Official Hiatus

Yeah, I know, the hiatus is the death knell, but ever since my father's hospitalization in early Feb., I've just been like, "Why bother?" And not in the "Why bother living?" kind of way, but just in the other-things-seem-more-important kind of way.

regarding marketing

Today was one of those days. Having a job in marketing, even having a job that's a couple promotions higher than your original job in marketing, is all about typing and retyping the same information in a slightly different format or order or both. Again and again. The slight difference is just enough to make it not quite worth it to try to cut and paste from some previous version of the information. Thus mistakes creep in, and this necessitates constant proofing of the same information, in slightly different format or order or both, again and again.

But I am also learning that sometimes all that is a welcome reprieve from dealing with "the mailing list," which is my current bane of existence. Our program is user-hostile, our addresses are old, our contact at the university mailing office is incompetent, and I'm brand new at dealing with it.

The good thing is that coming home is even better than usual--delicious, healthy dinner followed by awesome public library. Next up--TV. Well, I'm no angel.

The Sounds of Spring

Wednesday night, after Top Chef, we went to a little rock show, and despite our antiquity (in fact, in order to better deny it to ourselves), we didn't leave until after the last song. All told, I was pleasantly surprised and able to join Matt in mostly enjoying the show. (Hey, after the iFiddle incident, a girl's got a right to be suspicious.) For said last song, members of the audience were invited to raid a box of "pots and pans" to play on stage with the band. As long as I am not bullied into participating, I am generally okay with some small amount of tomfoolery such as this; however, one of the "pots and pans" was in fact a naked babydoll--the kind with a plastic face and plastic hands and feet but flesh-colored fabric torso and limbs. One must admit that these dolls in general are among the more horrifying, but when naked, the grotesquery is magnified. And how does one play this doll like a pot or pan? By holding the doll aloft and shaking it. It seemed no one could stand the horror, and the doll was repeatedly passed on to others before being abandoned atop the piano.

And then yesterday, we saw some music of a different sort at a folk arts festival. We learned all about the cuatro, a Venezuelan guitar-like instrument, and heard some KC jazz stories. It was also probably good for me to be reminded that Kansas City does have some cultural significance to the country at large. Compared to St. Louis, it can feel small and boring, even though we always enjoy ourselves there. However, since I don't know a lot about these kinds of music and have had little exposure to them, there came a point when even though I knew listening was good for me and good for the world, I was ready to hightail it out of there.

Counting Down

For many years, I slept with my watch on. I liked knowing what time it was, and looking at the clock radio would require perhaps lifting my head or even turning over. Looking at my watch required lifting my arm and tilting the watch face into the security lighting leaking in from the window. Eventually, I gave that up, though I still miss the convenience.

Being late--when there are consequences--makes me nervous, but that's never stopped me, really. I was late to class more often than not in college, especially to the first class of the day, however late in the day that class was. As a freshman, I was called out about being late every class meeting by a sweet teacher I really liked. It was a small class, and I felt not only embarrassed but like a bad person, and I think I tried to do better--for her. But over the next few years, I continually crept into classes about 5 or 10 minutes late, having spent the previous 20 running (and then walking, gasping for air, and then running) in the heat and intense sun. I'm sure the good students I sat next to wished I had taken my red-faced, wheezing, sweaty, insane-haired self somewhere else.

I can be on time. I have steadily made it in on time while teaching and working various retail jobs. I hardly ever miss the beginnings of movies. But when given the opportunity to stay in bed for 5 (or 10 or 45) more minutes, I will.

This methodology is in great opposition to my mother's. Throughout my childhood, we were early to everything all the time. To be just a few minutes early was as unthinkable as being late. We once got to church so early that the doors hadn't even been unlocked. I remember arriving to some awards something in high school and just sitting silently in the cafeteria with my parents for ages before any other family came in. It seemed eternal. I was wearing a white dress with flowers. Recently my mother complained to me about my sister always leaving for work twenty or thirty minutes earlier than she needs to. "From you, all right! She learned it by watching you!" I told her that I had never been "on time" for anything until after I moved away from home.

But back to my watch. The watch I used to sleep in was the one my father bought for me in the eighth grade. I had decided I needed a watch, and for a while, I got to wear his. I loved the giant face, which was as wide as my wrist. Once I even noticed a bruise on my wrist (it had a stretchy, non-adjustable band and constantly slid great lengths up and down my arm), but that did not stop me. I loved my new watch--we went to jewelry store all the way in Canton, Georgia, to buy it, and it cost more than anything I'd ever owned--but I secretly missed my father's.

I wore that same watch daily (and nightly) up until a couple of years ago. The gold had completely worn off the band years before, and it just felt like time to put it into a drawer. I had a cute watch with a bee on it that I lost in the move to Missouri, and then I bought another one here, which served me well for about a year. And then the latch began to pop open. Sometimes this meant the watch would just fall to the floor (or that sometimes I'd find it buried in the bedclothes in the morning), but mostly it meant a particular little stinging sensation on my wrist where the crook of the latch was now buried in my flesh. Then the latch began popping open with even greater frequency so that I felt I was spending a good portion of my day just reclasping it. I began having phantom latch-in-wrist-flesh pains.

I ranted and complained about the cost of the watch. I wrote in a complaint on the Dillard's website. (I got an email saying a district manager would respond, and then, total silence.) Matt suggested I take the watch into a jewelry store for repair; I insisted the watch was too cheap to be worth it. I toyed with the idea of buying a new watch.

I continued to wear the watch.

Maybe about a week ago I started taking the watch off at work. I mean, I spend all day staring at the clock on my computer, right? Why spend all day staring at one clock while another one gnashes at my wrist? Then I transitioned into just dropping the watch into my purse in the morning and never actually putting it on. (I have learned that keeping my watch on the bathroom counter as I get ready helps me to not be quite as late as I would be otherwise.) Now, the watch has been at the bottom of my purse for two or three days. I haven't been any later to work than usual, yet, and it's been strangely liberating, for example, to have no exact record for how long we were at the library last night. I even had an internal alarm clock that made me check my cell phone at 8:45 in the coffee shop (we had to be home by 9 for Top Chef, yo).

But I know that I won't be able to keep it up forever. In the end, I have to have a watch--I just want to know, even if I also know that knowledge won't push me to get to work doing the things I know I should be doing, what time it is.

once more with feeling

On Friday, probably only about a minute or two after I walked out of the building, happy to start the weekend, the Camry and I got a little gift: a smack from another car, right on the spot that must say "smack me" in car-speak because, yes, it was the same spot where the Camry had received a previous little gift of the SMACK-it's-the-middle-
of-the-night-and-you'll-never-know-who-I-am type.

So since then, I've been thinking that if I were the kind of writer who was all invested in personal essays and shit, this anecdote (probably more lyrically or grime-ily written) would be the opening to an essay about how "repeat" isn't just a button on annoying roommates' CD players, how we advertise exactly what it is we're looking for, attracting the same hurts again and again, how our wounds are magnetic, not just to us but to others. Right?

Take Three

Friday I went to the dietitian again, with some trepidation about having spent the last two months either feverish on the couch eating comfort foods or out of town in various stressful situations eating junk on the run. I decided to be honest about all that, even though I recognized that it probably would sound totally lame to call those unusual circumstances after they'd been going on for two months straight. I also felt lame about how I just couldn't handle all the counting of things, grams good and bad.

And the dietitian said that I was doing so much better than I thought I was, that all the exact guidelines on grams and numbers were "just information" and not counting requirements--and that I am a perfectionist, but whatever, right? All that beginning stuff was a real relief! But it was weird to be called a perfectionist. I mean, I know I have those desires and tendencies, but I feel like there's been so little in my life that can be quantified and that really matters in that way for such a long time that it just doesn't seem right to try to lay claim to that label anymore. I mean, sure, I wish my writing were better and better, but there's no standard of measure. And it's not like I try to do bad or sloppy work on the job, but there's only so much one can do to a form letter and so little to be gained by obsessing over it. . . .

But it was cheering to be reminded of who I used to be or who I used to be tending toward becoming or however you want to look at it.

And then we had this delicious dinner of baked chopped veggies, vaguely following a basic How to Cook Everything Vegetarian recipe. But first, while Matt was getting his lingering cold checked out at the doctor's--I had to chop the veggies! Usually, I stay as far away from our food as possible, right up to the moment it's all prepared and on my plate. Yeah, partially this is laziness and lack of familiarity (and definitely this is not a fair distribution of domestic chores). But partially it's also this scene from my childhood:

Adult: Don't you want to learn how to cook?
Child me: No.
Adult: How are you going to eat when you grow up?
Child me: I'm going to eat out all the time.
Adult: You'd better find you a rich husband.
Child me: I don't need a husband. I'm going to be rich myself!

And pretty much that's how it has been, except for the getting rich part (that was just sass).

And okay, I had no idea what to do the butternut squash. I had to look it up in the cookbook just to see which parts of it were truly edible. But I did look it up, I hacked it up with a knife, and in the end, the vegs were delicious. I had thought it could go two ways: edible or inedible (and then we'd have to go out to eat, which is never unappealing). But it was this magical, unthinkable third way: delicious! And I had been involved in its making: unthinkable!

*Note: Matt, um, don't go getting used to that or anything, okay?

And then, in a third nice food-related thing, I started reading Julie & Julia, a fun memoir recommended recently by a pal I don't get to hear much from anymore, about a depressive who's nearing thirty and the realization that she's not an actress/secretary but just a secretary (banish the horrifying, scary thought!). So she takes on French cooking. The whole cookbook. In a year. Yeah, that's not the kind of project I can get behind really, but it's the kind of project I can read about. While waiting--at a safe distance--for my next meal.

Even the Minor Characters in My Life Are Revealed to Be Fully Complex Human Beings, or Pretend I Wrote This Post in December

Okay, so a while back I wrote about a pretty disastrous first visit to a dietitian. I briefly contemplated finding another dietitian somewhere about town, but after a few long conversations with the clinic and my insurance company, I decided that since no one--not even my insurance company!--could tell me for sure if even visits to this dietitian, employed by the same university, would be covered, things would only get worse with a name pulled out of the phone book or a google search.

So, in December, the day after I returned from a long week in Talking Rock, Georgia, and began coughing with extreme cold/respiratory infection #1, I trekked back to the dietitian. I was worried, both about how my new dietary guidelines had been pretty much forgotten in the holiday and travel madness of the past month and about how the dietitian was going to make me feel like the world's most inane toddler just by her communication methodology. I managed to be honest about some things--how I'd pretty much reverted to all my old eating habits--and not so much about others--when she asked how stressed I was, I said something like, "Oh, you know the holidays, always stressful," while wondering if it was appropriate to say something like, "For the past week, I've woken panicked in the middle of the night, heart pounding, lying awake for hours thinking about how sick my mother is, how the house looks like it's falling apart, how on the brink of poverty they are and how things are only going to get worse, how I work three jobs and probably just can't work any more, how even if I could, it wouldn't be enough, how I'm panicking about the lack of money because there's no way to even pretend I can control sickness itself and how if I can't really allow myself to think about it because I won't be able to withstand it." Oh well, we admit what we can, when we can, to whom we can. I felt I had admitted enough to a stranger, really, whom I was a little scared of.

As the hour went on, however, I discovered something about my dietitian's personality--that she had one and one that wasn't so unpleasant at that. She didn't snap at me or talk to me as if I just didn't have the mental capacity to understand. She was informative and kind of funny; she encouraged me to be honest about what I could and couldn't stand to eat; she overall made me feel like I could manage this new diet, which previously I hadn't really felt like I could manage at all. It was revealed that each session is an hour, and it dawned on me that what I had seen on visit one was get-an-hour's-worth-of-info-packed-into-ten-minutes mania. Having put in some teaching time, you'd think I'd have picked up on it sooner, but alas, I am more of a have-ten-minutes-of-material-to-stretch-into-an-hour kind of teacher.

At any rate, I walked out feeling better about eating good fats and insoluble fiber and about the world in general, full of people who seem so easy to define in moments of passing acquaintance but who, of course, are just as knotty and complex as it's so easy to see I am, seeing as how I live in my own head all the time. It was good to take a peek out of there.