Sock tales

Do you sleep with your socks on?

I don't, but sometimes I make myself just so I can have the satisfaction of kicking them off in the middle of the night.

If the thought of sleeping in socks makes your skin crawl, get this: my friend Igor doesn't just sleep in them, he tucks his pyjama bottoms into them. No exposed ankles allowed.

"The earliest known surviving pair of socks, created by naalbinding. Dating from 300-500, these were excavated from Oxyrhynchus on the Nile in Egypt. The split toes were designed for use with sandals." - Wikipedia

Image by David Jackson via Wikimedia Commons

Here's some real talk: forget the cool side of the pillow—how about no pillow at all? That's right. Andy and I have both soured on pillows over the past few years. We may start the night with our heads atop the suffocating feather sacks, but eventually they wind up at the foot of the bed or tucked under our arms like teddy bears. There's nothing quite like feeling your cheek against the cold, firm mattress. Try it sometime.

Cheers,
Margaret

P.S. One of the biggest flaws of this blog is that it only contains the last thing that pops into my mind right before I go to bed. That's why so much of it revolves around sleep, tiredness and Real Housewives.

But I want to be better. As of tomorrow I will start taking notes on the many blog ideas I have throughout the day.

I'll write about the time I fell off a bridge into a creek during a family hike, how my dad jumped in to save me and how my mom, unaware of the circumstances, fell in shortly after his heroic jump.

I'll write about the time my mom, cousin Martha, cousin Joe and I applied to be on the Amazing Race 'Groups' edition. We filmed ourselves describing how much we would butt heads. A friend of a friend edited it in his high school video production class and then we sent the VHS off to Los Angeles in a padded manila envelope. We never heard back, but it was the reason I got a passport—you had to have one in order to apply.

I'll write about my true thoughts on weddings.

I'll mourn the Nordstorm Brass Plum of yesteryear.

I'll write about how getting a Master's in Theology turned me into an atheist.

I'll choose one housewife from each franchise to transfer to another housewife city and describe why I think they'd thrive in their new home.

I'll talk about my fascination with mass hysteria like the Salem Witch Trials and the Dancing Plague of 1518.

I'll post old snaps and video from my childhood.

I'll share my family's secret 'cream cheese dip' recipe.

I'll give away another festive hat.

SO STAY TUNED!

Rusty

Below is a descriptive essay I wrote freshman year of college. It's difficult for me to read, as old writing always is. But I figured, hey, it means I get to relax and watch TV instead of coming up with something original to blog about tonight.

Full disclosure: we never called the van 'Rusty'. Creative license.

Margaret Kay

English/Herrick/9:30-10:45

Descriptive Essay

It was a big van. Not one of those 15 seaters that requires a special license to drive, but one big enough to make mini-van drivers feel minute and inferior. Its bench seats could hold all seven of us plus one lucky friend that, not knowing what they were getting into, willingly came along.  We affectionately named it “Rusty” partly because of its burnt orange paint but mainly because of the many patches of brown rust that resided on its exterior. The morning of the semi-annual Seaside, Oregon trip I would hurry down the driveway, slide open Rusty’s thick, dented, and recently “keyed” door, and claim my spot by the window.

            It was the same routine every time. After about 73 minutes of loading the back with duffle bag after duffle bag plus around five of our bikes we squeezed into the van. The seatbelts were a salmon color and about an inch think. They were so ancient and heavy that we had taken to calling them “safety harnesses”. I clicked the dense, shiny metal parts together and tightly squeezed the belt across my lap. Only when all eight clicks had sounded, could we begin our journey. My mom was the driver and the rest of us were the backseat drivers, turning our heads and cringing nervously every time Rusty came within inches of crushing a Honda civic or taking out a parking meter. Once we reached the freeway, though we breathed easier knowing there were less objects to run into. It was also when I first became bored. Yes, the drive had only lasted fifteen minutes but my attention span at age six was about as long as the lifespan of our countless pet goldfish. I stared out the window, but the trees were bent and the cars were smudged blurs of color which made my stomach hurt so I confined my eyeballs to the van’s interior.

            The seats were a blue and orange plaid with little balls of fuzz all over them. I picked them up and made a cotton ball sized clump. Placing the bundle of fluff in between my pointer finger and my thumb I pinched it, clamping down, releasing and repeating. While performing this customary road trip ritual with my right hand, I reached my left hand into the pouch located on the back of the seat in front of me. The pocket was a limitless ravine stuffed to a point far beyond dysfunction. Crammed with Babysitters club books, baseball cards, brain quests, and half-eaten lollypops covered with lent and hair, only the brave and severely bored bothered to reach into the swarming pit. My fingers collided with a bendable item wrapped in plastic and about the length of a pencil. Childish hope drew me to conclude it was a half eaten laffy taffy rope, still partially wrapped and simply forgotten by its previous owner. With a firm tug I pulled it out and to my dismay it was not at all what I’d dreamed it would be. In my hand there lay a string cheese spotted with mold and stamped with “Best by December 19^th”. I wasn’t sure of the day’s actual date, but I knew that Christmas had been months ago and the cheese was probably no longer eatable. Disappointed immensely, my gaze meandered toward Rusty’s cloth ceiling. It was off white and the way it drooped reminded me of our tent after a night of camping in the rain. What amazed me most, though, were the amebic brown splotches covering the ceiling’s fabric. Automatically I assumed they were coffee stains caused by lidless mugs full of Starbucks and their simultaneous encounter with a speed bump. Well picturing this fantastic image the car came to a halt and through the air my fuzz ball soared, nestling lightly atop the navy blue carpet and just out of my reach. The clump of lent was joined by other tiny items of clutter , blanketing the van’s floor. There were grimy, greenish pennies, various hair rubber bands and scrunchies, a New Kids on the Block cassette tape, three cue tips, a baby blue, sparkly toothbrush still in its wrapping, around six guitar picks and many other things that had found their way from someone’s jeans pocket to Rusty’s floor. My sister nudged me and said “Come on!” The van had stopped and the misty smell of ocean clung to my nostrils.

            I gathered my walkman, pillow and water bottle in my arms and took the lengthy jump from the van’s edge to the cracked asphalt of the cabin’s driveway. My legs had forgotten their purpose so I flexed them firmly. A satisfying ache jolted through my calf and up into my thigh. I felt my muscles awaken as the elevator of sensation ascended through them. At the deafening slam of the sliding door we walked away from our home of four and a half hours and headed toward the cabin. I glanced back at the beastly machine which was looking pudgy in the Cabin’s narrow driveway. There Rusty would sit for the remainder of our vacation waiting loyally for the return trip home.

Guten nacht, 

Margaret

Book chat

We went to a bookstore today. Andy's been reading a book called 'American Generalship — Character is Everything: The Art of Command' and he was in the market for something a little less dull. He ended up choosing a book on the history of salt.

Save the occasional classic novel (e.g. 'Jude the Obscure') Andy only reads nonfiction. My dad is a sucker for mysteries. My mom, sistahs and I love memoirs. Max seems to enjoy a blend of all three.

I've never read a self-help book, but today I had an idea for one I'd like to write. Along the lines of Brian Griffin's 'Wish it. Want it. Do it.'

Title: 
'Grow Up — How to stop whining and start winning' 

Introduction: 
It's commonly thought that those who go into psychology and/or write self-help books are the craziest people of all. I don't dispute that. Believe me, I'm right there with you. In the weeds. In fact, this probably isn't even allowed in the self-help section. I'm guessing you found it tucked away behind the clearance calendars. 

However, what I can offer are a few tricks that have helped me find peace in this bizarre experience we call life (Or have they helped me? Jury's still out). 

Middle bit:
TBD

Conclusion: 
Ignore 70% of the negative feelings you have. Most aren't valid. Remember to eat regularly. Spend time with toddlers and the elderly. Go to either a beach or a forest once a week. 

Image via Wikia.com

Don't you think people would appreciate the honesty and buy it?

Later,
Margaret

Cool, hipster or lazy?

I went hard on the tofu today. A big container of Steph's Tofu from PCC for lunch followed by a Vietnamese tofu bowl for dinner. It wasn't planned, but it happened. My stomach...bloat city.

Anyway, today's blog topic: this blog! How meta. (GAWD, I bet you knew I was going to say that. How meta? More like how predictable!)

Specifically, I'd like to respond to a common question I get: Margaret, why don't you make your blog look nice, buy a domain and get a proper URL? 

To which I respond, it's complicated.

Basically, there's something alluring about things that are slightly unpolished. It's why film photos still look so cool next to digital. It's why Reddit, compared to Buzzfeed, is a breath of fresh air. An extreme example is this email newsletter Andy gets every week. It's not fancy. It's not designed on MailChimp. It's actually not even a newsletter; it's just an email. All it has are about ten links to interesting articles, videos and images that have cropped up on the Internet over the previous seven days. It's so simple and so unrefined, that it feels...nice, accessible, unpretentious, personal, never overwhelming.

Everybody can have a blog—a really snazzy, professional, beautiful blog. My marketing career has taken me deep into the cringeworthy world of "blogger outreach" and I've seen my fair share of bright 'n shiny blogs. They're modern and colorful with brilliant custom graphics (like a background made to look like notebook paper!). They've long dropped their unseemly URL suffixes. No .blogspot.coms or .wordpress.coms to be seen. They're gorgeous! GAW-GEOUS!

But I don't go in for all that because I have a hunch that people—you—like a bit of rough. You like this outdated, no frills design. You LOVE it. It gives the illusion that the writing is good. And the free URL makes it feel kind of underground.

I explained all this to my brother Max last week.

"That's a very hipster argument," he says.

"Yeah, it is," I say.

"Yep."

<long pause>

"Or maybe I'm just lazy."

AND THE PENNY DROPS. That's a bingo. Lazy. The true reason, at least 80% of it, is that I'm lazy.

No comment.

Thanks for sticking with me through that. Stay tuned for tomorrow's post: I love Cracklin' Oat Bran so much, so why do I never buy it?

Love,
Margaret

P.S. I just realized what makes something "hipster". It's when the spectrum of unpretentiousness comes full circle. It's when unpretentious goes so far that it becomes pretentious. Kind of like how, in politics, if you go to the left enough, you wind up on the right.

Woops

It's midnight and I have no blog.

I really should have a contingency plan for situations like this. A solid backup post, saved as a draft and ready to go live when an unexpected late night work situation takes me past the point of no return.

Instead, all I have is this half-written post from January 18th, 2015:


How I will spend my millions

I'm still holding out hope that I'll be filthy rich some day. However it happens, I'm sure it's going to take a lot of hard work and ingenuity, which I'm not excited about. But eventually my desire for the finer things will hopefully motivate me to, as Lisa Rinna would say, hustle hustle hustle!

So when I am taking daily cash baths like Scrooge McDuck, here's how I plan to spend by hard earned dough.

A top-of-the-line Dyson vacuum cleaner—NOT a maid.

Weekly massage appointments—NOT daily sessions with a personal trainer.

A commercial grade juicer—NOT a

And that's it! Just when things were getting juicy (HA!). 

But what was I going for with that juicer comment? Clearly, I didn't get around to completing the thought. Maybe it was going to be, A commercial grade juicer—NOT a live-in chef. 

Image by Food Thinkers via Flickr

I guess we'll never know for sure. 

Bye, 

Margaret

Workin' for the man every night and day

A couple days ago, my new-to-America, Irish bro-in-law William was shocked and appalled to hear the Seattle Mariners were playing their 37th game in 38 days. He couldn't believe it.

But if he thinks that's crazy, then he should read this email that a banking analyst at Barclays just sent his summer interns. Trust me, it's worth a read.

Incoming Intern Class of 2015, 

Welcome to Power! I am sure you are all busy at training, but in the interest of helping your transition into the summer, and hopefully helping some of you secure Full-Time offers, I wanted to introduce you to the 10 Power Commandments. Respect them, love them, live them. You may have heard different stories about Barclays Power – go on WSO and you’ll see us called the “frattiest group”, “top Power group on the street”, or the group with the “best PE placement” – needless to say we are a unique group at Barclays. And with that come unique rules. 

For 9 weeks you will live and die by these: 

1. Our group dresses very conservatively. Given that it is summer, no socks is accepted and, in fact, encouraged. (Men: On your first day at the desk, it is customary to wear a bowtie and/or suspenders). 

2. Remember: this is a summer internship for a full-time offer. It won’t be easy. If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. 

3. We expect you to be the last ones to leave every night…no matter what. That’s what good summer analysts do. (Also getting in earlier than me would be a power move – You should enjoy your casual 9:15AM PT arrival time this Friday, but I wouldn’t get used to it). 

4. During your first few weeks we ask that you direct all of your questions to Michael Lomio. Tell the other summers too, Michael is industry agnostic. If you ask me a question it will be noted. 

5. Never take your jacket off at work. This is investment banking, ladies and gentlemen. Other groups may be more liberal when it comes to summer dress code, unfortunately were not 

6. You will be assigned junior “mentors”. It is much appreciated if you would bring breakfast in for your respective “mentor.” Some people are more particular about this than others. 

7. I recommend bringing a pillow to the office (yoga mat works as well). It makes sleeping under your desk alot more comfortable, in the very likely scenario that you have to do that. 

8. You are expected to allocate at least half your seamless web order for group appetizers/snacks for the month of June. No questions asked. Once the 2nd years leave, you can enjoy your $25 allocations. 

9. Have a spare tie/scarf or two around. You never know when your associate will run out of napkins. 

10. When you need to leave your desk there will be a sign out sheet outside your cubes. Please fill it out including where you went and for how long. This is important come the end of your internship. 

I hope it is clear from the rules above that the internship really is a 9-week commitment at the desk. You are here with the sole goal to impress the group enough to receive a FT offer. During my summer in the group an intern asked our staffer for a weekend off for a family reunion – he was told he could go. He was also asked to hand in his blackberry and pack up his desk. 

Some of you have asked for training materials to study up on before you start. Love the enthusiasm. First, I would recommend reading the GS Elevator twitter feed for some social cues. It might be seen as a joke to some people, but around here I think many people find it insightful. Below is a link to a great read for any dress questions. 

Dress Rules: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-dress-the-part-on-wall-street-2013-8 

Second, I have attached a fairly simple LBO for Staples. Understand this will be a bit tough for some of you without a Finance / UG business degree, but we believe in you. There’s a reason each of you was picked for the group. We expect you to give this your best shot and send us a completed LBO model with a short write up by Friday end of day. None of you will have this 100% correct, that’s expected. We also still expect you to complete a significant portion of it. 

Welcome to the big leagues, boys and girls. Play time is over and it’s time to buckle up. Once you hit the desk, your lives will be your work for 9 weeks. Please respond promptly to acknowledge you’ve received this e-mail (anytime in the next half hour would be fine) and to confirm that you are onboard for the summer. We know you have access to e-mail, so there’s no way to avoid this. If I remember correctly, you are probably doing training with Sean Clovey from IT, or Market Mark from TTS. 

Other than that, I look forward to meeting you all, and I hope you’re excited to join the group! We sure are looking forward to having you here! 

Yours Truly,

Justin

P.S. There are a number of typos in place in the email above. These are on purpose. First person to email me back with at least 3 highlighted typos is off to a GREAT start!

Yeah. I know. It's so bad. It's cartoonishly douchey.

The email was leaked to the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago. The guy has since been fired.

Image by 드림포유 via Flickr

My question: who is the person who receives this email and responds well to it? Who is that poor soul who reads it and thinks, "Man, this is so inspiring. I'm going to work extra hard this summer"?

I actually feel kind of bad for the guy who wrote it. He's clearly just an ugly example of a certain corporate culture where this sort of thing is seen as OK and normal. I'm fairly certain this dude is just repeating the stuff that he was told when he was a lowly intern. That said, Hitler wasn't able to do the Holocaust on his own. He needed brainwashed, power-hungry middle managers like this guy to buy into his crazy ideas. So, I take it back. I don't feel bad for this guy.

Yikes, did I just make a Hitler comparison? I'm getting so lazy in my old age. Forgive me.

Peace be with you,
Margaret

P.S. I had a crack at the three typos, even though it's clear he just added that caveat to cover his arse for inevitable typos. 'On purpose' my ass!

• "and hopefully helping some of you secure Full-Time offers" — Don't capitalize 'full-time' because it's not a proper noun.

• "Tell the other summers too, Michael is industry agnostic." — Should be semicolon instead of a comma (in my opinion).

• "This is investment banking, ladies and gentlemen. Other groups may be more liberal when it comes to summer dress code, unfortunately were not" — Two typos here. "Were" should be "we're" and it's missing a period at the end of the sentence.

• "It makes sleeping under your desk alot more comfortable" — Should be 'a lot' not 'alot'. 
• "When you need to leave your desk there will be a sign out sheet outside your cubes" — Should be 'sign-out sheet' with a hyphen. 

• "He was also asked to hand in his blackberry and pack up his desk." — Blackberry should be capitalized.

• "to confirm that you are onboard for the summer." — It should be "on board" not "onboard". 

That's seven. What do I win??


SOURCE: Wall Street Journal

If I start writing now...

Tonight, I'll let Charlie Brown speak for me.


  

'The Passion of Creation'
Image by Leonid Pasternak via Wikimedia Commons

In other news, North West is going to be a BIG SISTAH! Any guesses on names? Here's what I'm thinking:

South - 60% chance
Wild - 20% chance
Due - 10% chance
Go - 2%
Out - 2%
Mello - 2%
Narro - 2%
Shallo - 2%

Sweet dreams,
Margaret

Sixth Grade Essays: Part 4, Ambitions

I saved the most cringeworthy essay for last. Just remember, I was 12 and experimenting with the English language. Back then I wanted so badly to be descriptive, but my vocabulary held me back. When it doubt, I guessed.

Today's essay: Ambitions

Highlights: "leaking proudness"

Back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. 

LYMI, 

Margaret

THE JOURN

Today I found the journal my friends and I shared in junior high.

We would keep it for about a week before passing it on to the next person. Inside it are anecdotes from the halls of KJH, lots of talk about The Sims, a list of people we hate and regular updates on everyone's crushes.

I thought about sharing an excerpt here in a 'From the Archives' post, but it just didn't feel right. 'The Journ', as we called it, is sacred. Its hallowed pages contain rare, raw insight into the mind of a middle school girl. To share it here would be to betray my 14-year-old self. I just can't do it.

Plus, someone wrote and then highlighted in pink highlighter, "From now on, NO Arrowheadian boys can read this—we can't trust them!"

On the slim chance that an Arrowheadian boy reads my blog (Arrowheadian being our term for people who went to Arrowhead Elementary School), it seems I must honor The Journ's code of secrecy.

The good news is that I also found a poem I wrote around the same time. I read it and was AMAZED at how good it is.

Of course, it's actually terrible. But it's not that terrible. It's far less terrible that I would have expected. If I sat down to write a poem today, I sincerely doubt I'd be able to match it.

Let this be a lesson to us all: there are certain skills we never progress in beyond a junior high level. For most of us, poetry is among them.

Others include:

• Choreographing group dances
• Cursive (fun fact: Brits aren't familiar with the term "cursive". They call it "joined-up writing")
• Summoning the dead via a Ouija board

TGIF tomorrow,
Margaret