Generation X is turned off by inflexible time schedules, workaholism, and close supervision. They like to learn new things, … [and] want to be encouraged to display creativity and initiative to find new ways to get tasks done.

We’re also cynical little beasts. Coupland:

“As luck would have it, that was the morning the public health inspector came around in response to a phone call I’d made earlier that week, questioning the quality of the working environment.

“Martin was horrified that an employee had called the inspectors, and I mean really freaked out. In Toronto they can force you to make architectural changes, and alterations are ferociously expensive — fresh air ducts and the like — and health of the office workers be damned, cash signs were dinging up in Martin’s eyes, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. He called me into his office and started screaming at me, his teeny-weeny salt and pepper ponytail bobbing up and down, ‘I just don’t understand you young people. No workplace is ever okay enough. And you mope and complain about how uncreative your jobs are and how you’re getting nowhere, and so when we finally give you a promotion you leave and go pick grapes in Queensland or some other such nonsense.’

“Now, Martin, like most embittered ex-hippies, is a yuppie, and I have no idea how you’re supposed to relate to those people. And before you start getting shrill and saying yuppies don’t exist, let’s just face facts: they do. Dickoids like Martin who snap like wolverines on speed when they can’t have a restaurant’s window seat in the nonsmoking section with white napkins. Androids who never get jokes and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence, like an underfed Chihuahua baring its teeny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in or like a glass of milk sloshed on top of the violet filaments of a bug barbecue: a weird abuse of nature. Yuppies never gamble, they calculate. They have no aura: ever been to a yuppie party? It’s like being in an empty room: empty hologram people walking around peeking at themselves in mirrors and surreptitiously misting their tonsils with Binaca spray, just in case they have to kiss another ghost like themselves. There’s just nothing there.

“So, ‘Hey Martin,’ I asked when I go to his office, a plush James Bond number overlooking the downtown core — he’s sitting there wearing a computer-generated purple sweater from Korea — a sweater with lots of texture. Martin likes texture. ‘Put yourself in my shoes. Do you really think we enjoy having to work in that toxic waste dump in there?’

“Uncontrollable urges were overtaking me.

“‘…and then have to watch you chat with your yuppie buddies about your gut liposuction all day while you secrete artificially sweetened royal jelly here in Xanadu?’

“Suddenly I was into this très deeply. Well, if I’m going to quit anyway, might as well get a thing or two off my chest.

“‘I beg your pardon,’ says Martin, the wind taken out of his sails.

“‘Or for that matter, do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You’d last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest. You really make me sick.’

“Unfortunately, the phone rang then, so I missed what would have undoubtedly been a feeble retort…some higher-up Martin was in the iddle of a bum-kissing campaign with and who couldn’t be shaken off the line. I dawdled off into the staff cafeteria. There, a salesman from the copy machine company was pouring a Styrofoam cup full of scalding hot coffee into the soil around a ficus tree which really hadn’t even recovered yet from having been fed cocktails and cigarette butts from the Christmas party. It was pissing rain outside, and the water was drizzling down the windows, but inside the air was as dry as the Sahara from being recirculated. The staff were all bitching about commuting time and making AIDS jokes, labeling the office’s fashion victims, sneezing, discussing their horoscopes, planning their time-shares and Santo Domingo, and slagging the rich and famous. I felt cynical, and the room matched my mood.

Yeah.

So anyways, during the group discussion, my one classmate and I mostly ran with the conversation in our little group of six. She complained that Gen Xers are always off re-inventing the wheel, as though what already is in place isn’t good enough or we can’t be bothered to look for it. I complained that the last thing I want to do at work is to get dragged into a meeting to talk for thirty minutes about other people’s children. We agreed, at least, that we don’t have to deal with many older Traditionals or Millennials, so we focused mostly on the differences between us. Though, I’ll note, I have no beef against Millennials at all: they seem like fairly sensible sorts… well, those without serious helicopter parent issues, anyway.

So my classmate and I were the last to get up to make our presentation, and so we had just under ten minutes before class ended. She fielded one question, about the issues surrounding “feminizing” workplaces, which we all agreed was a silly question best forgotten. I had the age question, so I opened my mouth and started talking.

(I don’t recall my exact screed, and when I did and neatly wrote it down here a day after class, an errant mouse button click sent me away from my unsaved draft and I lost it, and I can’t be bothered to try again to reproduce either the speech or the text about it. Typical Gen X slacker, I suppose. Instead, I’ll paraphrase — and save much more often.)

The problem in integrating these two styles of working, the Boomer collaborative style and the Gen X independence, is that Boomers do not understand why we don’t want to be like them and they keep trying to convince us, and we are tired of tilting at windmills, trying to break through. Boomers grew up with extended families and neighborhood communities, and they learned that collective efforts can make an impact, like, say, protesting the Vietnam War. We, on the other hand, have been on our own since always; we don’t have the same support systems that Boomers did and do; we grew up in suburban wastelands with nowhere to ride our bikes to but other featureless cul-de-sacs, frightened of our neighbors because they probably poisoned our Halloween candy. We’re latchkey kids and many of us had divorced parents and fewer siblings. Through our experiences, we learned that we can’t rely on others to do things for us, and we’d rather discover a failure early and work around it than spend time beating up on it. (E.g., walking away from what might be seen as a one-sided discussion rather than trying to convince the other: if you can safely suppose that a person is just trying to convince you to do what they want, and is unwilling to be convinced of your reasoning, why bother wasting your time just to get frustrated? Give up on the no-wins early, and extricate yourself as soon as possible. Sure, you’ll lose some things you maybe could have won, but you’ll also be spending your time much more effectively and enjoyably.) What a Boomer sees as independence to the point of intransigence, an unwillingness to play well with others, we see as a virtuous, and necessary, responsibility to do things for ourselves: “If you want something done right, … ,” and all that. And what we see as mind-numbing, mumbo-jumbo pattings-on-our-own-back, time-wasting affirmations of our own effectiveness, Boomers see as … meetings.

(I think that was about the time where, in class, I got a shouted “Preach it!” from my fellow Xers in class, although it might have been about the crack about meetings to talk about other people’s kids.)

That is not to say that all meetings are evil, or that willful independence is a particularly effective way to get things done. I’m just talking about the prejudices that we have, that we bring with us to the workplace. The trouble is not even necessarily with having the prejudices (which is great, because good frigging luck shaking them off), but when people use them as weapons in a workplace culture. If you’re an independent sort alone surrounded by a bunch of meetings-to-plan-the-meeting-about-having-the-meeting types, get used to being the elitist cowboy snob; if you’re a collaborator lost in a sea of do-it-yourselfers, welcome to your new life as The Interfere-Tron 3000.

Gen Xers are few in number, bracketed on both sides by more populous generations — 76 million Boomers, 44 million Gen Xers, 78 million Millennials. One natural outcome of being a minority population is that we have to sit around and listen to how great and significant everybody else is, which is unbelievably tiresome and completely inescapable.

Here’s a typical example, from a site calling itself Baby Boomer HeadQuarters:

I’m not denying the X’ers the right to a name. Personally, I don’t care. But do they really need or warrant one? Do they have enough in common with each other and yet unique about their circumstances (as the baby boomers do) to warrant a defining name? Why not just leave them alone? Why do we have to categorize them? Oh well, I’m probably spitting into the wind here, aren’t I? I am just suggesting that it may not be fair to categorize and compare any other generation to the boomers, that’s all.

He probably intended that to read as: “Why do we try to force everyone into a category? Is that fair, to label everything endlessly and foist these expectations upon others?”

But what initially I read that as, before putting on my Boomer-awesomeness-field correction filter, is: “Why are we asked to label anyone else? Boomers are a huge group that should be celebrated for our self-evident awesomeness, so clearly paeons should be written to us, but these other guys, what have they ever done to deserve having even a name for themselves?” This interpretation lends itself first to hilarity oh, those wacky Boomers, and then to writing it off, because what else can we do? In combination, that is expressed as dismissive snark. Let’s call that the cynicism/pragmatism divide: What a Boomer sees is us being catty, and we see it as justified realism.

(Actually, the entire “Boomers, Gen X, and Beyond” essay there is well-worth a read. Boomers, you’ll be happy and smiling along as you go, maybe shaking your head here and there, probably pensive but upbeat by the end. Xers, you’ll be falling out of your chair laughing, if you bother to finish it once you see how the wind is blowing. I’d summarize it as writing ‘they just don’t get it’ as an act of just not getting it.)

Here’s an op-ed I was reading this morning: The Fat Lady Has Sung, by Thomas Friedman. I’d arrived at the page from someone’s tweet about a community charging for 911 calls, but found that the piece was actually about politics, and surprisingly, had a generational disconnect twist:

Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation,” eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts. Now we and our kids together need to be “The Regeneration” — the generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century.

This illustrates one personal prejudice I do have about Boomers as a class, and I’ll own it: I feel like they ate everything on the table and left scraps for the rest of us to scrabble over. As an example, I grew up being told by laughing adults to not count on Social Security, the system would be bust before I got there. I remember this distinctly, standing in my grandmother’s kitchen as a young child, an adult jokingly lecturing me that above all, I had to save for retirement because Social Security was going to be gone before I got there. (Never mind the problem inherent with that suggestion; that Social Security is meant for security, i.e. a basal level of support to avoid destitution, not to finance a comfortable retirement. It’s a common mistake.) Surprise, surprise: the prophecy is coming true. I pay substantially into the system, and I absolutely support my taxes being used to help others avoid starvation and homelessness. But it burns my toast on a massive scale to see people being gleeful about their own irresponsibility. Listen up, my precious darlings: Y’all are the ones who left Social Security a messed up pyramid scheme doomed to failure, and screaming now about maintaining your entitlement benefits after you had 40 freaking years to fix it — seriously? Seriously? You don’t get to moan about the fruits of your own recklessness and cast us as the villains. I’m only 32, I didn’t break this. This one’s on all y’all. And considering your benefits checks are coming out of my salary, I think you’d better shut up about cold-hearted younger people not caring about your golden years. I conserve gasoline, I shut the lights off when I’m not using them, I reuse and recycle, and I save. I am responsible, and I am doing my duty to support myself because you guys made sure that I knew I had no safety net. I’m doing my duty to future generations by doing my best to make sure that I not just do not diminish but actually improve their positions. And I gotta support a bunch of selfish blowhards who were given so much, and blew through it all like life was just a bad run at the craps table. Don’t talk to me about your retirement plans, don’t talk to me about the fabulous, fabled 1960s; I don’t even want to hear it. (You’ll tell me anyway.) When you need me, and you will: you always do, I’ll be there to save you because it’s my responsibility to support the society I live in, but don’t expect me to be giddy with delight as you’re reminisce about how great things used to be. Things could have been great now — it’s 2010, for God’s sake; we could have a colony on the moon and a cure for cancer! — but you guys got bored in the 70s and so we’re shutting down our space program and still driving cars that get 17 miles to the rapidly-disappearing gallon. Don’t talk to me about social security, man. Just don’t.

…but I digress. And I’d been so good up until now!

A frequent complaint that I see about Gen Xers is that we are, allegedly, just waiting for the Boomers to die. (You’ll see that come up over at that Baby Boomer HQ site I mentioned earlier, if you visit.) It’s a suspicious, furtive accusation, and it makes me sad. We’re not, you know. You’re still our parents, even if you are idiots with your money. I’m not sure what it is that we’re just waiting for the Boomers to die, for — presumably the supposition is that we’ll swoop in and snatch up all those sweet CxO corner offices. But the corner office isn’t a big deal for us. I’m not saying that there are no avaricious, social-climbing Xers, but that’s not what it’s all about. One remark I made in class that definitely earned me a shoutout was when I said that my work is not my life. I told an example of a discussion I’d been having with some coworkers at lunch. Someone was shocked to learn that although I have a smartphone, I do not use it to keep up with my work email at all times. (I maintain a pretty sharp work/life distinction, having learned the hard way that if I never stop working, my life sucks. I made a decision to not read work email on the weekends unless I’m on call or it’s an emergency several years ago, and never looked back.) Someone asked, “why don’t you read email before you come to work like we do?” And I stared at him and answered, like I was talking to a three year-old, “Because I’m in the shower, dude.” Working before work is the equivalent of the meeting-planning meeting. At some point, the abstraction gets a little silly.

Boomers have admirable dedication to their jobs, and are tenacious when it comes to accomplishing what they want. The unflattering name for this is “workaholism.” The generational disconnect here comes because Gen X watched these workaholics have their loyalty and dedication rewarded by layoffs and disappearing pension plans, and shifting the kids between the parents two weekends a month. So, again, we learned to work around the failure in the system: if our employers treat us as fungible or disposable, we will figure out a way to flourish regardless of the environment. That translates to us not depending on the company, and being protective of our individual development, so that we always have a backup plan.

When I want to go off and learn something new, to me, that feels like a positive act — I’m happier and more capable, which benefits my employer (thus the time is justified), and I have a new bullet-point for my CV, which benefits me. It’s worth pointing out that this is an prescribed behavior in some business practices: Agile programming practice, for example, insists on “refactoring,” which is the art of going over a working program in order to make it better. The wheel’s there, sure, but let’s throw some sweet rims on that baby and take her for a spin.

But that sort of thing can be interpreted as standoffishness or a selfish insistence on reinventing the Boomer’s perfectly good wheel for no reason other than self-aggrandizement, as my classmate (remember my classmate? This is a song about me and my classmate.) said was one of her hangups about younger workers. So it’s important for a Gen Xer to be able to explain this in a way that it makes it clear that it’s not because we don’t value the work that was already done, so we don’t make people resentful. And it’s important for a Boomer to recognize that just because something benefits us doesn’t mean that it’s devaluing them.

You’ll have noted by now that continual improvement, and acting to preemptively avoid disappointment, is a major factor in Gen Xer behavior patterns. That’s the thing that seems to be perceived as our cynicism; if you assume things are going to end badly all the time, well, how pessimistic of you, Debbie Downer! I don’t think it’s a negative though. It’s actually more optimistic: we see things that can be improved everywhere we go! If the rules don’t get us to success, we invent new ones. The accusation of cynicism assumes we see everything labeled “this sucks,” but in reality, it’s like seeing everything labeled “hope” everywhere we can go, because we can really do so much with what we’ve got at hand.

I like to joke, when people ask me what operating system or computer is “best,” that everything sucks, and you just have to find the one that sucks least for what you want it to do. But that’s just a joke, guys. I don’t really think everything sucks, because seriously, if I did, I would have given up years ago. (See earlier re: “Gen Xers and windmills, tilting at.”) If I were truly the cynical pessimist that people paint us as, don’t you think I would just phone it in, rather than showing up at work just trying to get to the point where I get to gleefully tell someone “I learned something new today”?

In practical terms, the work-is-not-life split means that I view myself as selling a product, my time, to my employer, and I don’t subscribe to the company-as-family metaphor. If the company and I do mesh well, that’s fantastic!, but I don’t count on it. I don’t set my sights on twenty years advancing through the ranks at one place, because in my experience, that’s unrealistic and setting myself up for disappointment. I set my sights on making sure that what I do is interesting and rewarding to me in terms of continual learning. If someone else is happy spending 70 hours a week slaving over a hot terminal, well, whatever floats your boat… but dude, it doesn’t float mine.

I think that one thing that gets frequently overlooked in trying to navigate tricky generational work-style conflicts is that, y’all, we’re all focused on the same end. I want to achieve things at work because it is interesting to me to make things better. Boomers want to achieve things at work because they like to win. So what if you want to have a meeting and I don’t? It’s hardly a crisis. Go schedule your meeting. Send me the agenda; if it sounds useful, I’ll tag along. If I don’t, send me the summary later. Don’t assume that just because I’m sitting at my desk, it’s because I’m plotting against you, and don’t use it as a weapon against me. In return, I’ll try and avoid assuming that you’re meddling with me just for the sake of being a meddling meddler. You might have to remind me that you are curious because you want to be involved, and I might have to explain that I’m not throwing out the wheel you already invented just because I didn’t invent it. But if we can put aside some of those differences, we can come up with some really great ideas, with each of us compensating for the other’s failings. You bring the beer and I’ll let you play the jukebox. It’ll be great — just so long as you know that if you play that “does your bubblegum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight” song, I am totally making you listen to Green Day.

I will close with a couple of jokes, stolen from someplace else, because I just wrote an essay that’s about twice as long as one of my homework projects I was supposed to be working on, and I’m about out of steam. First, I shall disrespect my elders:

Q: How many Baby Boomers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Not really sure, but they’re going to have a day-long retreat to brainstorm on the issue and will report back their recommendations.

Q: How many Baby Boomers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: The light bulb committee has determined it will take two – one to screw it in and one to supervise. Once the bulb is screwed in, there will be a group hug and a team building exercise.

Next, I shall be a realist about myself:

Q: How many Gen Xers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Just one – the slacker who blew off the brainstorming session.

Q: How many Gen Xers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Ehhh…. it’s not that dark.

And because there has been far, far too little taunting of the younger generation in this blog post:

Q: How many Millennials does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: All of them. And they worked as a team! And it was the best light bulb screwing in that any generation ever did – so I gave them all a trophy!

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading to the end, you slackers. Now make like a tree and get out of here, McFly.

jesus. if it’s so fucking stupid and so fucking hard, fucking drop out of college and save all the rest of us being killed when you graduate nursing school and give us all 20 ccs of something instead of 2 (COUNTING IS HARD). or if you can’t have the decency to admit that if you can’t complete junior high fucking mathematics at least SHUT THE FUCK UP IN CLASS ABOUT IT.

NIQUI SMASH.

…Lindsey Miller, 23, votes at the same polling place as Obama. She said Secret Service agents were checking names off a list and using metal-detecting wands on some would-be voters as they entered the polling place. The line was around the block at 6 a.m., she said.

“A lot of people were in pajamas. I know I was — not the time you want to be on national TV,” the University of Chicago graduate student said.

so. you live near obama. in fact, you vote at the same polling place. you chose not to vote early, and you chose to vote early in the morning, when it was highly likely that this very highly-observed candidate for the highest office in the land would be on site casting his own vote. you have presumably watched television in the past and know that national television news likes to cover candidates casting their votes. you saw the line and the secret service agents. and … YOU COULDN’T PUT ON A PAIR OF JEANS BEFORE LEAVING THE HOUSE?

i mean. seriously. i am not a highly trendy person, but i think the time has come for america to start paying a little more attention to our dress habits. PAJAMAS, to vote at the same polling place at the same time as a person who is possibly going to become the next president of the united states? in what universe is that sartorially okay? pay attention! pay attention and wear pants!

(…and don’t even get me started on people on airplanes, man.)

EXCEPT TUESDAY’S HOUSE. BECAUSE TIVO DIDN’T RECORD FRINGE BECAUSE IT THOUGHT IT WAS A RERUN. or maybe it was a rerun I DON’T KNOW IT DIDN’T RECORD IT but anyways i missed the very last bit of ‘house’ which means

— fair spoiler warning —

I SAW x KISS y AND THEN IT STOPPED AND FOX.COM DOESN’T PUT UP THE FULL EPISODES UNTIL 8 DAYS AFTER THEY AIR AND THAT MEANS NEXT WEDNESDAY AND OMG raaaaaaaaaa jkl;dfsjkdfsjkdal;dfsa;sda;lkdjsafdklfsjdfs;fdjsakdf;dafskjldsdfskl;dfsjkldfsjkl;dajkladfdfskjldfs;dsfjkdflsjkdfasjkldfajkldjkaldfjkldfsjk!!!!!!!!!

*pant* *pant* *pant*

thank goodness for bittorrent. with luck, i should be able to watch the ep in under 90 minutes. OMG WTF AUUGHGHGHGHHH. DON’T DO THIS TO ME, TIVO!!!!

update: AND NOW I HAVE TO WAIT TWO WEEKS FOR THE NEXT EPISODE?!?!?!?!!?! DAMN YOU, DEMOCRACY!!!!