Wedding-Registry Brainlock

*thump. thump. thump.*

That'd be the sound of my head.

Neal and I both have long shifts today, so I'm tooling about a bit with online shopping. Hit the point on our registry where I can't remember what else we need, except, "Bookcase! And a hammock!"

...I probably can't explain that one. And neither of the two hammocks in the style we like at the one place at which we're registered has a rating whose look I like.

...explaining why a hammock is a higher priority than, say, a bath mat...actually has a lot more to do with my sense of obligations that need to be fulfilled. The hammock doesn't need to match anything. We are both very fond of hammocks (though, it occurs to me, we will have several months of being married before anything like hammock-weather decides to poke its nose out the clouds) and relaxing out-of-doors rather than inside-on-couch. Fresh air, grass, contact with ground releasing built-up frequencies from all the radars we work with...very nice.

I'm in a weird place with this registry business. In general, it's a lot of, "Meh, I'm not picky. I'll start getting choosy about details when we actually have a place where I need to work with colors and styles," meeting, "No! You're getting married! We want to give you something! Pick something now! START CARING!!"

To which I respond, "Oh! Okay! I hadn't thought of that!" And happily do my best to Start Caring. The problem is, I get a little fuzzy on WHY to care, beyond, "Aunt Carla* wants to give us something, so let's figure out something she can give us!!"

*I do not have an Aunt Carla.

So I start picking things based on...what I think Aunt Carla would LIKE to give us. Really, coming off a good chunk of time where both of our living situations were so much the property of where we worked, neither of us are especially skilled at personal choices and style - just recognizing functionality. There's a fair amount of, what do we think would be useful? I think I chose a bedspread based on what I thought would be relaxing for color scheme. And aside from that, the rest of it has been the idea that people sort of EXPECT to find THIS sort of thing on here, and would be baffled and perhaps judging if we had an item on our registry that they considered to be less of a priority than these other six things.

Okay, forget that "we" business on that one - Neal handles criticism with a fair amount of Biblical practicality. I have the tendency to be, "AGH! DON'T HURT ME!" when it comes to what people think of me.

Better yet, what I think people think of me. I kind of assume that the majority pay no attention, a smaller minority are continually exasperated or disappointed, and the 5-12 people I spend the most time with over here actually like me. I'm generally startled anytime one of the first two are proven wrong.

I suspect all of this is exactly what every other woman in her twenties is going through approaching her marriage. (I'm told that as you get into your thirties, you care a lot less what people think of you. Right now, I'm just able to identify sometimes when something more important than condemnation is going on.)

And somewhere, quietly, I hear one of the mom-voices soothing, "Relax. It's okay. Somehow, it will all work out."

"Safe."

It's the same things your whole life. "Clean up your room!", "Stand up straight!", "Pick up your feet!", "Take it like a man!", "Be nice to your sister!", "Don't mix beer and wine, ever!". Oh yeah - "Don't drive on the railroad tracks!"
-Groundhog Day

While Strawberry is in San Diego, I have charge of her cat.

The Gentleman (who I'm going to start calling Neal, because it has the same meaning and doesn't fit his personality at all) is not a cat-person. This has been shown rather clearly this week. We have different backgrounds concerning cats - he had some over-exposure to one of the households where there are many cats that are not well-cared-for, and thus has seen a lot of the worst of them. I've grown up with the idea that one cat is nice, two cats really show each other some contrast, and unless one is keeping them as rodent-control on a large property, or carefully and sensibly fostering, more than two is probably not necessary.

It has been some time since I've HAD a pet. And I'd forgotten a crucial detail about a young cat - in Todd's case, a cat can be about the size he'll reach at maturity, and still have the brains of a kitten. Which are, regrettably, not much. If you have an animal that has large litters, that's usually an indicator that not all of said litter are expected to make it to adulthood. A keen prey instinct paired with little sense of self-preservation and matched with a lack of discretion about which things in the world are, indeed, prey...tends to result in some undesirable experiences.

Todd also needs his claws trimmed. I tend to play with him using an oven mitt - he likes to wrestle. But it's happened a time or two that I was holding something that required proper investigation, and evidence would suggest he doesn't see any point to sheathing his claws when he's reaching for something.

I see scratches as just one of the hazards of dealing with a young cat - I said I'd take the cat for the week, knowing that his beauty is a compensation for his lack of experience. Neal holds better to an idea that we're taught at work, and I'd largely forgotten.

Part of this morning's training was on safety - basically the concept that when we assess the risk of something, we don't just accept certain injuries or hazards as "part of the job." This was news to me. Last two trips, I thought we always accepted certain hazards as "part of the job." Until it's so bad that it impairs work, an injury is just something that happens along the way of getting work done. So we practice evaluating something not in terms of whether we'll get HURT, but whether that hurt will impair what we're trying to accomplish. That's why we have the benefits package we do.

Personally, I think this is because we're undermanned. If we had more people to get the work done, we wouldn't be so focused on whether we'd be able to get it done in time to keep higher-ranking people happy - we'd be focused on getting it done RIGHT. We're actually pretty good at this - we get injuries all the time, but very rarely is it anything so bad that it would keep someone from getting more work done.

So, the idea in our textbook that says this shouldn't happen - well, this is the first I've heard of it, but hey, I'm willing to give it a go. Don't know if I can pull that off solo, but I'll sure try.

This got me thinking, though, about another aspect of safety. See, there are a LOT of us that corporate has to train. And so, a lot of the time, rather than teach us how to do something safely, they'll just teach us that that particular action is dangerous, and not to do it at all. And that idea actually propagates (go figure) - not the one saying, "It takes time to learn how to do this safely," but the idea that, "This is dangerous - only an irresponsible person would do this."

I don't know how much stuff this extends to. I DO know about taking falls, though - that's the one that gets me about wondering where else they're applying this. I know how to drop from 12' or less onto a relatively yielding surface. I know how to roll if the fall catches me by surprise. Every fall where I've gotten injured was because it surprised me AND there was something in the way. I know there are greater heights that a person can safely drop from if they know what they're doing - I have two friends from college who base jump competitively, and one from climbing who knows how to drop from a line 40' up and roll for the ground to absorb the impact (not something he does regularly, just that in a pinch, he can manage it). And I know I haven't learned these yet, and that the older I get without using those skills, the harder they'd be to learn without injury. I'm not reckless about it.

But if you have the idea that people can't go just jumping off things taller than themselves, it looks like I'm showing off or being foolish. One of my good friends was actually really scared on a hike, because I dropped ten feet onto sand - he's never done it, and like most of the others we work with, he's been told that people can't do this, that it's dangerous.

(Yes, I agree that if you do it WRONG, there's a greater potential for injury. The same applies to rollerblading, skiing, running, etc.)

I'm kind of playing with both these ideas, and the concept of fear. It's not out of any fearlessness that I accept small injuries - trust me, I don't LIKE them, and prefer being able to avoid them; I just accept them. If we're trained not to accept injury as "just part of the job," though, maybe it's time for an attitude shift.

Now, if I could just convince corporate to change THEIR attitude about training people properly...