I have a friend who is going through a particularly nasty divorce.  So far, it has all the trappings of a Lifetime Movie starring Tracey Gold and Dean Cain, including the ex-spouse leading a “double-life”, the “bitter custody battle”, and the trespassed-upon woman who finally “finds her strength”.  I just hope it ends without the “attempted kidnapping and daring rescue” of the child, because her life is not a movie. It is serious stuff, and when serious stuff happens in Real Life, you don’t always get that clean, yet bittersweet ending.  Real Life is so much messier and, sometimes even more ludicrous than a Lifetime Movie. It’s like the Real Life script-writers aren’t even trying to entertain us! I do take solace in the fact that Real Life script-writers tend mostly to shy away from the overtly clichéd dramatic stuff, so plot twists, like kidnapping, are relatively rare. But sublimely happy endings are rare, too, and that, I think, is what makes a Lifetime Movie so much better than the crap Real Life comes up with. It’s just more hopeful and clear cut. Good girls win, bad guys lose – A nice, feminist fantasy which, if those Real Life writers penned it, I would vociferously rail against, but that’s another blog.  Lifetime can get away with anything, though.

So, Andy Rooney died this weekend, and because he was a fairly famous guy, I read a few articles out there about him. In one of them, he is quoted as admitting that he was also a fairly vindictive guy. Apparently, he was one who actually did sweat the small stuff.  He said, “Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It’s a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened.”  Omigod, isn’t it, though?! In the short run, vengeance does smell like justice being served on a hot platter. It even looks tender and juicy and delectable.  But, despite what you may have been told, here’s really why they came up with that whole saying about it best being served cold: In the long run, vengeance doesn’t taste anything at all like justice. It doesn’t even call for the same ingredients. Because, if justice is a juicy grass-fed steak that took months and months to age, and was grilled slowly to perfection; well then, vengeance is just a genetically-modified, microwaved soy-justice burger slapped between two slices of Wonder Bread. The quality is lower, you never really feel you’ve gotten enough, and the unseen side effects to those who consume it are toxic and cumulative.

It has been said about me by many who know me well, and some who don’t, that I am quite immature for my age…no matter what my age at any given time. Hell, I readily admit I am a 16-year-old trapped in a 46-year-old (and getting older by the minute) body. So it will come as no surprise to anyone that I have often punctuated an argument, justified my actions, or qualified my opinion with the simple phrase: You started it. At least I am woman enough to admit it and say it out loud, because come on and tell me you haven’t thought it! Then try to think of one disagreement, one fist fight, one gangland slaying, one political skirmish, or one war (even the Cold one), that could not be boiled down to each side, at their core, seeking vengeance against the other side because….

They started it.

I am certainly not some tree-hugging, peace-at–any-cost hippie. I understand that you have to stand up for yourself; that you, more often than not, have to fight for your rights; and that you may find yourself in a situation that has escalated before you know it, and you have no other way to extricate yourself from it but to keep fighting the good fight. My friend’s divorce did not turn ugly on a dime one day. It escalated incrementally from a healthy place of wanting to just be out of a bad situation that was making her unhappy, to a place of digging in and not giving into his ever more outlandish demands. I get this, and I’m not judging her for it. Her ex DID start it!

I have been reading a lot about Native American culture this past month, and no one has a better claim to the “They Started It” defense than those people do. I mean, talk about just sitting around minding your own business. I don’t consider myself any kind of an expert in Native American history by any stretch, but I do know that many of the tribes gave as good as they got…or better. They could be ruthless, and perhaps that ruthlessness upped the ante, giving the white settlers a fresh, “Ok, we did that thing over there, but hey, they started THIS THING HERE!” mentality. But what is a Native American whose home and very way of life is being taken from him to do? When it comes to vengeance, I’m not sure there is such a thing as “overkill” when it finally dawns on you that there will be no justice for you and yours; and that you, and everyone who looks like you, are systematically being wiped off the face of the Turtle Shell. In the end though, ruthless or not, the Native Americans never had a chance. Every tribe’s days were numbered, really, from the minute Columbus set sail. While that seems clear to us now, and maybe it was even clear to the white settlers then, it certainly was not readily apparent to most of the tribes in the early days of this nation’s history. So, they fought back. Because those white guys started it.  None of us knows what would have happened if they had not fought back so hard. Maybe more would be around today to pass down a different tale of subjugation and the wiping out of merely their culture. Or, maybe none would be around at all. Let’s ask all six of the Jews left living in Krakow today how not fighting back worked out.

All I know is, this notion of vengeance surely must be deeply-rooted in all of us. We all walk around knowing on some level that our actions are justified simply because the other guy started it. I myself have gone through a divorce that, at the time, I thought was the very definition of the word “amicable”. There was no battle for custody. There was no battle at all. Two reasonable people with no axes to grind on either side simply dissolved their union and went their separate ways, coming together to co-parent when the need arose. Doesn’t that sound lovely? It almost makes divorce sound desirable. But I have a penchant for idealism that can be irksome at times to those living in the real world. Like I really think I AM living in a Lifetime movie. So, that was probably just how I saw it. For sure, I did not see myself as the winner and my ex as the loser. If anything, I actually saw us both as losers. We lost a family unit, we lost a history, we maybe even lost a bit of ourselves. But I deluded myself into thinking we’d retained a friendship, and I was just conceited enough to feel proud of my part in that (and to believe that Yasmine Bleeth will play me in the Lifetime movie of the whole incident). Look how mature I am! Look at what a reasonable adult I am! I had no idea that deep down, my ex was still harboring some serious bitterness, and had a running tally in his head of things that “I started”, some going all the way back to when we dated. It never occurred to me that there really was a war going on underneath the calm exterior of our “friendship”. Like an ignorant (and arrogant) white settler, I just took over territory I believed was mine by right of my own personal “manifest destiny”. And like Quannah Parker, my ex went quietly into the hills and patiently waited for the opportune moment to make his last stand against me. The details are still in dispute, but I believe he won and it is my turn to retaliate.  I have pulled the arrow out of my shoulder, and I guess I should go back for his scalp, but I think I can see the writing on the wall now. Let him go. No one is going to win this thing anyway. I guess I took something he thought was his, so he took something I thought was mine.  I’m sure he sees this in a completely different light, but I guarantee you this: He thinks I started it, and I think he started it. He believes he lost, I believe I lost. The only thing we would agree on is that we are not even. But we are done, and I can choose to not retaliate further. How’s that for maturity? Or maybe this blog is my retaliation, and I’m just as immature as I ever was.  In the movie, a little tear runs down Yasmine’s cheek as the credits roll.

So yeah, payback is a bitch, but it turns out, one that is endlessly chasing it’s own tail. It always looks pretty badass when you come upon it, and it serves the intended purpose…at first. Divorces are finally granted, wounds are finally treated, land is finally divided, peace is finally made. But most of the time, that is usually where Justice finally walked in, trained the people and rehabilitated the Vengeance Bitch. Until the damn thing got out of the cage again and reminded someone, or more likely, stirred the rancor of someone who never forgot in the first place, and spurred them on to remind the rest of us, of what they lost the last time around. And it winds up again, like it never ended the quest for its own tail in the first place.  Believe me, when history books are written in the next millennium, WWI and WWII will just be one big WW with a 15-minute smoke-break in the middle. The pain of being wronged can go back years, even passed down to future generations through the centuries. Hell, it can go back millennia for some, and exacting revenge is the easiest and broadest answer to those pressing life problems, big and small. Let’s be real: Someone, somewhere at some time is always starting up some shit. Sometimes it’s you, sometimes it’s me. But does someone always have to feel the need to get even? Umm, yeah, someone always does. Sometimes it’s you, sometimes it’s me. We turn a blind eye to the self-perpetuating nature of vengeance, I think because in some respects we are ALL immature kids out on the playground of life, and because Andy Rooney is right, retaliation just feels better than being threatened. So, there you have it: It’s justifiable, it’s gratifying, and sometimes it really IS the other guy who started it.

So, until the Real Life script-writers come up with a plot twist that renders payback a toothless bitch, I’m just going to watch me a little old-school Meredith Baxter on Lifetime, where all the bad guys go to jail or die horrible, yet bloodless deaths, and all the good women get full custody of their adorable sons, and marry the handsome and brave detective that rescued them.

I have a friend whose absolute favorite holiday is Halloween. She loves it, and it has nothing to do with the annual abundance of candy corn, which for me would be the only reason to love it at all. I am not a big Halloween fan for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that it promotes wholesale, door-to-door begging on the part of neighborhood children. Sure, I did it as a child. Trick-or-Treating is a 20^th Century entitlement that is now ingrained in our culture…much like Social Security. So of course, I dressed up, went out with my friends and didn’t just willingly take candy from strangers, but actually ASKED for it! I gladly participated in this thing that, had I done it alone on any of the other 364 nights of the year, would have branded me an idiot-child. But on this night, I happily brought home a sack full of candy that my mother, even in the relative innocence of the ‘70s, had to judiciously examine for semi-opened wrappers and pin holes and God knows what else. All she asked for in return for saving my life (yet again) were a few measly candy bars — Good ones, though, like the Milky Ways and Three Musketeers, because fair is fair, and in addition to saving my life year after year, she also spent a lot of time on my costumes.

It is those costumes that my friend is all about on this strangest of “holidays” (and I use the term loosely, because my definition of “holiday” is simply this: A day I don’t have to go to work. But not even Federal employees get Halloween off and they only work like 100 days out of the year, so that makes Halloween suspect as a true holiday). She buys at least two costumes a year, both of them slutty because, she contends, this is the one time of year that an otherwise wholesome gal can let her inner-skank run amok  in public without retribution. Now, I live in America, so I simply can’t believe there is a generation of women under 50 who still believes you only get that ONE day to really tart it up. Based on the things I’ve seen some women parading around in at the mall on any given Saturday, I’d say any day could be Halloween. And that’s another blog…

Anyway, I tend to be of two minds about dressing up in costume.  When my daughter was little, I found it an absolute joy to dress her up all cute and send her prancing off through the neighborhood begging for candy.  I won’t lie about that.  It was all about showing off how adorable she was (the Milky Ways and Three Musketeers were just a bonus). Kids in costume are one thing. Adults in costume sort of make me cock my head to the side like a perplexed schnauzer.  Because, really?  I think any adult should seriously question themselves before they don a set of vampire teeth, zip themselves into a ready-made Disney Dalmatian costume, paint fake blood on their face or strap any sort of tail to their ass. I’m not saying you should not do it, but I think one should stop and ponder why you feel a need to do this. Forgive me, Socrates, but an unexamined zombie-crawl is not worth being un-dead.

As the year winds down and the holiday season starts up, it is no secret that the present economy sucks, bites and blows like a porn star. No one reading this needs me to list all of the evidence out there; I think we’re all living it in one way or another. But, miraculously enough, according to the New York Times, the economy actually grew by 2.5% in the last quarter.  And there was great rejoicing (yay). On the other hand, the very next day the New York Times reported that Americans’ rate of savings decreased for the third month in a row in September.  I’m not saying correlation equals causation here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say, I think I see a connection. Personally, I did not save a penny this summer because I simply bought a lot of clothes.   I lost a good deal of weight, so this is mostly justified. But quite honestly, and I’d almost rather break my fingers than type this admission:  This behavior is not unheard of for me. I admit it; cash is like kryptonite to me. Must…get it…away from…me…now!  But, believe me, if there ever was a time, THIS is the time to work on being a mature adult and start applying the concept of delayed gratification. So, among all of the other things I work on to enhance my personal growth (and there is boatload of stuff, because I basically have the maturity level of a Sophomore…in high school…which means you can call me “sophomoric” and I can only nod my head in shameful agreement), I am really working on curtailing my spending and using better judgment. For example:  All of those clothes purchased this summer were very practical articles purchased at discounted prices. Hey, Judgey McJudgerson, you don’t know! This was a big step for me! I have been much, much more frivolous in the past, possibly to the point of utter stupidity.  I’ve really grown! Don’t believe me? Back in 2009, I actually paid the non-discounted price of $450 for …wait for it…

A costume.

I know. Let’s just move on, shall we….

So, we all know there are two kinds of people in the world:  Those who love Halloween and those who love Christmas. I love Christmas, and not because it lacks the creepiness and monsters of Halloween, because on the whole, Christmas is a lot more frightening than Halloween and the scars are not fake.  But where Christmas is typically a prolonged nightmare of overblown expectations that can never be met resulting in massive credit card debt and hurt feelings, Halloween is a just one day of being startled over and over again by different people  covered in varying amounts of fake blood, wielding different fake weapons. It’s just plain fun, but my heart can’t take it. While deeply terrifying for sure, I know what’s coming with Christmas, and it usually isn’t gory or bloody.  I like that better.  I also score better candy; the kind that comes in big boxes that are easy to visually inspect for signs of tampering and say “See’s” on them.

But this friend, that I happen to work with, is a Halloweenie (like a Trekkie, because let’s face it anyone who really loves to dress up in costume, no matter how sleazy, is still walking more toward the “nerd” side of the street). She loves all that spooky, gross-out, make-you -scream-and-almost-soil-yourself-stuff, almost as much as she loves dressing up like a filthy ho-bag.  Everyone is different, but we all have to get along and play nice, so she is gracious enough to decorate the office in Christmas lights and snowflakes to indulge me in my favorite holiday fantasy, and I am gracious enough to wear a costume to work to indulge her on Halloween.  Fair is fair.

But, there are also another two types of people in the world: People like me who spend their money freely, and that other weirdo-type I like to call Scroooges, but the rest of the world calls “Savers”. As the holiday season looms before us like Michael Myers with a fake butcher knife, I say these Scrooges need to crack open their piggy bank and get the economy rolling again. Clearly, if you read them right,  the New York Times’ articles back me up on this. I mean, obviously, I can’t afford another costume, which is why I will once again be lacing myself into a tight corset and heading out the door for work on Monday as a naughty Renaissance maiden. So yes, I get the basic concept that we all need to grow up and stop spending money on things we don’t need, but it seems obvious to me that too much of this “maturity” is killing the economy. Maybe it’s just another “holiday” fantasy, but there has to be someone out there with their cash all hoarded up who is not sharing with the rest of us. I’m by no means asking for a hand out, I’m just saying someone, besides me and my favorite slutty zombie/pirate/Raggedy Anne/witch/Robin Hood/fairy, needs to get out there and spend a little of that stockpile on some frivolous crap this holiday season before the rest of us end up sending our kids out to go begging door-to-door for Milky Ways and Three Musketeers, and we max out all of our credit cards just to get through Christmas!

Wait…

I have a friend who believes that the most insulting thing you can call a person is “fat”.  If she is mad enough at you, she will hurl this insult your way, regardless of your BMI. Her reasoning for this is something along the lines that no one is immune to the word “fat”. Everyone innately reacts to it, I guess.  If you are truly a fat person, it hits you right where you live: Underneath all the layers of fat you put on to protect yourself from just this type of pain, ostensibly. If you are NOT fat, it still hits you because we all have an underlying insecurity about the way we look, and apparently we all have a little anorexia going on.  Now, this is her logic, not mine. As a person who falls somewhere between not anywhere near skinny, but not ready to have a heart attack in the next 30 minutes, I think I would just laugh at the person who spat the word “fat” at me in a fit of pique. Is that all you’ve got?  Yeah, I’m fat.  How is this advancing your argument? She and I just see this differently, but if she ever calls me fat, I’ll know I’ve crossed the line with her. It won’t make me feel any fatter than I already am, but it’ll make me stop and take notice, I guess. Now, if she calls me a “liar”, all bets are off, ‘cause them’s fightin’ words.

I don’t know if everyone is like this, but I just have no tolerance for liars. You can’t trust them.  Now before I get too far into this, I want to say I am the first person to adhere to the policy that, when used correctly, the “white lie” will save you a lot of trouble in the long run. But, it should be used ever-so sparingly and only in emergencies. If I am shopping with a friend and she takes the time to step out of the dressing room to specifically ask me, “Do these white pants look good on me?”, I believe she has put a certain amount of trust in my judgment, and I therefore have the responsibility to tell her straight up, “They make your ass look like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man, and your thighs look like two cats fighting in a sack.” This is what friends are for. You never, ever let your friends buy anything that calls unwanted attention to their ass. Cleavage is another matter altogether, but quite frankly I could fill a whole blog with the “Do’s and Don’ts of Drawing the Eye Up”, and perhaps I will one day. The point is, you always, always, always tell the truth in the dressing room….but…if that same friend wears those same white pants to a party, you SAY NOTHING. Well, you say nothing for as long as you can get away with it. If you are asked, and ONLY if you are asked, should you pull out The Emergency White Lie, and say “Those pants are cute”.  The purchase has been made; the tags are off and the pants are on her big, white, marshmallow ass. There’s no returning them. There’s nothing else you can say now that won’t devastate her and cause a huge rift.  I think we can all agree that The White Lie is your only option here.

But I think we can also all agree that for the most part, lying is really heinous. And it doesn’t really matter what the lie was about, or if it “hurt” anyone.  The small lies start to eat away at any type of relationship, and the big ones are just, well, deal-breakers. We’ve all been victims of each, I’m sure.  I had a friend for many, many years, and our friendship survived a lot of stuff, but when that friend told blatant lies about me, I was just done. And maybe this person didn’t see the things that were said as “lies”. Maybe the stories they told just represented their “perspective”. I could almost buy that, but the fact-twisting became so egregious that, what may have started out as “a differing perspective”, simply devolved into “a pack of lies”.  Game over.  Because where do you go from there?  How do you repair that? How do you ever again not take a pause after hearing something that person says, and ask yourself, “Wait, is that right?” And, quite frankly, what kind of a person DOES that and why would I want to associate with them?  Nothing will end my association with anyone, in any capacity, more quickly than a lie. Especially, if it is a lie about me, you unscrupulous a-hole.

Am I more militant than everyone else, I wonder? Do other people put up with lies as just the de rigueur of most of life’s relationships? What’s the big deal, Traci? Like you’ve never lied?  Of course I’ve lied. Ask the girl whose white pants are now at the Goodwill because her husband told her he felt a sudden urge to grab a harpoon whenever she wore them.  Even the White Lie is not a victimless crime.  But, it turns out you can’t ask her, because I just made the whole story up. See how you don’t trust me now?  Honestly, I will say my lies have been few and far between, and were always told in some sort of wide-eyed panic and were never without consequences. Even if those consequences were just my own guilt eating away at me until I made good and told everyone involved the truth, there were always consequences.  Lies are corrosive that way. They don’t just eat away at relationships, they eat away at the liar…or, at least they should. They certainly eat away at the liar’s credibility. You are still wondering what else I’ve lied about here, aren’t you? And, not that telling a “panic lie” makes it ok, but somehow a planned and carefully thought-out lie just takes it, and the liar, to a whole new level, and makes it harder to forgive such a deed. They totally meant to screw you over. Now, that’s just mean. Unless they did it strictly for a laugh and they tell you about it right after. Then that’s just good comedy. But there is something about habitually conniving people who, when given the choice, find it easier and more lucrative to lie than to tell the truth that makes me want to take a steaming hot shower after encountering them.

I am not normally a big believer in conspiracy theories. I believe in the lone gunman, I don’t believe 9-11 was an inside job, and I believe OJ murdered his wife and Ron Goldman. I also used to believe that “Sybil” was based on real person with 16 personalities, and that Alex Haley really did find his “Roots” in Africa.  Those last two I was wrong about.  Those last two are, quite simply, lies.

Turns out Shirley Mason, on whom the book “Sybil”,  and subsequent TV-movie starring Sally Field  (who, in my opinion, just turns into Sybil in pretty much every role she’s ever starred in since that one), was not a victim of childhood sexual and physical abuse at all. She was a victim of an unscrupulous therapist, who hooked her on psychotropic drugs; and a greedy third-rate writer who made up the lurid details of her childhood. According the New York Daily News, after that book hit the shelves, the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder became officially recognized, and the number of cases skyrocketed to 40,000, mostly women.

The Alex Haley story is a little older and, again according the New York Daily News, really blew up with a Village Voice investigative article in 1993. But Alex Haley was pretty well cemented as a fraud when the BBC did a documentary called “The Roots of Alex Haley” back in 1998. So it is old news now.  But the two stories resonate with me as to the insidious nature of lies and the liars who perpetuate those lies, and the subsequent liars who seek to cover up the original lie for whatever reason. These two particular lies (and I know there are others like them throughout history) had the power to actually change lives. Now, I know people whose lives were drastically changed by liars, but in those cases, each was just a one-off. A victim here, a victim there.  But these were awesome lies. These lies had legs; big powerful sprinter legs that could kick the truth’s puny legs all over hell for awhile. In the end, the truth got out there, but only after the damage was done and a rash of women believed they had a hundred or more personalities and one of them was an enslaved African captive named Kunta Kinte. Or something like that.

They call these kinds of lies “hoaxes”. I guess if a lie reaches a wide enough audience, goes on long enough, and has far enough reaching implications, it will graduate from a simple “lie” to a better word. Like how a bill becomes a law.  Anyway, I think the word “hoax” lacks punch. It doesn’t give this type of lie the justice it deserves. In fact, the word “hoax” is almost glorifying, when it should be insulting.  I would think these types of liars would really want their little “lie” to move up the ranks and be promoted to “hoax”. This isn’t behavior we want rewarded by giving it a lofty title. So, I believe these over-achieving lies should simply be called “Fat Lies”, and the overblown liars who create them, perpetuate them and subsequently cover them up, should all be called “Fat Liars”. Now that will teach them.

I now have two friends who have legally changed their names to something other than what their parents named them, and not due to marriage or divorce. One was to a simple shortening of her first name, which most everyone called her anyway. The other was to a completely made up last name that I still have trouble wrapping my head around. But their new names both fit their respective personalities, as does the fact that they both went and had this done legally. Although the two women are as different as night is from day, this name thing they share. It takes a certain type of independent spirit, I think, to shed a parent-given moniker for one of your own choosing.

I happen to like the name Traci for the most part. When I was a kid though, I wanted to strangle my mother for sticking me with a spelling of it that would forever thwart my obtainment of a license plate for my bike; unless, of course, I wanted to settle for one with “Tracy” painted on it, which we all knew in 1973 was a BOY’S NAME!! Yuck. Dumb mom. But let’s face it, she probably saved me from being abducted as a kid, because I surely would have been gullible enough to stop my bike and turn around to answer some stranger calling me by my name, and I never could resist candy from anyone. Anyway, I found out later I was sort of named after Ricky Nelson’s daughter, Tracey, who also must have had a hell of a time finding a license plate for her bike (and was thus saved from abduction, as well). We were trailblazers, me and Tracey.

So, I’m good with my first name, but I have legally changed my last name three times now. It was the obvious thing to do when I got married the first time in 1990. When I got divorced  fifteen years later, I dropped that last name like a bad habit and couldn’t get it done fast enough. I had never been comfortable with that name, but there are people to this day who still identify me by that name and no other. I do remember feeling all comfortable and happy with my maiden name back, like I was “me” again. Every time I signed my name, it was like running into a long lost friend. It didn’t last though. I ditched my original, comfortable name within three years of having changed it back, once again in the name of love.

So, what have any of my names ever said about me, about who I am? If you’ve met me as Traci Hansen, or Traci Lobejko or Traci Enger, you may or may not have met three different people. I like to think I’m this ever-evolving and growing entity, and that Traci Lobejko is not Traci Hansen is not Traci Enger. Yet at the same time, at my core, I know I am still just the same old pain in the ass I’ve always been and that everyone who had met me at some point along my journey has seen the same core of me, no matter how “different’” I believed myself to be at any given point on the path.  So what is in a name, really? Does it say anything about you? Should it? What if it does?

It has already been established that I was such a bossy little girl, that at some point near the end of second grade, I was punched square in the neck by a boy who’d simply had enough of my mouthing off.  I can say all I want that I was a victim of bullying in my childhood, but there is a contingent of my former classmates who would willingly stand up in a court of law and testify with no regrets, “Your Honor, she SO had it coming!” I was forever by turns being picked on and ostracized, forever crying about it, and forever trying to manipulate my peers into doing what I wanted them to do, causing them to ostracize and pick on me and make me cry, chorus repeat. I simply never learned.  I did have friends who put up with my BS, I suppose because there was a fun side to me, and some people like being told what to do and how to do it, but eventually even my friends tended to get sick of my antics. My relationships were fraught with angst, and even down-right hysteria at times. If you didn’t like me, I would have a boat load of arguments why you should, and how mean you were and why my way was the right way and why you were wrong, and I would hurl theses platitudes at you through streaming tears.  I know it sounds like a serious mental illness, and there are times I think my parents and step-parents looked sideways at each other and mouthed, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Do we need a professional up in here?”…or whatever the hip Seventies version of that would’ve been.

But really, I contend that my behavior stemmed from a simple lack of siblings. Hear me out, now. My social skills were not as honed as they would have been had I had at least one other child around to practice on.  Instead, my “rough edges”  had to be smoothed out in a more public venue at recess, while negotiating the rules for four-square (you cannot make up your own rules so you always win  because then no one else has any fun, it seems), or deciding who would be Wonder Woman and who would be the “guest star” (being Wonder Woman all the time makes the other girls not want to play Wonder Woman with you anymore, I guess), or deciding how to react appropriately when someone cuts in front of you in the lunch line and calls you a cry-baby (more crying does not stop this behavior in others, it turns out).  Apparently though, siblings were not in order for many years to come (and many years too late to help me in this arena, really. Although, I love them very much and they have proven super-useful to me in other ways throughout the years – another day, another blog). So, my life has always sort of been about figuring things out the hardest way possible. Maybe everyone feels that their life is like this. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, because we all know it’s always your parents’ fault.

I always think I have come a long way since those days. As each decade of my life has passed, I have looked back with a belief that the experiences of that last ten-year span, and what I learned within those years, were cumulatively making me a more stable, rounded, and likable human being. Then somewhere in the middle of the next decade,  I get tripped up on my own ego. My thirties were especially effective in taking me down a peg or two in this department.

In my thirties, I worked in the field of medical collections, and for many years I was on the phone with the general public telling them why they needed to pay their doctor bill (believe it or not, some people just don’t think they should have to pay their doctor bill. I know! It’s a crazy world). Anyway, I am not a big fan of the unwashed masses, and quite frankly, I have no business being the public representative for any company in this capacity (mostly due to the fact that I actually call the general public “the unwashed masses”). But, I didn’t know all that then. I thought I was “tough” and “pragmatic” and “got the job done”. Once again, not a well-liked girl, but it seemed to me, at the time, more like a “haters-gonna-hate” situation. The job didn’t lend itself to a high “likability” quotient, I reasoned. In reality, I was actually a raving bitch and should have been fired for the things I said to people in those years. I certainly would have gotten the message faster had I been shit-canned, but that is not how my life has ever played out, thus far.

I must have taken hundreds of calls at this job, but I don’t really remember any of them. The only one that stands out does so only because of what happened afterward. A co-worker got a call one day from someone who had follow-up information to give to the person he had spoken with the day before. The caller did not remember who he had spoken with the previous day. As my co-worker was looking up the caller’s name in our system in order to read any notes that may have been taken on the previous call, the caller did offer a telling bit of info regarding the collections person he spoke to the day before. In his heavy Asian accent, he helpfully mused, “She talks a lot. Very bossy.”  As the caller’s information popped up onto my co-workers screen, he was not at all surprised to see my initials on the notes for the previous day’s call.

Now, I am fascinated by Native American culture and have, therefore, read quite a bit about it. I’m no expert to be sure, but I do believe that most tribes held off naming their children until such a time as the appropriate name for that child presented itself. Had my parents only waited a bit…and been Native American…my name surely would have been Talks A Lot, Very Bossy.  I may have believed I would outgrow this name as I matured (and, in my case, I use that term loosely), but history would have proven me oh-so-wrong.  Discovering my true name was a bit like a slap in the face, though. It calmed me down some…um, eventually…I think.  But I can’t say it didn’t sting a bit to know that I was perceived in such a way by a stranger on the phone, and that not a single one of my co-workers disagreed with this snap assessment of  me. But in the immortal words of Popeye, “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam”.  As I maneuver my way around the sharp curve of my mid-40′s, I accept this moniker and all that it has ever meant and all that it will mean. For sure, I would never have had to legally change my name at all, had I been named correctly in the first place! So, okay, it’s no Dances With Wolves, but Talks A Lot, Very Bossy is who I am.

But you (and the State of MN) can just call me Traci (with an “I”) Enger.

Yes, I did it! I have committed to blogging. I haven’t committed to a certain time frame, or any number of blogs, or even a theme for these blogs, but blog I will! That’s the extent of my commitment.

It took me a little bit of time to figure this thing out, and quite frankly it will take even longer to really get the hang of it. So now it’s late, and I’m making my first message to the world a short one. Don’t get too used to that. This may be the last time you will be able to read my blog in under five minutes.

While it is true I have no real theme in mind here, I do have many ideas about what I want to say, and have for years believed that my voice was way more important to humanity than it really is. It is why I have never had a fear of public speaking. I have labored under this delusion that pretty much anything I have to say should be heard by a massive audience, the bigger the better. And now the internet has gone and fed my delusion and given me an outlet. I wanted my own talk show, but while I am a fountain of self-confidence, I was born without ambition or a filter. So even if I was lucky enough to stumble and fall onto the stage of my own talk show (and that’s about how it would have to happen, believe me), I would alienate my audience in the first segment by saying something offensive or stupid. That’s how I roll. I’m much better read than heard, thanks to things like editing and spell-check and the ridiculous amount of time it takes me to type.

Anyway, I hope this is fun for someone other than me! What a drag if no one else gets to have fun. It’ll be like elementary school all over again when I bossed all my friends around so much until they didn’t want to play with me anymore and finally one kid just punched me in the neck.

Well, there’s my next blog!

Goodnight!