It isn’t often that I bake things requiring a variety of ingredients:

Lesson observed: a delusional egomaniac can manipulate hope and beauty into oppression and ugliness.

Also: think about what you’re getting into before the Kool-Aid rolls around.

From craigslist:

We are looking for enthusiastic, money motivated individuals to have the potential to earn unlimited income.

Upon closer inspection, “unlimited income” comes in the form of:

hourly pay of up to $12 per hour

Apparently,

if you are ready to be successful and make a ton of money

you will need to work approximately 4,000 hours per week to pay off that BMW, as this wage at full time doesn’t get you very far around here. I have a feeling “money motivated individuals” are looking elsewhere.

That’s how my sister described us in this photo. It was taken in summer 1996, when I was 18 and Blue was 19:

Here’s a poem of Blue’s from that era:

today i woke up like a slam in the face
not adjusted yet to the dream i had just had
i was on the wrong side of the road
heading straight for a big white van
we collide and slam! i’m awake
about to hit what’s heading towards me full on
but now ive decided
i will choose what slams into me
i know where i’m headed
my dreams
direct me.

Eleven years later, she’s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. More importantly, she’ll be in San Francisco next week visiting me. Yay!

I was at the pharmacy recently, in line behind about 15 other people. The setup was such that there was one clearly demarcated queue feeding into a row of approximately five cashiers. As each cashier finished a transaction, he or she would invite the next customer to that particular station (thankfully not using the questionably grammatical “Can I help who’s next?”).

As I stood in line, I noticed that the woman behind me was slowly and subtly invading my personal space in an attempt to move ahead of me in line. At first, I gave her the benefit of the doubt: maybe we arrived at the same time; maybe I didn’t notice her and inadvertently cut her off when I walked in. However, I clearly remembered looking around before getting in line so as to prevent such a faux pas. Verdict: guilty.

My knee-jerk reaction was to protect my space and prevent her from advancing. In response, she adopted a new strategy. She stood off to the side of the line, as if confused about the system, and slowly moved toward the cashiers. When the one nearest her beckoned for the next customer, she made a beeline for the counter.

Freeze-frame: what to do?

During social conflicts, my regionally diverse upbringing makes itself known via a domino effect of emotional reactions. My formative years in upstate New York meant that my intuitive response in this situation was to yell:

“HEY! What do you think you’re doing? Do you think nobody saw that? Get back in line!”

However, the 15 years I lived in the Midwest immediately canceled out the New York reaction:

“be passive aggressive. You can be mad, and think that lady is rude, but dontmakeascenedontmakeascenedontmakeascene.”

Following the Illinois voice, Georgia made an appearance. This one was passive aggressive, too, but more along the lines of:

(to the other rule-following patrons) “Oh my gosh, ya’ll. Did you see what that woman did? Some people.”

Of course, after a year and a half in San Francisco, the when-in-Rome attitude of “whatever” has taken root as well. This was the prevailing attitude amongst the line-standers at the pharmacy. Some people took note of the woman’s obviously antisocial behavior, but shrugged it off. As for me, after my internal regional conflict, I came up with this:

I had nowhere to be in the immediate future. In fact, my schedule is so very flexible at the moment, it is driving me mildly insane. The truly interesting part of this scenario is that woman’s personality. What is it that caused her to pull such an elementary school-esque move? Did she have a small child to pick up at day care? Was she double-parked? Was she missing her favorite TV show? Why is it that she was perfectly comfortable subverting the other patrons’ (unknown) needs for hers?

In short: four years of sociology classes trump geography.

Yay, Project Janna got a makeover!

As I am in the process of finding a permanent job, I decided to improve my marketable skills by learning more about web design. I am now happy to report that when I direct my WordPress files to perform various tasks, they grudgingly oblige sooner rather than later. This is a vast improvement from my previous experience, in which they often chose to oblige exactly never.

I haven’t tested this template in Internet Explorer. If you find any bugs, feel free to email me at janna [at] projectjanna [dot] com or to leave a comment, and I will cheerfully advise you to download Firefox, for this reason.

If you are not using Explorer and find bugs, please email me or leave a comment, and I will cheerfully fix them.

In other news, the About page has changed, and I am now represented by a photo of a kitten.