The day before my wedding my mom booked facials for me and my maid of honor. I had never had a facial before and I haven't had once since. The beautician was, accordingly, not impressed - clearly I didn't have a proper daily skin care routine, my eyebrows had never been shaped, and on top of that I was a complete wimp and kept saying "ow!" as she poked and prodded me. At the end of the process I did not feel more beautiful; I felt like my face was red and tender I was worried that I'd have to get married looking like a swollen berry (I didn't). The employee at the cash register asked if I'd like to purchase any skin care products, and even before I could say "no, thanks" the beautician rolled her eyes and said witheringly, "I sincerely doubt it - she's low maintenance."
1. I like that I'm low maintenance.
I once had a job working for a complete jerk. My initial assignment was, literally, to sit in a dark room and invent a medical device that would make him millions of dollars. Without speaking to any other employees. It became clear relatively quickly that this wasn't going to happen, so I decamped to the R&D group and tried to make myself useful. Whether I did or not is maybe a matter of debate, but I certainly accomplished a lot more there than I had in the dark room. Some months later, I was pregnant and working 60% time so that I could drive home early, before the morning-that-in-this-case-was-evening sickness set in. From my perspective this was only honest - I could have stayed at work until 5, but I would have spent the last two hours feeling nauseous and getting nothing done, so better to save the company some money. One day out of the blue I got a furious email from the aforementioned jerk, accusing me of being negative and lazy (turns out, anyone who worked less than 100% was "lazy") and of mooching off of the other employees, and telling me to shape up or ship out. I wrote a rebuttal to the email, decided the job wasn't worth fighting for, and quit the next day. Saying goodbye to my best friend in the office, I said that I was frustrated, but that I could see his perspective - he'd hired me to invent something, I'd failed to do that, anything else I had or hadn't accomplished since then was beside the point. She looked at me and said something to the effect of, "Susannah, seriously, only you could get canned but still see things from the boss's point of view."
2. I like that I can always imagine things from multiple points of view.
One of the weight loss app's goals is to get people to move more, so they set an initial step goal of like 2,500 steps and then increase the goal a little each day until you get to 10,000. This seemed silly. I walk 9,000 steps on an average day without even trying.
3. I like that I'm a good walker and can live without a car.
Today we got a new vegetable box. I'm a huge vegetable box fan, because although eating more vegetables sounds healthy and virtuous, you are never going to catch me buying celery root or chard at the supermarket. (Or, god help me, a farmer's market. That would require talking to someone.) But if these veggies show up at my door, I'll cook something with them. And most of the time, it will even be edible.
4. I like that I can work creatively with what I'm given.
5. I like that can capture things succinctly in writing.
So there. Whew. 😅
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