Saturday, August 13, 2011

a nice day......


although the weather was perfect, beautiful sunshiny----- and the birds were chirping and swooning wildly outside, i decided to stay in bed.   
(it occurs to me that i may be tired from  getting physical  with"su".  but that's another story.  you have to scroll down for that).
oh my bed felt so comfortable....
but it was hard to relax. 
i had the" mommy tape recorder" going on and on in my head.  it has my mother's voice from way back when, complete with her deep southern twang.    way back when she had to raise "us two yungin's" (my brother and me).  we never understood why she had to make a full time job out of it.  we yungins were out of sight most of the time.  we hung out up the hill or in a tree.  we really tried to "stay out from underfoot".

my mom was a fairly opinionated person.  sometimes the words on the mental tape got aggressive and degrading. 
if my mother were still alive today she would have called me  "a no account".
a "no account and good for nuthin'".  she had no time for laziness, she said.  and if there is one thing she couldn't tolerate--it was "shiftlessness".
my mom did not believe in standing still.  standing still meant one thing.  lazy.

 so growing up, i was one busy girl.  i swam everyday for 2 hours - and took sewing, etiquette  and modeling classes.   I took dance and acrobats, and a bit of ballet.  

i also took a typing class during 2 summer breaks in junior high years. 
my mom insisted i take this class so that one day i'll be "useful".  

i was 12.  the last thing i wanted to think about was a job as a stenotypist.  i hated the idea of  wearing tight skirts, nylons and high heels and i didn't want to sit on my boss's lap or get coffee.  i learned how stenotypist's acted because we had an illustrated book in our bathroom called "poems for the john".  it showed sexy women sitting  pert on their boss' desk pretending to be writing on a pad.  the boss always had a slobber dog's expression.  the secretary had perfectly coifed  hair, (that she needed to fluff up once of twice by looking in her hand mirror)  lipstick, nail polish, tight skirt and showy top.  blech, blech.
it would have made more sense to me to first take lessons in primping and lipstick blotting.
  
the summer typing class.
now that was a hard class.  my teacher covered each key on the type-o-writer with masking tape.  
then we were timed to write "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
there's that word lazy again.  
 it was not easy pressing down on the mechanical typewriter keys.  i think it would have been better to  stand up and throw our bodies into it; bear our weight onto the keys.  my teacher didn't like the idea.  he said that we should use dainty motions with our fingers and show no pain on our faces.  humpf.

i carried this image of a secretary/stenographer being sexy and sitting on her bosses desk for a long time.   much longer than necessary.
when i married my attorney husband, i became his secretary.   none of those things applied.  didn't seem to matter what my hair looked like (within reason) and i could wear sports shoes. 
when i sat on his desk i didn't have to cross my legs or fluff my hair.  in fact, he would just work around me asking to please move my bottom out of the way so he could catch his incoming calls.

maybe i needed to puff up my hair.

so what about my lying in bed all day.  well, it didn't really happen.
turned out i could only stay in bed for an extra hour.   
it's because i could no longer stand my mother's voice inside my head asking,  "who do you think you are? some kind of princess?  get up from there you lazy thing".  
i thought i was - lying in bed all day.  a princess - and so what?
" how do you think things got done around here. no one on god's green earth has the privilege of lying in a bed all day long.   that is just sheeeeer laziness.  pure and simple." 

there may have been  a quote from scripture  thrown in to emphasis god's intent-- because 12year old girls needed to get up out of bed and become prepared for work using the type-o-writer.  and be useful to someone some day.
i know, i know.

i have responsibilities afterall.
so here i am.
at my computer.
i am NOT a lazy hound.  see mom.







4 comments:

Ali said...

As I lay in bed (at 10:30 in the morning) here in Italy and read this I think oh my how 'lazy' I am! We have made a conscious decision to be 'lazy' today as we have been so much on the go for the past few months....we all need time to slow down.
It's strange the image of stenographers we have as twelve year olds. Mine was the girl in the typing pool.....bored silly, knowing she had more to give the world but held back because nobody would recognise her. I refused to learn to type when I went to school because I was NEVER going to be that! I love the way life has of bursting the 12 year old bubble, your ideas of the sexy secretary and now I can basically touch type having taught myself when I went through uni and needed to prepare assignments on the computer!

Lisa Bebi said...

yes a go bit of slowing down should be in order for everyone. including us. that's a funny story regarding your take on stenographers too.
i think yours is more accurate than mine-------mine was learned from a joke book; a gag gift to my dad, with illustrations that i looked at from 4 years on. when i was finally able to read i found the jokes weren't funny anyway....

minnie said...

omg, do i remember the days back in highschool, having to take shorthand, because i could be a secretary my mother told me....so i had the worst typing teacher on the planet, "a man" he was mean, then had to take typing from him. it turned out later i had many jobs tht required typing...and became grateful that i go at least that skill....of course i never became a secretary, more a rebel not to be anything like it. what i really relate to is the tapecorder mother in the background saying, you mean your still in bed, dont you have stuff to do, i am always doing, and when i am not i am also playing the guilt tape.....i am trying to shut it off, but it is so hard...

Elizabeth Johnson said...

I think you should go back to bed. A little laziness every now and then is probably good for the creative soul.

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