Digi-Scene

I went in this morning to have my first mammogram. If nothing else, I'm glad that I read somewhere in a magazine article about taking some ibuprofen beforehand to minimize the discomfort. Discomfort, hell! They smash your boobs flat between two pieces of plexiglass. On the plexiglass are little red measurement marks and sure enough the technician pulled and tugged and smashed just to see how far along the line my breast could be elongated. I think I scored a 10. As you are imagining that pretty sight, they go ahead and snap a picture of it. It was just my luck that they had to retake one of the images, too. Arrgghh...

I'm trying not to think about the potential results, especially in light of the recent diagnosis my friend Jennifer received that she does indeed have breast cancer. Instead, I just sit here and pray that I get the letter (everything is OK) and NOT the phone call (we need to see you again)...

I love my birthday. I know, I know. Having reached the advanced age of 43, I should be cursing my birthday and the passage of another year, but I honestly love my birthday and I'll tell you why.

It's the one day out of the year that I feel absolutely no guilt about having an entire day that is all about ME. I don't give a rats ass about anyone else on this day. I do what I want, when I want, and for how long I want because, hey. It's my birthday.

Today was a perfect Kim birthday. It started with Boni serving me my favorite breakfast in bed (french toast). Even though he fretted for a solid week because he had never made french toast, I thought it tasted wonderful. Partly it was because I felt completely selfish and decadent about having someone cater to my every whim today, but Boni not only did it willingly and cheerfully, but he was looking for ways to make my day perfect.

In addition to the breakfast in bed, I received a beautiful bouquet of tulips from Boni too. Anytime I receive flowers I get the silliest smile on my face. I honestly think Boni gets as much pleasure out of that as anything else. He also bought me a cake and even sang happy birthday to me, not once but twice (once at breakfast and then later after work when we cut the cake and had ice cream).

Many phone calls and birthday wishes later and quite frankly I am feeling very loved. Isn't that what a perfect birthday is all about?

My boss is nowhere to be found this afternoon. And I'm irritated.

Big changes are afoot here at the international conglomerate that I work for and none of them bode very well for us cubicle dwelling minions. At least this time when they started "right-sizing" the company, they started lopping dead weight from the top first. That at least was refreshing, even if the CEO got what amounted to 18 months of severance pay. What's wrong with him getting the two weeks that most of the people who work for him get? I understand the concept of golden parachutes but that doesn't mean that I can't wish that they would fail to open on the way down.

Last week during my 1:1 with my boss, I got a nice pep talk that "keeping your nose to the grindstone and staying focused on the organizational goals during a time of transition is your best defense against getting the ax". I'm not sure what planet he's from, but in my world, that doesn't amount to squat against a pink slip.

So here I am polishing my nose to a high sheen on this grindstone. And my boss? Since he hasn't been in his office for days now, I'm assuming that he's out on a few job interviews telling other people about how focused he is on organizational goals....

Well, I finally have a term that describes my life in a nutshell, thanks to this URL. I've been self-diagnosed with continuous partial attention or CPA syndrome. This malady manifests itself as the ability to mainly focus on one task, while simultaneously monitoring other background tasks, just in case something more important or interesting comes up.

I recognized the symptoms when I found myself watching a Padres baseball game on the TV this last weekend while at the same time IMing a friend AND paying my bills online. How did I make the leap to a diagnosis of the more serious CPA syndrome rather than just a 24 hour case of multi-tasking? When I realized that I wasn't doing any of these tasks to save time or effort, it was merely because I didn't want to be stuck doing something that was irrelevant or boring. Heaven forbid that I should be bored, even during my leisure time. That was the lightbulb moment that let me know that I was dealing with something more insidious than merely trying to be efficient.

The only way I console myself after having been given this awful news is that at least I don't suffer from polyattentiveness. No one seems to want to hear about your batle with polyattentiveness, but if you mention CPA syndrome, they'll want to tell you all about their ability to do things like blog about an event AS IT IS HAPPENING.

I'm not that far gone. Yet.