I grew up reading the comics. I couldn’t wait until the Sunday paper came and I could read Nancy and Prince Valiant and Snoopy and Hi & Lois.

I’ve found that my favorite comics, though, are the single pane, twisted humor ones. Like The Far Side. Or Ballard Street. Today, because y’all brightened my day so much after my little pity party yesterday….I give you:

—- There are some times that you really have to wonder how in the world people’s minds work. Other times, you simply snort coffee through your nose and move on. —-

From dictionary.com:

lim·bo /?l?mbo?/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[lim-boh]

1.	(often initial capital letter) Roman Catholic Theology. a region on the border of hell or heaven, serving as the abode after death of unbaptized infants (limbo of infants) and of the righteous who died before the coming of Christ (limbo of the fathers or limbo of the patriarchs).

Funny how, as I sit here on a nearly empty floor in our headquarters in Chicago, the floor that used to house the top executives, the concept of limbo keeps popping into my head. I’m at my desk cubicle looking around 360-degrees. (Whee, spinny chair, and no one to frown at me! oooooh, dizzy. Just a sec…. Okay now.) I see three people in an area that used to seat 45. I don’t know if I’m nauseous from the spinny chair, or the thought of how much things around here have changed.

Another division of my peers have received the news that their positions are being eliminated at the end of March, or April, or May, and that their services will no longer be needed. Or, (albeit a much smaller percentage, but still!) that the purchaser has found “just the position” and that they’ll be offered continuing employment.

Their division? Is no longer in limbo. They’re not wondering what they’ll be doing 3 or 6 or 9 months from now. They’ll either be unemployed and looking for a new position, or they’ll be doing their new job. They have closure to the uncertainty that has been clouding our existence since last April. And Oh Mah Holy Hell y’all. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that closure? (Say it with me, “Amen Hot!” “Yes, sista!” “Can I have your chair?”)

You’re wondering, aren’t you (well, if you love me at all you are…), if I’ve heard anything yet. Um, that would be……no. N.O. with a capital No. And y’know? It’s starting to suck donkey balls. Really hard. (The suckage, not the donkey balls, because, y’know that would just be gross.)

I have no problem with being laid off (preferably in the summer? Think about how wonderful my tan garden would look.) and looking for a new job. Let’s face it, this isn’t the same company that I’ve worked for for the past 15 years. My favorite people are gone or going. It’s a completely different culture. There’s 200 times (no fucking kidding, 200 times) more employees. Small fish in a big pond much?

I enjoyed the fact that my opinion was valued and that the CIO and I could sit down on a patio in Amsterdam, slam a couple of beers or bottles glasses of wine and dissect an important issue. Can you picture your local petshop goldfish swimming in the Pacific? Well, there you go then. That’s the picture I’m looking at.

Being the Hotfessional I am, I’m having problems adjusting to that thought. I could work my way back up, make my mark, and grow into the size of, say, a trout or a largish-tuna, but y’all? I’m forty-four years and 292 days old (Fuck me. When did I get that old?). I’ve been working in this industry for 23 years. Of the eight financial institutions I’ve worked for, eight no longer exist.

Hey, I have a minor in math. I can do that. 8 minus 8 equals not.a.single.freaking.one.

But, let’s face it. With 46 weeks of severance pay, and 46 weeks of health insurance (with no increase in premium) hanging in the balance, I’m not leaving until they kick my ass out. With that much money on the table, I could stay in Michigan, get Shortman through his senior year in high school, and then look for a job in a much larger geographic area. I can negotiate a relocation package. (I bought my house the day before the housing market took a dive. Don’t laugh I’m not kidding. We closed the deal, got the keys, and went out to the house the next day to take some measurements. On the way, the guy on the radio predicted a major downturn in housing prices. I thought Mr. Hot was going to jump out of the car on I-94.)

Anyway, limbo is a crappy place to be right now.

My recruiter did come back with a position that he thought I might be interested in. A Project Manager for GMAC. The pay was actually a bit less than I make now; the incentive plans available were much less that I am eligible for now, but they do give a car allowance. (I’m a Dodge girl. I don’t even like very many GM cars. So, meh.) It’s back in my old neighborhood (um, 2 hours during rush hour?). I said “Thanks but No Thanks”. (Someone out there is clicking their tongue at me and shaking their head. “Beggars can’t be choosers” is being muttered. Shush.)

The next day I read this.

I wonder if he’s taken that Project Manager job off his list to recruit for.

—- So, I pack up to leave the office and head out to O’Horror once again. And I realize that there’s another definition of Limbo: “a dance from the West Indies, originally for men only, in which the dancer bends backward from the knees and moves with a shuffling step under a horizontal bar that is lowered after each successive pass.” Hey, don’t they drink rum in the West Indies? Well, hell, fuck a duck and count me in. —-

- Not someone’s bare ass, but the lunar eclipse that is happening outside my window. I’m on the 28th floor - so it looks damn close.

- I’ve got the television on for background noise, and I just heard an advertisement for a new television show called “Ax Men”. They were talking about logging. I heard “blogging.” Almost pulled a muscle in my neck whipping my head around to find out who was blogging in the woods.

- Met Kristabella for dinner tonight. We ordered three appetizers to split. Swiss Fondue, Dipping Straws (fried bread) and a fruit & cheese plate. Y’all? Piles of food. (Not to worry, we managed to do a pretty good job of eating it.) And hey, fruit! If you ignored the bread, fried bread, and bread, it was pretty healthy!

- It’s so damned cold in Chicago. And I can’t find where I threw my gloves when I came in. It’s really going to suck if I can’t find them in the morning.

- Mr. Hot and Shortman bought an American Idol game for the PS2. When I called home, they were singing Gladys Knight and the Pips. I hate talking on the phone. I hate talking on the phone when the person you’re talking to is carrying on a conversation with someone else who is in the room with them.

- The channel button on this remote control sticks. And I don’t know any of the channels, so I have no choice but to press “channel up” to surf. I want to throw it through the window.

- I’m watching House Hunters - and these people are looking at homes priced at $1,600,000. No, that’s not a typo. Over 1.5 MILLION! (To make matters worse, they are Michigan grads and have to have an extra room just to display their Wolverine shit.)

—- Okay, enough bitching. Now, don’t forget to send me your Hotlight sites for Photography. It’s getting darned close to the end of the month, and I have to have time to go through and come up with something witty and intelligent to say about them so I can share them with you all. Get me the link (you can leave it in the comments or email me) by the 25th! —-

I guess I roped some curious cats when I mentioned my sister’s arranged marriage. That’s cool. I’m happy to elaborate. I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine though, and I’ve been up since 4 am (it’s now 9:08, damned close to my bedtime), so if I ramble a bit, please put up with me.

I do have to give y’all some background though.

First, my father is the eldest son of a Lebanese immigrant. My grandfather (who I never really knew since he was bedridden as long as I could remember) was Muslim. My father, who married a Catholic girl, never practiced his religion (and I never got that phrase, the whole ‘practicing’ thing, but okay) until his father died in 1969. I was 5. Being the oldest son, with a young family (my sister was 3 weeks old when Grandpa died, my brother was 3), Dad felt that it was his place to teach us all his heritage.

Prayer 5 times/day, being at the Mosque, no pork products - that was what I remembered. Oh, and Arabic lessons. (No, I don’t remember any of it, unfortunately - one of my greatest regrets.) Apparently though, Mom couldn’t deal with the huge change in her husband. Something happened, I don’t know what exactly, but Dad stopped praying, stopped going to the Mosque. (Bacon, though, was still forbidden in our home. I never knew the joy of a pepperoni pizza or a ham sandwich.)

Flash forward 17 years. I had gone away to school, met Practice Husband and was engaged. I was working as a bank teller, living at home (again, because my student loan money got cut…thank you Ronald Reagan) and going to school locally. My mother called me at work to tell me that Dad had been hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer. I believe that this brush with mortality (My Dad, the cop? It took an ulcer to make him realize his mortality. That’s the kind of guy he is.) made him start thinking about God again. And ensuring his place in the afterlife.

I was married not long after (not arranged - I met Practice at school) and moved out of state. My brother and sister still lived at home. Ski was 16. They listened to Dad; were influenced greatly by him and his actions, and became Muslim.

At this point, I have to take a break and tell you all - my father is one of the most tolerant people I know. All of the good things about religion are embodied in Dad. He’s never tried to pressure me to become Muslim; he’s still the same hilariously funny guy that I grew up with. My mother, as well, has embraced the basic tenets of Islam. They are tied together irrevocably, have been married 45 years, and I can’t imagine what will happen when “till death do they part” comes. They love each other, their children and their spouses, and their grandchildren with an amazing boundless love and generosity. (So, criticize Islam all you want, but criticize my family and I will not be the sweet Hotfessional that you know and love.)

Anyway - my brother married a girl that he went to High School with. She converted to Islam because it was important to him and they had a beautiful daughter together.

My sister graduated from High School and started college locally. My father met a guy from Brazil at the mosque. He was about my age (5 or 6 years older than my sister) and was interested in meeting a “nice Muslim girl.” My parents spoke at length with the guy; spoke to the people in the community that knew him. They liked him and introduced him to my sister. They never dated. They were never together without a chaperone (that I knew.)

I came home from West-by-gawd-Virginia and met him. We went to an antique auction. MomandDad, me, and my sister’s “fiance”. My parents asked my opinion. They asked my brother’s opinion. They asked my great-grandmother’s opinion. He was a nice guy. He was ambitious. He wanted to make something of himself. We all approved.

And so they got married.

If you ask my parents, they’ll say the marriage wasn’t “arranged” in the traditional sense of the word. I guess I can understand that. Let’s call it “managed” then, eh?

Ski and her husband had the first grandchild in the family. A beautiful boy. When her son was two years old, my divorce from Practice was final. I had met and moved in with Mr. Hot. She left the Brazilian not long after. She moved back in with my parents; she brought her son with her. It didn’t work out - to this day, I don’t know all of the details why. I gather that he was a hot-blooded Latin who was very demanding and misogynistic. That’s as much as she will say.

She moved south in a fit of rebelliousness a couple of years later. I had actually moved back north, with Mr. Hot and Shortman in tow, when it happened. She found a Muslim community, had a ton of friends and met the man that she’s married to now. They have four children together, and have sole custody of her son. (Her ex- got deported. His green card ran out.) They lived for a while in Michigan, and recently moved back south.

The second marriage, while not arranged managed by my parents, was also arranged managed - by friends. She found someone who is much more like her temperamentally, and they have a true partnership.

Do I believe her first marriage was a mistake?

I believe she was too young for the kind of marriage that she had. She was 18 years old. She had never lived out on her own, she’d never dated in High School. But, she wanted to be married and she wanted to have a big family. It was, as they say, a recipe for disaster regardless of circumstances.

When she ran away and got to live a little, to think and make decisions on her own, she found the right guy. The one that makes her happy.

My brother and his wife got divorced. (Three children, three divorces. We all tell my parents that they made marriage look much too easy - none of us were prepared, the first time, for how much freakin’ work was involved.) Brother Dear is now remarried to a girl (our third cousin, no less), that he met through relatives “setting them up.” They have two children together. His daughter from his first marriage lives with her mother; her son, from her first marriage, lives with them.

We truly are a mish-mash of children, step-children, ex-spouses, in-laws, out-laws, and “who the heck are you and how are you related to me”? We’re spread across the country now, and the cousins (our children, my parent’s grandchildren) don’t get together nearly often enough, but oh mah holy hell people. When they do? Watch out.

We had a family portrait taken about four years ago - all of us. MomandDad, us three kids, our spouses, and 10 grandchildren. The picture is hanging on our living room wall. Shortman had some friends over for his birthday. One boy stopped by the picture - stared at it for a while, and looked over at Shortman. His next words had me and Mr. Hot in stitches. “You’re right Shortman. You don’t look a thing like ANY of your cousins.”

—- All we could think was, “Is this really the sort of topic that 8th grade boys discuss during lunchtime?” —-

Made it. Aided by high winds, we landed 20 minutes early. Which means O’Horror had no gate for us. (Yes, I know, I wouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t bitch about something!) So, I ended up getting off the plane pretty much at the time we were supposed to land. Which means I have very little to write about today, except that I’ve been going from meeting to meeting pretty much non-stop.

Off to have Italian in about 30 minutes, so I can’t write much anyway - but so many of you are interested in the whole arranged marriage thing, I’m going to work on that post tonight. If it’s at all readable after multiple glasses of Merlot and an order of cavatelli, I’ll post it for tomorrow.

In the meantime, as I anticipate tomorrow’s adventure to have fondue with one of my favorite bloggers, go check out an 80’s reference here.  Because, even though I was only a teenager for 2 years in the 80’s, it was “my decade.”

—- I remember the first time I heard that song. I almost fell off of my bar stool —-

This morning, I got up at 7:30 (unheard of on a non-work day) so I could make my 9 o’clock appointment to get my roots slathered with enough dye to hide the skunk-stripe of gray that appeared last week touched up.

Then Mr. Hot and I returned the 25-lb plates that he bought on Saturday. Did you know that weight-lifting plates, contrary to what I thought, do not have “standard size” holes in the middle? Well, they don’t. Apparently, the bar that you put them on are not a standard size. Can you tell that we don’t buy more weight very often?

The funny thing was that when we got them home Saturday and discovered this, he brought them back up to the living room and put them on top of the cedar chest - so we could return them today. Then he went back downstairs and “did his arms.” He was laughing about how he couldn’t lift his arms in the shower to wash his hair.

A little later on, we were cleaning the living room and he went to move the cedar chest to plug the vacuum into the outlet behind it. Someone (okay, it was me) had put a blanket on top of the (50 lbs of) weight plates that he’d put on the cedar chest.

The look on his face when he tried to move that thing was priceless. He yelped, “I can’t even lift this damn thing!” Then it dawned on him. He moved the blanket and threw it at me, but missed; I was on the floor laughing so hard I nearly peed my pants.

Annnnywaaaaaay. After we returned the plates, we took Poopy the Puppy for a nice walk, came home, had lunch, did our workouts, read blogs and books, made dinner and ate. Then I printed my boarding pass and packed (yes, Virginia, I DO get to go back to Chicago tomorrow….sigh), and now it’s 7:30 pm. I finally get to sit down and write.

And other than that funny story from Saturday? Not much going on…it’s going to be an early night tonight. Four a.m. comes early.

I did find this picture, however. It’s the day we brought Poopy the Puppy home. May 3, 2003 - he was 15 weeks old. He’s a chocolate lab/daschund mix - all of the intelligence of a lab with the nose (and voice) of a hound.

Sleeping on Mom’s lap - like the little 8 pound baby he was.

This is a picture taken this past November:

Problem is, he still thinks he’s small enough to sleep on my lap. Especially when one of the cats decide that they want that lap.

—- Fifty days into Blog365. Oh mah holy hell, only 315 to go! —-

I have a lake in my backyard. Now, before you get all jealous and shit, it’s because the 8 inches of snow that we got last week is melting. It’s 44 degrees outside and raining. I’m waiting to look out the back window and see some geese and ducks landing.

Of course, tomorrow morning, their tail-feathered butts may be frozen into an ice cube, because it’s supposed to be 5.

Today is my little sister’s birthday. She was born while I was in kindergarten. February 17, 1969. I was thrilled to have a sister. She would sleep in my bedroom; I’d read her stories. We’d do each other’s hair. Share clothes (she ended up being 5′3″; I’m 5′9″ - it never really worked…). Become a team against that THING in the other room - our brother. He was such a creep.

But first, a couple of things about her. She was born in February. Freakin’ cold February. (She never suffered the indignity of being thrown into the algae filled pond on her birthday like my brother and I did. She would have simply bounced off the ice).

She was born with a tooth. Seriously. The girl came out of mom with a bottom tooth. That tooth was always smaller and kinda brownish…but it was a real tooth. (The tooth fairy took it, so it had to be, right?)

She had the darkest brown hair and the darkest brown eyes and olive skin. She also had a streak of pure blonde hair down the back of her head. Newborn full-head-o-hair, like Frema’s little girl - with a blonde streak. She always lamented that it was on the back of her head (once she figured out that women pay big bucks to have their hair streaked) instead of in the front.

She came home from the hospital in a snowsuit that had a hood trimmed in fur. With her olive skin, brown eyes and hair, she looked like a little Eskimo baby. Dad immediately started calling her Skimo. Then Ski.

To this day, she’s Ski. She always will be.

When she could pull herself up in her crib, she chewed on it. Gnawed the headboard like she was a damned beaver. Woke me up every night. I’d tell her to go to sleep. She’d gnaw louder. I’d cry for my mother to “Come get her out of here. I want to sleep.”

Then she started having seizures. No one knew what it was. She would stare off into space, pursing her lips like a fish. No thrashing, no fear that she would ’swallow her tongue’. Just staring. And those fish lips. Nights in the hospital to see if the doctors could figure out what was happening meant that I got to sleep through the night without feeling like a tree would fall on me.

I was scared to death that I had killed her - that she was sick because I bitched about the noise she made.

Apparently, in addition to being born with a tooth and a blonde streak in her hair, she had been born with some sort of scar tissue on her brain. Years on phenobarbital and normal brain growth cured the seizures.

We went to North Carolina one year for a family vacation. It took us two days to get there, but we got to see Top Sail Island - where MomandDad lived when they were first married. It was a wonderful day at the beach. We’d never seen the ocean before. It was the first time we’d taken a vacation, ever. We talked about it for weeks and weeks before. Ski and I had matching bikinis; we built sand castles and collected shells.

That night - the first night we were there - someone shook me awake. It was my mom. “We’ve got to get home. Your sister is sick.” She had a huge tumor that came up overnight behind her ear. We drove 14 hours straight through the night and she was back in the hospital. Doctors removed the tumor, and she was fine.

Ski grew up, had an arranged marriage, (yes…that’s what I mean. My parents picked her husband) and gave birth to the first grandchild. She now has 5 children. The oldest is 18. The youngest is 4. Four boys, one girl. She’s a terrific mother; has had her share of nights in the emergency room with kid’s with breathing problems and allergic reactions and puke-fests galore. She claims it’s payback for everything she put my parents through.

I claim that it’s because she’s the one who is strong enough to deal with it.

—- Happy Birthday Ski. I love you, little sister. —-

Ski and #4 - the third son.