Dear Readers:
I am extremely bad at people's names. No, worse than that. I can meet someone once and, six months later, tell you where they live, where their spouse went to college, and what their dog is named, but I cannot for the life of me remember their thrice-damned name.
I now live in a very, very small town. I can only say so many times, "I'm sorry, I'm so bad with names, could you remind me of yours?" before people start to get offended. Of course, I always try to link their name to a phrase ("Rose of Sharon") or to some descriptor ("Sammy's mom Alice") or to something about them ("Sara who's from Israel and whose spouse teaches history" - this one works the best but is impractical in many social settings where nobody is introduced as "My great-aunt Sophie who used to practice Wicca and who lives on a hippie commune in Kansas") but clearly it doesn't work. I also repeat their name back to them, say it in my head several times right away, and promptly forget it.
Other suggestions?
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Thursday, March 06, 2014
A Cherished Memory
I have no idea why this suddenly popped into my head, but there you have it.
December 1999
A group of college friends has been giving gifts. Someone has given our friend E, a blonde, bubbly, zaftig, future-librarian Quaker, a soft-antler headband and a red nose that lights up. Her boyfriend N, a nerdy physicist with dark curls, looks on dubiously
E: "Look! I'm Rudolph! You can see me in the dark!"
N: "I guess we could... play reindeer games? ...oh, dear."
Everyone bursts into laughter.
I am sorry to say that I've lost touch with all of them, due to some unfortunate personal circumstances in grad school, also known as "My ex took those friends when I ditched him."
December 1999
A group of college friends has been giving gifts. Someone has given our friend E, a blonde, bubbly, zaftig, future-librarian Quaker, a soft-antler headband and a red nose that lights up. Her boyfriend N, a nerdy physicist with dark curls, looks on dubiously
E: "Look! I'm Rudolph! You can see me in the dark!"
N: "I guess we could... play reindeer games? ...oh, dear."
Everyone bursts into laughter.
I am sorry to say that I've lost touch with all of them, due to some unfortunate personal circumstances in grad school, also known as "My ex took those friends when I ditched him."
Monday, March 03, 2014
Unaccountably
Sad. Maybe lonely. Also out of processing cycles due to scheduling and arranging and managing and making sure there's something for dinner every night. Having a cold all the time both makes me feel depressed - I think it's some combination of not sleeping as well, being in pain, and echoes of fear surrounding being in pain.
Many ergs of mental energy are being used on real estate at the moment. There are both too many choices, and not enough uncomplicated choices.
Right now, my spouse is much occupied with other things. Marriage is a partnership, and heaven knows I have been on the other side of the neediness seesaw (see also: those two years of being sick, pregnant, sick of being pregnant, or pregnant and sick). Still: something to be endured.
Many ergs of mental energy are being used on real estate at the moment. There are both too many choices, and not enough uncomplicated choices.
Right now, my spouse is much occupied with other things. Marriage is a partnership, and heaven knows I have been on the other side of the neediness seesaw (see also: those two years of being sick, pregnant, sick of being pregnant, or pregnant and sick). Still: something to be endured.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Why Everything Takes Forever
12:00 Preschool pickup. Bug throws a tantrum, as usual, and we stand outside the car for ten minutes until he stops waving his arms around and screaming.
12:15 Tatoe gets eyedrops, by which I mean I pry his eyelids open and drop the antibiotic in.
12:20 Lunch. My children are the slowest eaters in ever. I manage to eat a bowl of reheated lima beans. They have five arguments (you a duck! no, I'm not! yes, you is! no, I'm not! I was first! no, you weren't!) until I tell them that they can either eat or argue, but not both.
12:50 Bug gets a time-out. I don't even remember why.
1:00 I finally take a thrashing Tatoe upstairs for a diaper and a nap. He screams.
1:10 I read Bug his books and shut the door for 'quiet time', also known as 'Mama needs to go lay down in a quiet room now.'
2:15 I go to get Bug. He is fast asleep.
2:20 Tatoe wakes up screaming. I ignore him and do the rest of my looking-things-up-on-the-internet.
2:30 The military jets do their daily supersonic low-altitude flyover. I curse at them. Tatoe wakes up screaming. I ignore him.
3:00 Tatoe wakes up screaming again. I wake Bug up and we all go downstairs. Tatoe gets eyedrops AGAIN.
3:15 Tatoe wails piteously 'I want GWAMPA!' for the ninth time today. We call my dad on Skype and the children sing him songs and tell him fifteen times 'I had a doughnut today! I ate the whole thing!' The dog pants at them.
3:45 I look at real estate briefly.
4:00 We try to leave the house. Tatoe needs a diaper. It takes five minutes to convince him to go upstairs. Then he wants to pee on the big boy potty. My spouse has let him pee in the froggy potty last night, but not emptied it; this morning I put water in and forgot it. Tatoe, moving it out of the way, spills it all over the floor.
4:15 I finish washing the bathroom floor, my hands, my feet, Tatoe's hands, and everything in between. Tatoe gets a new diaper. The children clean up the toy tornado in the living room.
4:30 Bug starts wailing about wearing shoes! And he can't find his sweater! (It's eight inches away, on the floor.) And wearing boots! And he wants a helicopter! I lie down on the couch.
4:45 He finally finds his sweater and puts it on.
4:46 Tatoe makes a dirty diaper.
4:50 I finish writing this, take off everyone's shoes, and go make a cup of tea.
12:15 Tatoe gets eyedrops, by which I mean I pry his eyelids open and drop the antibiotic in.
12:20 Lunch. My children are the slowest eaters in ever. I manage to eat a bowl of reheated lima beans. They have five arguments (you a duck! no, I'm not! yes, you is! no, I'm not! I was first! no, you weren't!) until I tell them that they can either eat or argue, but not both.
12:50 Bug gets a time-out. I don't even remember why.
1:00 I finally take a thrashing Tatoe upstairs for a diaper and a nap. He screams.
1:10 I read Bug his books and shut the door for 'quiet time', also known as 'Mama needs to go lay down in a quiet room now.'
2:15 I go to get Bug. He is fast asleep.
2:20 Tatoe wakes up screaming. I ignore him and do the rest of my looking-things-up-on-the-internet.
2:30 The military jets do their daily supersonic low-altitude flyover. I curse at them. Tatoe wakes up screaming. I ignore him.
3:00 Tatoe wakes up screaming again. I wake Bug up and we all go downstairs. Tatoe gets eyedrops AGAIN.
3:15 Tatoe wails piteously 'I want GWAMPA!' for the ninth time today. We call my dad on Skype and the children sing him songs and tell him fifteen times 'I had a doughnut today! I ate the whole thing!' The dog pants at them.
3:45 I look at real estate briefly.
4:00 We try to leave the house. Tatoe needs a diaper. It takes five minutes to convince him to go upstairs. Then he wants to pee on the big boy potty. My spouse has let him pee in the froggy potty last night, but not emptied it; this morning I put water in and forgot it. Tatoe, moving it out of the way, spills it all over the floor.
4:15 I finish washing the bathroom floor, my hands, my feet, Tatoe's hands, and everything in between. Tatoe gets a new diaper. The children clean up the toy tornado in the living room.
4:30 Bug starts wailing about wearing shoes! And he can't find his sweater! (It's eight inches away, on the floor.) And wearing boots! And he wants a helicopter! I lie down on the couch.
4:45 He finally finds his sweater and puts it on.
4:46 Tatoe makes a dirty diaper.
4:50 I finish writing this, take off everyone's shoes, and go make a cup of tea.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Unanswerable Questions
Frequently, people are attempting to make conversation and they ask me an innocent question that I find deeply awkward.
My second favorite is "Are you close to your family?"
Um... yes? I mean, Dr. S and I rearranged our entire lives so we could live closer to them. We see each other quite often and go on various shopping errands for each other and I've just spent a combined total of about 70 hours knitting my sister an elaborate hat-and-scarf set per her request. And we like each other and maintain reasonably good boundaries. And then there's my middle sister, to whom I almost never speak, who seems to be going through her post-college-discovering-the-world phase, but ten years after college and after two children and a divorce instead. For example, she exhorted Prudence and me to read "Lean In", as if, for one, we'd never heard or read of being assertive, and for another, as if 'play the game harder and surely you'll win like me' were the most useful advice ever.* (For the record, I prefer more constructive works like "Beyond Bias and Barriers", "Lifting a Ton of Feathers", "Women Don't Ask", and "The Price of Motherhood", which at least give concrete advice, such as "Ask for more money.") My spouse says "Yes, you are extraordinarily close to your family."
However, here in the Baptist-heavy South, my very favorite casual, awkward question is "Are you religious?"
This seems so simple, and yet it's so complicated. To a Jew, 'religious Jew' usually means Orthodox or black-hat (Hasidic), although there are plenty of committed, practicing, believing Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jews in the world. Perhaps what people mean to ask is, do you belong to or go to services at a religious institution? Do you believe in or pray to a deity? Do you participate in religious traditions? How are you working that out with your children, in a place like this? Are you the bacon-eating, Christmas-celebrating variety of Jew, or not? I never know what to say other than "I guess."
* In case you don't want to read the whole article: "Lean In’s goal is to push women forward into their work so as to overcome what Sandberg represents as women’s universal internal resistance to career velocity.... Life is a race, Sandberg is telling us, and the way to win is through the perpetual acceleration of one’s own labor: moving forward, faster. The real antagonist identified by Lean In then is not institutionalized discrimination against women, but women’s reluctance to accept accelerating career demands... By arguing that women should express their feminism by remaining in the workplace at all costs, Sandberg encourages women to maintain a commitment to the workplace without encouraging the workplace to maintain a commitment to them."
My second favorite is "Are you close to your family?"
Um... yes? I mean, Dr. S and I rearranged our entire lives so we could live closer to them. We see each other quite often and go on various shopping errands for each other and I've just spent a combined total of about 70 hours knitting my sister an elaborate hat-and-scarf set per her request. And we like each other and maintain reasonably good boundaries. And then there's my middle sister, to whom I almost never speak, who seems to be going through her post-college-discovering-the-world phase, but ten years after college and after two children and a divorce instead. For example, she exhorted Prudence and me to read "Lean In", as if, for one, we'd never heard or read of being assertive, and for another, as if 'play the game harder and surely you'll win like me' were the most useful advice ever.* (For the record, I prefer more constructive works like "Beyond Bias and Barriers", "Lifting a Ton of Feathers", "Women Don't Ask", and "The Price of Motherhood", which at least give concrete advice, such as "Ask for more money.") My spouse says "Yes, you are extraordinarily close to your family."
However, here in the Baptist-heavy South, my very favorite casual, awkward question is "Are you religious?"
This seems so simple, and yet it's so complicated. To a Jew, 'religious Jew' usually means Orthodox or black-hat (Hasidic), although there are plenty of committed, practicing, believing Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jews in the world. Perhaps what people mean to ask is, do you belong to or go to services at a religious institution? Do you believe in or pray to a deity? Do you participate in religious traditions? How are you working that out with your children, in a place like this? Are you the bacon-eating, Christmas-celebrating variety of Jew, or not? I never know what to say other than "I guess."
* In case you don't want to read the whole article: "Lean In’s goal is to push women forward into their work so as to overcome what Sandberg represents as women’s universal internal resistance to career velocity.... Life is a race, Sandberg is telling us, and the way to win is through the perpetual acceleration of one’s own labor: moving forward, faster. The real antagonist identified by Lean In then is not institutionalized discrimination against women, but women’s reluctance to accept accelerating career demands... By arguing that women should express their feminism by remaining in the workplace at all costs, Sandberg encourages women to maintain a commitment to the workplace without encouraging the workplace to maintain a commitment to them."
Friday, February 21, 2014
Winter, Houses, Viruses, Bacteria, More Winter
1) It was our birthday. (The spouse, my sister Pru, and I all share a birthday.) My family brought cake and the dog. The next weekend we left the kids with them for 24 hours. It was glorious. As we drove away, Bug asked "When can we go see Grandma and Grandpa again?" and Tatoe said "I want Lily-doggie."
2) For my birthday, Bug gave me a belated case of pinkeye and Tatoe gave me a horrible cold. The asthma is mostly okay except when I get a cold, and then I can't breathe* and then I can't sleep and... you get the idea.
3) This allergy thing, it is going to send me into a spiral of depression one of these days. I continue to develop new food reactions** and then I feel like eating ALL THE CHOCOLATE, with a side of frightened and sad and angry.
4) We have now looked at... twelve?... houses in person. One was too small. One was too shoddily built. One was delightful and affordable and lovely and the owners had just taken an offer that day. (SOB SOB SOB.) Four were "Not just no, but HELL NO." One had an impossible driveway that gave me vertigo on a warm, dry day. One was a drive-up-and-drive-away. One had lumpy drywall and was over-priced. One was lovely and wonderful, but had nowhere to plant a garden. The last one has a beautifully planted five acres, and is almost twice as big (3800 square feet - you could fit five Manhattan apartments inside!) as we actually want and they want waaaaay too much and it needs some work and we could maybe barely afford it and our car slipped on 1/4 inch of ice at the bottom of the enormous driveway and we would need a truck and an actual tractor and I just don't know. Oh, also it is down a narrow, winding road with a steep dropoff. Into a creek. What's the use falling down a hill if you can't end up in a creek? I can't tell if it's time to adjust my expectations downwards quite a ways, or hold out for spring house listings, or get in touch with that one builder, which idea frankly gives me hives. Dr. S is happy to make them an offer tomorrow. I need to dither first and stare at real estate listings for another few days first.***
4a) This is not the worst of choices to have to make. We can stay in our crappy apartment for two more years if we want (I do not want). It's not the end of the world, but at some point I would like to find my !@$% teapot and plant a garden again. I've put my life on hold for six years while my spouse pursued his insane-seeming career ambitions and I'm quite ready to move on, to say nothing of unpacking the rest of those boxes, one of these days.
5) I need to exercise. Then I would be less depressed and sleepless. I cannot exercise, because I feel like I cannot breathe (exercise elevates it from a feeling of shortness of breath to a feeling of being stabbed in the lungs with many pointy knives; no amount of albuterol fixes this). However, as we are now in the South, winter will be over in a month. Thank the Lord and pass the brandy.
* More to the point, I feel like I can't breathe but have perfectly adequate pulmonary function and oxygenation and therefore nobody will do anything about it. Which is perfectly reasonable, but doesn't help me when I wake up with a can't-breathe feeling in the middle of the night.
** I have the classical symptoms for a diagnosed condition. Dear Readers, I know you mean well, but please do not suggest that I have something else. I do not. I have this thing and there is no treatment beyond allergy shots (and an unreasonable amount of antihistamines) and it sucks.
*** There are 23,000 people in this entire county. The real estate market is not exactly booming.
2) For my birthday, Bug gave me a belated case of pinkeye and Tatoe gave me a horrible cold. The asthma is mostly okay except when I get a cold, and then I can't breathe* and then I can't sleep and... you get the idea.
3) This allergy thing, it is going to send me into a spiral of depression one of these days. I continue to develop new food reactions** and then I feel like eating ALL THE CHOCOLATE, with a side of frightened and sad and angry.
4) We have now looked at... twelve?... houses in person. One was too small. One was too shoddily built. One was delightful and affordable and lovely and the owners had just taken an offer that day. (SOB SOB SOB.) Four were "Not just no, but HELL NO." One had an impossible driveway that gave me vertigo on a warm, dry day. One was a drive-up-and-drive-away. One had lumpy drywall and was over-priced. One was lovely and wonderful, but had nowhere to plant a garden. The last one has a beautifully planted five acres, and is almost twice as big (3800 square feet - you could fit five Manhattan apartments inside!) as we actually want and they want waaaaay too much and it needs some work and we could maybe barely afford it and our car slipped on 1/4 inch of ice at the bottom of the enormous driveway and we would need a truck and an actual tractor and I just don't know. Oh, also it is down a narrow, winding road with a steep dropoff. Into a creek. What's the use falling down a hill if you can't end up in a creek? I can't tell if it's time to adjust my expectations downwards quite a ways, or hold out for spring house listings, or get in touch with that one builder, which idea frankly gives me hives. Dr. S is happy to make them an offer tomorrow. I need to dither first and stare at real estate listings for another few days first.***
4a) This is not the worst of choices to have to make. We can stay in our crappy apartment for two more years if we want (I do not want). It's not the end of the world, but at some point I would like to find my !@$% teapot and plant a garden again. I've put my life on hold for six years while my spouse pursued his insane-seeming career ambitions and I'm quite ready to move on, to say nothing of unpacking the rest of those boxes, one of these days.
5) I need to exercise. Then I would be less depressed and sleepless. I cannot exercise, because I feel like I cannot breathe (exercise elevates it from a feeling of shortness of breath to a feeling of being stabbed in the lungs with many pointy knives; no amount of albuterol fixes this). However, as we are now in the South, winter will be over in a month. Thank the Lord and pass the brandy.
* More to the point, I feel like I can't breathe but have perfectly adequate pulmonary function and oxygenation and therefore nobody will do anything about it. Which is perfectly reasonable, but doesn't help me when I wake up with a can't-breathe feeling in the middle of the night.
** I have the classical symptoms for a diagnosed condition. Dear Readers, I know you mean well, but please do not suggest that I have something else. I do not. I have this thing and there is no treatment beyond allergy shots (and an unreasonable amount of antihistamines) and it sucks.
*** There are 23,000 people in this entire county. The real estate market is not exactly booming.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Contradictions
I live somewhere poor and rural - except for the city, which is full of very rich Mountain U. students and faculty. I'm a frugal housewife, but I also have a bunch of fancy degrees. (The people in town think frugal means keeping last year's JesusPhone.) I liberate unattended fruit. I make things. I read science articles.
It turns out there aren't a whole lot of stay-at-home analytical thinkers - in this small town - who both make things and don't suffer from paranoid delusions about vaccines/gluten/Democrats.
Of all the people I've met here, the one I like the most (personally) is a card-carrying member of the Tea Party. I'm planning to help her plant her first big garden in the spring. Our children all love each other beyond words. Her child wears camo all the time and will probably hunt once he learns to hold a gun.* The spouse and I are pacifist liberals who, literally, make crunchy granola.
Anyhow, the summary version is I feel a bit adrift and, even though it's better than all that deeply unpleasant uncertainty, I haven't figured out exactly what shape my life is going to take in the next few years, or how it will weave in with the amazing assortment of personalities here.
* I'm all for hunting for one's food - after all, I eat meat, and deeraren't exactly endangered are a pest and a menace around here - I simply don't.
It turns out there aren't a whole lot of stay-at-home analytical thinkers - in this small town - who both make things and don't suffer from paranoid delusions about vaccines/gluten/Democrats.
Of all the people I've met here, the one I like the most (personally) is a card-carrying member of the Tea Party. I'm planning to help her plant her first big garden in the spring. Our children all love each other beyond words. Her child wears camo all the time and will probably hunt once he learns to hold a gun.* The spouse and I are pacifist liberals who, literally, make crunchy granola.
Anyhow, the summary version is I feel a bit adrift and, even though it's better than all that deeply unpleasant uncertainty, I haven't figured out exactly what shape my life is going to take in the next few years, or how it will weave in with the amazing assortment of personalities here.
* I'm all for hunting for one's food - after all, I eat meat, and deer
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