Janet

I don't really like boats, so don't surprise me with one, unless the surprise you're looking for is "Oh, wow! Just what I never wanted!" I think it's because I have always suffered from motion sickness. Even as a child riding the Fire Island ferry during the summer — a brief trek across the Great South Bay that more resembles a water-taxi route than a sea journey — I would race to claim a seat in the open area up top, away from the strong smell of fuel that increased my discomfort with the tilting of the horizon.

I usually try to be the type of person you don't go out of your way to avoid. (Here in Janet's World, we aim high with our interpersonal communication goals.) Most days I am successful in my attempts not to be offensive. As a result, I may even take it for granted that I am at ease in most social situations. But that was before last week, when I took a volunteer job that caused me to stand in the shoes of the undesirables. For two hours, I joined the ranks of the debt collectors, the tax auditors, the process servers — perhaps even the colonoscopy administrators.

Please stop reading this if you are not interested in my breasts. (Now there's a topic sentence that might not make it past an editor.) I suppose I have always been very interested in my breasts. As a preteen, I anticipated their arrival, and it turns out that — like most awesome things in my life — they showed up late. It took me a while to get used to them, but pretty soon I was letting them do their thing, which is exist on my front and command a weird sort of attention, as if they were disconnected from the rest of me. Before having breasts, for example, no one really stared at my ears or eyebrows, so I had no way of comprehending this strange new focus on my torso.

Last weekend, I was accosted by an angry do-gooder. It was a shock, of course, because most do-gooders have smiles on their faces or at least in their hearts, and they approach their volunteer tasks with a calm, happy sort of vigilance. These folks simply show up where they are needed and quietly do what needs to be done — whether it's grading spelling tests, playing checkers, serving meals or picking up trash — because they want to give of themselves. Because it's enough to make a small difference in their corner of a troubled universe.

Around this time last year, after picking up my son from a Sunday afternoon climbing session at Earth Treks in Columbia, we drove to a nearby Chinese restaurant to pick up dinner. To our surprise, my son's government and politics teacher and his daughter were in the waiting area. It is not surprising, really, that my son's high school teacher and his family would like Chinese food. There's just something mildly shocking about seeing teachers you respect in ordinary situations.

I've just spent two days in training on a system that generates business reports, and I understand so much more about the power of my company's particular tool and its application in my job. I also have a really bad headache from glancing at the teacher's screen up in front of the classroom and then back at my monitor for the better part of six hours each day. But here's the thing. Now I really want a Janet's World Home Management Database. Why, the JWHMD already has the requisite long and unmemorable acronym — it will fit in perfectly in the IT world.

The Maryland gubernatorial race would be considerably more enjoyable for all who still read the newspaper and listen to the radio if the candidates simply followed the rules. And by the rules, I mean the rules set forth by my local elementary school for student council races. Running gubernatorial campaigns according to the student council rules would cut the number of accusatory letters to the editor penned by zealous advocates as well as the incessant insult-trading on talk shows.

I'm going to fight this $68 parking violation. And I'm definitely going to employ the Roseanne Roseannadanna defense. Everyone knows someone who's a bit like Roseanne Roseannadanna: someone who begins talking about one thing and inevitably veers off track with all sorts of entertaining yet meaningless anecdotes. The gifted Gilda Radner portrayed the sweetly ridiculous character on Saturday Night Live more than 30 years ago. Perhaps I should change the name of this column to Janet Janettajanetson.

I lead a very structured life these days. Sometimes I feel like I'm the female version of the banker father on "Mary Poppins," except that I smile a lot, love my children, and generally prefer spending money to saving it. Each day I wake up at 5:40 a.m. and turn on the coffeemaker. I exit the house at precisely 6:56 a.m. to avoid the school-bus traffic jams, arriving at my office in downtown Baltimore with plenty of time to organize my day. After working, I return home and fix the scheduled dinner and cross off one or two tasks on my home to-do list before retiring.

As a sport, yoga is definitely not all about competition and progressing to a higher level, which is good, because it forces many of us to let go of our annoying tendencies to be competitive and drive ourselves to a higher level. Or so I thought. Semester by semester, I've been moving into a smug yoga zone wherein I started to believe I possessed core muscles that could support my actual body weight. Fortunately, last week I had a very Zen experience that brought me back to my center.