Snippets from the past
August 8, 2018
I always have about 200 drafts saved here, dating as far back as 2006, and hit an all time high at 237 drafts last week. I realized that I never go back more than ten posts to pick up the thread and finish up a half written snippet so I’m resolved to spend ten minutes a day, or 50 minutes at once, deleting them.
They’re a bit of a time capsule, though, so I saved a few bits.
Sipping the workaholism martini
“You’re like a 1950s American dad. All you do is work to take care of your family; all you worry about is how to support them.”
No fewer than three people who don’t know each other, who may or may not know I blog about money a lot, who only know me from various points in my life have said the above to me over the past couple of years. Passing judgment, perhaps? Maybe. But that doesn’t make it untrue, either.
In any case, I don’t really take it that way. All I know is that it’s not nearly as fun as it sounds, what with the current love for all things Mad Men. It just seems like life should be a lot more glamorous if that were the case. I kid, I kid. Life would not be better if I were making oodles, smoking cigars and drinking real martinis at the three-martini lunch. (…..)
It’s perhaps a little less resonant now that I’m a few hundred miles away but clearly, my focus is on my parents, maintaining their health and securing their future, more often than not.
2018: I’ve learned my lesson, I’m living life.
I’m not that excited by strippers
The glitz, the glitter, the glamour. The… meh.
Anecdotally, strip bars have figured in 90% of the bachelor parties that PiC has attended.
They have been 0% at the bachelorette parties I have attended, though approximately half have been of a feisty nature. At least 2 of my now married, closest girlfriends, if not more, have immediately mentally gone to Vegas if you know what I mean in their plans for my prospective pre-marital celebrations. Oddly, I’ve never particularly had an opinion about the matter, living though I did off a major highway garishly populated by the Tropical Lei, the mysteriously named Toy Box (no, dear, that’s not for kids), and a few other less high profile strip bars.
So now I’m thinking about it and strippers and strip clubs are just not all that exciting. Dude or chick alike, I can’t stop thinking, no offense, but ew, sweaty. Sweaty is gross. Yeah, that’s what I’m all concerned about here, folks, perspiration and the likelihood it’ll splash. YUCK.
2018: Bless them but I’m still grossed out by the idea of being around sweaty strippers. Though my life is such that it’s no longer a question – we’re all in our 30s and 40s and no one is having those kinds of pre-wedding send-offs that I know of.
Dressers remind me of being poor
When I was two and a half drawers tall, my clothes were rolled in the second from the bottom left and right hand dresser drawers of an 8-drawer set. The bottom left hand drawer was reserved for hiding the scary dolls that had been given to me because I was a girl. Never mind the fact that I only liked animals and real live babies, not fake babies with eyes that only blinked if you upended the unnatural creatures, I kept getting hand me down dolls so I buried them.
I can’t actually remember being tall enough to know what went in the top drawers. They must have belonged to my errant sibling before he erred. The closet was jammed full of “just in case” things because we couldn’t afford to buy things twice. So anything we ever used went into the closet.
To this day, having a dresser reminds me of not having the money, of not having open empty spaces, of not having the luxury of minimalism, of living crammed side by side like little birds.
2018: Much of that has worn off. We have a dresser AND a closet and I regard both as luxuries.
He just likes the flavor
We have a joke in our home that PiC’s not addicted to coffee, he just likes the taste!
Readers, he’s addicted.
2018: He’s addicted.
How long Anon?
I’m an anonymous blogger. As online identities, we’re all anonymous to some degree, in the main, but as an anonymous blogger, there’s this requirement that I have to keep my blogging self separate from my Real Life self or start to censor myself. So my identity as Revanche is informed by my Real Life persona
Does it make a difference to our readers?
And does it give anyone else a headache?
I remember reading Penelope Trunk’s explanation of why she became her name, and wondered if my blogging life would someday subsume my own. Her reasoning for the first name change didn’t really resonate with me, but the later one, the pen name given to her by Time Warner and the developments therein, did:
Then I started becoming friends with people I interviewed. And I could never decide when to tell people that my real name is Adrienne. If I told people too late in the friendship they would get insulted. So I started telling people earlier, and then I couldn’t remember who knew what name. And then I found myself signing my Penelope emails as Adrienne.
I’m pretty much at that point. And I’m struck with this realization that even though it’s not a branding thing for me, Revanche = Real Me + all the financial background, friends, and conversations I’ve developed through the blog that enrich my life. And I like that part of me just as well as any other part of Real Me, so it gets more and more confusing in everyday life when I reference something related to Revanche’s world that isn’t connected with Real Me’s world.
There are a few people I’ve met IRL through this blog whom I’ve become quite good friends with, and I can tell you that it looks more than a little suspicious when I pause for half a beat between one breath to the next searching for a viable name.
2018: Still anonymous. Some friends just call me Revanche offline anyway because it’s too confusing.
I’m in love …
with this chair. Oh, and the man who bought it for me.
As usual, the reasoning was: you need to take care of yourself, you need a good office chair, and this is one of the things you wouldn’t spend real money on, so I did.
Ahhh. Even after so many years, PiC still knows that despite my grumping about not having a proper desk and organizational office area, I also won’t spend real money on needed things because it costs “too much.” Actually, strike those quotation marks. It is too much. But he’s spoiled, working for a real sized company that has real ergonomic professionals who pay Not Monopoly Money for fantastic chairs that have all kinds of doohickeys and adjusta-bars. I don’t even know what all those options are.
2018: Still me. Still him.
This is a great idea! We have a bunch of 2010 posts that should get this treatment. (It’s kind of crazy how #2 and I have both mellowed out in the past decade, and also how mommy drama is such a thing of the past, probably because I no longer interact with people who cause it. So there’s half-started rants that just aren’t getting finished.) Also love the 2018 updates. 🙂
Thanks! 🙂 I’m glad I didn’t delete all of them outright.
Tropical Lei and Toy Box– did you live in/near Upland/Claremont in So. Cal.? Or all “adult” establishments just generally really bad at coming up with original names?
LOL I should not be surprised there were more than one or two similarly named establishments!
I go in and cull my pending drafts every few months, so the total number of pending drafts usually maxes out around 30 to 40 for me. I’ve only been blogging since late 2014 in this iteration of my blogging life, so I don’t have quite as much of a fun time capsule effect from looking back at my old drafts.
I suppose one of the most memorable things I let linger so long that it became too untimely to post is, er, something that was inspired by James Damore’s bit of stupidity at Google last summer. Now there’s a name that should be left to fade into obscurity and ignored by all good people… Sadly, I think the situation I was angry about back then (how there are way too many people everywhere happy to openly defend him and people like him, and say they make “good points” – as if they’re actually making arguments in good faith) looks far worse now than it did back then. So many things happen these days in that vein that make me angry, enough that I may need to stop looking at anything on Twitter because it leads me down the rabbit hole to those stories. (All my rage for the people defending Bari Weiss for her tweet about Mirai Nagasu, for an older example. My position on that particular issue seems to have no real support in any mainstream source, which shocks me.)
I’ve always wondered vaguely how people approach making friends and possibly meeting IRL with people they first encountered through anonymous blogging! I’ve corresponded by email with a few people through the blog, but never met anyone IRL. (If I was considering meeting with and speaking with someone IRL, I had thought I might just disclose my real name then, but who knows… I’ll deal with it when it comes up!)
I think your way is infinitely better. My way takes way too much time.
You’re right, the Damore related sexism has only gotten worse since then :/
I didn’t meet people offline for many years, and not that many of them, either. Only the ones who I had grown to know very well via regular correspondence. There are some I’ve corresponded with closely for many years who I still haven’t met! It’s always a delicate dance to try and set up a meet, too. It has to be very clear to both parties, IMO, that you both would get along and could be intimately trusted and even then sometimes it doesn’t go right.
I’ve only met Wandering Scientist from our regulars, mainly because she travels a lot so I contacted her once when I knew she was going to be heading near my town.
I did meet one of our readers who rarely/never comments at a conference once– it turned out she’d sent an Ask the Grumpies in! I was like, wow, this story sounds really familiar, have you seen this blog it seems really relevant. And she was like, that was me and I took that advice (And she did! And it all worked out!).
We had a famous woman in my field commenting from time to time, but I have never met her, and she no longer pops up in comments 🙁 .