Lindsay Heinzen: Major Offender....

This is a hard thing to blog about but it's been on my mind the whole weekend and since i love you all and want you to feel like you know me... i'm exposing myself for who i really am. I have some irreverent friends at work (whom i love) and who i feel completely comfortable around. We're always joking about things that perhaps shouldn't be joked about like dismembering babies, the occasional penis joke (because people say things that sound like other things and so we laugh at them for the way they make them sound.... ex. from a family member "i want a nice hot juicy tube steak." (they thought that meant a hotdog.)..... So anyway, apparently, my friends and i have been offending people on a daily basis with our conversations and have made people want to leave our team or move as far from us as they can. My immediate boss pulled me over and told me all of this and i couldn't help but feel terrible. I cried and cried in her office telling her over and over how sorry i was and how i guess things just got out of hand. At the same time though, i find it annoying that people should be offended by things that were not meant to offend. Anyway... the straw that broke the camel's back was a drawing a did for a friend's birthday card. This friend is from China and he's always been really reserved until i came along and we've really bonded and he's opened up. We joke back and forth about each other's babies being stupid and the biggest joke we had was how i was going to rip his baby's head off and hold it over my head triumphantly. I know i know.. it makes no sense but we both thought it was funny. So for his birthday card, i submitted a picture i'd drawn of me with the baby (see picture above) in said position. He actually thought it would be really funny... but apparently my boss did not. She told me, in front of all of my coworkers, that it was inappropriate and that i shouldn't have done it. And that Phil's (my chinese friend) baby had been in the hospital for a week a while earlier. "But we just joked about this yesterday? We were laughing." She still wasn't amused and walked away make me feel completely stupid and helpless in front of my coworkers. WOW. I was so upset. I later talked to her and found out that she heard a GROUP of us had put the card together and she wanted EVERYONE to know that it was inappropriate.... (except that the only person involved who was there was me, the others were out of town.). It was the most awkward situation i've ever been in. I cried and cried. Everything worked out in the end and my boss was actually amazingly understanding. She just wanted to let me know though that there were a lot of people offended by my and my friend's comments because a lot of people on our team had been trying to get pregnant but could not and me making light of babies was offending them. I'm sorry. But i also feel like a baby joke is pretty funny now and then. I'm sorry if you disagree... i've just always been de-sensitized to things like this because of the way i was raised. I just didn't get it. (see poster below that my mom got me after i saw hers and wanted one)... yes... we may be weird but we are still human. I guess that's it. I know a lot of this was jumbled but that's how i feel.

a few selected close ups of scenes from the poster my mom got me.