The night before my daughter's 18th birthday, so the day before her 18th birthday -- well, for actually a few weeks prior to it, my daughter had been in and out of the hospital. They had given her Benadryl and some other things and it had just made it worse and she didn't know what was wrong with her, but her roommates drug her back down to that hospital for a third time. And finally, the hospital really started to pay attention, and we got a call to rush to Kalamazoo. We live near Detroit. That [our daughter] might have meningitis. And, you know, meningitis can be deadly. So we -- our car couldn’t even make it. We took someone else's car that could make it and we drove straight there as fast as we could. And right when we got there --  it was right at midnight as my daughter was turning 18. And right as we got there, she was having a spinal tap. And then we came into the room and the doctor came back in, and he told us what was going on and my poor daughter was just -- her head was down. She couldn't look up at all. Her brain was just hurting so bad, she was just moaning, she couldn't even talk. And I said -- the doctor said, “It's meningitis. We won't know until we get cultures back if it's bacterial or if it's viral.” You know, “We've gotta quarantine her.” And this, that, and the other, and I said, “But she's gonna be okay, right?” And that doctor looked at me, and he said, “I can't tell you that right now.” And that was one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever heard in my entire life. And they went to go take my daughter up and put her in a room and me and my wife went outside. This is back when I still smoked, I went outside to smoke a cigarette. And there was a homeless gentleman out there. And he asked what we were -- he asked for a cigarette and then he asked what we were there for and we told him. And he said, “Can I pray with you right now? Can I pray for your daughter?” And we held hands and we stood there out in the freezing cold in the middle of the night, and that man prayed…

I love cute and interesting shoes which aren't always conducive to living in the Midwest, living in the Great Lakes region, especially in winter. And that has gotten to be more of an issue since I moved to the UP years ago, because the winters here are insane. And we were -- I wouldn't, I guess I wouldn't call it lucky, maybe lucky for like fashion-wise a couple years in a row recently, where we had really warm winters. Where it was easier to wear less functional and more aesthetic clothing. But this year has been a hell of a winter. And this year, I've had to go to court a few times and you -- I mean, you have to look presentable, and I have my own standards for that. And to me that means personally, I feel, I would feel so uncomfortable wearing professional-looking pants. I am a skirt girl. Just, I just am. Always will be. [...] Like I said, I walked to the courthouse in pants and boots, and then I took a bag with me with my heels, and walked to the courthouse. And then because I had the skirt over, I could reach under the skirt, undo my pants, take the pants off, and like, have -- and then be in my skirt and tights. And then I switched from boots to heels just for this court date, and -- which was a lot of sitting and a lot of waiting and a whole lot of nothing. But, I mean you, I don't know, for me personally, it doesn't, it doesn't matter. If I'm sitting in the freaking, what do you call those, pews? That's a church term, but like, whatever you call those, the benches. It doesn't matter. If I'm spending my time sitting here, it's just feels weird to show up in like anything else. So that's what I did. And I was there with my partner's mother and sister, and his sister is kind of the same with how she dresses, but she is a pants lady. She ended up doing the same thing and their mother was like, "You girls --" Like, she showed up in like, I don't know, like, you know, a nice sweater and nice pants and tennis shoes, ‘cause she, that's what she has to wear. But she was like, "I still --" She's like, "I would…

So my sister had lived in a home in a different city and then she came to get a degree at MSU. And so she was living in like a tiny apartment, and then she like lived with someone for a little while -- anyway, most importantly there was like a little liminal period where she like, didn't have a ton of room for all of her stuff. So she was like, "Well, I have this giant TV from my house." Like, "You're moving into --" It fell during the time that I was moving into an apartment in [city]. And so she was like, "Oh, this is good timing. Like just take my TV and like, just use it. And when I come down, like back down to [city] for the year or whatever, I'll take it. Or I'll use it or whatever." And I was like, "Oh, that's so nice. That's great. Thank you." And so the timing on this was crazy. So she unloaded it into my mom's garage. And it just sat there. And then we packed it super gently into the car. We brought it into the apartment super gently. And we like propped it against the wall. We just like, we didn't have a mount for it at the time, like -- and we just used like my really tiny ridiculous TV for like a month. Like, because we didn't have furniture to put this giant TV on or a mount to mount this giant TV. So we just used like my shoddy little TV, when we were still very much moving in and had like no furniture. And so then like a month into living here, we go to turn the TV on. And it's got issues. It looks as if somebody -- like, if you asked me what it looked like, it looked like somebody like punched it in one of the corners. Like it was like all like -- like when it's off it looked totally fine, totally normal. There's no external physical damage. But then you turn it on and it's like spider-webbed in one of the corners. So I don't know if like somebody pushed on the screen while we were moving it or what. I was with the TV the whole time though and I never saw anything like that occur. Maybe they're just gentler than they look.…

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio.  There's not a whole lot to be grateful for, honestly. And I say that because, like, work is a sh**show. And we all know that work is a sh**show, but it's getting bad enough that people who said they would not be looking for jobs are looking for jobs. Which, you know, to some extent I was like, "Well, I kinda told you so. I told you it wasn't gonna get better." And so, you know, in that respect there is absolutely nothing to be grateful for. Like at my job, that is. And, I mean that, that's also like what's super difficult. That I cannot graduate fast enough. That I, I might be stuck here for another close to year and a half. Or, you know, if someone wants to pay me, you know, 30% more, I'm gonna be like, "Peace out. Come at me, bro." We will see. I mean it's, it's worth making a lateral move at this point. It's -- I went to a, you know, I went to a conference last Thursday. And explaining to people what is happening at my job, which is then followed by, "Please hire me. I'm good. I'm smart. I can do stuff." And then I went to a network event on Monday and it's like -- it is awful out there. There are CIOs getting laid off, who are looking for work. And, you know, my friend's husband's sister was CIO -- either CIO or CTO. And you know, she is getting ghosted on fourth, fifth rounds on interviews. It's like, if this is how bad it is for C-suite people, how are the rest of us going to survive? And, you know, I'm, I'm making friends with as many people as I can. I'm going to these networking events. I'm trying my best to not lose hope. But, it's, it's not, it's not good out there.

My, um, mom used to have my cousins, three boys, over to her house quite often when they were little to spend the night and to spend some time. And what she usually would do is, she had pajamas that they could wear at her house so they didn't have to bring pajamas every time. They -- it was usually just like a big T-shirt, like some of my sister and my old t-shirts that we didn't wear anymore, and when they were little they just were -- just kind of longer, you know, on them or bigger on them but they, but they liked that. So, she would usually -- they'd usually come, they'd change into the pajamas, and she'd usually throw their clothes in laundry. And oftentimes all three of them would just run around with those big T-shirts on. So, underwear obviously, but no, no shorts or pants, they just liked to wear the big T-shirts. That was like the cool thing that they wanted to do. So, they were doing that and their clothes were in the laundry, and I think my mom was -- my mom was not in the living room. I know that. She was down -- she was down the hallway, somewhere. And my sister and her, at the time, boyfriend, now her husband, but her then boyfriend were coming over as well and they pulled into the driveway and I said, oh, you know, "[Boyfriend] and [sister] are here. That's exciting," or something. So, the youngest of the boys. I was sitting in one of the chairs in the living room. He comes over to me super close, like as close as he could get to me and he said, "I need pants." And he had this just horrible look on his face, like he was mortified. Like he just was so embarrassed. "I need pants." I think he was okay, he felt comfortable just wearing this T-shirt around the family, but I think that thinking about my sister's boyfriend coming over and him not really knowing him and like having it be, I don't -- maybe they -- maybe that was the first time they met him? I don't know. I don't think it was, but again, I think, you know, he didn't often see him. They didn't -- they lived in Indiana at the time so they didn't -- they didn't see…

A lot of my injuries have been the result of doing silly things. I remember riding my bicycle through backyards in my neighborhood in 1989,1990. And I literally clotheslined myself. It was actually my mom's boyfriend's neighborhood, if we're being fully transparent here, which is only important to know because it means I was not super familiar with the environment. But as far as I could see, there was just really no fences, just open boundaries between yards. I was trying to take a shortcut back to my mom's boyfriend's backyard, and I could not see the clothesline in the neighbor's backyard. And it clipped me, like, almost like, you know, uh... Wait, oh no, why am I blanking, in horse riding, when you’re -- it's not jousting, is it the joust? You know when you have the big spear and your -- the lance, so to speak? It was kind of like that. It just knocked me off my “horse,” except instead of horse, it was my small little BMX bike. So, yeah, that was silly. I learned. No one was around to watch that one. So you feel embarrassed, but like, no one saw it. I still feel ridiculous. It's pretty funny how you just bounce back up back then. I have a feeling that it would affect me more now.

I went to visit, I went over to a guy I went to school with. I don’t think I’d ever been to his house before. And his parents were away and they had like a college student or somebody house-sitting with them. And she was kinda like in the mix, like we were down, I went down to talk with them. Maybe we were gonna play D&D, I don’t remember. But she was like right there, and I happened to look over on their -- what they had hanging on the wall, they had these fabulous like Native American rugs. And I said, “Oh my gosh, those are awesome! I like those Navajo rugs.” And um, oh gosh how did I hear about this.  Maybe it was later, one of the guys who was like at the house told me that after I left, she said that I was like obnoxious or hard to like or something. And one of the reasons she -- like the example that she gave or like the evidence she gave, was that I was being a know-it-all by looking at the rugs and saying what tribe had made them. And that just really floored me because I was like, well, I mean, I traveled down to New Mexico and Utah and other areas of the Southwest with my family, and we actually did have some Navajo rugs at our house. But I wasn’t really trying to pretend to be some kind of expert in like, Southwest American textiles. That’s actually just like, what they are called. Like even if you have like a Hopi or a Zuni weaver, people going down there they’d say, “Hey, I’d love to see some Navajo rugs.” So I just, I felt so unjustly accused. I mean, I was simply using just this sort of vernacular vocabulary, and she was accusing me of being like some kind of specialist. 

Every year when I was a junior high teacher, at the end of the year, we had a kind of a 8th grade end of the year, graduation type ceremony. And the high school graduated and they were done using the auditorium and so we would hold ours at the auditorium when they were done. Okay. So as an 8th grade teacher, I had to go over there and help them get organized and practiced, their going in and coming out and all that other good stuff. And I bought a lovely new pair of capris in a nice khaki color and I wore them to school that day that we were going over to do the practicing cuz I knew it was gonna be a -- and these were kind of like cargo khakis and so they were good because I could put all the stuff I needed to go over to the high school without having to carry my purse and all that other stuff, so it was great. So I did that, I got this really cute little sweater vesty thing that went with it. I bought the whole outfit from Eddie Bauer. It looked really good, I was happy. Get over to the high school, and I sat down in one of the front, very front row auditorium seats to watch the kids do their thing. And as I did that, I caught my pants on a spring that was sitting up in the auditorium seat because those seats were being replaced as soon as school got out, not knowing that the first row was not somewhere where people were supposed to sit, and I ripped my pants. Well I didn't have the opportunity to go back to the other school so I took off my vest. Which fortunately was a cardigan type and tied it around my butt and just kept going. And one of the kids said, “What are you doing?” and my other teacher buddies said to me, “What are you doing? That looks ridiculous.” I said, “It doesn't look as ridiculous as the fact that I have a big hole in my pants.” I said, “Don't sit in that seat,” and she went, “Ohhhh.” Anyway, I was lucky it was the end of the day that we were doing this but it was really, really not one of my favorite teaching days.

This is something that happened when I was probably four. My parents and I lived on a small farm, forty acre farm. We had a few beef cows. We had a few chickens. I don't know if we had pigs at that time or not. I don't remember the pigs. And there's a picture of me with some baby ducks, so maybe we had ducks, too. I don't know, I don't remember the ducks.  But these beef cows, you know, the purpose of raising beef cows is to have calves and raise up the calves and sell them. And, one day a guy drove in with his car and my dad and I went and walked over to his car and he opened the trunk and there was a calf. A little baby calf. And I was amazed. So my dad and this guy got the calf out of the trunk and we took it into the car -- ah, into the barn, into where the cows were. And I thought that that was how you got calves, some guy brings them in the trunk of his car. I don't know the circumstances of that. Maybe we had a cow that had had a calf that had died and -- I don't know. I -- my dad does not remember this at all. So anyway, sometime after that, my dad said to me, "The next couple of days, we're gonna have a new calf." And I thought, "Great!" And man, I watched for that guy in his car to bring that calf. I watched every car that went by. And this was, you know, we lived on a dirt road. Not many cars went by. So every car that went by, I looked at it hopefully that maybe this was the guy bringing us the calf. So, one morning when Dad -- when my dad said, "Oh, we had a new calf, got the new calf last-" or, "We had a new calf last night," I was so disappointed that I hadn't been there to see the guy bring us this calf. And I have no idea how long this thought persisted that this is the way you get calves is a guy brings them in a car, I have no idea. But you know, that's what I thought at the time.

What's the difference between tennis shoes and sneakers? And that one is a little trickier, just because where I grew up it wasn't particularly unusual to have those essentially be synonyms. And what I mean by that is, quite often, your sneakers would be what you might wear to play tennis on a court, especially, if you weren't, say, using basketball shoes or more stylized kind of sneakers and sneaker designs. Tennis shoe designs were maybe a little more basic 30-40 years ago. So, it wasn't necessarily uncommon to have sneakers being sold as the same kind of tennis shoes that John McEnroe or Chris Evert or Jimmy Connors might have an endorsement deal for. Especially you remember, you know,  Converse having both basketball style shoes and tennis slash sneaker style. I think there was like a Jimmy Connors model or some such might have been Converse, he might have had a deal with another brand, but for a long time, were quite interchangeable.