Am I The Grinch?

OK, so all of my co-workers gave me Christmas gifts. Ornaments that don't match my tree, candy and a notebook, and a $25 gift card to Legal Sea Foods (holy cow!). One even said, "Next year, we should just all go out to lunch instead of these obligatory $5 gifts." I didn't get them anything... except for the two I work with most closely (which I blogged about last week). Am I jerk? Probably. But I barely bought my own family gifts this year. I guess I could've just done cards or something nice but it's too late now. Just blame it on being knew and honestly not knowing people did gifts around here.

Reading my mind

My family (well, mostly me) uses Amazon's Wish List feature for gift ideas, especially those small stocking stuffer type gifts. I literally put every brand of beauty, cosmetic and cleaning product I use on there so they don't buy me Crest toothpaste (I use Sensodyne) or something.

Back on Nov. 29, I found a really pretty yellow necklace on Etsy that I wanted. I had been wanting one for a while, most specifically back in October when I had to work an event with a Bruins player and had nothing yellow (ahem, "gold") to complement my black dress. Since then, I've gone to two Bruins games with my dad and came from work both times, so I was in cute work clothes as opposed to Bruins gear, and I WISHED I had some yellow jewelry.

So, I added said necklace to my Amazon Wish List. Forgot all about it, actually.

Today, my boss and co-worker and I exchanged gifts. The three of us are our own team within the bigger media relations team within the even bigger communications department. MY BOSS GOT ME THE EXACT YELLOW NECKLACE THAT I NEVER TOLD ANYONE BUT MY AMAZON WISH LIST ABOUT. How crazy is that?! She doesn't have access to it, but she knows I like going to Bruins games with my dad and that I often meet him right after work. And, she knows me well enough to know my style. Nailed it!

She also got me a very pretty cosmetic bag from West Elm. My co-worker got my a fuzzy ball winter hat that actually keeps my ears warm, unlike my other one which is thinly knit and barely provides any warmth, as well as a copper "K" wine stopper and a photo frame/ornament with a little dog on it - OBVIOUSLY a photo of Rags is going in that one.

I don't have a lot to spend on gifts this year, so I decided to make a majority of all the gifts I'm giving. For my boss and co-worker, I picked up a box of four stemless wine glasses for - I think - $8 at TJ Maxx. I got out my ginormous bag of acrylic paint and a box of Q-tips, and went to work “dotting” the bottom of the glasses. I did two in warm shades and two in cool shades. Then I baked them at 350’ for 30 minutes, and voila!

They both said they loved them, and appreciated that they were handmade. I gave the bluish ones to my co-worker and the pink ones to my boss as I thought they suited their personalities and styles best. I was going to tell them they could trade or mix & match but they opened them at different times and seemed content with what they got. Success No. 1 of my handmade gift-giving Christmas.

Recommendations for fellow bookworms

If you're looking for quick, easy reads during the holidays, I recommend the two books I loved most in the past year. The first is John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. I read it right after Peter Heller's The Dog Stars and the two couldn't be more different. I was just on a star kick, I guess.

I read The Fault in Our Stars the weekend before I started my new job. If you know where I work, you'll know that reading about adolescents with cancer was good preparation for me. It was fiction of course, but it provided a viewpoint of teenage cancer that we don't often see.

It's been made in to a movie that premieres June 6, starring Shailene Woodley. I'll be seeing this one in theaters (and I see maybe three movies a year in the theater - tops!). Maybe you've never heard of Shailene. She starred in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and aboslutely dreadful show on ABC Family that I could not stop watching until the final season (which I still need to do). She was the only redeeming factor on that show. She'll also be starring in my other favorite book-turned-movie in 2014...

The Divergent series sounds a lot like The Hunger Games. Set in dystopian Chicago, 16-year-olds must decide whether they remain faithful to their families and upbringing by remaining in their original "faction," or if they want to start over with a new life, abandoning their families and friends for good. There are five factions - Abnegation (selflessness), Amity (peace), Candor (honesty) Dauntles (brave), and Erudite (knowledge). There's fighting and death and love, but the aside from those aspects, it's nothing at all like The Hunger Games. The subsequent books, Insurgent and Allegiant are equally as good. So good that I actually pre-ordered Allegiant (I NEVER pay for books) and it was delivered wirelessly to my Kindle in the wee morning hours the day it came out. By the time I got to work that morning, I was about 50 pages in.

I dragged my dad to Catching Fire on Thanksgiving night, and without having read the books or see The Hunger Games, I expected him to be totally lost and bored. He was not. We had a great discussion on the ride home about how clever Katniss is and how technologically advanced the Capitol is. But admittedly, my favorite part of the movie was actually the preview for Divergent, which premieres on March 21. I'll be seeing that one in the theater, too!

I don't anticipate either movie will be nominate for an Oscar or a Golden Globe, mostly because the target audience is probably the 16-24 age group. And based on my love of these two books, I'm guessing I still identify as a 24-year-old. It was one of my best years!

I'm Thankful

All week, or even all month, I've been looking forward to Thanksgiving. Not only are Wednesday and Friday my first days off (not counting holidays) since I started my job in July, but it's my first time spending any amount of time back in Longmeadow. This morning when I woke up, I was tired but knowing I'd be in Longmeadow later tonight put me in an instant good mood. And when I got off my train and walked outside, it was snowing. The last time it snowed, I was already in the office before it started. So this was my first, first-person experience with active snowfall since last winter (or spring, technically).

I only walk outside for about 25 seconds as I get from the Garden/commuter rail portion of North Station to the Green and Orange lines portion of North Station, but those 25 seconds of snowfall where all I needed.

As I walked into the station, I saw the guy handing out the free Metro newspapers. He's one of two guys that are always there in the mornings. I take a paper every single day, so when neither of them were there yesterday (it was bible salespeople, instead), I was disappointed. Today, just as I made eye contact with him, he dropped his stack of papers on the ground. Because we are consumerist jerks in 'merica, today's paper was enveloped in a giant sales circular from somewhere, making the normal matte newspaper print slippery due to the circular's glossy finish. I could tell he was having a hard time by the look of sheer frustration when he dropped them. He paused, and didn't bend down to pick them up right away. I think he was doing one of those, count to 10 in my head instead of cursing out loud, things. So I started to bend down to help him, but he smiled, put his hand out, and said, "No. Thank you dear." I smiled, took a paper, and went on my way. I made it exactly eight steps before I started bawling my eyes out. I don't know whether they were happy tears, sad tears, PMS tears, or what. He must know that everyone who takes a paper from him in the mornings is in a rush to get somewhere, and that he shouldn't let me make myself late. I started wondering how he was going to spend Thanksgiving. He can't make much, if anything, passing out free newspapers. Even if he does, he gets pushed, shoved, hardly ever thanked, and stands in a covered but freezing cold (or boiling hot) entrance.

I won't see him again this week as he's only there in the mornings and I'm off all week, but I decided that I have to do something. His hands are always full of newspapers but there's a window ledge nearby where he keeps a coffee. Maybe I'll bake some cookies or get him a $5 gift card for Dunkin Donuts. I don't know, but I feel compelled to do something. I literally tear up every time I think of this morning's interaction and I cannot figure out why it's bothering me so much, but it is.

Bottom line: I'm thankful for everything in my life. It may not be perfect, but it is exactly as it should be.

First post-surgery bummer

With nothing but positive comments from my friends, family, and other people who knew how bad my eyes were before my orbital decompression and even still before my eyelid lowering surgery, today was my first reality check that my eyes will never be exactly as they were before Graves'.

A guy at work, who rarely talks to anyone, said, "You always have this look of surprise. Like you're thinking, 'I didn't just see that, did I?'"

Little does he know, my heart just broke a little and it's more like, "I didn't just HEAR that, did I?"

Guess I need to consider that follow-up surgery after all...

Red Sox, Gators, Bruins and Patriots - but in which order?

*Edit: Dad swears he was never a Whalers fan, nor did he raise me as one. I don't know why I remember so vividly attending Whalers games and having all sorts of Whalers gear and being sad when they moved to North Carolina, but then again, I was in 7th grade when that happened so maybe I'm making up a childhood for myself here. Very possible with Graves' brain...

Everyone always asks me which teams I root for. I was born and raised in Massachusetts, but my dad was born in New York, spent a few years in Amsterdam, New York and then many more in Enfield, Connecticut. Although Enfield is on the border of Massachusetts, Connecticut hasn't had a professional sports team since the Whalers packed up and became the Carolina Hurricanes in 1997 (breaking all of our hearts, by the way). So most Connecticut residents root for either New York or Boston teams - and seem to be pretty evenly split. Rhode Island is surprisingly similar even though most people consider Rhode Island part of Massachusetts, and the Red Sox Triple-A team is in Pawtucket.

What I'm getting that is that I was raised a Yankees, Giants and Whalers fan. My family never cared about professional basketball, but we were pretty obsessed with UConn, especially during the 35-0 Rebecca Lobo season.

It wasn't until college that I got sick of being the lonely only Yankees fan. The 2003 ALCS was what did it for me. I was a sophomore in college and had been around Bostonians for the past year at my small state school, and I finally got the itch to switch teams. The Yankees won the series and I had to save face, but inside I felt so left out of the riot that the students had when we lost to the Yankees (notice I'm already saying "we" here). It wasn't a riot I condoned, but we were rowdy college kids and that's what you do when a Boston teams loses. Or wins. You riot. Students flipped a campus police car. I went to watch for a little bit but everyone knew I was a Yankees fan so I didn't stay and I certainly didn't partake in the mayhem.

That winter and spring, I became good friends with one of my co-workers at Target who was a diehard Red Sox fan from Enfield. He made it his life's mission to convert me. For Christmas, he gave me the ugliest, manliest (literally - it was a men's) Red Sox hat. But he was really trying. I liked him, so I let him win. I traded in my pink Yankees gear for non-pink Red Sox attire.

And boy was I rewarded. As we know, the Sox reversed the curse and won it all the following season.

Most days, I forget I was ever a Red Sox fan. My mom never really cared about the Yankees, but became a more loyal Red Sox fan in the late 90s or early 2000s. My brother could care less but liked identifying with my dad, so we were a house divided for many years.

When I moved to Florida in 2007, I had no idea how ingrained in the Gator Nation I would become. I didn't get season tickets to the games (first-year students almost never do), but I managed to procure tickets to every home game thanks to a sweet part-time gig with StubHub and a best friend who worked in the UFAA ticket office. The Sox made it to the ALDS and swept the Angels on my 23rd birthday, the day after a very rough Gators loss to LSU. I remember watching the World Series with my then-boyfriend, who had become a temporary bandwagon fan (only because of me) and was a huge Josh Beckett fan. We didn't do anything special for Game 4 of the sweep but sit on his couch and watch the game with no fingernails left at the end. Everyone congratulated me (my nickname in Florida was "Boston" because no one down there knows anything else about the state of Massachusetts) for a week straight, and I proudly wore my Schilling jersey everywhere, but nowhere as proudly as on Halloween a few days later when I dumped a bottle of red nail polish onto my sock.

I took this on my walk into work this morning.
2013 ALCS Champions!

To answer the question of what teams I root for, I struggle every year with my order of preference. After last year's dismal season, I went into this season saying 1. Bruins 2. Gators 3. Red Sox 4. Patriots. That preference only means if all four of those teams were playing in some championship game at the same exact time, which would I watch/go to. But this year, the Gators are sucking and the Bruins season has only just begun, so you can safely assume my order is more like 1. Red Sox 2. Bruins 3. Patriots 4. Gators.

On that note, I am available Wednesday and Thursday evenings if you would like to take me to Games 1 or 2 of the 2013 World Series. My office is approximately 450 yards from Fenway Park and I know of a great place to get a drink and a burger before the game that only the locals know about. Call me.

Just a clean freak, not suicidal

Every time I clean and purge my office/desk at work, I always wonder if people are assuming the worst. This is because when I was in high school, I would eventually get sick of my locker being full of papers and other crap that made it messy, so I’d clean it out and usually ended up bringing home clothes, gym sneakers, and other things that had just been piling up. One time, I guess I had been having a bad week and so when I cleaned out my locker, the next day I was called down to my guidance counselor’s office. I don’t remember the conversation anymore (it’s been 11+ years), but she basically asked if I was going to kill myself. Ummm...what?! No! Of course not! Why would you ask me that? She said my friends were concerned that I had cleaned out my locker and took a lot of things home, and they had informed her that they thought I might be planning suicide. I immediately knew which friends she was referring to, and I was furious with them for crying wolf when they knew full well I was just down in the dumps, not suicidal.

I think we had all been reading too much “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.” Remember those books? I think they specifically recalled the story of Kyle, which I’m sharing below from an untrustworthy source, so who knows if this is even how it goes.

One Day – Story
One day, when I was a freshman in high school, I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school. His name was Kyle. It looked like he was carrying all of his books. I thought to myself, “Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday? He must really be a nerd.”

I had quite a weekend planned (parties and a football game with my friend tomorrow afternoon), so I shrugged my shoulders and went on. As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running toward him. They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes. My heart went out to him. So, I jogged over to him and as he crawled around looking for his glasses, and I saw a tear in his eye.

As I handed him his glasses, I said, “Those guys are jerks. They really should get lives.” He looked at me and said, “Hey thanks!” There was a big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude. I helped him pick up his books, and asked him where he lived. As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I had never seen him before. He said he had gone to private school before now. I would have never hung out with a private school kid before. We talked all the way home, and I carried his books. He turned out to be a pretty cool kid. I asked him if he wanted to play football on Saturday with my friends and me. He said yes. We hung all weekend and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him. And my friends thought the same of him.

Monday morning came, and there was Kyle with the huge stack of books again. I stopped him and said, “Boy, you are gonna really build some serious muscles with this pile of books everyday!” He just laughed and handed me half the books.

Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors, began to think about college. Kyle decided on Georgetown, and I was going to Duke. I knew that we would always be friends, that the miles would never be a problem. He was going to be a doctor, and I was going for business on a football scholarship.

Kyle was valedictorian of our class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn’t me having to get up there and speak.
Graduation day, I saw Kyle. He looked great. He was one of those guys that really found himself during high school. He filled out and actually looked good in glasses. He had more dates than me and all the girls loved him! Boy, sometimes I was jealous. Today was one of those days.

I could see that he was nervous about his speech. So, I smacked him on the back and said, “Hey, big guy, you’ll be great!” He looked at me with one of those looks (the really grateful one) and smiled.

“Thanks,” he said. As he started his speech, he cleared his throat, and began. “Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years. Your parents, your teachers, your siblings, maybe a coach… but mostly your friends. I am here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. I am going to tell you a story.”
I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the story of the first day we met. He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn’t have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile.

“Thankfully, I was saved. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.” I heard the gasp go through the crowd as this handsome, popular boy told us all about his weakest moment. I saw his Mom and Dad looking at me and smiling that same grateful smile. Not until that moment did I realize its depth.

Never underestimate the power of your actions. With one small gesture you can change a person’s life. For better or for worse.

It's a nice story, and still gives me chills. But that wasn't at all the case with me, and I didn't at all appreciate my friends' concerns because they were unfounded. I eventually forgave them and realized they were actually looking out for me, and maybe also trying to create a bit of drama at my expense, but I still think about every time I do a deep clean and purge of my desk or even my place. Awkward!