Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

As I’m sure you are well aware, August 6th was National Rootbeer Float Day. To celebrate, let your lovely eyes and tongue tango over this recipe for a Rootbeer Float Cupcake. I probably won’t make it anytime soon — I theoretically attempt to avoid sugar, dairy and wheat, which, along with travel, love, and dreaming are pretty much the ingredients to most of the delicious things in life — but a Rootbeer Float Cupcake does sound tempestuous, a tasty Delorean race back in time to a magical world of elongated stripy bendy straws, when I was under 4 feet tall and all smiles all the time. Other cupcakes to contemplate include Pear and Blue Cheese Cupcakes and Lychee Lemon Coconut Cupcakes!

I saw you standing across the cafeteria, all prettied up in your onesy jumpsuit, oily hair slicked back in a delicious pony tail, grinning like you just peed yourself and you just don’t give a damn. If you like mayo, you would love what then happened in my pants as I saw you graze through the “Dress Your Baked Potato” line.

Never had I seen so much goddammed chives on one plate! You were different than the others. I’ve been around the block a couple of times, and it takes a lot for me to get my hot dish hot anymore, but you had some tricks up your sleeve when you made your third appearance at the “Dress Your Ice Cream Sundae” table.

I hid under my table, watching, waiting for the boiling point, for something to happen, for you to make your move. I know confidence is attractive, which throws me in the same salad bar container as deviled eggs. I want you babe, and you’ll just have to recognize that in the midst of my peeping at you like Uncle Tom. Look around and down about 30 degrees. True love awaits like a crisped ham and cheddar hot pocket in the microwave.

Wait! What’s this? Your eyes trace over my quivering hamhocks and lilliputian skull to rest uneasily on my man beef, squeezed like caramel cream into my size 58 waist polyester track suit. I saw how carnal knowledge flashed behind your wandering eyes, one of which is wandering. I saw your nose whistle with delight through your deviated septum and our septic tank sized breasts heaved with girlish, churlish, and wild awakening.

Like a coffee enema, I had found my way into your heart, or had I?

Charlie Kaufman, writer of such movies as Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Being John Malkovich, has a new movie in production — Synecdoche, New York. According to IMDB, the movie is about “a theater director [who] struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play,” blurring what is real.

Fascinated by the word “synecdoche”, I looked it up: a figure of speech where a part describes a whole (a “set of wheels” is a car; “threads” are clothes), vice versa where the whole describes a part (“use your head” refers to using your brain), and specific to general (“coke” means any soft drink).  Expanded definition and examples are here.

I work with Chrissy. She is, as you might assume by her nomenclature, a female. She is also with child — to be her fourth. She is exactly my age, 29, and an entirely pleasant and competent being. Her constantly expanding job duties include Reception, Event Coordination and Human Resources.

Three months ago, I asked for raises for both of us. We both deserve it — we are underpaid and overworked, and folks with similar job duties around Seattle earn more. I was persistent in my urging, and eventually, to satisfy me and to keep me employed (I was contemplating Graduate School), I was awarded both a pay raise and a bonus. Chrissy, thus far, has received bo diddley squat. I’ve urged her to pursue this, and written letters to management myself on her behalf.

I discovered a fascinating article in the Washington Post entitled Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling. The article describes:

In one early study, Babcock brought 74 volunteers into a laboratory to play a word game called Boggle. The volunteers were told they would be paid anywhere from $3 to $10 for their time. After playing the game, each student was given $3 and asked if the sum was okay. Eight times more men than women asked for more money.

Another study quizzed graduating master’s degree students who had received job offers about whether they had simply accepted the offered starting salary or had tried to negotiate for more. Four times as many men — 51 percent of the men vs. 12.5 percent of the women — said they had pushed for a better deal. Not surprisingly, those who negotiated tended to be rewarded — they got 7.4 percent more, on average — compared with those who did not negotiate.

The article tells how women, more than men, are judged negatively for assertively pursuing promotions and raises. Our society programming equates passivity with feminine. Pretty dumb, huh?

I recently learned that our beloved, quasily deified and totally assassinated civil rights leader was a serial plagiarizer, both throughout his academic career — including his Doctoral Thesis at Boston U — and in his speeches. This isn’t new news, first coming to light when his wife, Coretta Scott King, released much of his scholastic papers to Stanford in the late 1980s. It is, however, refreshing for me when heroes become flesh and grounded, when ideas of perfection are desolved within universally flawed human experience. It makes me a feel a bit better about myself. Link