Julie Pippert

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.”

The Rules – A Hump Day, Hmmmm


I was visiting Julie Pippert at The Artful Flower last Friday and caught the hump day topic before the fact for a change and thought I might give it a go. I don’t do MEME type stuff generally because I am an all-about-me kind of blogger, but I loved the topic. Rules. And this is what Julie has to say about it in the form of a prompt:

Notes: Next week’s Hump Day Hmmm. Mamma Loves suggested “The Rules.” Call them rules, call them mores, or maybe even call them ethics. In general, we all understand there are certain rules and most of us try to follow them. Something to do with being good. But…are we all playing by the same rules? Do we all have to answer to the same rules? Are the rules applied equitably, and enforced equitably? Are we even all playing the same game? Are you a rule follower? You tell me.

Growing up Catholic, and a girl (the two most incompatible things ever by the way), life was an onslaught of “thou shalt not’s” and double standards. There was one set of rules for boys and another for girls, and the girls’ rules always sucked in a big way by comparison. Life if you were male was like five on five full-court, but if female it was six player. Three on three. Half-court only. You were restricted to either shooting or blocking the shot, and if that wasn’t binding in a Chinese shoe kind of way, there was that little two-dribble and pass thing. Boys could be altar-servers. Girls were lucky if they were allowed to step foot on the altar to help clean it. Boys were priests and ran the parish while girls were the nuns who took orders and did the heavy lifting. Boys were husbands and heads of household. Girls were fashioned from their ribs to be Stepford Wives their (junior) partners aka wife. When I was 8 I wanted to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but I was told I couldn’t because I was a girl. When I was 9, I wanted to be a priest and was offered the nunnery. When I was 10, I wanted to write and was told I wasn’t any good. I equated that with being a girl and laid low for a good deal of my life thereafter.

Rules were woven into the essence of my being from before conscious memory, but I never willingly followed. I conscientiously objected. Quietly. Passively. Aggressively. I quit the basketball team in grade 10. It wasn’t really basketball anyway if you couldn’t run the court. I stopped going to confession that year too. If God could hear my prayers, couldn’t he hear my sins straight from my mouth as well?

In school, high school and university, I learned that rules were more guidelines than anything else, and the more talented you were the less they applied to you. This was reinforced by my years as a teacher. If I got the job done, it didn’t matter if I was a team player or a maverick. Results were everything. Who you knew mattered – a lot. The objector in me began to wonder who had come up with this neat little scam called “the rules” because they sure didn’t apply equally or sometimes even at all.

I am not a rules girl. I don’t get the Sex in the City approach to love. I am not Gordon Gecko enough to crave out a slice of the American Dream for myself and my family. I was too busy surviving while my first husband died slowly in plain view to coif our suburban yard or join the right play groups or volunteer at the church. There was always something more important to do than identify the feet I should have been annointing with perfumed oils and drying with the long tresses of my hair. Life would have been easier if I had colored inside the prescribed lines and known which way the wind was blowing and who was releasing all that hot air in the first place.

When I became a widow I was blithely unaware of the fact that there were more “rules” waiting for me although surely the one time in your life you need a little wiggle room wouldn’t be the time to slam the door behind you, right? I didn’t know a single widow under the age of 55 but when I went looking for my “own kind” I thought I would find comraderie and found instead a curious culture with a shitload of rules. It was like being back in Sr. Marilyn’s homeroom at Resurrection Grade School in 1976. That inner passive aggressive middle-schooler is never hard for me to locate and channel, and I did what I always do when confronted with a rigged game.

I understand the reason for law and societal norms. They are necessary because so many of us would rather be told what to do than to think for ourselves. The civilization that results is patchy at times but works, more or less. When I think of rules however, the aforementioned laws and norms is not what comes to mind. Rules are the norms within norms. The cliches and gangs that spring up in the gaps like weeds in a cracked cement driveway.