How I injured myself by being unemployed

So I was laid off due to COVID-19 in March and have been on unemployment since then. Apparently, I’ve been one of the few lucky ones, as so many people around me who desperately need the benefit have not received a cent of it yet. I’ve been looking for more work ever since then, but you know how it is.

Therefore, I’ve kept busy by being a personal care assistant for half a year. It was a hazardous, back-breaking job fraught with lots of TMI, one where I injured myself repeatedly but didn’t have any sick days to take. I finally had to leave that job the day I almost lost an arm, a foot and my life all in the course of one short morning.

That job also taught me that I had gotten older and heavier and as a result, my arthritis had ramped up by a significant amount. Unfortunately, that makes me more prone to injuries and slower to heal from them — a devastating double-whammy for someone like me who can’t sit still to save her life.

But my industriousness never took a vacation because the moment I healed from my first part-time post-pandemic job, I blew through my apartment like a hurricane, gathering up all sellable items. I washed, disinfected, laundered, ironed, folded, and bagged most of my items. I took hundreds of photos and created a spreadsheet that could track sales and inventory.

When I had a spare moment, I learned how to make marijuana edibles such as cannabutter and my own brand of happy cakes. I even formulated a salve for dogs with hot spots, to replace that painful tea tree oil stuff that’s on the market.

There’s not even currently a legal way for me to make money doing these things, but I sure wish there were, because I could really help a lot of people and animals with my recipes. Plus, it’s fun!

But through it all, I’ve been job searching, sending out tons of resumes and getting spam texts at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday in response, hoping the next help wanted ad will be legit, and wondering — desperately — where all these remote jobs are that everyone absolutely needs and that the corporate media keeps insisting we don’t want.

And also, through it all, my right foot has started hurting — a lot, but only when I stand up, or try to walk, or breathe. Which is usually fine because I don’t need to go anywhere. I’ve done plenty of Zoom interviews by now.

My foot was all swollen and tender, so my doctor told me to take ibuprofen and Epsom salt baths. I added CBD salve for good measure. What helped most, though, was staying the hell off of my foot. No easy feat with errands to run and no car. But I persisted in doing nothing, and it really paid off.

While sitting on my ass, I finally took some time off from everything — the job search, the personal enterprises, the benefits paperchase the state had me on — to focus on myself and figure out what was actually going on in my life that I could no longer stand up anymore.

Doing absolutely nothing was strange and kind of harrowing at first. I had to let go of the terror of feeling like I wasn’t doing enough to help me and my spouse survive. I had to stop feeling guilty for doing absolutely nothing for a while.

After a few days of that, a moment of clarity hit me while I was in the bath: My foot was not hurting because of a blood clot, or cancer, or a degenerative disease. I had injured my foot by getting into bed, the wrong way, repeatedly.

And I had been doing it hundreds of more times than usual since I was unemployed and, even though I had kept myself pretty busy, I still had nothing better to do but lie around half the time.

How the hell does someone injure their foot getting into bed? Well, I’ve always kind of climbed into bed with my right foot tucked under me, which is usually just fine when you’re young and don’t weigh a whole lot, but when you’re older with arthritis and 50 more pounds on you, all those foot bones you’re crushing between your body and the corner of the mattress really make an impact.

When I went into a deep meditative state during that bath, which happened at the culmination of many off-the-clock hours spent aimlessly searching for a cure, I was able to walk through my actions and see what I had been doing to my foot all these months and why it had become a problem. Then I was able to start healing it.

So that’s how I injured myself — and then healed myself — by being unemployed. It’s also why I feel that we need a Universal Basic Income and many more legit, good-paying remote jobs: so that people like me won’t completely destroy themselves, either by working way too hard, or with idleness, or both.

I mean, just look what happened to me when I tried sitting it out for a while. But then again, being able to take that break and reconnect with myself is ultimately what gave me my health back. And it was pretty much free of charge for once. At least I didn’t have to trade in a bunch of sick days to get it.

Meanwhile, I need to put all this manic energy to use by doing some actual good for the world. So bring on the lucrative, ethical, remote jobs that help support and save all life on the planet. I’m ready to stay on my ass and do them. After all, is it really too much to ask that I spend my so-called declining years saving the world?

Until that happens, I’ll be whipping up another batch of my famous happy cakes.

Why you can't rely on spell check alone

Millions of times a day, an MS Word document is created. Then the document’s creator uses the spell check function and figures that everything is magically taken care of. But all kinds of errors can be missed that way. In fact, some sentences that started out great can be turned into incomprehensible garbage after your spell checker gets through with them.

Spell check can miss or even cause spelling and punctuation errors. It has a limited vocabulary, and if it doesn’t recognize a word you’re trying to use, it might try swapping it out for another one that rhymes instead. Sometimes it tries sticking apostrophes into words that don’t need them — like plurals, for instance — while citing unrelated language rules.

It also misses some words that are spelled right, but which don’t belong in the sentence. For example, “Her mother said she ban go to the store” is considered correct because the word “ban” isn’t technically misspelled.

That’s why it’s necessary to read and then reread what you have written, and enlist a second pair of eyes to help you. Never rely on MS Word’s spell check function alone to get the job done.

My lazy lover, the copier machine

Machines have gotten cocky lately, and we can’t seem to escape them. In Los Angeles, they even have talking buses now that shout out the next stop, nagging us about how we should hang on and stuff.

The grocery stores there also have talking machines in the aisles that blurt out the day’s specials when we walk past them, which just serves to startle us and interrupt our thought processes.

And now, even in the office — although the machines there may not be talking yet — many of them have become lazy, bossy, untruthful and downright passive aggressive.

The office copy machine and I have a tumultuous relationship at this point. It reminds me of a lazy boyfriend. Here’s one of our relationship “conversations”.

Me: (Puts document in feeder tray, hits copy)

Copier: (Yawns, stirs to life) “Your job will start in 30 seconds. Do not press copy again. Hit delete if you want to cancel the job.”

Me: (Waits 30 seconds)

Copier: …

Me: “Fine then!” (Hits delete)

Copier: “No jobs to delete.”

Me: “You said to…”

Copier: “Hit delete if you want to cancel job.”

Me: (Hits delete again)

Copier: (Acts like it’s going to start the copy and then abruptly stops) “Oh, my feeder tray doesn’t work.”

Me: (Takes document out of feeder tray, gets a feeling that the copier’s lying, puts document back in feeder tray and hits “copy”)

Copier: “Mmm, that’s better.” (Copies document)

Me: (Puts another document in feeder tray to copy)

Copier: “Um, the paper in tray 1 is low.”

Me: (Checks to see that copier has more than 25 sheets) “You have enough paper, just give me one copy of this one page.”

Copier: “Well, the paper in tray 1 is low, so…” (Sits there idle)

Me: (Puts an entire ream of paper in tray, presses copy a few dozen times) “Just. Copy!!”

Copier: “Your job will start in 30 seconds.”

Me: (Presses copy again)

Copier: “Paper in tray 1 is low.”

Me: “Liar!!” (Kicks copier)

Copier: “Beep!”

Me: (Kick!)

The oddest jobs I've had

We all have to work to survive, in some way or other. And there are many odd jobs in the world to be had. In fact, I’ve worked over a hundred jobs in my life so far, and many of them were pretty odd.

Were they all legal? Technically, I doubt it. Was the pay decent? I gained experience, mostly. That doesn’t pay the bills, but it will build character. Here are some of the strangest jobs that have built my character.

Yard Worker — An old guy who lived behind the community swimming pool once paid my sister and me a few quarters to pick up fallen branches from his yard. Did he really need the help, or did he just wanted to see little ten-year-old girls in bikinis bending over?

Thankfully, one of my parents came out of the public restroom and got us very soon after we started. But how was this even allowed to begin in the first place?

General Store Clerk — At age thirteen, I minded a whole store on my own. One of my parents worked just downstairs at a ceramics business and wanted to keep an eye on me after school. But I guess it was better to potentially break child labor laws than to risk have me going off on my own to vandalize some nearby property after school.

Wood Tick Remover — During summers, I removed copious amounts of wood ticks from our dogs. The ticks would be all green and bloated with blood. The big, tough guys in the family wouldn’t even go near those ticks, which would then prompt me to chase the guys around with a handful of them, because I guess I was kind of an asshole back then.

Fire Starter — I’ve always been a little bit of a pyro, and so it has often been my job to get the family home’s living room fireplace going. I was especially handy when the wood was a little wet and everyone else who had tried to get the fire lit just ended up filling the house with smoke. Some people just have a way with a match. I can light a cigarette in a rainstorm with one, but don’t recommend it.

Dog Extinguisher — Speaking of fire, I could also stop what I started, because our dog’s tail burst into flame a lot and I had to deal with that. You see, she liked lying by the fireplace when it was full of burning chunks of wood, but every so often the fire would spit out an ember.

Then the ember would land in her fur and begin filling the room with smoke. Whenever that happened, I would have to leap off the couch and extinguish her big, fluffy tail before she noticed. Which thankfully, she never did. She would just lie there, wondering why I was slapping away at her fur and what that burning smell was.

Broken-Glass Handler — For some reason, my grandma loved broken glass, and kept handing bags of it to me and my little sister when we went to work in her yard. She had lined her yard with these cinder blocks and we needed to fill the holes in the blocks with glass. It was actually pretty sweet, the way the colorful broken glass glittered in the sun, though.

But it sucked when we would have to remove all those shards of glass from the cinder blocks, remove the weeds that were growing within them, and then place all the shards of glass back in. Our hands would always be bleeding by the end of the day. Where was OSHA back then?

Paper Jogger — Did you ever wonder how the pages of a book are stacked neatly together? That doesn’t happen by accident. They have something for that. A paper jogger is the name for a vibrating table, and also for a person who straightens stacks of paper. The vibrating table is a printing company’s tool of choice for wrangling tons of pages into neat stacks.

My coworkers made several bawdy jokes about what else a vibrating table could be used for. It was a real boring job and our imaginations ran wild.

Coupon Victim — You know those annoying little coupons that fall out of newspapers? Well, they’re a lot more annoying when a bindery machine is dumping out thousands of them on you, and you’re supposed to be putting them into newspapers, but the machines are going way faster than you are.

I often got buried in ads while standing, dazed in the assembly line, just like that scene in I Love Lucy where the candy factory’s conveyor belt goes out-of-control on Lucille Ball. Except unlike her, I didn’t get any chocolate.

TV Juror — I got paid to be a juror while watching ex-spouses battle over car custody and stuff, sometimes throwing their subpoenas and shit at each other. Judge Judy once told me to zip it because a plaintiff made me laugh.

Judge Joe Brown was more subdued, though. He just kind of flirted with all the ladies in court. Talk about justice in action! It was fun to feel like I was making a difference in the world, or at least pretending to for the cameras.

Famous Person Photographer — Speaking of cameras, remember the “Cootchie cootchie” flamenco guitarist Charo, and the “Tiny Bubbles” guy, Don Ho? I used to be a photographer at their clubs, snapping shots of their audience members. Then the stars would autograph those photos and I’d sell them back to the crowd. It was fun because most people were pretty thrilled to get their souvenir photos.

I could do my sales pitch in both English and Japanese, which helped double my tips. In fact, I even met other famous people this way, such as NFL star Jim McMahon and ex-First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos. Neither of them wanted their photo taken though, and they were pretty firm about that.

Student Waker-Upper — I worked for a company that had clients who needed me to wake them up. Some of them just needed the extra help because of their overbooked schedules or medical conditions. The students I roused were always just as irritated as they were appreciative.

So if you’re lucky enough to have a job, it’s probably not the worst one in the world. In fact, it might be more interesting than you realize. And if you’re currently in between jobs, don’t worry. There’s a whole world of weird shit out there to do, which means it won’t be long before someone’s paying you to work an odd job, too.

One tiny spelling error can cost tens of thousands of bucks

Many years ago, I worked for a large financial institution that needed one of its clients to sign a document. This had the potential to net the company several thousands of dollars. But unfortunately, one of the company’s employees had typed the client’s name incorrectly at the bottom of the document below the signature line.

It was bad enough that one of my coworkers had spelled the client’s name wrong, but it was made worse by the fact that he had managed to type a swear word into the first name, which was Shirley. Unfortunately, the “r” in her name had somehow gotten turned into a “t” on the document, changing her name into “Shitley”!

Luckily for my coworker, the client had a sense of humor and waited until the document could be corrected to sign it. However, it could easily have gone badly for the company. That's why it always pays to have someone proofread your business documents, especially the ones requiring signatures.

Glittery shit

Lots of people struggle with the concept of religion these days. What with all the news stories of terrorist attacks happening in places of worship, coupled with revelations of sexual abuse from those who are most entrusted to further our species’ spiritual mission in life, the prevailing question has come down to this: Does religion truly alleviate — or contribute to — the amount of suffering in the world?

Personally, I find religions stifling. Whenever we try to take in and understand with our limited minds the unimaginable splendor and beauty of our universe, we always fall short of being able to really comprehend it, because we’re marveling at a power greater than ourselves. In fact, maybe that power is just the culmination of our true selves, projected from a much better space and time.

Perhaps God is just a singularity, a solid point of consciousness which comprises all of us, plus everything else, in every iteration of itself that has ever been expressed. That sounds pretty cool.

The problems start to happen when we try to capture that concept in a finite, static world with solid beliefs and rules. Then we become like kids putting a lightning bug in a jar because we’re thrilled at its phosphorescence.

We don’t mean to come off as cruel, but we wish we had the ability to glow like the creature we’ve captured. However, that bug just wants to be set free. Likewise, every thread of religious dogma seems to limit God and ourselves along with him, her or them, depending on how you prefer to look at it.

Perhaps by dropping religion, we will become less cruel. Then maybe we can truly free ourselves, while letting God out of that glass jar to which s/he’s been confined.

I tried being ultra-religious when I was a kid, because I went to a Catholic school where I and the rest of the kids went to mass about four times a week. But most of the sermons seemed to be given by a hyperactive priest with a short temper who couldn’t wait to go chain-smoke in the parking lot.

He thought nothing of scolding the teenagers who bothered to show up during the ceremony. Then he’d pass the collection tray around. So I dropped religion pretty early in life. It was then that I realized how much suffering the church in my hometown was contributing to.

The problems that my neighbors and I had with poverty, with spousal abuse, teen pregnancy, harassment, assault and addiction were impossible to approach the church members for help with, because the general response would be that we were deserving of our suffering.

That’s how I came to believe that religion only brought out the devil in people. So it was really weird when I found myself once again in a church, this time working in it, almost three decades later.

But it was a different flavor of religion — Greek Orthodox rather than Roman Catholic — a religion whose members threw local parties and always seemed to have fun while enjoying each others’ company. Plus, I really needed the money.

Working for that church gave me a strange, new perspective. I hadn’t been prepared for the shock of finding out just how many other people in the world had also become disillusioned by religion. And not all of them were taking it very well.

In fact, that a lot of them had begun taking out their feelings of betrayal from these dogmatic systems by passive-aggressively wrecking church property. And suddenly it was my job to deal with the fallout, by cleaning up all of their messes.

For instance, there are a lot of homeless people who congregate around a church. That’s because most of the church members I worked for were actually good-hearted people who couldn’t turn away the needy. They were constantly having potlucks to raise money for charity, and would donate supplies to the local homeless shelter.

But some of the folks who enjoyed the parishioners’ generosity would pass out drunk in the church’s parking lot instead of sending thank-you notes.

One homeless guy in particular, who benefitted from many of the church’s good graces and charity, decided to jump out of the bushes and menace me while I was walking home one afternoon. He taught me that the local cops would do nothing if he kept on harassing me and my coworkers all day, and threatening us with assault.

I also learned where he slept right out in the open, like nobody had a score to settle with him. I felt pretty pious whenever I walked by him and refrained from enacting revenge, but smiled knowing that I could totally do it.

This was the same guy who used to like to piss and shit all over church property, and it became my job to find the little treasures he left me on an almost-daily basis. Sometimes there’d be a discarded lighter, or some trash from a fast food restaurant.

At other times, he’d find a marker and draw symbols and messages — stuff like Think or Jesus — on the walkway, which I’m sure he meant facetiously, due to the silk panties thrown on top of the words for good measure.

Sometimes it made me chuckle to find his crazy-person messages to me, like when there was a very large, realistic-looking toy gun shoved into the bushes that I had to call the cops to retrieve and check out. I also found an empty package that belonged to a vibrating dildo on the stairway.

Still, I wasn’t about to handle his turds. But I wasn’t going to let him have the last say, either. That’s why I took to sprinkling his poop with glitter.

That way, when he came to lie down in the stairwell the next night, his own poop would still be in his way so that he could deal with it himself. But the sparkling coat of glitter would let him know that his message was received and returned, along with a crazy smile and a cackle.

He may have pissed me off, but he certainly wasn’t winning this thing. I eventually quit my job because of this guy, but I still know where he sleeps.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, a local woman started making regular trips outside the office, and insisted upon having her dogs shit in the middle of the church’s lawn, right at the top of a hilly section. Of course, I was supposed to clean that up every time she came by.

So one day, after she left, I tried hucking a bunch of glitter at the dog shit and ran off cackling. But there were three errors with this tactic. First, there was a church service in session and the parishioners, if they were glancing at me through the stained-glass windows, would know for sure that I was crazy. Second, this woman didn’t notice anything except her cell phone. Third, I slipped while trying to run away and almost landed face-first in the dog shit.

For a while after that day, I just hid from her whenever she and her dogs appeared, because I didn’t want to deal with the overwhelming desire to smack her upside the head and send the gum that she was snapping flying out of her mouth. But then those useless cops would probably arrest me.

However, the more she did it with impunity, the more I realized that I must answer with the same devil-may-care attitude. How could I pull that off? I wondered. Then I asked myself: What do I really want out of this situation?

I want to pet her dogs! was my mind’s happy response. So the next time I saw her, I excitedly trotted over to meet her. I introduced myself to her and asked about her dogs. They were happy to see me and came over, tails wagging. I crouched down and pet them, sweet-talking them and chatting her up.

I realized that the last thing she wanted was a conversation, but I didn’t care in the least. Her dogs ended up shitting by the curb that day. And funny enough, she waves at me now whenever she sees me.

So perhaps religion really does bring out the worst in us. However, there’s still some good in us left. How do we stop the dogmatic institutions we’ve created from taking the rest of it away? We reach into ourselves to see what we’re truly made of.

We bravely look around and notice what’s wrong and what needs fixing, and then we get to the task of making things right with each other again. And whenever we encounter someone’s else’s shit, perhaps the best response is to just happily sprinkle a little glitter on it.

Life in a closet on Craftmore

(The name of the actual street has been changed to protect identities.)

In life, there are two main types of bullshit: the kind that you have to put up with and the kind that you don’t. The bullshit you have to put up with can strengthen you and turn you into a better person.

The bullshit you don’t have to put up with can eat away at your determination and self esteem. The big trick is knowing the difference. And that’s where it can get difficult.

A few years ago, I decided I’d had enough of my tiny bullshit studio apartment. Can’t I do better than this? I wondered, and looked around for a nicer place to live. I found an ad for an apartment that sounded like a steal at $250 per month! The ad didn’t mention a deposit or last month’s rent, but apologized up front that it wasn’t the best place to live. Still, I was optimistic.

So I walked down the trash-strewn street, lined with leaning palm trees, and past the parched desert yards where guys worked on their cars. I stood outside a brightly colored brownstone on Craftmore Street in Los Angeles and waited for the guy, who showed up dripping of sweat. He took me into the place he was renting. I didn’t expect a whole lot for the rental price, but holy Hell, I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was, either.

We hit the kitchen first. It was pitch dark in there. During the afternoon. There was a busted mirror over the sink and no place to turn around. A bare, burnt-out light bulb hung from the ceiling on a single electrical cord. The fridge and stove were rusty, unused, maybe didn’t even work. The kitchen was actually smaller than my own, and that’s saying a lot because mine had originally been a walk-in closet.

I regretted mentioning to this guy that I just looooved to cook. Because if I moved in, I’d better love heavy-duty cleaning, electrical wiring and plumbing too. The landlord either didn’t exist or wasn’t told about the needed repairs. Never a good sign.

It means that either the landlord is really shitty or the residents are trying to hide something from him. Like an extra tenant who’s not on the lease, for instance. A tattered bedsheet hung by the fridge. “Oh yeah, someone lives over there,” said the guy. Mystery solved.

Okay, that sucked, I thought. But how much worse could it get? Well, I was about to find out. We turned around and I saw a spacious bedroom with one bed. There were no curtains on the window, but there was lots of space, and no furniture to speak of. Score! I thought. Look at all this room! I began fantasizing about how I could make the bedroom work, fix the kitchen, make friends with the guy behind the curtain...

But then, the guy who was renting the place out said, “Oh, this is my room.” Wait, he’s staying?  “I thought you were moving out,” I said. “No, I moved out of the room you’ll be renting.” Okay, I thought, looking around. There didn’t seem to be any other room. And if there was, why wasn’t Mystery Curtain Guy already living in it?

Then he ushered me over to his CLOSET. And that’s where my descent into madness truly began. “Here,” he said like a game show host revealing a prize in a nightmare. “This is where you’ll be living.” He gestured with a flourish toward the musty, darkened hole in the wall.

The ceiling sagged, too low for me to stand under. A big fan hummed noisily, useless against the mold on the walls. The shag carpet seemed to move of its own accord. But again, all the light bulbs were broken here, so I couldn’t tell if anything was crawling around in there besides us.

I beheld the splendor of my new home while keeping one eye on the guy, lest I get assaulted or something else crazy. The whole afternoon was sliding downhill. A dog wouldn’t have stayed in there. Even if you put in a food bowl in there for him.

I pondered whether I could just hold my breath and live there for a few months, which would at least let me save up a deposit for a much better place. I’d still have to get rid of all my belongings and install some lights and check constantly for pests, but maybe I could make it work. That’s when he came with his speech about the $400 deposit and the six-month commitment.

As I looked at him like he was crazy, he explained that it wasn’t such a bad deal. Hell, he’d lived in the closet for an entire year. So by his logic, that made it an acceptable dwelling for other human beings!

This right here is the kind of unnecessary bullshit that I hope nobody actually really needs to put up with. I’d like to believe that he could’ve done better. I think that when he settled for this whole living-in-a-closet bullshit, it twisted his mind a little.

But in a last-ditch attempt to sell myself on the place (I’d be saving $550 per month off my current rent by moving in!), I casually brought up the question of pests. “Well, I haven’t seen a roach in a while,” he said, as I wondered how he expected to notice pests in the dark. “I mean, there used to be a big problem with them, and then we cleared all that up. But let me know if you see any more,” he added helpfully.

At this point, reality started kind of blurring out on me, and I heard a buzzing noise in my head. Something told me to run, run away and never look back. He was saying something like, “Oh, you’ll see MICE, sure, we’ve got lots of them for some reason...” Maybe because they’re eating the roaches? I thought.

When I balked at the prospect of living like a kidnapping victim, and complained about the deposit and the commitment on top of it, he said, “Well, it doesn’t sound like you can afford the rent anyway.” Not if the rent will be paid in my slowly draining-away sanity, like what he let happen to him. “No, I sure can’t afford the rent here,” I answered, and left.

I got home — what a nice word, “home” — to my crappy nine-by-nine studio, with a working kitchen, lightbulbs in the bathroom, and no pests. I banged my shin on the bed, tripped over an electrical cord, heard the neighbor kids shrieking outside my window... and thanked God for my good fortune.

How much of the closet-living bullshit had this guy really had to put up with, and how much had he just settled for living like vermin in this city? I felt bad for him, but the experience somehow vindicated my own life choices.

I hadn’t done as badly with my life as I could have. Is living in my tiny studio apartment the type of bullshit I had to put up with? I guess it was. That had been my real question when I started looking for another place. At least I had my answer.

What's wrong with jumping up and down?

We don't always like it when someone states the obvious to us. For instance, the phrase "jumping up and down" is nonsensical, because we don’t really jump down at all. We jump up and land, then jump up again. But nobody wants to hear about that when they just want to write a good sentence.

That’s why when I copyedit, I’d never correct the sentence “She jumped up and down with excitement” to “She jumped up repeatedly with excitement.” I would probably just leave the original sentence be, even though it's factually wrong.

However, it's so embedded within our vernacular that we easily understand it. I might consider changing the sentence to “She jumped around in excitement,” which is a little more precise, but I would probably run it by the writer first to see what’s truly intended or preferred.

There are rare instances within the English language where tradition and tone are actually a little more important than factual content, and this is one of my favorite examples. Maybe that’s because I really did jump up and down — I mean, jump around — in order to thoroughly research it.

The hot screaming bubble gum hair disaster

Hair can be a magical thing. Whether it drapes down a woman’s back in long curtains, curls circuitously about a baby’s cherubic face, or pokes out in whitened shocks from under an elderly man’s knit cap, hair defines us, adorns us, distinguishes us from others.

But hair is also notoriously prone to tangles, fires and bubblegum. And more hair often means more problems. These are things I learned as a child.

Another thing I learned as a child, during a boiling hot summer day, is to never scream with bubblegum in your mouth, because that gum may go launching out of your mouth and into your four-year-old sister’s hair.

And your little sister loves her long, curly locks and has been growing them all of her life and now you have threatened to destroy all of that just because you’re bad at chewing while screaming.

I did this one day, back in the 1970s. In those ancient times, girls had long hair and boys had crew-cuts, at least in the Midwest. There were no colorful hair dyes or mohawks or fancy styles on kids back then, and there were rarely any short-haired girls.

That’s why it was a big disaster for girls to get shit caught in their hair back then — because you’d have to get your hair cut short, and then your gender would be constantly called into question while it grew back out.

Was it wise of us to put such gender bias into hair styles back in those days? Not really. It probably also wasn’t very wise of us to demand that half of the kids in the country grow a head full of hair that was almost as long as they were tall, and then trust them to care for it like a professional, all before they learned to read and write. That’s why there are horror stories like mine now.

Why was I screaming, anyway? Probably because I was about six years old. Remember those days when you found it hilarious to play that game where you see who can scream the loudest? Like we were somehow busily honing an ancient survival skill that we had no idea how to apply to real life?

So yeah, I was screaming because my mother had gone into a store and I thought: Wouldn’t it be fun to have a contest to see who can scream the loudest?

So there I was one hot summer day, sitting in the back of my folks’ jeep and trying to top my sister’s shrill vocal skills, when suddenly: “Ker-thoom!” the bubblegum I had been holding between my back molars careened out of my mouth and plopped right into the middle of my sister’s waist-length hair. So then she looked down, saw the huge bubblegum wad in her long, curly locks and started bawling.

I immediately panicked and tried pulling it out of her hair, but of course that just hurt her and tangled it in there more. So while she’s crying and slapping my hands away, and I’m apologizing helplessly, that’s when our mother comes out of the store, and she’s all: “What the hell are you girls screaming about? I thought someone was killing you.” By that time, the little wad of gum I’d spit into my sister’s hair had somehow quadrupled in size.

My mother couldn’t help us because she didn’t even have long curly hair so she didn’t know a thing about troubleshooting it. In fact, she was one of the rare women in town who had short hair as a little girl.

In fact, on the day of the screaming bubble gum hair disaster, she was sporting an ultra-modern, short-haired pixie-cut, just like the lead actress in the horror film, Rosemary’s Baby.

Therefore, my mom couldn’t solve the gum problem, but my grandma saved the day. She had big, curly hair and decades of practice with it. So with her wisdom, she taught us about how peanut butter gets gum out of hair, because the oils in it helps gum slide out.

It made me wonder how my grandma learned about the peanut butter trick. Did she and her sisters used to spit gum into each others’ hair, too?

Peanut butter saved my sister from the horrible fate of getting all her long, curly locks chopped off and spending the summer being called a boy, all because her older sister couldn’t scream and chew gum at the same time.

But karma has paid me back mightily since then. Tree branches have yanked out hanks of my hair as I ran past them, and a willow tree practically snatched me bald-headed a few years after that day.

This happened at a friend’s house after we had tied two willow branches together to make a swing, and I was swinging along when suddenly my hair got tangled up into the little leaves on the branches. By the time I could stop the swing, my hair had turned into a massive ball of twigs and leaves, and I ended up hanging from the tree by my hair, my feet dangling inches above the ground, my scalp on fire with pain.

My friend was able to save me by running into her house and getting a butcher knife, which she used to hack away at the tree branches and my hair until the willow could finally let go of its death grip on me.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a mixture of terror and relief at the same time as I did while watching a panicked twelve-year-old slashing away at my hair with a butcher knife in order to save me from asphyxiating to death.

Then when my hacked-up hair grew back, a boy in my high school who had a crush on me tried to surreptitiously run his fingers through my hair as he passed me on the hall stairway.

However, he got his class ring all tangled up in it instead and he ended up yanking me up the stairs by my scalp for a few moments. I think we both felt the same feelings of desire, confusion and alarm, but I don’t think our attraction to one another grew even a little bit that day.

So I’m really glad that our society is finally allowing little girls to get whatever hair styles they want, and not demanding them to be consigned to a life of really long hair and the annoyances and dangers that come along with it.

At least I’ve learned that if you’re ever going to chew gum and scream, you should probably do those things separately so that nobody gets hurt. And also, if you do have long hair, keep some peanut butter and a butcher knife handy, just in case.

Does your company have a Style Guide?

You put a lot of work into what you write, making sure that you’re using the correct spelling, punctuation and capitalization. But did you know that a piece of writing can still look and feel wrong, even when everything is technically spelled right?

Errors of consistency can cause this. The color “grey” can be “gray” too, for instance. But if you spell the same word differently a few times within the same body of work, it’ll look wrong and your readers will notice, even if they do it on just a subconscious level. And that might stop them from reading.

When you want your writing to be extra polished, hire a copyeditor. They catch these types of inconsistencies, and can help you create a style guide for your organization. A style guide contains your group’s preferred rules of language, helping to set the tone of the messages that you broadcast to the world.

I’ve worked for companies who have Flight Attendants, not flight attendants, and for businesses who spell the state of “Hawaiʻi” like the Hawaiians do, and not “Hawaii” like the visitors do, because their message needs to convey more cultural sensitivity. Style guides helped me to do these things quickly and consistently, every time.

Six vegetarian dinners that will leave you craving a burger

Vegetarian food is everywhere these days. You can buy hot dogs, Bratwursts and even luncheon meat that wasn’t made from something that used to draw a breath on this planet. And although a lot of meatless fare can be tasty and vaguely satisfying, most of it leaves me feeling like something is missing; perhaps a few slabs of bacon. So here are six vegetarian dinners to try out before finally breaking down and eating some meat, you hopeless fellow carnivore.

Falafel Plate — The wonderful combination of gritty and crunchy textures will please your palate immediately, but your tongue will be writhing around that falafel ball’s chickpea interior, searching out for the charbroiled flavor which is strangely missing. Hey, at least you tried!

Tofu Dogs — You can load these things up with all the fixings of a regular hot dog in an attempt to try and make it more convincing to your taste buds. You’ll probably even enjoy the peppery flavor of whatever is packed into their fake-intestine casings. However, they may leave you with a feeling of heartburn and confusion, as you wonder how mashed soybeans are able to set fire to your stomach.

Veggie Sandwich — The good part about this meal is the fact that there are literally dozens of things for you to pile on between two healthy whole-grain slices of bread. Also, slather on whatever condiments you want to. Since it’s meatless, you don’t have to worry about calories. Your stomach will feel about to burst once you get this sandwich down, but it will be rumbling in hunger a half hour later, so be ready with some chicken fingers or something.

Salade Niçoise — I’m gonna throw this one onto the list, even though it’s technically cheating. There’s a big old slab of tuna in here, along with a hard-boiled egg that would scare any vegan right out of the kitchen. But this one is also loaded with lettuce. Who knew that you could shit so much from eating a few handfuls of leaves? If your intestines think it’s food, then who are your taste buds to argue?

Meatless Lasagne — Did you know that it takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce 16 ounces of steak? Why don’t you save the planet and have some meatless lasagne instead? Eggplants provide you with vitamins B1 and B6, and tomatoes are a great source of potassium. Plus, cauliflower that is cooked just right has the texture of grated parmesan cheese. But I bet you’re still thinking about that steak, aren’t you?

Lentil Soup — Ever few days I try to get myself to drink down a can of this sulphury stuff because it’s good for me. Then I regret it for the next eight hours, while burping up the taste over and over again. But it’s got organic carrots and potatoes in it, which are vital in protecting us against illness and disease. And if I eat an entire serving, I will feel really full. At least until that pepperoni pizza I ordered arrives.

You too will feel so much healthier and better about yourself every time that you can manage to choke down the food that’s actually good for you. It’s in the trying that we succeed, after all. So when you’re next getting ready to devour some cooked flesh, distract yourself by eating a ton of vegetables first. Your taste buds might not thank you for it, but your body — and the planet — will.

Uphill both ways

You know how people joke that their grandparents had it so much harder than they have, with stories about how they had to walk to school in the snow for miles, and it was uphill both ways? Well, I actually have such a story.

It took place in the ‘90s in Minnesota, where I got up every day at 4:30 a.m. to work at a bindery. It was winter, and no busses went there. So I’d put on two pairs of pants, shoes and boots, a hat, coat, scarf, mittens, two shirts and a sweater, and go out into the cold.

The temperature got down to -18ᵒF on some mornings. When I tried listening to music on the way there, the batteries in my Walkman cassette player would freeze and stop working by the fourth block. When I blinked, my eyelashes froze together, and I’d have to rub my eyes with my mittens to get them pulled apart. I got frostbite on my fingers a few times too, in spite of the mittens.

At the bindery warehouse we made notebooks using a punch press machine, and if we weren’t careful, we could chop off a finger in its sharp, circular blades. There were other assembly-line types of machines, all of them ear-splittingly loud. I wore earplugs the entire day to protect my hearing, especially when the shrieking horns went off to signal the ending of lunch or break time.

It was a balmy 55ᵒF in the warehouse, so we employees kept our coats and hats on, but had to remove the scarves and mittens for our own safety. Sometimes people would remove their jackets if they got warm enough while lifting boxes full of paper and books. We made $5.50 per hour and there was no overtime.

I tried to do the same amount of lifting as my male coworkers — most of them bigger than me — in order to stay employed. The only problem was that I had a torn tendon on one of my thumbs from an old injury that I couldn’t afford to get sewn up, because there was really no health care for poor people back then. So when I lifted boxes, I could feel a ripping sensation all the way up my arm. I learned how to compensate and it healed somewhat anyway, though.

During lunch breaks I’d eat a peanut butter sandwich and buy a 25¢ coffee from the vending machine. I’d read self-help books and dream of a better life while my coworkers tried to rope me into their multi-level marketing schemes. My dreams and struggles finally helped me decide to get out of this drudgery and learn computers.

Today I’m a writer who’s had a pretty livable career that doesn’t involve frozen eyeballs or shrieking horns. I’m not king of the world or anything though, nor do I spend my time yachting around and doing whatever I want, but I’ve come a long way. And although I’m not ready to retire, it’s nice to know what I can accomplish and what I can endure.

There have been setbacks throughout this time, such as when I lost a tech support job in the Bay Area and got a job cleaning toilets in a punk bar. But I learned something from each and every job I had, and was damn glad to have them all. There have been times I couldn’t get a job too, and those are the hardest times for anyone, because it’s easy to feel like you’re not needed anywhere. But that’s never true.

On the day I got laid off from the bindery, I found a kitten on my way home. He was in the middle of the street, standing in a mound of snow, with frostbite on his ears. I put him into my jacket and continued to my place. As I felt him purring from the warmth of my many layers of clothing, I was not worried about how we would afford to survive. We were alive for that moment, and that was all that mattered.

It’s all been downhill from there.