Wednesday, 1 September 2010 - It is a new month, and as often happens at the beginning of some time delineation, we get to thinking of all the things we can begin. September is the beginning of a new school year for so many. It is the start of diet season for so many more, and fitness classes will see a boom in participants - at least for the first few weeks. Funny, for all the years I went to school and for how much I enjoyed school, I still dread September.
September to me feels like the start of a rapid downhill slide to the year's end. Another year will have come and went, and I yet I continue to stand still. I dreamt last night of my grandfather. In trying to sort out what that might have meant for me, we came up with a few options. Perhaps he represents a time in my life when I felt more secure. He died when I was but seven years old. Maybe he represents the lack of stability - that eventually everyone leaves. I occasionally wonder what it is about my past that has me frozen in my present, unable to make commitments and so fiercely independent. My reality is, that I want to make a commitment. I want to be needed and to be needy, and I want a future. Am I the only crazy one here? I look back at the men in my life and I can see why I've always run from commitments. Nobody stays forever. They die. They leave. They take their masks off. They bail. They run. They get suffocating. So rather than experience that all over again, it's easier not to get in to the situation in the first place. Right? Come on.... agree with me dammit. No? Hmmm, turns out maybe I'm a nut. However, I guarantee I am not alone.Pick up the phone, and call any one of the people in your address book and for sure there is something about all of them that is a little nutty.
It used to be that making a call to anyone in your contacts list required going through an operator. She or he would connect you to your other party, listen in on the conversation, and at the end of the conversation, end the connection and the call. I can only imagine how nutty the people in those calls seemed to the operators. Mind you, at that time, I'm betting we didn't just call up a girlfriend to talk about the too short skirt Peggy had the nerve or lack of sense to wear yesterday. We certainly didn't make calls just to pass the time because we waiting at a table in the bistro down the way for our dining mate to arrive. Operators played an important role in communications at one time. It was on this day in 1878 that Emma M. Nutt was hired on as the first woman telephone operator in America. Emma worked at the job for 33 years, and probably in that time heard her fair share of insane conversations. Today is named in her honour - Emma M. Nutt Day - and is meant to celebrate telephone operators. I suspect that at one point in time you would have had operators you could invite to a celebration and to whom you could feed cake. Nowadays, operators are just automated voice messaging systems, and unless you are also serving pizza and cases of Coke, the geeks that now program our 'operators' probably aren't interested in a tea social. Emma Nutt would have enjoyed the celebration. She was a swell gal. She was also very thankful her first name was not Imma.
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