Tag: Life

Humor, Life, Work

There Is No Winding Down

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
― Leonard Bernstein

Three weeks from today will be my first day in nearly five years that I don’t have a full time job. Getting there is equal parts exhausting and frustrating, but strangely not in the least terrifying. I thought I would feel more panic or at least fright about the future, but there’s none of that.

The legal team at J.’s future employment has started the ball rolling for our visas.

We have short term housing worked out.

J. has a current job.

I’m getting braver by the day about diving back into freelancing.

Stress-ZebraStripesAll good things! No, the trouble is not the future, it’s (as it often is) the present. Getting from here to there. The proverbial now.

My trainee is still struggling mightily and there is so much out of my control when it comes to her training. I can’t force people to hold certifications to suit her time frame, I can’t even always get her to commit to the training time I want. I had to arm wrestle with administration to get what I have now, and the whole experience has been an lesson in a lot of energy expended for very little thanks. I may have to post about that next.

Training itself is challenging, and not just because my trainee has very poor retention! She constantly makes little mistakes and errors – from typos to major data storage snafus – that she does not catch herself. I fear even running to the vending machines now because I’ve come back to find her giving a patron majorly incorrect information, and once stopped her from disseminating highly confidential paperwork. She requires constant supervision. Lest you think I’m being too hard on her, these are things she should already have experience with as a dispatcher, it’s not new aspects to her job at all. I can see why they are trying to find her a new position, but I’m surprised they think giving her mine is a way to minimize damage.

It is the end of my semester and my supervisor is truly swamped with trying to get her assignments completed, and so she is not as available for me to address concerns with her. It’s not her fault, but the business culture of my office is (unfortunately) rather dog eat dog and I honestly worry about being blamed for my trainee’s lack of knowledge once I’m gone and no longer able to respond to such criticism. That sort of thing has happened to others in the past and I’m anxious to avoid being another casualty of it.

My new 6:30am drop off time is seriously hurting. I’m in a perpetual state of nearly-but-not-quite sick and due to the way schedules fall out we often don’t get home until after 6 or 7pm at night. At which time we need to cook, clean, and run any number of other errands. Last night I didn’t get dinner on the stove until nearly 9pm – the hour I wanted to be in bed. Speaking of dinner, a diet of pizza and cereal because we have not been able to make it to a grocery store during normal business hours isn’t helping. Dinner was a heavy duty vegetable minestrone to combat fears of scurvy!

Three weeks from today is going to be a good morning! The next 20 days are going to be stressful in the extreme. Perk me up, kittens, bring me your offerings of humorous tidbits, words of wisdom, or even commiseration as I do battle with elusive retailers for the MP and rewrite another section of my manual for my trainee!

Humor, Life, Work

The Monday-est of Mondays

“Monday is a lame way to spend 1/7 of your life.”
– Author Unknown

Weekend was a blur of family photos, a bit of local activism, and many dinners. For the first time in memory, Sunday dinner at my godparents spread out over three tables (plus one for the kids)! All wonderful but not exactly relaxing. Hence when I stumbled through the office doors this morning at that hated time 6:30am, I didn’t even try to force wakefullness; I just set another alarm and fell haphazardly onto the loan sofa in the department. I awoke an hour later covered in some sort of sofa-fuzz that needed a lint roller to resolve, but refreshed and ready to start the day.

Until our housing management company called and said our previous managers did not properly transfer our deposit so they have no record of our prepayment of this month’s rent. Currently, we’re tracking down four year old bank account information to prove ourselves and liking our former managers less and less by the minute (although to be fair we like the new ones quite a bit. We just wish they’d been our managers to start with as I imagine if they had been we would not currently be having these issues). I spent lunch wheedling information out of some people who did not want to give it to me and chasing information up phone trees like a metaphoric cat. And my trainee forgot every single thing I taught her on Thursday – plus she’s taking two days off next week which is two days of training she won’t get and desperately needs, since I only have 16 days left.

Mondays. I do not recommend them. Pizza for (a late) dinner, I think. Onward.

Humor, Life, Work

Adapt or Die (Good grief, another serious one…)
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Trust. They seldom spent the energy to made busts in the ancient world of people who didn't know what they were talking about. Except Caligula - he was cracked. (via)
Trust. They seldom spent the energy to make busts in the ancient world of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Except Caligula – he was cracked. (via)

I’ve been watching a parable in motion the last little while, minions, and the results of pondering on it have been varied.

I’m training my replacement at work.  She is a very kind, good natured woman who loves her dogs and is a bit too generous to unappreciative family members.  But she is getting old and is increasingly unable to do the job she has now, and the department (in an effort to care for its people) wants to shift her somewhere else without letting her go.  It’s a very noble idea and I admire the sentiment behind it, but the application of it has been really frustrating to adapt to.  Because, though she is a lovely woman, she lacks some basic work skills that people take for granted these days.  I thought I would have to train her on responding to media requests, it turns out I’m teaching her how to cut and paste in electronic documents.

It’s uphill work and sometimes I get frustrated with her lack of focus and memory retention (she is older and not in excellent health), but working with her has been an insight into how I must look coming out of survivalist mode and into a new professional landscape.  Here’s the problem I (and a few other friends I’ve talked to about this) am facing.  I’m ambitious, I want to work hard, and I want to learn new skills.  But I’m mediocre.

I’m not talking about personality or aptitude (although that may be a conversation to be had when my ego is less fragile), I mean that I am indistinguishable in many ways from a lot of other workers.

I work at a university, and every year the incoming class of freshman – though admittedly growing, in my opinion, more loutish every year – have skills that I don’t have.  For the purposes of creating and marketing content, there are more ways now than there were when I graduated less than a handful of years ago.  These kids understand them almost intuitively because they make up the world they move and operate in.  I was born before the internet, the nephews and nieces we visited this evening have known how to operate smartphones since the could scoot haphazardly across the floor.  Frankly that same dubious personality and aptitude might be my best selling points currently, because looking over the skills and resumes of friends (to say nothing of these freshmen)…I have got catching up to do!

When I say I’ve been in survivalist mode, I mean it.  An entry level job where I have been able to gain some work skills, but precious few for the industry I want to work in, and even fewer local opportunities to pursue them elsewhere.  There was no other work to be had when I graduated, and within two months of my graduation work got even harder to find.  I was lucky I had the ability to put food in my mouth, so I hunkered down and focused on surviving – I’m only in retrospect realizing how stressed and scary it’s been, just surviving.  I see how people get stuck doing it.  I’ve always believed that to lever yourself up out of anything, poverty, ignorance, or bad circumstance, required a foothold of some kind, something to push yourself off of.  I believe that now more than ever because I’ve been living without a foothold for a long time (with a good education even) and it’s rough.  It’s limiting.  It doesn’t allow you to pay enough attention to peripheral developments that can help you.

That’s what happened to my trainee.  She learned how to do one thing and one thing only.  In the meantime things developed (like email and word processors) and she was so busy surviving on her one skill that now she can no longer do it, the road to learning to do something else is a hundred times more challenging for everyone involved.

Moral of the story: never quit adapting, minions.  Mediocrity is optional.

To that end I’m reaching out to friends and acquaintances I admire who can help point me in the direction to gain skills I lack.  I’m using every interaction I have for the MP to try and learn something useful and use it to be more effective.  I am trying to remember how to be creative and more proactive after a few years of monotony and prescription.  I’m trying (and gah, the sentimentality of this hurts physically to type) to be more optimistic and brave than I’ve needed to be for a long time.  It feels a bit scary and uncomfortable, to be honest, like stretching muscles and parts that have atrophied when I wasn’t looking.  I’m not special at all, and that’s okay.  It just needs to be remedied.

Alright, that’s it!  Everyone out of the confessional!  Er, unless you have some wise words or musings to add in which case let’s just quietly snag those wafers and wine to munch on and slip back in to chat.

Angst, Humor, Life, Money

Late Night Musings After a Trip to the Bank Instead of Yoga

“While I don’t believe that money guarantees happiness, I know it helps. Because money can buy you the freedom to live life 100% on your own terms.”
– Brian Tracy

I’m loathe to confess this, ducklings, but it’s the truth: I’m a walking cliche.  Money concerns have stressed me out over the past year and a half, and it’s probably made me a bit less good humored.  Winding down my first Real Live Grownup job is contributing somewhat to that stress.  I know it’s the right time to leave, J. has a signed contract to start a new position in mere months, we’re not going to starve and we’ve planned pretty wisely for it, but the truth is I’m a bit freaked out.

Getting our student loans for J.’s graduate degree and then immediately turning around and paying it to a school was a whiplash inducing experience: I’d never personally handled that much money in my life and in a matter of weeks it came and went.  Our usual expenses became much more tightly managed with those loan payments every month.  We’ve streamlined and budgeted and still almost every penny is spoken for each paycheck.  It’s a satisfactory but not very reassuring state.

Here’s the thing – we’re good with money.  Really!  I put 10% of each paycheck into savings without exception, I pay into my 401k and have made smart choices in managing it, we take care of our property for reselling when it becomes necessary, and we’re not extravagant.  J. and I both operate under the frugality now, security later mentality; we believe in delayed gratification.  But money and its management have gotten a lot more complex over the last few years and frankly I now understand why my parents (who were not wealthy but were very comfortable when I was growing up) were always talking about it and making financial adjustments and budgets.  It doesn’t matter how good you are with it, I think money is terrifying, especially when you don’t make much.

And I don’t.  Part of the reason I feel it’s the right time for me to try and move on is because I don’t think I’m paid enough – which feels weird to write.  I spent the first couple years of my job just thankful to have it, but I’ve watched duties and responsibilities add up without review of what those jobs are actually worth and it’s been frustrating.  The university doesn’t do merit based wage increases and the opportunities for raises are almost nonexistent.  My boss actually told me at my last annual review a month or so ago that if I were staying they probably would have had HR come in and complete an inquiry to see if my salary should be raised.   Which is nice to hear, but would have been nicer a year ago when my duties were upped significantly after Hennessy quit.  I know that I’ll probably start whatever job I take next at a much lower rate than what I currently have (which, I promise, is saying something), but I’ll be willing if I have the option of merit based raises, especially since I expect to start at a bottom rung wherever I get a foot in the door and am willing to work hard to move up.

I graduated just before the financial meltdown, I got a job literally just as Lehman Brothers collapsed and when faced with the pretty terrifying prospect of joining my friends and associates in parents’ basements or collecting unemployment, I chose safety and stayed where I was.  Probably longer than I should have, if I’m honest.  Nowadays I’m ready for a bit more risk.

A few financial boons have eased the nervousness somewhat as we plan our escape and next stage.  Dad found an old bond in my name that I can collect on (after completing the task of tracking down who holds it now since the companies and ownership have transferred quite a bit, especially since the Recession hit).  That baby is going straight towards loans and savings!  J. picks up odd jobs where he can and assisted writing an article for a business magazine which brought in some extra income.  We’re not starving – if I’m objective and rational we are a long ways off from it.

But.  If the last four years have taught me anything, watching my grandparents’ retirement vanish practically overnight with the financial collapse, feeling my financial obligations grown disproportionately to my income, working on the MP and seeing how hard hit some professions in particular have been by the new financial reality…it’s that I know exactly how quickly monetary security can go away.  I think I’ve become just a little more paranoid.

Weigh in, minions, and be honest!  Have financial concerns taken on a different hue to you because of external forces?  What have the past couple of years looked like for the Minion Coterie?  Do money and financial planning cause you stress, even when you’re good at it?  Am I unnecessarily paranoid – or is this worry common?  Talk to me, I’m really interested in a broad perspective here.

PS – As a further effort to cut expenses I just made my last want-based purchase for the entirety of 2013.  Hold me to it, minions, if I breathe a word about shopping in anything but hypothetical terms before Christmas, strike me down!

Humor, Life

Things You Might Not Know About Me

“I am not convinced that one ever knows quite enough to come down with a full condemnation.”
– Julian Fellowes, Snobs

Who Are You
via

I’ve had a surprising amount of recent encounters with people that ended with, “I didn’t think you’d be into that,” or some such variation (although for heaven’s sake, nothing sinister or scandalous!).  Even friends and coworkers with whom I’ve spent cumulative years in close proximity.  And it got me thinking about how readily all of us form ideas about even our close friends and how even lifelong mates can surprise us.  So here’s a few facts to add some nuance:

I really like science fiction.  Don’t let the pearls fool you.  I admit I’m not entirely up on the canon or all the great authors, but I genuinely enjoy the genre – for the same reason, as it happens, that I enjoy history.  Human nature and the human condition interest me.  History shows me that humanity has behaved in roughly the same way stretching back millennia, scifi shows me that as far as we can project we’ll be behaving the same ways millennia in the future.  Far from discouraging I find that a pleasant thought since I tend to view mankind as a sort of tenacious struggle, always upward.

My first recorded professional ambition was to be the first person to see a giant squid in the wild.

I have terrible handwriting.  I have boxes of notebooks kept through middle and high school, piles of scribbles and sketches, and my desk at work is a well organized but tightly packed mass of agendas, notes, and schedules – all handwritten.  I still prefer a small leather bound planner to an electronic calendar.  I write by hand all the time, and yet for all the practice my penmanship is dreadful.

I prefer salty and savory to sweet almost uniformly.

One of my personal disappointments is that I have a great relationship with my siblings but I don’t know them extremely well.  I moved out when my sister was six and she turns sixteen this year, and for the better part of those ten years we’ve lived on separate continent or on the opposite sides of one.  That’s ten years of inside jokes and stories that I simply am not privy to and only catch up on during holidays.

I know I have vivid dreams because I catch glimpses of them when I wake up, but I almost never can remember them.

Some girls have the knack for always looking finished and put together.  I always feel seconds away from terminal dishevelment and somehow no amount of effort seems to tame the flyaways.  I pretend not to care but I’m really self conscious about it and covet the easy polish of some women.

I love reading new books but my secret love is to reread favorites over and over again.  J. teases me about how I’ll read some novels a dozen times a year, but there are a select few I never get sick of.

I am a religious person often deeply at odds with my faith.  It’s sometimes a rough balancing act, but I think it makes me a more thoughtful person and more deliberate about life.  Which is what I think healthy religion is supposed to do, frankly, so in spite of the vexations, I’m okay with the struggle.

So, that’s me.  Minions roll call to the front, please, and tell me something about you that I probably don’t know.

Humor, Life

Let There Be Sight

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
– John Lubbock

un-world-sight-day
via

Know what’s amazing, kittens?  Vision!

No, I haven’t cracked or anything, bear with me.

My vision has never been spectacular and I’ve had periods throughout my life where things got weird optically, but it was university that really killed me.  I think it was computer screens, dim lecture halls, and horrible powerpoint presentations on bad projectors that did it.  Christmas break of sophmore year, I believe, I went home to England and got a pair of really nice glasses in a great shade of red so I could see the blackboards.  I remember putting them on for the first time and the shock of realizing that the world wasn’t soft focus and fuzzy, it was full of sharp edges and bright breaks between colors.  Looking around made frightened for a second that I could cut myself on leaves.  Where had all of this been hiding?

Glasses perched firmly on face, I considered the matter closed.  Unfortunately my eyes didn’t.  Slowly the sharp bright world has needed more effort to stick around.  At first I only needed my glasses to see things that were far away.  Then the next year I needed them to slightly closer, and so forth.  For about the past year I’ve needed them to watch TV.

So on Saturday I threw in the towel and got fitted for contacts and again went through the dizzying experience of discovering that the world looks differently than the reality I’ve been living with – and it isn’t framed in a rectangle of black.  The mountains looked like they could slice and I could drive without hunting for face gear.  I can read the clock on the microwave from the couch.  I could read signs across the street without squinting.  I’ve been kicking myself for not considering contacts earlier ever since.

It’s amazing how we can get used to things that don’t seem like a big deal until we take the trouble to fix them.  It’s always good to be reminded that there’s a technicolor, HD world on the other side of only a little bit of bother.

Humor, Life

Tiny Triumphs

“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”
– Napoleon Hill

Another day, another hectic week, minions.  But there’s always a few bright spots:

I have lunch with an old acquaintance today who I haven’t seen in months.

The existence of my first godchild has been confirmed.  My own godmother is candy coated awesomeness so the bar has been set pretty high, but I’m excited all the same.

Dad turned up a bond in my name long past its maturity date that I get to collect.

And on that same note, J. did our tax return last night and hooray, we’re poor!  But we did get a nice return this year that will allow us to pay off a couple of things and put a small but tidy little sum into savings – a feat not as easily accomplished since student loans reared their heads.

Community, my favorite show and really the only thing off of PBS that I make a real effort to watch anymore (at least until Game of Thrones and Mad Men are back), returns tonight after a long and rather silly hiatus.

Any quick and cheap things getting you through this Thursday?

Humor, Life

Sing To Me, Muse, of the Rage of C. Smalldog…

“Get mad, then get over it.”
~ Colin Powell

This holiday season has been fraught and no mistake.  The weekend was a good chance to sort of recover from some personal stuff last week – many thanks to Margot whose Christmas present to me was a ticket to a concert that we went to together.  Christmas music is wonderfully soothing.

And I needed to be soothed because last week I was angry.  It’s not very Christmas-y but deal, kittens, holiday mirth will soon resume.

Anger-and-HealthI think anger is a hugely underrated emotion.  It’s something we’re supposed to tamp down, turn away from, or disavow.  I disagree.  Granted there is a difference between allowing yourself to feel anger and being consumed by it and that should be appreciated, but if you are a healthy, balanced person who is in control of yourself and your actions I say: go ahead, get angry.

I don’t mind feeling it.  I jokingly (but semi-seriously) refer to it as my “backup emotion” because when able to choose between feeling hurt or sad or angry, I will always pick the latter.  I don’t really get personally offended, but I do get angry.  Generally feeling it means I perceive that a wrong has been done within my sphere of influence, and feeling it usually motivates me to do something to try and either fix or ameliorate the wrong.

It has practical benefits as well.  The house is never so clean as it is after a particularly bad day at work.  My involvement in events and causes is ten times more stalwart when I’ve been personally angered by a behavior or policy.  I can cook a week’s worth of food in a couple of hours, to say nothing of a pile of baked goods, when properly hyped up on righteous indignation.  It’s invigorating, it’s energizing, it gets stuff done.

I admit I’m usually pretty well in control of myself.  I learned to control my anger as a teenager and change it from something that could be destructive into something constructive.  To use it as a motivator instead of a end of itself; it’s one of the best personal lessons I’ve ever learned.

The trouble with anger, at least as I’ve experienced it, is that it’s a fossil fuel: it can get you a long way, you can power a whole Industrial Revolution with it maybe, but it’s a finite resource.  Sooner or later, it’s not sustainable.  No healthy person can feel angry all of the time – it takes up way too much energy!  Oh, I’ve lasted months on it, but in the end it runs out, and if the thing that made you angry is still hovering around, meddling in your life, it can be really easy to feel exhausted, hounded, and generally just really disheartened.

And I’ve never really been able to get a grip on being disheartened, I’ve not learned to channel that into optimism or anything really useful.  It mostly congeals into sad, tight little ball of stress that I tuck down somewhere and try to get over.  Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes not.  Last week I managed a lot on anger, but I ended up disheartened pretty quickly and was surprised by how draining that was too.

Thank God for support teams, and no mistake!  Husband, parents, and good friend do a lot to make you take heart again.  Ultimately all anger burns itself out.  I’m now trying to learn, when I start feeling grim, to just outlive the bastards.

But I’m curious.  Does anyone else have a backup emotion, or something potentially bad that they have managed to harness for motivation?  Is it healthy for you personally?  Unhealthy, but it works?  How do you cope?

Humor, Husband, Life

Who’s In Charge Here?

“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”
– C.S. Lewis

J. and I both had, “Oh dear, we’re grown up…” moments last night.

J.’s experience was in a grocery store where he heard two girls talking about graduating, and they looked so young! “There are full grown adults,” he said, with some resignation in his voice, “who are younger than us.”

This is a pretty surprising thing, to be honest.  Working at a university, living in a university town, it gets a bit easy to smugly lump the majority of the residence together as “those helpless little darlings,” that you tend to see the most of – freshmen and sophmores who generally haven’t a clue.  But we’ve lived here long enough post my graduation that entire class of students has cycled through their four year degrees and scampered off to greater things.  To many of them, we are their Five Year Plan personified – there’s horror for you.

My clash with age was at my zumba class where for fun the instructor taught us the routine to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which I thought was great fun for the upcoming holiday spirit.  Walking out of the gym, I overheard two girls talking to one another.
“I liked it except for that weird monster dance we did.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t even a good song.”
Cue C. clutching herself in horror.

The decade I was born in is now something to be trotted out in fashion or for parties, usually “ironically.”  I lived before the internet – something we’re only a couple of freshman classes away from being ancient history.  I lived during the bleeding Cold War, when the Soviet Union was a country, Europe was split down the middle, and communism was still a threat, instead of a largely pejorative term to be hurled at anyone who disagrees with you socially.   And these people have no idea who Michael Jackson was except for the last few, collapsing years of his life!  What gives!

J.’s less than a month away from 27, which somehow seems unnervingly closer to 30 than 26 for some reason, and he’s only seven months older than me.  We’re the grown ups.

Dear heavens…

Humor, Life

Get Up, Get Out

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
– Albert Einstein

Thanks for your lovely encouragement the other week.  All evil overladies should have a coterie of such fabulous minions.  I’m taking it to heart and working out a few schemes!

J. and I went on a bit of a spree last night.  He picked me up from the gym and we ran a couple of boring errands – and quite suddenly we decided to run more errands for fun and ended up driving nearly all the way to the city mostly just to wander around shops.  And this is not a pastime either of us are known for.  I found his birthday present and took advantage of free samples (I am a sucker for lotions and potions, particularly the kind I don’t have to pay for).  Burgundy was on the mind, we both trawled for the shade – he for pants I for a blazer.  We ended up getting ice cream, which we haven’t done in months if not a couple of years.

It was delightful!  It’s nothing big but we’ve not done anything spontaneous of late and deciding in the late evening (still dressed in workout gear) to just go was remarkably refreshing.  There is nothing so mind numbing as routine and boredom.  Slough it off whenever you can.

If necessary, fight.