Hump Day Hmmm

Single Serving Acquaintances: Filling in for Hump Day Hmm*


In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character first meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on an airplane in what he explains is a “single serving friend” relationship. Basically it likens the whole idea of striking up friendly banter and interaction with people you will never see again to a ketchup packet or the shampoo offerings in a hotel room. One shot and it’s over.

Single Servings are the essential building blocks of mommy groups which grow into the child’s version of a one night stand – the play date – with the potential to make companions out of women who wouldn’t have a thing to say to each other sans children.

A lesser version of this is the drive-by. Like the young man at the Holiday Inn Express Sunday morning who, after eavesdropping on a rather mundane conversation between Rob and myself on preparing Quaker Instant Oats, happily inserted himself into the discussion and gave us incorrect directions.

And there was the woman at the rest stop outside Moorhead, MN who began chatting with me in the washroom. Chattering away at my back really because I didn’t make eye contact or anything until I realized that she wasn’t talking to the hand dryer. She proceeded to talk mostly at me on and off for the next 15 minutes while Rob and I walked around the playground where Katy and her little girl were playing and as he and I chatted with each other in the picnic area.

“She might have been a widow, you know,” Rob pointed out later. “Traveling alone with a child and all.”

That thought had occurred to me back in the washroom but not because she was a woman who appeared to be on her own. It was the conversation she was having with her daughter as they walked in.

“…there are bad people in the world just waiting to hurt little boys and girls who wander away from their moms.”

I was just glad at that moment that Katy was dancing around the stall and didn’t hear her. I didn’t want to be in a position of refuting another parent’s right to go over the top with a stranger danger lecture within their earshot.

Not that all widowed/divorced/or simply single moms are paranoid. That could just have been me. Still is me. I am hardly unique.

When she and her daughter took their leave she said good-bye to Katy and called out the same to Rob and I as we canoodled in the picnic shelter. We can’t be in public without touching. It just wouldn’t be us.

“Are you going to mention that we were making out like crazy?” he asked as I began writing this.

“No, because we weren’t,” I replied. “Should I though?”

“Well, it would titillate your readers.”

Since some of my readers are also bloggers who write things that need disclaimers, I doubted that highly. Now if we’d been el fresco on the picnic table, it would have merited a description. Besides, this post was supposed to be about those people you meet on trips, interact with – willingly or not so, and never see again but make wonderful blog filler.

*I didn’t get a prompt from Julie Pippert this week, so if you have a single serving acquaintance tale to tell link it or use the comment box.

How Far Would You Go? That’s the Hump Day Hmmm.


Hump Day Hmm topic: this is “How far would you go for your kids/family/loved one/self?” I vary the who it is because really, that’s up to you, as is the interpretation of the question. Maybe it’s 500 miles through a hot and crowded zoo. Maybe it’s a move to another country. Maybe it’s setting aside something you do. Maybe it’s a life change, such as getting sober. – Julie Pippert

How far would I go? I feel sometimes that I have already lived this particular topic to death via my blogging for all the world (that cares) to know.

I endured IVF for the sake of motherhood and my late husband.

I put my life, and my child’s, on hold to tend to a terminally ill husband.

While living through the nightmare of care-giving and widowhood, I started and finished a masters degree to ensure a secure financial future for myself and my daughter.

I took a chance on a seemingly affable and intelligent Canadian I met on a message board for widowed people. Became friends. Became more. Opened my heart and soul and believed in happily ever after again then emigrated to a foreign country, leaving behind the shell of a life for which I had worked and struggled and bled.

How far would I go? How far do I need to go to get where I am meant to be? Or to accomplish the things for myself, but more often others, that is required of this current tenure on Earth?

That’s how far.

I am not convinced that life is about us. It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote about “the pursuit of happiness” and after centuries of responsibility the human race jumped on that idea squarely with both feet. But the great religions speak only of our duties and obligations and even Buddha declined to lump enlightenment in the same category as “getting happy”.

But we are not Borg either. There is room for the individual. Perhaps part of the process of enlightenment is finding the balance in between.

How far would I go? I haven’t reached my limit as yet, so I don’t know.

What about you? What is your answer to this Wednesday’s hmmm, hmm?

Write it, prose or verse. Words or images. Here or on your own space but don’t forget to link back if you chose the latter.

The Comfort Zone – A Hump Day Hmmm


My husband is continually amazed by the contrast of me on the page/screen and me in reality. He met me via my words and so thought me this bold, outspoken woman, and though I can be her when I need to be, I am closer to the image that Rodgers and Hammerstein paint of Cinderella, but my little corner is an office that was once a bedroom and my chair sits in front of a Macbook.

I am most comfortable when I can write. I don’t stumble for words (or mispronounce them). No one can hear my slight lisp or the accent that veers back and forth between Southern Iowa and Northern Alberta. Like Cinderella, I can be whatever I want to be. Whether or not that is really me, I haven’t yet discovered.

Almost exactly a year ago, I left the high school where I taught for the last time and headed home to continue purging and packing my belongings and begin my wait for Rob to arrive from Canada. Within a week, the house was near empty and ready for its new owners and we were on our way to a new life in another country.

I am the least adventurous person I know. I am the last person that anyone who knows me would imagine could meet a man on a message board in December and marry him on foreign soil six months later, willing and ready to begin anew.

However, I could write it. The story of love across international boundaries conquering all with a mousy, yet determined, heroine and a sexy, sturdy hero leaping over and pushing aside all manner of obstacles to be together.

But I am living it instead. Minus the mousy. I am shy. Not timid.

Nothing is more terrifying to me than new people and yet I have put myself deliberately in the position of being the new girl over and over most of my life. As blood-curdling as the prospect of a room full of strangers is, I changed schools 5 times in a 20 year teaching career and this was after taking a job in a city where I knew absolutely no one to begin with.

When I came here last June, everyone save Rob and my younger step-daughter, Jordan, was a stranger. Everywhere I went was some place I had never been. And I did a lot of it on my own with only my four and a half year old as back up.

I joined two writing groups, have made myself a regular at the gym and the Starbucks (the only familiar landmark in a Twilight Zone of same yet not same places).

They know me at the grocery, the bank, the child-minding and the school. Maybe not so much a testament to me but to the smallness of our town. Still, I have found a home.

And I write. Send my writing to the world via this blog and MSU and the comments on the blogs of people I have come to know through my initiative and theirs.

My comfortable place is behind the words I write and the stories I dream, but I have and continue to move past and move them out into the world along with myself.

*So what better topic for Hump Day Hmmm this week, eh? Tell us about your comfort zone, outside your comfort zone, and share a journey you took outside your comfort zone…what happened? I think reading each of these stories will pull each of us beyond our own existing horizon, so I really hope for a lot of participation. Let’s even beat last week, which had over a dozen submissions! (I was ecstatic!)

To motivate you even more, I’ll put a prize on the table again: a Morgan Spurlock book or DVD. Choose among his Super Size Me, Don’t Eat This Book, or Season 1 of 30 Days.”