Ha, and I thought perimenopause was crummy!

We're "social distancing" here in Oregon. Today was the first day for me of working remotely. My office is encouraging everyone who can to work from home with no/limited in-person meetings, and Cook's office is reorganizing around staggered shifts and partial teleworking so they can all stay six feet away from each other all the time. (All the meeting rooms have been assigned quotas based on their size, so the smaller meeting rooms can now accommodate two people who sit pressed against the opposite walls.) I was supposed to go to a conference in Chicago next week, but it was cancelled. (And I was really looking forward to it.) Skipper's school trip to Japan in June has been cancelled. (Though our family trip to Japan is not cancelled- we're going to hope as long as possible that we can pull that off.) Skipper's baseball season and Duchess's ultimate frisbee season (long story) have been postponed. All my meetings have been cancelled or turned into video chats. THE LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS CLOSED.

All the stores are out of toilet paper, which briefly seemed very problematic when I thought this morning that we had only two rolls left in the house. Turned out we had an unopened box in the basement containing 36 rolls, so we'll make it a bit longer.

The kids are out of school as of today, through next week and the following week (which is spring break) and half the week after that (unless they extend it). All activities are cancelled. I'm not sure how that's going to go. Based on experience so far, Duchess will spend it lying in bed texting, and Skipper will read a bunch of books and periodically appear to ask questions like "What's communism?" or "What's a nuclear family?" or to startle me as she did this week when we were talking about COVID-19 and she said "Well, Mom, one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic" and I said "ARE YOU QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN AT ME?!?!?" and she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said "Yeah!" like that's a normal person thing.

None of us know how to prepare or what to do. Skipper had a sore throat and abdominal pain this evening - do we now all stay in the house for 14 days? Are grocery stores going to run out of food as the supply chain falters? Should I have bought more canned beans today? Is it really going to snow tonight? The future, even the immediate future, feels wildly uncertain. And yet, people are still out and about, going to work and to bars like it's normal. I met a colleague at a coffee shop this morning; he was firmly in the this-is-overblown camp, and mentioned that his 75-year-old mother who has compromised lung function is really paranoid right now and makes everybody wash their hands. Sitting there, eating an almond croissant, with people socializing cheerfully all around us, I felt crazy. (And I told him his mom is right and he should wash his damn hands.)

Anyway. I bought a puzzle and the new Hilary Mantel book. We may starve to death, and/or have to wipe our butts with rags and moss, but we're not going down without reading material.

What is this life?

I feel unmoored. Nothing has happened to make me feel this way, particularly. I think it's the cumulative effect of everything. Not only does the entire world appear to be falling (further) into chaos and tribality, and the national situation seems unsalvageable, but Oregon is flooding (better than burning? maybe...), the political left is unable to stop tearing itself apart at any level, The Good Place is over, parenting a teen is the hardest thing, and I'm looking menopause right in the eye. Also, I'm still on the downward slope of the happiness curve.

My job, building on my last job, involves talking and thinking a lot about things that have to change - we have to build more densely in our cities, and we have to get around more without cars - but that are incredibly difficult for people to imagine changing. The way humans normalize things is staggering to me, whether it's normalizing purging and dehumanizing your enemies or normalizing traveling around at speed in a mostly-empty metal box that emits air pollution (that gives us heart attacks and cancer and alzheimers and learning disabilities and HAIR LOSS), messes up the climate, and crushes to death 40,000 Americans a year.  We are capable of accommodating and rationalizing so much. And pushing on it makes me feel exhausted. I'm not naturally inclined to activism; I like being a cog, and I don't like saying things that make people scrutinize me. (I love lecturing to passive, approving audiences, though - let me know if you've got one of those needing a speaker.) However, my personal theory of What We Need to Do (which is well-supported by research - I swear I am not making this up) can come across as wildly radical to normal people. Even the most liberal people mysteriously believe in a whatever-deity-granted right to free parking for eternity. And this makes me feel kind of unhinged all the time. It's totally possible that I SOUND unhinged a lot of the time. The other day I was explaining my theory of transportation systems to a person I had just met in a professional context, and he listened to me explain that a person who takes transit instead of driving to a destination, even if they go there for the most nefarious purpose, such as murder, has made a prosocial choice of transportation, and then he said "Do you say this kind of thing in public?"

So there you go. Unhinged, unmoored. However, I just want to say, please consider driving a little less. It was 65 degrees in Antarctica today. Maybe look into how you could get involved in local upzoning efforts, or maybe some advocacy around bike infrastructure. Bumblebees are going extinct. Ask city hall to dedicate right-of-way to buses instead of car storage. I'll let you off the hook about menopause, but you should definitely take the train next time.

It's all about me, part 586

Having my youngest child turn ten feels like a personal milestone in my life. I am officially a Parent of Old Kids. Then there's Parent of Multiple Teenagers, and then there's Parent of a College-Age Kid, and then there's Parent of Adult Children. It's a different place, here, and I like it. (Except for the part where I'm going to die.)

I like that my kids do things themselves. Skipper gets away with us doing a lot more for her than Duchess has, because she gets so ragey when asked to do things that it's just easier to not ask, but even she is stepping up to the plate more, and can of course do most things in a pinch. Duchess requires almost no transportation to anything, and while she resents that her friends all get rides everywhere,* she does like the freedom of being able to take the bus all over the city on her own schedule. Having them both be able to stay home on their own is a great blessing. Having them decide to make pancakes and then make them themselves is lovely.

And I like that they are their own people. Weird, poorly behaved, selfish people, but still.

Duchess is in Canada this week, at a rowing regatta. She's experiencing the Duchess Plateau in rowing right now, and she's struggling with it. As usual, her coachability gave her early success, and she quickly rose to the top of the group of the kids she started rowing with. Now, though, her improvement has flattened out, and some of the other kids are getting better faster than she is. With that, plus the addition of new, good rowers coming from other clubs (Duchess's club is the largest and most competitive in the area), Duchess actually got demoted to a worse boat last week. She was very, very, very upset. It's an interesting moment - I'm not sure if her enjoyment of the sport and of her friends is enough to push her through the discomfort. I thought that when you rowed, you competed at the beginning of the season, got placed in a boat, and rowed with that boat all season. That's not the case at all; you're continually competing with others to protect your place and try to displace the next person in the ranks. She's a sensitive person, and external judgement is very important to her, so this constant evaluation is hard on her, even when she's moving up or holding fast. When she's moving DOWN, it's very hard. And she's also not temperamentally inclined to voluntarily and on her own do the kind of extra work it would take to improve her outcomes. Cook and I are watching with interest - we have no idea if she'll quit and move on to other activities, or if she'll keep doing it and keep being tormented (this is definitely the worst outcome for the rest of the family, since Duchess does NOT suffer in silence), or if she'll keep doing it and develop a reasonable coping strategy. Or if she'll suddenly, magically turn into the kind of person who does extra work on her own. Or if she'll become the largest coxwain in the rowing world. Stay tuned!

I keep interviewing for jobs and not being hired for them. (I actually bought a blazer for my last interview!) I'm trying to learn how to brag more and also blather less, which are both difficult for me. I find that am a self-deprecating but also somehow self-centered windbag, which is a weird combination, and not great for convincing people to hire you.



*This makes me bonkers. Our neighbors drive the .75 miles to the local grocery store, and 1.2 miles to their kids' school. If people can't even manage walking or biking those trips on quiet streets with sidewalks, climate change seems completely unsolveable. 

Impostor/author

I struggle to accurately understand my own accomplishments in a lot of fields. Sometimes I feel like I'm amazingly good and other times I feel like I don't even deserve to be in the room where this work is being done. I am given to understand that the second part of this, impostor syndrome, is common for people who might be considered under-represented, and that women often struggle with it. I don't know why my experience of it alternates with delusions of grandeur, though.

The impostor syndrome side of this really shows up when I'm looking for work. I'm 42, and I still am clicking on entry-level jobs. My coworkers are encouraging me to apply for higher level jobs, managing projects or programs, and I am constantly surprised by this.

Last night I dreamed that a woman who was some sort of semi-famous lifestyle coach invited me to speak about my book at a lecture series. I said "sure, why not!?" and then when I arrived at the venue and was waiting in the wings, prepared to just kind of talk off the cuff,* it occurred to me that I wasn't sure I had actually written a book. I tried to remember, and the first thing I considered was that I couldn't remember getting any royalty checks. Or, you know, actually doing the work of WRITING A BOOK. And then I picked up a copy of the book, and flipped through it, and I started to realize that no, I definitely had not written this book.** I started thinking about how I was going to solve this problem, and then, fortunately, I woke up.




*This actually makes some sense. I'm usually happy to talk off the cuff in public, in spite of my anxiety and mediocre social skills. 
** It was titled "Life is Good," which definitely should have immediately tipped me off that I didn't write it.

Um, hi.

A coworker recently gave me this card. It felt apropos.



















Work is crazy right now; due to pending layoffs at a different department, we are likely to see a bunch of "bumping" through the union contract, which allows people who are laid off to bump out other people with the same job classification and less seniority. (Not bump OFF, just bump.) I am exceedingly likely to get bumped, due to having only a few months of seniority in this represented position. I'm pretty resigned to it, because my bleak worldview generally gives me a helpful perspective on this sort of thing. (I AM dreading being unemployed again, but at least I'll get unemployment benefits for a while, and we're financially okay.) However, the uncertainty and the anxiety of the people around me at work is making me anxious. I did have a big surge of anxiety before I learned more details, because I was afraid my boss was just going to show up at my desk without warning and escort me to the door, which seemed awful.* I have since been reassured that I will get at least a little advance notice, so I feel generally better about everything. I haven't even been eating very many cookies.

What else? Not much. It's raining. The girls have been spending their clothing allowances. To my disappointment, Skipper did NOT purchase this furry thing.

























* Cook suggested I bring a boombox to work, cued up to play some kind of triumphant song, and just press "play" when I was escorted to the door, so I could leave in a blaze of glory. I found some comfort in this idea, but I'm still much happier with a quiet advance notice. I'm really more of a sneak-out-under-the-radar kind of a person.

updates

1) I had two days at work last week that did not meet my new baseline for a successful day. One of my coworkers offered today to teach me a few exercises she learned "from a local shaman" to help me shield myself from negativity emanating from other people. I enthusiastically took her up on it. At this point, any kind of shielding - magical, physical, psychological, hypnotic, technological, imaginary, placebo, cardboard box, whatever - is something I will try. We scheduled a training session for tomorrow (right before I have to go talk with some people I really need to be shielded from). I'll let you know if it works.
2) I am continuing to Eat Less. I consequently weigh less. (I suspect that my commitment to this campaign is due to the fact that I desperately need a successful project in my life to balance my increasingly awful projects at work.) Turns out that I don't actually need to eat anywhere near as much as I thought I did in order to function perfectly well. I don't know where this knowledge is going to take me, but it's probably a good thing to know.
3) I am bullying everybody in the house into an ongoing pseudo/lite-KonMari tidying process, one small category at a time. Next weekend, stuffed animals!
4) Skipper has a piano recital coming up.
5) Duchess meets every stereotype of adolescence that you could possibly imagine. Surly? Check. Sulky? Check. Sleeps late? Check. Really wants a phone? Check. Et cetera.

6) Skipper lost another tooth.

Report

So... I should say something here, right?

Hm. Everything's fine. We're here. We're alive.

We're having a large wooden fence built between us and our crummy neighbors,* probably marking the completion of our transition into the world of smug upper-middle-class homeowners.

The kids are fine. Weird and mean, but fine.

My new baseline for work: a day in which I don't cry in front of other people at work** is a successful day! (I'm going to make a poster.) Today was a successful day.

Cook has not cried at work ever. As far as I know...

Eating Less continues, and continues to take up all my remaining energy after work and family.

Skipper had lice again. I think they're gone now.

Duchess is so excited for middle school. SO EXCITED, you guys. She's struggling to decide on which afterschool club she wants to do - Magic cards club, or Math/Engineering/Science club.

That's all. I hope you all have successful days!

*Not the gun-selling, broken-car-collecting libertarians, who have been ideal neighbors from Day One - the other ones. The ones who are outside smoking and swearing and talking about boring things ALL THE TIME. 
** Weeping softly alone in a bathroom stall doesn't count.

Oh, hi! You may have thought I was dead. I'm not. I've been busy doing things like unsubscribing from email lists, trying to clear out my email inbox, listening to a backlog of podcasts, etc. You know, end-of-the-year kind of stuff.

Also, I've decided that I should probably look for work in a field where my work is not subject to criticism from people beyond the basic circle of my coworkers. It turns out that I do not like being criticized by lots of strangers. (Not that I'm good at handling criticism from anybody; it's a major flaw of mine.) I take it far too seriously, and it makes me feel awful and I pretty much want to lie under my desk and cry, and then pretend it all never happened. Also, I want to punch the people who are criticizing me, but of course I don't. It's all a very Skipper-like response.

It has been raining steadily for weeks - flooding and general misery abounds. I know that you think that it rains all the time in Portland, but it actually doesn't, really - we typically get a lot of grey and frequent but not very heavy rain. Not only has it been relentlessly grey (the sun came out for about an hour this afternoon, and I think it was the first time in at least ten days), but there's just been A Lot Of Rain. I biked to a dental appointment in a tremendous downpour last Monday, and I arrived (after adventures including at one point having to carry my bike up a brambly bank to avoid a sidewalk-and-street-swamping lake) completely drenched, dripping all over everything. The receptionist offered me a blanket. All our clothes are wet, all our shoes are wet, and the umbrellas drip on the floor of the mudroom all the time. It's like we live in a submarine.

However, everything is basically fine. Some lists.

Skipper's roster of Clothes She Is Willing To Wear:
- four pairs of pants
- four shirts
- one fleece jacket
- one raincoat
- three pairs of socks
- one pair of sneakers
- one hooded sweatshirt

What Duchess is Reading (all at once):
Navigating Early
The Two Towers*
All Creatures Great and Small

What Skipper is Reading (and LOVES):
Harriet the Spy

What Cook is Reading:
Barbarian Days

What I am Reading:
If You Only Knew**
All your awesome holiday cards. Thank you!

Hey, NPR has the 2015 version of the Book Concierge up! (The girls recommend Interstellar Cinderella, by the way.)

That's all I've got. I have to get back to unsubscribing to things.


*She picked up the trilogy again because she really wants to watch the movies, and Cook is holding firm on his Book Before Movie rule, but then she got sucked in. It's fun to see.
**This is a romance of the sort that you would probably never read, and while I read lots of crappy romances, this is pretty good stuff. I recommend it, should you be inclined the romance way.

Agency

I am still alive! Everything is fine. No big news. I've been busy, and distracted by other forms of navel-gazing.

First, news of the kids:

• Skipper can read. 
• Duchess is currently pretty much delighted all the time (except for breaks for door-slamming tantrums) right now. She's got a potpourri of good stuff going on.
• Her "Battle of the Books" team is doing very well and providing a lot of really joyful socializing (which was very timely, as she had been very sad for a few weeks about her lack of friends) at her team's "practices." 
• She has been hanging out more with her best kung fu friend, which makes her also feel much better about her social life in general.
• She and her best kung fu friend are officially starting to prepare for their next big promotion.
• She's been getting more playdate invitations lately, from unexpected quarters, mostly from boys. I think she may be the practice Girl for many of the boys in her grade, as her temperament (flexible, enthusiastic) and her activity choices (electronics, frisbee, basketball, running club) have made her the girl that most of them know the best, and as they look ahead and realize that they are going to have to start having actual human relationships with the girls they know, Duchess seems like the easiest entree. I am crossing my fingers that being the practice Girl will turn out well for her. 
• Skipper is angry a lot lately, and blames everything on everybody else. We're weighing whether we want to try to figure out a therapy route or just wait and see how it goes. Being a rage monster seems like a bad strategy for life, but therapy seems like a big, time-and-money-consuming step that may or may not be helpful. 
• We've all been sick this week, with some kind of cold/flu thing.
• We busted out the extra twin bed, so now the girls have three beds in their room. Duchess sleeps in the twin bed (which she fills alarmingly full - it won't be long before we have to invest in an extra-long bed) and Skipper has moved to the upper bunk of the bunk bed. This means that Skipper no longer gets a parent lying down with her at bedtime, which is kind of a big change. It has gone very smoothly, and she is very pleased with her new sophistication. Duchess is also pleased with what she feels is her new sophistication (a bed of her OWN!), and they're both excited to host sleepover guests in the empty bottom bunk.

News of the adults:

• Cook decided he needed a project, and is accumulating the parts he needs to build himself a bike, which is pretty cool. 
• I've made self-improvement my project, and have added a daily half hour of exercise to my life, which is also cool. The main reason I kicked off my project is that lately I've been feeling like I had a little more agency in my life, and this seemed like an important way to deploy that agency.

Talking to a friend last fall about the experience of being unemployed, under-employed, and tenuously-employed  (not to mention employed with an abusive boss who considered me to be useless), I realized fully for the first time how destructive that has been for me. It left me feeling like I could not change anything about myself or my environment, like I was an inert, useless person to whom things just happen willy-nilly.*

Having now been employed for nine months at work at which I am successful and where I am appreciated and welcomed by people I respect, I think that I have been slowly rebuilding my feeling that I am NOT actually a useless failure of a person. I'm at the point now where I feel like maybe I can make small gestures at changing things in my life that aren't working well.**

I'm not going to write about my exercise program here, because I am well aware of how incredibly tedious that is.*** I will say, though, that starting an exercise program at my current advanced age is really different, and much less rewarding than starting an exercise program 14 years ago, so it's requiring every bit of that feeling of agency. Further behavior change will have to wait until my confidence is bolstered more.


*Weirdly, the symbolic representation of this helplessness for me is my teeth. The last year has been an ongoing misery of fillings for me, along with dire warnings of future misery to come. I have tried to do everything I have been told might help, but the cavities keep coming, and I don't see a way to make them stop.

**Even more weirdly, the symbolic representation that started making me feel like maybe I can change things is that I've been doing self-care for blepharitis.  This involves putting a warm washcloth on my eyelids, and then wiping my eyelashes, so it's not exactly the most empowering or exciting lifestyle change, but it is a thing I can do that actually improves something about my moment-to-moment life. That's kind of powerful.

*** Yes, even more tedious than keeping an unremarkable blog about one's unremarkable parenting of unremarkable (but much-loved) children. 

Tips for the Fat Lazy Bike Commuter

Now that I've been bike commuting an 8-mile round trip almost every day for a few months now, I feel qualified to make some recommendations to others like me, who are neither fit nor fearless. Here is what I have learned.
1) Wear clothes that wick, especially for your underlayers. I'm usually a natural fibers sort of person, and I do not perform any activities that have led me to think that I might need "technical" underpants. I guarantee that nobody in Patagonia's design or marketing departments has me in mind as they do their work. However, I have learned that sitting around all day in sweaty clothing is crummy, and apparently "technical" means "hey, your clothes don't have to STAY sweaty!" So unless you're bringing a complete change of clothes, I highly recommend some nice synthetic wicking fibers.
2) Find a good place to change. I do not recommend my own changing spot, a humid, stuffy public restroom where homeless people also go to change. Ventilation would be nice.
3) Take it slow. Stop for pedestrians. Chat with other slow bicyclists and pedestrians. (You're going too slow to chat with anybody else.) Notice the scenery. Is that a bird singing? Isn't this nice?
4) Wear antiperspirant, even though it's a little disturbing, and definitely doesn't go with your philosophy about what people should put on their skin. I am already continually in danger of violating of cubicle-world etiquette because I have a very hard time not blurting out whatever I think to the person who happens to be nearest me, and I do not need to give my cubicle neighbors another reason to request a seating re-assignment.
5) Wear your boots. They're still the best.

Brief check-in

We're almost through the week! Skipper has enjoyed some elements of her camp experience, and definitely NOT enjoyed others. Today she went on a field trip and refused to participate in any of the activities. But she went! Small steps. She's been very clingy, and mostly just wants to cuddle when she's got a parent at her disposal. Skipper's happiest when her world is rock-solid, and having her daily routine changing every week is really screwing with her sense of stability, so she feels very vulnerable. She's powering through, though. She's learned some dance routines and martial arts routines at camp, and she really likes those. She puts on her hand-me-down taekwondo outfit after camp and punches and kicks very seriously.

Duchess has loved robotics camp. She is one of two girls out of the twelve kids participating, but four of the boys are classmates of hers from school, and she likes three of them, so she's pretty comfortable. They play games like "Secret Circuit," which is apparently great fun. AND they're going to have root beer floats and watch "Spirited Away" tomorrow, which is even greater fun. (The kids at this camp are the sort of kids who spend time arguing over whether they should watch a Harry Potter movie or a Hayao Miyazaki movie. As I guess you would expect from a robotics camp.)

Duchess is still swimming, before camp, and enjoying it a lot. I think she may be at the highest fitness level of her life right now, having spent the last five weeks doing 7-10 hours of fairly intense aerobic activity (swimming, kung fu, gymnastics, and ballet) a week. Between camp and swimming, though, she's very much missing loafing-on-the-couch time, so she burrows into it whenever she can.

And Cook and I are staggering through our days. Cook has a bunch of work projects he's mightily struggling to wrap up before vacation, and I have a big work surge next week  We're mostly just adjusting as best we can to having both of us working full-time - staying up late washing dishes and putting together lunches, and trying not to forget anything as we rush out the door in the morning. There's a chance my job (currently scheduled to end in October) might lead to permanent full-time employment, in which case we'll have to get a slow cooker and come up with some better strategies.

Positive feedback

Hey, you know what it turns out I've been starved for? Being praised. In the last week or so, I've had several people tell me I've done well at various tasks at my new job, and thank me for my work. These were not important tasks, and while I did them well, I did nothing exceptional, and yet people THANKED me for them! And they were genuinely pleased with me!

I can't even tell you how good that feels. I'm pretty sure I've gotten more positive feedback in the last week than I had in the preceding five years, total. It has an astonishing motivating effect; I'm so delighted to get praise, like a golden retriever, that I'll go the extra mile for people who are nice to me, and fetch any grubby tennis ball you want. I think employers who are considering employing people who have been unemployed for a while should know about this effect.

Yikes

Holy cow - it's hard having a job! I spent the day digging myself partway out from under a pile of urgent to-dos, and fielding several drop-in visitors with whom I had to meet. I have to pick up Skipper at 2:15 at her school, a 8-minute bike ride from my (temporary) office. I said goodbye to my second drop-in visitor and looked at the clock, which read 2:14. I raced over there, and caught her before she made The Walk of Shame to the office, but she was the last kid there. She was not pleased.

But it's interesting, and my mind is working again! Hurrah!

Small news items

1) The strike was called off! Hurray!
2) I have a (part-time, short-term) job! Hurray! The gig is relevant to my education, pays okay (I will earn enough, though just barely, to pay off Skipper's preschool tuition for the school year, which is a great relief to me), is located nearby, and offers fairly convenient hours. Double Hurray!

It's a full-time job.

Recently, Skipper told me that she's not going to have a job when she grows up. "I don't really want to work, Mom. I'm just going to be a liver, like you."

Updates

1) Cook has been using his new standing desk at work for three days now (including a 12-hour day and a 10-hour day). He says so far he has noticed only that "it's a lot of standing." Considering that he commutes to work by bike, I think he's gone as far as he can go to reduce the health impact of his job without buying himself a treadmill desk.

2) We've been eating a lot of cucumbers.  We have one very productive cucumber plant, and we just were gifted 10 pounds of pickling cucumbers.75% of us love cucumbers vinaigrette, and 100% of us love pickles, so we're going to make a lot of that. I refuse to can anything, so it's all going to have to get eaten in the next week or so... got any good recipes?

3) I got rejected from the one job I applied for this summer. I hadn't really expected to get an interview (though I truly am qualified for the job, and it looked like it would be a really good fit), but I found myself crushed by the rejection email anyway. It totally destroyed my cheery summer mood, making me realize how much of that cheeriness was built on air - one rejection put me right back where I was when I decided to take a break from applications. Where I was, in case you forget, is a place that is unpleasantly redolent of hopelessness and self-loathing. I would prefer not to stay.

Oh well.

4) Duchess has decided that she would like to be an architect focusing on sustainability when she grows up. I don't think she has much grasp on what that would entail. I have the impression that she's thinking she will build houses for wildlife. I wonder if I can find an architect in Portland who'd be interested in having an 8-year-old do a job shadow.

5) We (okay, the girls and I) have achieved Max Fun for the summer. The girls had so much fun at the amusement park yesterday, which, when piled on top of all the other exceedingly fun things they've done this summer (Duchess went to Disneyland again, even), seems crazy decadent.* I'm not sure if we can top this, but we've still got a much-anticipated week at sleepaway camp** for Duchess and between one and three camping trips. That's a lot of fun still to come. The hair-shirt part of me warns darkly that we're setting the fun bar way too high...

6) Back-to-school shopping has been completed, except for the two reams of copy paper and the $25 check. I don't remember if schools ever provided any of this stuff, or if families have always provided all the materials. We certainly supply all the materials Duchess uses over the year (and then some), including tissues and bandaids, and sticky notes and permanent markers for the teacher to use. This year, Duchess is not required to have paint, which to me suggests that there will be even less art in her life. I splurged and bought her a pack of mechanical pencils, which seem to make her feel extremely competent and grown-up.

That's the news. I leave you with one more photo from our California trip.

*I am coming to terms with the basic conflict of my personality, which is more or less divided evenly between self-indulgent hedonism and self-punitive martyrdom. My brain is lying on a couch, wearing a hair shirt, calling for more dancing girls and wine.
** With a "marine ecology" theme!

The future

Lately, between hopelessly submitting job applications, volunteering too much, not cleaning enough, and watching bad TV, somehow I keep finding myself reading articles about the new economy, in which adults need to be continually reinventing themselves, connecting with new people, learning new skills, switching jobs, etc. It's all so... dynamic. I am feeling the opposite of dynamic. I don't WANT to be dynamic.  I don't want to have to be selling myself on twitter and tumblr and foursquare and a million things I've never heard of just to participate in society. I don't want to be continually networking. I just want a steady job that I don't hate, and that pays more than the cost of childcare.* And I want to be able to retire before I die. (Assuming that is, that I ever get a job again. I may already be retired. Mission accomplished!)

This vision of an entrepreneurial world in which everybody is nimbly working the angles and positioning themselves for the next big thing  - I don't know, it sounds to me like a 20-year-old's** vision of a great place. People get damaged and set back all the time, and people are sometimes stupid and often stodgy. There has to be space for the cautious, the late adopters, the damaged, the sensitive - the rest of us. (Or maybe not!)  I'm having a hard time imagining what the world is going to look like in ten years, or fifteen,***** and I'm often afraid that it's just going to run over me and/or people I love.

On the other hand, the lesson I know I should have learned by now is to take things one day at a time. It has to be enough to be alive now, to be safe and warm and (mostly) clean, to know that we are secure, to have friends and family who will back us up when we need them. The kids are very effective at bringing me back to the immediate moment, with their demands and their dramas. This morning, for example, there was a big drama about a blister. I'd like to keep things in a state where a blister can be a big drama.


*If I had guaranteed access to cheap, good childcare, I would feel a lot more entrepreneurial. (Or at least as entrepreneurial as I am capable of feeling, which honestly isn't very.) Republicans, are you listening? Give me universal single-payer healthcare and decent affordable childcare, and I promise you I'll start a business. 
**Not me when I was 20, though, because even though I was oblivious, I wasn't nimble or entrepreneurial even then.
*** This also ties in to my ongoing perplexity about what skills and tools the girls need to acquire now to prepare for their adulthoods. Computer engineering? Hand-to-hand combat? Beekeeping? Robotics? Construction? Negotiation? Aeronautics? Sharpshooting? Beats the hell out of me. I am, however, almost 100% sure that it's not going to be musical theater, which is what Duchess is interested in at the moment. 

Holidays

So! The kids are on break, officially. And I am leaving my job after this Tuesday. THIS TUESDAY. So I will also be on break, indefinitely. I feel great about this, in many ways, enormously relieved. In other ways, I'm feeling terrified. My biggest immediate issue is that I really, really, really don't want to take the kids out of childcare, because if I then get a job, they won't be able to get back in to their programs. Skipper confessed the other day that she likes everything about her preschool, except for one kid who hits her. I don't want to take her out of there. Duchess loves kung fu more than anything else in her day (and she loves pretty much everything in her days), and I don't want to take her out of there, either. We'll go on as we are for a little while, and then retrench. Essentially, I need a job in order to keep my kids in childcare.

My biggest long-term issue is my deep fear that I will never find another job. I'm going to try to ignore that for a few weeks, long enough to eat a lot of cookies, watch the kids revel in Christmas, and enjoy the tremendous pleasure of listening to Cook and Duchess play holiday songs on the piano. Life is sweet.

Bad babysitter

Today I'm off work, and in charge of Duchess, Spruce, and O Blond. They're happily playing Playmobil in the basement (thanks again for the loan, Rock Star Uncle!), and I'm catching up on lots of minor things I have to and want to do. I've been reading the NY Times, for one thing, and look! I found an article that gave me a new way to think about the "skills gap" and labor, employment, education, and job training in the United States!

Yesterday Duchess attended a "winter survival, stealth, and archery" camp. They were outdoors most of the time, and it rained relentlessly the entire time, but apparently she had fun,* and she's very excited about archery now and wants to do the "Archery Apprenticeship" program they offer

*While I can't think of a single time that Duchess has not enjoyed a day camp or class of any kind, I was concerned that the weather, and the jury-rigged weather-appropriate outfit we put together for her, might make for a milestone disappointment. It didn't. It might actually take adolescence to kill Duchess's joy in stuff like that.

Brainwashing, phase 1

1. Duchess is taking a lego physics class on Sundays. She and her friend Spruce are the only girls in the 10-kid class. She complained on the first day that the boys only want to talk about "...stuff that's boring to me! All they want to talk about is the Millenium Falcon!"
2. Duchess is doing an "All About Me" presentation in class next week,* and has a big poster template to fill out. Under "When I grow up, I would like to be..." she wrote "engineer or architect"**

* Her teacher uses these one-time, 30-minute presentations in place of show and tell, and has scheduled them to correspond as closely as possible with each kid's birthday. Duchess, FYI, will turn eight next Friday.  Does that make you feel old?
**I believe this enthusiasm is directly related to my telling her that she should give any career that interests her a shot, but she should bear in mind that some careers (acting) are less likely to be lucrative than other careers (engineering). Duchess would prefer to be rich in the future.