Ten Things I Just Don't Understand

10. A trillion of anything.

9. How a person can justify taking a bonus of any amount, let alone a million dollars, when they've run a company into the ground instead of making it better.

8. Why small business owners think it's a good idea to go on camera in their own TV ads. Don't their production companies advise them against this? Lawyers and car dealers are the worst offenders. People--it just doesn't work. Your ads are obnoxious and annoying! Hire professional actors!

7. Why Adam Sandler is so popular.

6. Why Arrested Development was cancelled.

5. Why people make a big deal out of graduation...from preschool. Or kindergarten. Or elementary school. Or 8th grade. Isn't that setting the bar pretty low, to act like it's a major accomplishment? Stop it, people! Just say no to preschoolers wearing caps and gowns.

4. How anyone can resist bacon; and on a related note: how can bacon be so delicious and also, so useful. I believe the more bacon you eat, the lower your chances of getting swine flu. (Props to J.Ro.)

3. The Twitter craze. Can you explain it to me?

2. How an airplane that weighs 187,000 pounds can fly.

1. And the number one thing I just don't understand: How all the actions of Evil-Good-Evil-Again Tony make any sense at all if he was really Evil Tony all along. This point is moot, of course, now that we know that Evil-Good-Evil-Good Tony was out to avenge Michelle's death throughout the course of Day Seven. I guess he was just cackling insane, like Rush Limbaugh.

Back in the Swing (Sort Of)

Chicago little league baseball has begun in spite of May snow flurries, brisk winds, and perpetually soggy fields.

We had signed A. Peevie up for minors because he had skipped a year of baseball, he's small for his age, and he still fears the ball. (He begged us to sign him up for majors, but we did not want him to be eaten alive.) The Little League Powers That Be (TLLPTB) decided, in their infinite wisdom, to place him into majors anyway, because of his advanced age (11). This made the little man very happy, because he sees himself with great confidence as a major league ball-player.

The first few practices were rained out, plus A. Peevie missed at least one due to illness. Finally, we made it to a practice three days before the first scheduled game. A. Peevie took the field reluctantly, warily eyeing the two boys who were batting fierce line drives from the first and third baselines.

"Ready position!" the coach hollered, but A. Peevie had no idea what he meant. He shuffled his feet, hunched his shoulders, and looked over toward me with a worried frown. A ball whizzed over his head.

"A. Peevie, get in ready position!" the coach yelled across the field, crouching down and dropping his glove down between his ankles to demonstrate. A ball whizzed by A. Peevie's left shoulder, and his worried frown intensified. He started to take a step toward me, but I waved him back.

"Give yourself a coupla minutes!" I encouraged him, but when I turned toward the coach I said, "Coach, I don't think he's ready for this level of play." I explained our situation, and he agreed that if A.P. was still afraid of the ball he'd probably be better off in minors in spite of his age.

Meanwhile, balls were still whizzing past A. Peevie, and he was doing his best to avoid getting killed or maimed. I waved him in, and by the time he got to me he was shaking and crying from terror. I comforted him and told him he gave it a try, and was very brave, but we'd move him down to minors where he'd feel more comfortable. The coach also patted his shoulder kindly and said, "Hey, buddy, thanks for coming out and giving it a try today. We'll get you up here in majors next year, OK?"

I called the league director, and he got A. Peevie onto the minor league Orioles, with a coach whose motto is "No Child Left Behind." As it turned out, the next day was the first game; but A. Peevie was not on board.

"I'm not playing," he announced adamantly. "I don't want to play baseball anymore. I'm not going to play."

"Well, buddy," I told him, "You have to give it a try. We only signed you up because you said you wanted to play, and now we've got you on a team in the right league, and you can't just quit."

"Well, I do quit," he said firmly. "I'm not playing." Fine, I told him, but you're going to sit on the bench with your team anyway.

Everything is a huge emotional roller coaster with this kid. He wants to play, he doesn't want to play; he can't wait for baseball to start, he can't wait for baseball to be over; he's crying, he's laughing insanely. It gets exhausting.

So we show up at the game the next day and met two of the assistant coaches. These guys are the kind of guys you want coaching your anxiety-ridden, ambivalent, inexperienced little leaguer. One of them gently persuaded A. Peevie to toss the ball with him. The other reassured him that he could play in the game if he wanted to, but if he didn't feel comfortable yet, he wouldn't have to.

In the end, A. Peevie chose to sit on the bench for the whole game, even though the coach asked him about every other inning if he'd like to get in the game. I alternated between sitting down by third base in my folding chair, wishing I had brought a blanket because it was so dang cold; and hanging out behind the bench to try to help A.P. meet some of the guys on the team.

One little guy chatted with us like we were old friends, and later, on the way home, A. Peevie smiled cheerfully and said, "I like that guy."

A. Peevie came home "sick" from school on the day of the next game, so he was off the hook for baseball once again. The next game is scheduled for Saturday, the day after tomorrow. I wonder whether my middle child will swing the bat, or sit in a miserable heap of stubbornness on the bench.

Bad Clients

I love being a freelance writer, and if God and Mr. Peevie allow it, I will never go back to a regular full-time job, ever.

That said, there are some things that suck about being a freelancer. One of them, as I have noted, is that there is no guarantee of a regular paycheck.

Another is that sometimes clients are slow-to-pay, or don't pay at all. Why is that? I currently have two clients that I produced work for who are not paying my bill. One is a former colleague; we used to have lunch together periodically; we are friends. She signed off on my quote in February, and I delivered the first draft of a resume to her about a week later, along with an invoice.

We went back and forth with emails for a few weeks: first she wanted to do a conference call, then she didn't, then she asked for a different resume format. By this time it was late March, and she still had not paid my invoice, nor did she pay the up-front half that my contract required; but I still delivered the second draft on April 3. Five days later she asked me for another re-write, and this time I insisted that I talk to her mom--the actual subject of the resume--to make sure that I understand from her exactly what she wants.

Now it's a month later--three months after we made the contract--and my former colleague has not put me in touch with her mom, nor has she paid my invoice. I had asked her after the second draft was rejected if I could just call her mom directly, but she wanted to set it up herself. She is now ignoring my emails.

Grrr. Bad client.

The second non-paying client is a huge IT consulting company in Florida. They probably do millions of dollars of business every year--but they are stalling, or reneging, on paying my lousy $150 invoice for consulting on and re-writing a marketing brochure. WTF?

This client I got through E-Lance, a website that allows people or companies to post freelance projects online, and subscribers pay a monthly fee to have access to the job listings and bid on the projects. Since it's a virtual international marketplace, I'm bidding against writers in countries where the dollar is worth a lot more than it is here; and without exception, all of the jobs I've bid on have had minimum bids of $50. In other words, someone in India or Bulgaria is willing to write 50 articles for a grand total of $5, which, bully for them. I'm not.

So this IT company, which will remain un-named unless it turns out that I really am not going to collect any money from them, asked me to turn around a first draft of this brochure copy in 24-36 hours, which I did. I did some research on the company, researched their competition, made some recommendations for how to improve the piece they were producing, and wrote a concise, peppy first draft.

They hated it.

It's fine for them to hate it, though, because that's what a first draft is for. Anne Lamott calls them "shitty first drafts." This company is apparently unclear on the concept of a first draft, because, as it turns out, when they didn't like what I produced, they gave the project to another writer to finish up for them. They were planning on just dropping the project and not paying me, because, as the client said to me the other day on the phone, "I didn't get what I wanted."

But let me backtrack. At first, I didn't get any feedback from the client himself, but his representative told me the client was unhappy with what I had done for him and that there were grammatical errors in what I had written. Now, I might not be Noam Chomsky, but I do know my way around a p-ante, if you know what I mean. Which you probably don't, but stay with me here.

(Oh, and just as an aside, I did wear Noam Chomsky's name on my back during one of those meet and greet games in college where you have to go around the room asking people questions to figure out what name has been scotch-taped to your shirt. Every time I asked a question--am I a male? Am I alive? Am I in sports?--people would look at me with a blank expression and say, "I have no idea." This was Mr. Peevie's hilarious idea, and yet I still married him.)

So back to my point. When I pressed my client to point out the alleged grammatical errors in my writing, he admitted that they weren't so much "grammatical" problems as they were concerns about word choice. Effing word choice. That's like telling an engineer she made structural mistakes in designing a bridge, when in fact she painted it a color that you're not quite comfortable with.

He also said that what I wrote wasn't long enough. So for word choice and length, he figured it was just fine and dandy for him to breach his contract with me. In fact, I believe he considered that by not delivering a perfectly acceptable first draft, I was the one who had breached.

I told him, look, Mr. IT Guy, you're a billion dollar company. I'm a sole proprietor operating out of my home office. Are you really going to cheat me out of $150 dollars? He replied, without any irony, "We're not a billion dollar company," which missed the point by approximately 26.2 miles.

At one point he said, well maybe we can still pay you to produce another piece for us. Of course I'd love to get more business from you, Mr. IT Guy, but I'd like to get paid for the first job FIRST, I told him. (I can be very direct when I need to. Some people call it combative.)

In the end, we agreed that he would send me his comments on my original first draft, and I would revise it so that they could use the material for another purpose. This is what should have happened in the first place. That conversation occurred two days ago. I'm still waiting for his edits.

Bad client.

Yes, M. Peevie, There is Butterfly Poop

Since so many recent Green Room visitors have arrived via a quest for information about butterfly poop (because of this tangentially-related post), I figured it's only fair to offer a primer on the digestion and excretory systems of insects.

As it turns out, yes, butterflies DO poop. The bowel movement of insects, including butterflies, is known as frass. I assume that's a made-up word that combines "fragrance " and "ass" into an optimistic euphemism for excrement.

I tried to find an image of butterfly poop, but all I came up with was this image from a two-year-old post in a fun blog. It seems that it shows up as a reddish-brown stain, which is precisely the last thing I need in my house, so I will not be inviting any butterflies to flit around my living room. It's bad enough that there are seven unmatched dirty socks, miscellaneous overdue school forms waiting to be filled out, and a shoe-store's worth of cleats and sneakers lying around.

In my research I also came across a related story about an unfortunate tattoo.

That's all I got on the topic.

King of Music

At the end of American Idol tonight, tiny little Seacrest was announcing the special guests that will appear tomorrow night.

"We'll have the World Famous Slash!" he said, and Mr. Peevie and I just looked at each other, all, huh? Slash? But my little Music Man A. Peevie is way hipper than either of us, and apparently way more on top of the contemporary music scene.

"Slash!" he said joyfully, "He's the lead singer for Guns and Roses!" He then went on to name three or four of his favorite Guns and Roses songs, which, wha? When did this pop culture knowledge flood his brain, and from whence? I'm certainly not a contemporary music maven. Until last week I though Pink was just a color.

We were watching another show a couple of weeks ago, and a tune started playing. After literally five or six notes, A. Peevie says, "Hey, it's The Immigrant Song!" Mr. Peevie cocked his head, listened for a moment, and agreed.

Again, I was a musical outsider, and I cogently inquired, "Huh?"

"Led Zeppelin!" A. Peevie and Mr. Peevie said in unison, and Mr. P reminded me, "It was even in School of Rock" which we watched last week for family movie night. Apparently The Immigrant Song has quite the backstory, and even got a shout-out in Shrek the Third.

That kid never ceases to amaze me--and he was so cheerful when Mr. P and I were amazed at his musical knowledge that I thought his cheeks were going to pop right off his face.

"You are the King of Music!" I told him, and then M. Peevie, not wanting to be left out of the royalty-making, announced, "And I'm the Queen!" Princess, maybe; but since she just fractured her wrist on Sunday, and didn't get it x-rayed and diagnosed until two days later, and has been such a non-complainer about it, I'll promote her to queen.

Like how I stuck that little anecdote of continuing family drama into a completely unrelated blog post? It's called segue, and the really great writers know how to make it so smooth you barely even realized it happened. Then there's writers like me who point it out and analyze it in the next paragraph, making the whole thing completely irritating and clunky.

I'll stop now.

Seriously?

The most hilarious consumer item since The Clapper is the Chia Obama.

Every time I hear the radio ad it cracks me up--and then I click on the web-site and find out I can order a "Happy Chia Obama" or a "Determined Chia Obama"--or BOTH! I could watch Determined Chia Obama's hair grow over and over on the Chia landing page for hours.

In a ludicrous development, Walgreens decided that it would be inappropriate to sell Chia Obamas because some customers complained that they are offensive. Do they not hear the patriotic music playing in the background of the ads? This is not a product that mocks our president; it is a product that celebrates the fact that we finally have a president with curly hair. Duh.

I must have one. The only question is: Determined, or Happy?

Get Ready for Poem in your Pocket Day

Go here to enrich your life with poems and poetry-related ideas and activities.

Start thinking about what poem you'll put in your pocket for Poem in your Pocket Day on April 30. Will it be a classic that reminds you of your 8th grade English teacher? Or a sentimental favorite that you first read when your love was young?

Maybe the poem you put in your pocket will be a brand-new find, something that makes you think, hmmm, I should seek out poetry more often. Or maybe it will be a Psalm, or other poetic verses from the Bible, which of course is packed with poetry and all sorts of other literary forms.

I'll help my kids choose a poem to put in their pockets on PIYP day. It'll probably be something by Shel Silverstein, a perennial favorite among all Peevies, not just the short ones. (FYI, if you only click on one link in this post, click on the Shel Silverstein one, because it's fun.) Maybe this one, called Messy Room:

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or--
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

You are going to think I am terribly predictable and lame when you hear what poem I chose to put in my pocket on PIYP day. Too bad. I came across it by accident while cruising around on poets.org, and at first I was going to choose this one instead, because when I read it I thought, wow, this woman is my psychic twin! Only smarter and more literary.

But then I clicked to read about the author, Elizabeth Alexander, and I was reminded that she read a poem at Obama's inauguration--and I remembered liking it when I heard it; so that's my poem in my pocket: Praise Song for the Day. Here it is:

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.


Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

I would love to hear your PIYP selection.