Carol Ramsey

I’d like to introduce you to my new baby girl, Alana Michelle. She is pretty amazing so far, very sweet and cuddly and not any trouble at all. I can’t wait to see how things go and where we end up.

I’m not going to blog anymore. I’m going to write in some other way, just not this way, not for now. Thanks for hanging out with me.

Love, Carol Ramsey

And I look back now and smile a bit and wonder, because I was shy, awkward, geeky girl from a traditional suburban family, so why exactly did I identify with this…

In the day, we sweat it out on the streets

Of a runaway American dream

At night we ride through mansions of glory

In suicide machines

Sprung from cages on Highway 9

Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected

And steppin’ out over the line

Oh, Memphis town rips the bones from your back

It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we’re young

Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

I discovered Bruce Springsteen’s The River and Born to Run when I was in High School. Born in the USA was the album released at the time, but I didn’t like that album much, so I kept looking and I found love.

Cars? Girls? Sweating it out on the streets? Death traps? Really? The constant pull of desire, convincing the girl to go to bed and getting her pregnant? The struggle for escape from a dead end life of factory jobs? Living on the backstreets? This spoke to me?

Well, yes.

None of his stories were mine literally. But he believed in something. I was going through the motions, getting good grades, doing what I was told and I didn’t believe in anything of my own. So what if he believed in cars and girls, it was something and maybe I could find my something too.

I put The River and Born to Run on my iPod this week. I still know all the words. I’ve been singing out loud in the car about chrome wheels, fuel injections and stepping out over the line. It is twenty-five years later and I have found my cars and girls. It is family and kids and home.

I have The Rising and Working on a Dream on my iPod too, the grown up version of Bruce Springsteen, and I have tickets to his show in April. It is fun, to have the grown up me wink and the shy, awkward High School girl in me, telling her she made it. Cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to run…

I was one of those kids who kinda enjoyed getting sick because you got to miss school. Getting sick was a little bit like a paid vacation for me because I never really got anything that serious. A little lice and I got 3 days off!

But recently, I have changed my mind.

The last three illnesses I’ve had have been my worst right alongside chicken pox. I caught a terrible stomach bug about a year ago and threw up all over my friend’s bed at a sleepover. Then, after my father picked me up at 2:00am, I threw up 3 more times only making it in the bucket once.

Over this recent Christmas break I got my second stomach bug and a chance to lose my dinner two more times the day after Christmas.

Today, I am writing this post on the last day of my very worst illness.

Last Friday, I took a day off from school because I had a minor fever and felt terrible. That day I closed the curtains, turned on the TV, and laid 3 blankets over myself all the while muttering, “It’s freezing in here!” My dad had said that I would probably be better by Saturday and he took me out to lunch.

That night, my mom picked me up and basically told me that my forehead could fry an egg. She was pretty close, when we checked my temperature the thermometer beeped at me saying I was 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course it was wrong, and we used a different one after that and it told me I was 102 degrees.

After a night of barley 6 hours of sleep, I woke up barely able to walk. My mother found me on the toilet crying with a blanket on my head. I asked her to help me up and she popped the thermometer in my mouth for the 600th time. One-hundred and four degrees.

We rushed to my doctor’s appointment early and they diagnosed me with the flu and bronchitis.

I guess I should be more careful about what I wish for.

I rushed into the hallway and pulled my gun from a drawer. Was there still time to get in position?

He was inside the living room, walking towards the back of the house.

Yes, there was time.

I got into position and pointed the gun. I had just a few extra seconds to think about what I was doing and I thought, you know, I’m not really THAT mad.

So I put the gun back in the drawer.

That was my dream last night.

I thought it was a pretty random dream, until I was at work today and a dear, sweet friend, the one who knows I have been addicted to Rice Krispie Treats during my pregnancy, the one who made me a batch using a the recipe from my favorite bakery, she came by my cube, excited and full of enthusiasm for an idea she just had and all I could think was, “You are COMPLETELY CRAZY, don’t you realize this IDEA OF YOURS makes more WORK FOR ME and I’m PREGNANT and I have TOO MUCH WORK ALREADY!” I was pretty short with her, I was so on edge, so full of tension, like I just might kill some body.

Maybe the dream wasn’t so random after all.

I am in a fight with my work. It is kind of like being in a fight with a person, just different. I have things I want to finish before I go on leave. I scaled back once already, which helped, but not enough. I feel like no one else can do the work that I do or know how to take it over when I am gone, as if I’m a world famous brain surgeon and I’m the only doctor in the world who can save my dying husband, like in a day time soap. I know that isn’t real. It’s just as much of a dream as me keeping a gun in a drawer in my hallway.

But like Noel said the other day, knowing something is true doesn’t always make it feel better.

I want to be happy at work. I want to work hard, but no so hard I am short with sweet people when they are excited about a new idea. I want to do what I can and let go of the rest. I have said this to myself a thousand, million, trillion times. I guess I’ll just keep saying it. Maybe I will learn to believe it and feel it, a little bit at a time.

As I watch all of this and I reflect on Obama’s inauguration speech, though, I can’t help think of Dicken’s famous opener to A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The world has seen these times before - perhaps even worse. It’s hard to not read the paper, listen to the radio, or browse the internet and hear that things are worse than we’ve ever known. That the hill is a bigger hill than we’ve ever had to climb. That the tasks before us require sacrifice that we’ve never known. But let’s face it, this just isn’t so.

There’s certainly work to do and there are certainly people that need help, but there have been harder times. The system is broken and the ethics in our political arenas and board rooms need serious mending, but there have been bigger economic and political collapses. Some of us have faced these challenges. For some of us (like me) there are sacrifices that will have to be made that we’ve never had to know.

I for one want to be optimistic. I want to believe in the hope and the positive expression of the American promise that Obama speaks about. I’m tired of the politics of fear and divisiveness. I’m tired of being able to visibly see the dividing lines between family members, co-workers and friends. Are you with me? Or are you not? It’s this a “safe” place for me? or should I bite my tongue?

The America I believe in and am proud of is so much bigger than this. It’s the America I want for my children and my children’s children. I hope we find our way.

Thank you President Obama for re-introducing us to ourselves and our ideals. God bless you and the horse you road in on.

I think everyone has at least one super power. Maybe not flying or turning invisible, but smaller things on a more every day scale, something that most people can’t do but you can handle easily. For example, I can eat the same thing for dinner five days in a row and it doesn’t bother me. I developed my powers when I was single and I would cook one thing early in the week and eat it all week long. When I hear someone say, “I’d rather not eat Mexican, I had that yesterday,” and it takes me a moment to remember that not everyone has my super power.

But, everyone also has their kryptonite. That one thing they should be able to do, given their other skills and experiences, but this one they just can’t seem to figure out, as if Lex Luther himself was holding a stick of kryptonite near by…

Luckily, the kryptonite also tends to cause smaller problems on a more everyday scale. For example, I buy clothes in the wrong size.

Strange, huh? You would think that a woman with a college degree who can raise two girls and be married, who drives a car and pays the family bills, who has been buying her own clothes for more than two decades, could figure it out.

I hit rock bottom six or seven years ago when I was still single and I decided it was OK to spend real money on clothes. The only trouble was that I decided this about the time I had friends who shopped at CP Shades and I loved the colors and textures of their clothes. And I noticed the style well enough, I guess, that all the shirts were long and boxy and loose and the mix and match pants and skirts all had elastic waist bands. The dresses were full-length, with an A-line cut and wide at the bottom.

I would include a link to the CP Shades web site, but they are out of business now. Some people still love their clothes, there are lots of them on sale on eBay. Here is one of the tops…

I like Facebook for the random things that happen. I don’t get sucked in like some and I don’t pass around little green patches or knight duels or pretend presents. I have a basic profile, I search for people now and then and I like to see who comes around. Rebecca came around today and she made me smile.

In the ninth grade I was best friends with Frances. We played tennis, had sleep overs, watched General Hospital and both had a crush on Greg Harrison. My parents said I couldn’t have a gerbil, so Frances gave me one for my birthday and we named it G.H. because our two favorite things, General Hospital and Greg Harrison, both had the initials G.H. There were a group of girls that we hung around with and Rebecca was one of them.

In the tenth grade, things started to change. Our High School had a ninth grade building, which made it feel more like middle school, but when you moved to the big building, with the tenth-twelfth grades, things got more serious and the sorting out between the popular and unpopular became more severe and it didn’t go well for me.

I was awkward. I dressed funny. I doubted myself pretty much all the time. I had a lot of ideas in my head, but they stayed all bottled up inside, as if they were in a different language than the one spoken in my High School, so no one would understand them anyway.

I remember the day in the tenth grade when I knew for sure I was in trouble. Frances didn’t like her history teacher, so she requested a transfer into my class. On her first day in my class, she checked in with the teacher, then turned around to see two empty seats, one next to Jennifer, who was popular, and one next to me, her best friend. And Frances chose the seat next to Jennifer. That sucked.

When I was in eleventh grade, my parents took a trip. They knew I had been friends with Rebecca and they knew her parents from church so I was going to stay at Rebecca’s house. My parents didn’t know that Rebecca was popular and captain of the drill team and had tons of friends and I was not popular and we did not hang out anymore. It was so awkward showing up at her house. I felt like a stray cat looking for shelter.

Rebecca could have acted like Frances and distanced herself from me and made me feel even more like a dork. But she didn’t. She was nice. I don’t remember much about what we did, just that she was nice. We didn’t end up best friends or anything, but I still remember that week, when I felt a little less like a dork.

Without Facebook, I wouldn’t have had a chance to say thanks to Rebecca. So, thanks Rebecca and thanks Facebook and thanks to life for cool little random things that happen.

Yesterday, our family of three and a half (a.k.a. Baby Girl) went to a restaurant in Downtown Austin called Thai Kitchen for dinner. I had already eaten with my mother not 45 minutes before, so I chased Baby Girl around the claustrophobic restaurant until the food was ready.

Baby Girl waddled around the corner and began acting really cute to a man waiting for a table by the door. He smiled at her and then turned his head to look at me.

“Is she your kid?” he asked.

What an absurd thing to ask, I thought. Do I look like the kind of kid who would have a baby at 10 years old? But I just dismissed his question with an uncomfortable smile and a “she’s my sister“.

I pushed that question far from my thoughts for the rest of the night, but it came back to me today. If he was just a man in town for a business trip, is teen pregnancy really that normal where ever he’s from? And if he wasn’t just a business man then did he really think that asking a 12 year old -who, by the way, is short enough to look nine- if the little girl she was chasing around a restaurant was theirs is such a casual question?

But of course, maybe he was just one of those people who think something in their head and it just comes out of their mouth all wrong. Maybe I misinterpreted it all wrong.

It’s certainly something to think about, isn’t it?

For what it’s worth, it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit… start whenever you want… you can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that stop you. I hope you feel things that you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
- From The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I went to go see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button this past week and for the most part I left the theater with the same taste in my mouth as when I saw Forrest Gump. Both movies are molded from the same piece of clay. And in fact both were scripted for the screen by the same person. But I’ll be honest - I’m a sucker for this type of sentimentality.

[God it pains me to admit that... and so publicly. Yuck.]

Perhaps it was because I was recently laid off from a job I’ve had for 13 years, or celebrating my daughter’s 12th birthday, or expecting our 3rd child in February, or the fact I drove a mini-van to get to the theater, but every one-liner from the film hit me dead on in the chest. And god it hurt.

There’s also a good chance I responded the way I did to the film because I had also recently seen Seven Pounds, a movie’s whose theme is about forgiveness and redemption. If you knew it was your final days, could you forgive yourself for the choices you’ve made? what about the ones you didn’t?

I’m not sure what part of the universe is calling out to me, but I’m pretty sure it sounds a lot like Morgan Freeman telling me to “get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” I feel a calling and hear it all around me, but I haven’t quite put my finger on what it’s saying. My friend Macky tells me it’s my age. Apparently all 36 year olds are sitting around wondering if they’re life is on the right track. This must explain why “A Purpose Driven Life” has been on the best sellers list so long and more specifically why it’s being sold next to other business books. There has to be something more, right?

I’m pretty certain this isn’t a new phenomenon, otherwise the word “angst” would be as new to us as “truthiness”. Still, I can’t see my grandfather who served in World War II asking “what do I want to do with my life?” Truth is though, you can either answer this question yourself or it’ll get answered for you.

And so, for what’s its worth, I hope you’re living a life you’re proud of, and if you’ve found that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to not only start all over again, but you know what the hell you want to do and have the support of your friends, your kids, your spouse and your faith to get there. Let me know how I can help.