The Adventures of Erin

Does anyone else see that black cloud following me?

2009-09-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

(Note: Immediate family members might want to give this one a miss, at least for a while.)

I went over to my parents' house tonight to check on things (okay, okay, it was also to watch "Mad Men" on OnDemand because I don't have cable) while they're on vacation. I went home and fed the cats, checked on Louie (he seems okay, but he's still so thin), and Sam and I stopped at the dry cleaner's and the dog park, and then drove over to the house. Their cat Isaac met me in the driveway, in a frenzy of meowing. He always gets anxious when there's no one home, and the neighbor across the street who cat-sits has been known in the past to indulge Isaac's begging with an entire canister of cat treats in a single week, turning him into a treat monster for days afterward.

So I wasn't concerned. I went inside, fed the dog and got him some water (hot weather today!), picked Isaac up and gave him a treat, scavenged for a snack (there's something about looking in other people's cupboards when they're not home...I think it takes me back to babysitting, after the kids went to bed and I got hungry waiting for the parents to get home), and went in the living room to watch TV. I gave ZaSu, their other cat, a pat as she slept in the chair with her back to me.

Which is how I discovered--

--that she was dead.

One hand in the air above her, I froze for a long moment, the kind that lasts so long that it stretches time out like an elastic band. Finally, a thought appeared: what THE HELL was I going to do? My parents were away, and I couldn't just leave her there, but I couldn't bring myself to officially look. Finally I saw that the neighbor across the street, who is the sweetest man and would do anything you needed him to (I'm guessing that includes a ride to the airport or a kidney), was outside in his car. I ran out and asked for his help. I called my parents to break the news, while he drove to the store for a suitable box. My parents were so sorry, and said to do whatever I thought was best. So I found the number for a local emergency vet clinic, and called to see if they could take her. They could. I got directions.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment, looking down at my directions to the clinic written in green marker on several post-its, the first thing I could find. We've had Zazz since I was 16. She was only a month old. One of the other neighbors was trying to find a home for her, because his friend had been illegally keeping a cat in his apartment and it had kittens. She was the tiniest thing; she fit in the pocket of my bathrobe, and slept by my head, purring. When she was six months old, she broke her leg--while sleeping on the tailpipe of the neighbor's truck, which he did not notice before taking it out for a spin. She was resilient, though. She survived, but she's had a pin in her hip ever since, and she has always hobbled a little.

Our neighbor came back into the house with a box from the store. A box that said "Bud Light Lime" on it in bright green letters. I was sad about our cat, upset enough that I couldn't be the one to wrap her and gently place her in the box (bless you, dear neighbor, for taking that on). But there was a part of me that floated briefly overhead and saw that there was an element of the ridiculous in the two of us solemnly carrying a beer case out of the house.

Our neighbor drove me down to the clinic, and we took the box inside. He carried it for me, and with great sensitivity set it down. I had said goodbye with a final pat outside, not because I wanted to, exactly, but because I knew I would regret it if I didn't. She looked almost asleep, peaceful, quiet, but I could feel when I stroked her that she wasn't there anymore.

Inside, the nurse looked up questioningly, and I explained that I had called a little earlier--"Oh, about a cat," she said, and came around the corner to take the box from us, just as the vet came out from the back room. Someone made a remark about the fact that it was a Bud Light box, and the vet asked jovially if we had brought pizza, too. The nurse laughed. When they were both gone, my neighbor and I looked at each other. "Did that seem a little insensitive?" I hissed. "I know!" he said.

I whispered that when I had called the clinic and choked up as I explained that my family's cat had just died, the lady on the phone had just said, "Okay," in a matter-of-fact tone. I know you must get to be a little jaded working in a place like that, or you'd probably want to go home and slit your own wrists every night, but I would have settled for a little forced sympathy from her. They taught us at the call center years ago that just because you've heard it all a thousand times, the person calling you is experiencing it for the first time.

Just then, the vet came back out, his face white. "I'm so sorry," he said with genuine emotion. "I didn't realize your cat was dead." We nodded that it was okay.

And just like that, it was finished. I handed over my debit card and signed a treatment release form. The neighbor drove me home and gave me another hug (or I gave him one--I could tell he felt guilty for "letting" this happen on his watch, so I found myself comforting and reassuring him that she lived a good long life and went so peacefully in her sleep in her favorite chair, that we couldn't have asked for better for her, and he shouldn't blame himself at all).

I went inside and gave Isaac a huge handful of treats. I hugged Sam for a long time, as long as he let me. I stayed and watched my show so that Isaac would be hopefully be comforted by my presence. (Incidentally, Mad Men might not be the best choice for an evening of grief--someone died this week, and it's a maudlin show in the best of times.) Another neighbor called, having gotten the news from the other neighbor and seen my car still in the driveway. She wanted to make sure I was okay. We complain about the neighbors sometimes, but when something real happens, everyone is there for each other. And she's a dog person.

The last of my childhood pets is gone. I'm sad, but she lived a good long life and she was old and it was just time. These are the things we tell ourselves, when we don't have other words, but they seem true to me tonight. She was a good cat.

No answers yet

2009-09-10T22:54:00.000-07:00

Why, I ask you, can't it be the easy solution just once? The vet called me today, and said he's 98 percent certain, based on the early test results, that Louie does not have hyperthyroidism. That's good news...but we still don't know what's wrong with him.

It could be as simple as a parasite, which is easily diagnosed with a $30 test, and cheaply treated. Or it could be a GI problem, or an inflamed bowel, or some kind of cancer. In order to diagnose these latter three, we would be looking at an ultrasound ($800) or an endoscopy ($1200), and that's just the cost of figuring out what's wrong--not treating it.

Have I mentioned that I really like this vet? He gives me detailed information with which to make informed decisions, and he's sensitive to cost and practicality when it comes to treatment. So if the parasite test is negative, he suggested that we put Louie on a special hypoallergenic (=$$) diet, and monitor him for a month. If he gains back some weight, we know it was the bowel thing and he just has to be on that diet for the rest of his life. If not....Well, we didn't get that far.

I love my pets, I really do. And I want to be a responsible pet owner. But I also try to be practical. He is my cat, not my child (does this sound familiar, readers? remember this same debate from a year ago with a certain German shepherd?), and I don't think that just because we can treat animals with advanced internal medicine and specialized procedures, we necessarily should. Even if he has something that could be treated and give him additional time, I'm concerned about his quality of life. A person can rationally understand that even though a treatment is painful, it is for a purpose. My cat is not going to grasp that concept.

Sorry to get maudlin on you again. I'm just worried. And tired. And stressed out at work. I like my job most of the time, but lately I feel like I'm getting about 10% of 10% of the necessary information to be effective. My immediate supervisor only gets some of the facts (nobody seems to know everything, so at least we're all in the same boat there), and she only has time to throw a few of them my way when I see her between meetings and crises. It's been chaotic and frustrating. I think it will get better. I just hope it's soon.

I've been having headaches, too. I went to the doctor last week, and he thinks I'm clenching my teeth in my sleep, so now I have a very attractive bite guard (think hockey player) to wear at night. It seems to be helping, because I haven't woken up with a migraine.

But in the interest of ending on a positive note, here's some good news: the community orchestra I play with has a new director, since our founding director retired in 2008 and we tried out three candidates last year (and hired my favorite). I think it's going to be a great season, and I'm motivated to practice my viola for the first time in ages. There are so many new players that we actually ran out of chairs tonight. So that's good.

I'll try to post an update when we know more about Louie. Not to be indelicate, but I have been waiting for him to leave a, um, sample, so that I can take it to the vet for testing. Sensing this, he has been avoiding the litter box.

In Which Erin Becomes Educated on Feline Illnesses, Too

2009-09-09T19:49:00.000-07:00

I thought we were done with the vet for a while. First: Sam is doing great--he loves to go to the dog park and gallop up and down the hill, and he's energetic and happy and wonderfully life-enriching.

But I noticed a week or two ago that my cat Louie has been losing weight. I can distinctly feel his spine and ribs, and now the bones in his head, as well. He's a big cat, and he had put on a few pounds since coming to live as an indoor-only feline at Chez Erin, but I weighed him (Erin+cat on scale - Erin on scale alone = cat's weight) and discovered that he'd lost at least two pounds. So, being the responsible citizen and pet owner that I am, I made him a vet appointment.

I was not sure at all that I would get him back after the appointment--but only because the technicians were all trying to take him home with them! He is a very sweet and personable cat, if I do say so myself, and people generally warm to him quickly. He has big blue eyes (hence his original name was "Blue"--named by the same idiot owner whose solution for him continually climbing onto the neighbor's roof was to have him declawed; good riddance to her--but I just couldn't call a cat BLUE, so we transitioned to LOU-ie), and he has thick gray fur with a mix of tabby and Siamese markings. He's about 10 years old, as far as I know.

Louie's a very good cat. He sat very patiently on the exam table and purred and purred. The vet even had to wave a cotton ball with rubbing alcohol under his nose to get him to stop long enough so she could listen to his heartbeat.

So...the vet thinks that he has hyperthyroidism. We won't know for sure until the test results come back, but he seems to be a likely candidate: rapid weight loss, increased appetite, older cat, Siamese.

If that's the case, the good news: it's treatable or even curable. The bad news: treatment will either be a pill twice a day for the rest of his life (estimated at about $20/month); or a one-time radioactive shot which cures the disease, at a cost of $800+.

That's right.

$800 or more. He would have to go to a specialist; there are two places here in town that administer this particular shot.

I have to admit, I laughed when she gave me the estimate. It's not quite as much as it cost over a year to treat Sam for heartworm...but it's close. At this point, I feel like I should get a thank-you note from the vets' children for single-handedly paying for their orthodontia--and probably their new speedboat and ponies, too.

I haven't decided yet what I will do if the test results show hyperthyroidism. Tomorrow the other vet will call me with the first results, and we'll go from there. I feel bad--I always seem to be interrogating him for medical information, but he patiently answers all my questions and gives me very reasoned advice.

So, cross your fingers that it's nothing more serious than this. If treated properly, it won't shorten or really even affect his life. And the next time someone offers you a reasonable rate on pet medical insurance, do me a favor and take it!

Groceries, American Style

2009-09-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

I'm supposed to be grocery shopping right now. That was my one goal for this afternoon, to go to the grocery store and bring home some food so I will be stocked for the week. (And yet, here I sit.)

Once I'm out of the house and there, I actually kind of enjoy the grocery store. I like finding just the things I need, as efficiently as I can, and determining the best price, and figuring out the option with the least salt or sugar or fat or whatever. I like clipping coupons (except when I hate it). I like to stand in line at the checkout and read the tabloid covers (I have to admit, I miss the Weekly World News and its zanily doctored photos); and I like to look around unabashedly to see what other people are buying. The college guys on Friday nights with two six-packs and a shrink-wrapped package of firewood. The old ladies with a cartful of canned goods and a fistful of expired coupons. The teenagers with eight candy bars and a Red Bull. I like to guess who's on their way to a party (tortilla chips and a plastic tub of dip), and who forgot to buy one ingredient for tonight's recipe, and who just had a sudden craving for some fancy cheese.

I feel a little guilty for resenting the grocery store. It seems like I should be grateful just for the opportunity to shop at all. First, there's the fact that I have sufficient money to buy enough food for myself, including the occasional splurge (macadamia nuts, feta cheese, good chocolate, almond-stuffed green olives--or yes, sometimes Cheetos, my secret junk food of choice).

Also, I have lived in another country, where going grocery shopping was an exhausting, bewildering, and often frustrating experience. In China, we lived near a large underground supermarket, with a conveyer belt that slowly moved you and your cart and 500 black-haired people downward into the belly of an enormous cacophany of pop music and small electronics and tanks of mysterious live seafood and a whole aisle of instant noodles in cups and tubs and boxes. There were rows of plastic packages of spices I couldn't even guess at, and twenty-five kinds of canned tuna (including some with black beans mixed in), and signs and labels everywhere that I couldn't begin to read. Just finding things that I could recognize as food--bread and peanut butter and Oreos--was an ordeal that could take a whole morning.

Not to mention standing in line at the checkout, which is an aggressive sport in China. If you don't move up against the person in front of you as close as humanly possible without fusing together, and use your cart and body to guard your spot, preferably with a friend to block the other side, you will find yourself constantly at the end of the line, with sweet-looking tiny old women muscling you aside like crafty linebackers to get ahead of you. When I moved back to the States, it was hard to get used to polite Americans standing in line again; I rammed more than one shopper's ankles with my cart, and my mother looked at me like I was crazy.

Whenever I came home for a visit, I was overwhelmed by the variety of choices and the fact that I recognized everything. My mom would take me along to the store, and ask me to go pick some cereal or ice cream. Several minutes later, she'd come back to find me frozen in the middle of the aisle, staring at the possibilities, brain unable to make a decision because I could read the packages and I knew what ALL of them were. Coming from a world where one box of crackers in English was cause for delight, this was just too much.

Don't get me wrong: I loved the food in China. I still dream about it sometimes. We ate out all the time at restaurants both rich and cheap. Everything was good--corner noodle shops serving steamed dumplings filled with pork and chives, tiny hotpot stands in the market where you pointed to the boiling bowlful you wanted and ate it at a communal table, fancy places with "traditional" peasant fare for exorbitant prices real peasants could never afford. Other than my friends, I miss the food most of all. But when I wanted to cook in my apartment, or just have food on hand for a quick lunch in, I needed something that I knew how to prepare and eat. And that was not as easy to find as you might think.

American brain freeze extended beyond grocery shopping, too. After my parents picked me up from the airport on a trip home, I would stare out the window at all the billboards and signs in English, amazed that I could understand them. I would sit on the edge of the bathtub and read the entire toothpaste box. I couldn't get enough of television in a language where I finally knew what was going on. In China, I would watch TV sometimes and attempt to figure out the story line. Some shows weren't too hard--that man was kissing a woman who wasn't his wife, and when she found out she was really, really mad--but the mystical kungfu serials and comedy hours were utterly baffling. Occasionally I would come across a dubbed American movie, and I would try to follow it by seeing if I could lip-read (I could not). There was one broadcast channel in English, run by the government as all Chinese TV is, but most of its programs were wholesome and educational and whitewashed and incredibly boring--and that's coming from someone who likes PBS--except when they would show English-language movies one night a week. I didn't care what it was; the novelty of the box in my living room finally speaking my language was exciting enough. I discovered that many of my friends in the expat community did the same thing: Australian, South African, British, it didn't matter. We all watched and then talked about Longitude or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or whatever was on.

That's not to say that we didn't enjoy spending time among Chinese speakers. But when you're constantly barraged by a language that's not the same as the one in your head, and your brain has to work overtime all day to make sense of just enough words to figure out what's going on and how to reply, it's a refreshing treat to be able to sit back and have the words flow in without effort.

And now it's time to venture out to the grocery store where I am fortunate enough to be able to shop, so that I don't have to do it on the holiday tomorrow. Happy Labor Day, everyone.

Now I'm hungry

2009-08-09T22:28:00.000-07:00

I should be in bed.

It's 10:30 and I have to go to work tomorrow (in my head, I can hear my father's voice saying "bedtime--it's a school night!"), but I just saw a terrific movie and I am feeling inspired. The movie was Julie and Julia, based on the book by Julie Powell, which is in turn based on the blog she wrote about cooking all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child in one year.

I read the book a few years ago when it first came out, loved it, and gave it to more than one friend as a gift. Now that it's a hugely successful movie (my parents and I were turned away from the sold-out 2 PM show and had to come back at 7:40 tonight!), I am experiencing the mixed emotions of anyone who has watched something they loved first, turn into a major success with masses of new fair-weather fans who jump on the bandwagon of acclaim as it goes by. In other words, I am happy that it's a hit, but I want some credit for knowing it was a hit before anyone else had even heard of it. It's the same way with music: say you are devoted to a local indie band that suddenly makes it big, and now everybody's a fan, and you're not special anymore for liking them (just ask my sister about Imogen Heap).

So anyway, watching a movie about a woman who writes a blog that gets turned into a book and then a movie made me wish that might someday happen to me. But of course that would necessitate me occasionally writing (writing on? writing in?) my blog. I'm making an effort to post more frequently. We'll see.

I would definitely recommend the movie, and moreover I would recommend eating a delicious rich meal before you go, and possibly sneaking some duck in pastry or raspberry cream into the theater in your pockets. I am simultaneously starving for butter and cream and eggs, and debating whether to go online and find a deal on a used copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking right now before they're all snatched up, so that I can try my hand at the wonders therein.

Speaking of food, I went to the farmers' market this morning, because it was my week to pick up the CSA (community-supported agriculture) share I'm splitting with a coworker. Red new potatoes, green beans, still more summer squash (how much zucchini can one person eat?), the first of the sweet corn, lettuce, fresh-cut chives, and some rather disappointing blueberries. I also bought cherries and apricots. Okay, now I'm officially hungry.

This is the first year I've bought a CSA share. Because everybody gets whatever they put in the boxes for us, I've been forced to branch out from my usual weeknight repertoire. I tried fava beans for the first time--okay, but nothing special, or at least not the way I prepared them. I experimented with fried zucchini, but haven't found a recipe I like yet. Last week I ate potatoes sauteed in olive oil with leeks three times, and still couldn't get enough. I made zucchini bread from my red-and-white Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, and the smell took me back to Lanzhou, China, where I used to bake it in our tiny toaster oven for our breakfasts, and sometimes I would put in a few precious chocolate chips.

After the market today, I took Sam to the dog park for the second time this weekend. He's getting so he knows when we're approaching it--I don't know if he sees all the dogs, or recognizes the smell, but he puts his nose out the window and wags as we drive up. I would take a ball or frisbee for him, but he just doesn't seem interested. What he really likes to do is run after a dog who is chasing a ball. He doesn't want the ball; he just wants to race. We spent about half an hour, at the end of which he was plodding along, exhausted, tongue lolling. At home, he immediately sprawled on the floor and fell asleep for the rest of the afternoon. I took him for a moderate walk tonight and he wore out halfway through. It's going to take a while to build his stamina back up, I guess.

The vet also gave me stern advice about not overfeeding him. Sam gained another pound between May and August, which is still within a healthy weight for his size, but I had a stern talk with my parents (okay, my mom) about not going too crazy on the treats. If only he wasn't so good at a sweet, sad, hungry expression. Mooch.

It's a little strange for me not to be worrying about him all the time. I didn't have to be vigilant at the dog park to keep him from galloping. I don't have to plan our activities so that he doesn't have too much exertion. He can do whatever he wants now. Lucky him. Right now he's asleep in the hallway by the front door. I don't know why he likes to sleep there; he wedges his long legs in between the wall and the closet door, and presses his back up against the door. It doesn't look comfortable. As long as he's happy, though, I'll let him be.

Driving home from the movie in the dark tonight, I thought about how I started my blog last spring just as I left my last job, and how it's been a year this month since I got my new job. I was thinking about Julie in the movie, being encouraged by her readers, and how it has helped me, too, to know that people were out there caring about me and hoping for the best.

Navigating the night streets (squinting through the arced smear across my windshield from the bug I attempted to gently brush off with my windshield wipers earlier today so it wouldn't blow off in the wind and die; and instead managed to trap in the blades, maim, and eventually have to put out of its misery with the "high" setting--all while driving down the road at 35), I thought about being treated like an adult at this job, and not a perpetual twenty-something temp and secretary, even though I often feel like a child who is disguised as a responsible 30-year-old. I thought about how one of the head bosses told me on Friday that he wants me to take his place at a weeklong training he can't attend. I thanked him, but politely asked if there wasn't someone more appropriate to go instead (i.e., someone more senior or important than myself), but he said, no, he thinks it should be me. I'm not sure if I will get to, because (this being government) other people have to agree, too, but it was flattering to be thought of at all. I felt like...well, like a grown-up, like maybe people see me not as just an assistant who answers the phone and makes copies and takes care of everyone's payables. Like maybe I have potential for something. I know I'm thirty years old and I shouldn't need external affirmation from my superiors to feel good about myself. But I still like it once in a while.

And now, I really should be in bed. Either that or I will have to go into the kitchen, melt some butter, and lick it directly out of the pan. Go see Julie and Julia! And then read the book.

Good night.

Test results! (a short post, for once)

2009-08-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

For those who want to know, Sam and I just came from the vet: no heartworm!!! His test was negative, which means he has a completely clean bill of health! He can take long walks and run around at the dog park and catch a frisbee (although I'm not sure he's a frisbee dog or a ball dog).

Yay! We're off to the dog wash now.

One last reminder: if you have a dog and it's not currently taking preventing heartworm medicine, call your vet RIGHT NOW! This is an easy and cheap disease to prevent. Much easier and cheaper than to treat it.

--Erin

Book Club

2009-08-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

My book club met tonight. I've always wanted to be in a book club, but never could find the initiative (or the right group at the right time) to start one myself. We are all adult piano students with the same teacher. It's quite a mix, six of us, all women--one retired, another retired with grandkids, two in their 40s (I think?) with teenagers, one a little younger who just got married. And me, single and in my 30s. The piano is the one thing we have in common.

We formed by chance. I was reading a library book one day while I waited for my lesson (Cartwheels in a Sari--a memoir by a woman who grew up in a cult in New York City--I recommend it). It was a miracle that I was early in the first place, and on top of that I had remembered my book. The woman with the lesson before me started asking about the book as she packed up her music, and then our teacher joined in, and before we knew it we had a book club.

This month it was The Kite Runner, which is set primarily in Afghanistan in the 1970s. It was one of those Important Books everyone was reading a year or two ago, and I can see why. I liked it, but it was sad, and then it was sadder; and then just when I thought things were looking up, it got sadder still. But yet, it was not without hope. You should probably read it, if only so you can say you've read it.

This was only our second book. Before this we read The Glass Castle, a memoir by a woman who grows up semi-homeless with her bipolar mother and alcoholic/out of touch with reality father. Cheery. Parts of it were hilarious, but honestly I couldn't believe people could be that uninterested in the welfare of their own children.

I was hoping for something happy this next month, but now we're on to Love in the Time of Cholera, which I've never read and don't really know what it's about yet, but judging by the title, I'm guessing the screenplay adaptation was not written by Mel Brooks.

After this, it's my turn to choose (alphabetically by last name--very logical of us). I've got my book picked out already. I bought it on sale at Powell's. It's piano-themed, non-fiction, and--I'm hoping--a little happier in tone.

But of course, book clubs aren't really about the book. Oh, sorry, was that a secret?

Or at least, ours isn't. A simple statement about the characters might lead to a grandchild anecdote (or two, or ten...), or various medical ailments of one's friends and relatives, or a work story, or tales of a neighbor whose kid joined a cult, or another novel that you simply must read (at which point we all take out our notebooks to write down the title), if only any of us could remember the author's name. And ten minutes later, we circle back around to the book. We drink a little wine, we eat dessert, we laugh. It's low-pressure, companionable, nice.

Unfortunately, I'm feeling irritable today, so internally I wasn't as patient as I should have been with a certain member, who is very nice and genuine and sincere and caring, but who has a prominent tendency to monologue, almost exclusively about herself. I'm hoping it wasn't obvious that I was annoyed. I know I've got an expressive face. I try to be nice. But you know how most groups/offices/families have one person where, whatever someone else is saying, it inevitably applies to them in some way, which leads to another long story? Kristen Wiig on SNL has perfected this in the character of Penelope, who compulsively one-ups everyone around her (so your dog had puppies? Penelope just gave birth to kittens! you broke your finger? Penelope lost a leg and regrew it in a week...etc.).

Like I said, I try to be nice, but I'm not feeling very tolerant today. Maybe it's the heat. I spent all last week staying with my parents, where there is glorious air-conditioning. My condo reached 80 degrees inside by Monday morning, and 100+ temperatures were predicted for the week, so I called my mother and asked if the open invitation was still good. The dog and I stayed with them until Friday, when it cooled off a little. Not a bad deal: queen-size bed, free cable TV (I watched The Daily Show every night before I went to sleep), warm showers, home-cooked dinners, and well-stocked fridge. Also, I left Sam with them during the day, so he had his own private doggy daycare for the week. I was afraid he would refuse to go home with me again, preferring to stay with the benevolent dispensers of treats and belly rubs, but fortunately dogs are loyal and he hopped right in the car to go home. He's a better person than I am, for sure.

Sam's final heartworm test is on August 15. I asked the girl how long it would take to get the results, expecting it to be a day or two--preparing myself for the long wait over the weekend. But she said, "Ten minutes." So on August 15 we'll know, after nearly a year of treatment and waiting and more than a little money, whether it worked.

Work has been a little crazy, too. A new group/team has just been formed, which I was not part of, and then I was, and then I was not, and now I am. I was moving with them to a different floor in the building, and then I wasn't, and then I was, and...well, you get the idea. There are rumors flying around the office about personnel changes, hirings, reorganization, and people are getting pretty squirrelly. I think everything will be fine once the dust settles, but in the meantime, as a lower-level worker and a "work producer" as my boss likes to call it (as opposed to the "non-work producers", aka most--though not all--managers of the world, who merely come up with ideas and pass them off to the producers for execution), I keep getting more things to do, and none of the old work is going away. It's frustrating because I feel like the quality of my work is not as high as it could be, but lately the goal has just been getting things off my desk so I can go on to the next.

I keep reminding myself that I like to be busy, but there's busy and then there's frantic, out-of-control, screaming-on-the-inside, about-to-throw-my-chair-out-a-window-if-someone-gives-me-one-more-thing-to-do-that-they-could-easily-do-themselves-in-two-minutes busy. We're somewhere between the two right now. I try to take deep breaths and not curl in a fetal position under my desk.

But I'm not complaining--I'm employed full-time, I have good benefits, and I'm definitely not bored!

So...how have you been? Thanks for the blog comments. Even though this may seem like an open therapy session/journal entry exclusively for my own benefit, I appreciate knowing you're out there. :-)

Time to go open the windows to cool the house off a little before bedtime.

All right, all right, I've been avoiding you

2009-07-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

Today started with a hairball. Or was it an omen?

I was just on the other side of sleep this morning when I began to hear the unmistakable sound of a cat hacking something up beyond the foot of my bed. I recall a dim thought about investigating, but then fell back asleep and forgot all about it...until my alarm on the dresser went off. I leaped up and raced around the end of the bed to switch it off--landing smack in the middle of a giant, cold, wet hairball. (Note: if you have trouble waking up in the morning, an adrenaline jolt from stomping on something cold and slimy with your bare feet is quite effective. My shrieks undoubtedly woke the upstairs neighbors, if not the actual dead.)

So that probably should have been my first clue.

I should start by saying, I like my job. I really do. I'm grateful every day to have a job in this frightening economy, and most of the time I find my work very busy and interesting. But the thing about a busy and interesting job is, sometimes it can be entirely *too* busy and *too* interesting. Right now, we're in the middle of a big reorganization of people and departments and responsibilities. It's like Fruit Basket Upset, only with people's jobs. No one really knows what everything will look like when the tornado finally sets us down in some field, but in the meantime there's still plenty to do. In fact, there's more and more every day, masses of papers swirling around me that I manage to snatch out of the wind and hold onto long enough to put on my to-do list before they're gone again.

This was my first day back after a pleasant four-day holiday weekend, and it included a lunch meeting, an afternoon meeting, and several red-alert crises. Tomorrow I have a breakfast meeting with a new "team" that has been formed from some existing departments. What makes me a little concerned is the fact that when I looked at the list of invitees, I'm the only administrative person on the list. The other six are either project managers or program managers. Is it cynical of me to think that this may result in more work for me?

My boss--my immediate supervisor, that is--says sympathetically, "Everything runs downhill." She used to be an assistant, so she gets that extra work tends to fall on the lowest-ranked person. (Me.) Others are not quite so sensitive.

Do I sound ungrateful? I feel guilty for complaining, because there are so many people out of work these days. People with real problems, like losing their houses and not having the money to fix their cars or pay for their kids' braces. I, on the other hand, have a full-time job, with excellent benefits and enough wages to pay the mortgage and have a little left over for electricity and food and stuff.

I should be kissing the hot concrete at the building entrance, twirling in Julie Andrews circles in front of the jammed copier, hugging the boss who brings me yet another "urgent" project. I should not be resenting the long walk from the parking lot (past the managers' reserved spaces that are always empty), or the lady who microwaves broccoli at 9 AM, or the man who sits behind me and has long, loud personal phone conversations in a voice like a hive of bees.

And yet, I do resent them. Of course I do. I'm pretty sure if I were in the Garden of Eden, I would be complaining about the itchy grass or the too-sweet fruit or the offensively naked man or something.

Also, in case you haven't figured it out during my three-month blog hiatus, I did not get into library school. I wasn't surprised, really, because so many retirees or laid-off workers are going to grad school for a renaissance career as a librarian. The thin envelope contained a letter saying they had a huge pool of applicants this year, more than ever, and they hated turning me down. Part of me was relieved. Now I don't have to figure out how to pay for grad school, saddling myself with massive debt or taking on another job. And I don't have to take on studying for classes in addition to my full-time job. Also, I wasn't 100% sure if I wanted to take that path, and now the decision is made on my behalf for at least another year. But I was also a little disappointed. Finally, I thought I had figured out what I was going to DO WITH MY LIFE. Now I'm not so sure.

When people ooh and ahh over the fact that I graduated from Whitman, I always feel like a bit of an impostor, a poseur compared with my overachieving classmates. I haven't been awarded a Fulbright, or a Rhodes scholarship; I'm not in medical school, law school, or Harvard Business School. I don't work for a national newspaper. I'm not solving global warming or the hunger crisis. Nor, even, am I married with two or three adorable moppets whose pictures appear in the alumni magazine.

I work in an office. I have an ordinary job, an ordinary single life, an ordinary condo and dog and car. Ordinary is okay, especially in this economy, but I'm still left with the looming question of where I might be headed from here.

So...that's enough maudlin reflection for tonight. In better news, I took Sam to the vet a few weeks ago to be weighed, and he had gained ten pounds in two months! This is excellent news, because weight loss is a symptom of heartworm, and it's a good sign that he has gained some back. He was down to 68 pounds in December; now he weighs nearly 82, right in the target healthy weight for a German Shepherd. When I pet him, I can't feel all the bones in his head or count his ribs anymore.

His final blood test is in August, six months after his last injection. That's when we should know for sure whether the heartworm treatment worked or not. My guess is--no, I don't want to jinx it by speculating, but let's just say I have hope.

In the meantime, Sam seems much happier with life. He bounces along on our walks, his tail curved up, and his ears taking in every crow and squirrel. I took him to a dog park for the first time on Sunday. He *loved* it! I was a little worried because I don't know his history, particularly in socializing with other dogs, but he loped around the park and sniffed the butt of every canine who would hold still long enough (and some who wouldn't). Then he came home and fell asleep in the middle of the floor for the rest of the day.

Also, I discovered tonight that he goes *crazy* if I blow air on his face. He leaps up, races in circles, runs into the couch and the piano, and then comes back for more. Pretty soon I was laughing so hard I couldn't get any air to come out, and I forgot all about my stressful day and my existential crisis, and then he rolled over for a tummy rub. Just like a dog.

In which Erin finally returns to give an update

2009-03-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

First, an apology to my loyal readers (if I have any left). I was very surprised to find that it has been a month since my last post. A few things have been keeping me occupied, though. Here's a brief summary:

1. Family stuff. My grandmother broke her hip, and has been in the hospital and now a care facility while she heals. The break was such that they were able to do a "simple" hip replacement, so it's the least bad it could have been, but it's still not great. I've been to see her a few times, and I know I should go more often because she's bored and anxious to go home. You might think, if you've never been in the hospital, that it sounds rather nice to lie in a bed and watch TV and have people visit and bring you food. But it gets boring awfully fast. When I had my gallbladder out a few years ago (yes, apparently I'm now a seventy-five-year-old woman--but seriously, it's genetic and it runs in my family), I was looking forward to a few days of pampering, but I surprised myself (and the doctor) by dragging out of my hospital bed and walking around unaided on the same night of my surgery. Some unconscious part of me just couldn't stand lying there. I didn't see that coming.

2. Work, work, work. Part of my job involves assisting with a new citizen committee, and they meet once a month in the evening. That sounds simple, but putting together binders, ordering food, reserving rooms, etc., takes a lot more time than you would think. Not to mention attending the meetings, which work out to an extra half-day of time for me. I have the option to bank the overtime hours for later use, but this month I was so tired by the end of that week that I took Friday afternoon off instead. Which was wonderful: I came home, ate a leisurely lunch, took the dog out, and then had a nap. Perfect day. There were about fifty things I needed to do, but I did none of them. "I did nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be."

3. Orchestra. We're now in rehearsals with our third tryout conductor. The second one was...interesting. We had two concerts with him at the end of February. They went okay, but I just don't think he is the best fit for our group. He spent a great deal of time in rehearsal on very small passages and on developing a "sound", often working with one section at a time and leaving the rest of us sitting there staring at our shoes, and we were dramatically underpracticed on the very ambitious symphony he selected for us to play. The third conductor is very nice and has a quirky sense of humor, but the music he picked out is...well, it's just too easy. Some of it I played in high school, and we weren't an especially advanced high school orchestra. I'd rather be bored than stressed, I suppose. But I really think the first guy, from last fall, is going to be it. He's lighthearted but passionate about music, and he doesn't treat us like a bunch of amateurs (which we are). We're voting in May, after our next set of concerts.

4. Sam! My sweet dog and I have survived two months of confinement, with very few scars on either of us. (One night in mid-February, I sensed he must be feeling better because he was acting bored; I came home from rehearsal to find that he had gone through my office trash and chewed up two near-empty pens I'd thrown away, and he had gotten blue and black ink all over the carpet in my office. It looks like someone beat up my rug.) This week, he has been for walks every day but one. You should see him on a walk now. He's so happy. He trots along, pulling at the leash, his tail wagging and his ears up. Today we went to the park for the first time in two months, and he had to sniff every single bush and tree; as I was telling my parents, obviously he's trying to catch up on two months of news that he missed.

The next step for Sammy is a second heartworm test, which will be August. The new protocol calls for testing six months after the last injections. There's a small possibility (10-15%) that this treatment won't work. So what would we do then, you ask? We would start over, and go through the whole treatment regime again. But I am trying to keep a positive attitude about it. He seems to feel so much better already that I hope the treatment worked. If the August test comes back negative, Sam can run and play as much as he wants.

5. Housecleaning. I really hate cleaning the house. Or I guess I must, because I put it off as long as possible every time. My desk at work is fairly neat, but that's because I can't get anything done if I don't have a surface to work on. At home, I can always go in another room if I can't stand the mess. Until all the rooms are messy, and then I finally have to bite the bullet and clean. The problem is, there are two separate stages of cleaning: first, there's the tidying and clearing of surfaces, wherein I sort the big pile of mail on the counter, take out the recycling, and hang up my clothes. Then, there's all the vacuuming, dusting, mopping, and bathroom-scrubbing. It usually takes me two days for the two stages, and if I start all this on a Sunday--as I usually do--I end up doing the intensive cleaning on Monday after work. Which is what I did this week, for four hours on Monday night. No wonder I have been experiencing....

6. ...General malaise. I don't mean to complain, and please don't think this is about to turn into a medical blog (just tonight's edition), but I've been feeling really run-down this week, for no good reason. I have been sleeping as much as I ever do, exercising again with the dog, and eating well. But I have been very tired and a little weak. Not sick enough to stay home, just not quite right. It'll pass, I'm sure, unless it's bubonic plague or tuberculosis or mono or something.

In a related note, this afternoon I decided to have a little nap on the couch for a few minutes. I had just started to drift off, when I was jolted awake by a low wolf-growl behind me, from the dog I thought was asleep on the floor. Sam shot past me to the window. I sat up to see what horrible menace was in the area--hitman? rabid pitbull? burglar? A few moments later, here's what went by on the path: a little old lady, walking a white poodle in a pink sweater and a toy Yorkie. My dog sat at the back door and growled threateningly at them. Way to protect the house, Sam.

7. Entertainment. I don't watch that much TV (isn't that what everyone who likes to watch TV says?), but I do follow a few things, and all of the shows I watch have had new episodes lately. I read that February sweeps got pushed back to "March sweeps" this year because of the digital switch, but then the digital switch got bumped to summertime, so we were stuck with reruns in bleak February anyway. So, since I know you're curious, here's what I'm watching this season: The Office, 30 Rock, House, Scrubs (but only because I want to see how it comes out--I am so over that show/Zach Braff), and Brothers & Sisters (which I watch with 75% attention while I wash the dishes, change my sheets, and get ready for bed on Sunday nights). And RIP, Pushing Daisies. I couldn't even bring myself to watch the last couple of episodes of that, because I knew that there was some kind of major cliffhanger coming that would never be resolved. Sigh. Oh, and I've got an endless supply of movies and TV shows (except the second season of Monarch of the Glen, which I just finished season one of on DVD) from Netflix. So there's lots to do. Not to mention books. I just reread Julie & Julia, which I highly recommend for anyone who likes to cook. Or anyone who doesn't. And then I get two weekly magazines. Etc.

8. Financial fun. I turned in my grad school application at the end of January, and then I had to do my FAFSA. But to complete my financial aid paperwork, I had to do my taxes first. Which was all just so exciting. I should hear from the school of my choice in "late April", whatever that means.

9. Friends from distant lands. Two of my college friends, who are married (to each other), were visiting from eastern Washington with their young son, and I spent an evening with them. Also, my friend who's been living in Egypt is in Portland this week with her husband; I will see her tomorrow, which I'm very excited about.

So, that's about it. How have you been?

Neighbors & Friends

2009-02-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

When you're outside in your sweatpants and curlers on a Sunday morning, it is inevitable that you will run into one of the neighbors. Probably one of the ones you're less friendly with, who will not acknowledge you even though you're pretty sure he can see you standing in the middle of a bare patch of grass in your spring coat, your head covered in crazy velcro loops. Probably it would have been a good idea to take the curlers out and put on real pants and maybe a little makeup before going out.

But when your dog has to pee, he has to pee.

Since he can't go for walks right now, Sam and I spend a lot of time out in front of my building, in one of the remaining squares of grass not torn up by the drainage workers. I'm not exactly sure what they're doing, but it involves digging a trench around each house, and a long one all the way between my house and the next one over. Seriously, it looks like Bugs Bunny took a wrong turn on his way to Albuquerque and tunneled around my yard in circles. There is construction tape everywhere, stretched on wooden stakes along the trenches--but only on one side of each. In fact, now that I look around, all the tape is on the wrong side to protect me. Apparently no one cares if I fall into a two-foot trench and break an ankle in the dark, as long as the trespassers are safe.

Our frequent trips outside mean we've been seeing a lot of the neighbors lately. Not just the nice ladies who helped me move my piano in two years ago, and who always smile and ask about my cats and pet Sam. And not the dalmatian owner on the other side, who is terribly nice and lives with her adult son (he's not just an adult--he's got to be close to 40, and they both work at the same place and share a company SUV; I haven't asked why he moved back in with his mom, but since he walks the dog and shoveled all the sidewalks when it snowed, I have no objections).

There are also the less-friendly people, who look suspiciously (I may possibly be projecting a little) at my too-large dog and refuse to make eye contact with me, even when I call hello. These are the people I'm afraid are going to turn me in for having a dog who's more than twice the weight limit specified in the homeowners' association rules.

There's one woman in particular I'm concerned about. She's an older lady with tight gray curls who lives a few buildings down, and wears an enormous duffel coat and a sour expression while she takes her yappy terrier out several times a day. She used to walk the dog right by my building as I was leaving for work in the morning, and the dog barked at me every single day like I was trying to rob a bank. I would greet the dog anyway, because he's a cute little thing with wiry hair and funny ears, and say hello to the lady, but I got nothing in return.

Fine, I decided, she's just grumpy. She also does not like Sam. As I believe I mentioned in a previous post, her eyes got very large when she first encountered him, and she backed away into the carport as he went calmly by on the leash. When I reassured her (over the noise of her terrier BARKING BARKING BARKING at Sam) that he was really very friendly, she said, "He's just...too big". And that's the only time she's spoken to me.

Sam, as I have said before, is not a barker. He lets me know with one deep German WOOF when he needs to go out in the morning, and he sounds an alarm to tell me that there are workmen outside or a dog walking by, but he's not a recreational yodeler/howler, and he rarely barks at other dogs when we are out together.

So it took me by surprise when we were out one day two weeks ago, and he began aggressively barking, barking, BARKING and lunging onto his back legs, straining at the leash.

I looked to see what terrible danger he was warning me of, be it homicidal maniac, careening car, or stray bear: but no, it was just the woman who doesn't like him, and her tiny terrier, of course. I don't think Sam cares much for her, either. I figured she was just that way with everybody, but then I saw her laughing and talking with the dalmatian lady by the mailboxes. So maybe it's just me.

The other person I was concerned might turn me in to the HOA lives on the first floor on the other side of our patch of communal grass. I got the impression--through a wordless exchange in the dark a few nights ago, in which she stood in her doorway and muttered while Sam peed in the yard (he does this a lot, as you might have noticed)--that she thought I had scared her cats. But then it occurred to me, happily, that under condo association cats are not allowed outside without a leash. Which is a ridiculous rule, to begin with, but her cats spend a great deal of time, free-range, digging around in the dirt and rolling on the sidewalk. They're nice cats; one is black-and-white and quite friendly, though I can't say as much for her owner. But she can hardly complain about my dog without admitting that her cats are also in violation.

So I think we're safe for now.

Sam seems to be feeling better after his two shots last weekend, although he's been sleeping a lot. We're on day 10 of his second month of highly restricted activity. Yesterday I went to the vet to pick up the rest of the antibiotics for his bladder infection. I also bought, at the vet's recommendation, some probiotics to sprinkle on his food. (I had to write down "probiotics" while talking to the vet on the phone before I realized that they are ANTI-antibiotics. I had no idea such a thing existed, but they replenish the healthy bacteria in his system that the antibiotics could wipe out. Incidentally, they look and smell just like beef bouillon and Sam LOVES them.) I steeled myself for the total due, and when the vet tech told me three times that it was really only $30.10 for all of it, I got a little hysterical.

I'll be glad when we're done with all this. Between Sam and work, I've been tired and edgy for weeks now, to the point that I briefly considered feigning illness to get out of seeing an old friend today, who's in town for a conference this weekend. (No, I wasn't actually going to *do* it!) I'm just not all that enthused about driving an hour or more roundtrip to the other side of town where she's staying and which I'm not all that familiar with. Before you judge me too harshly, I have already taken care of that myself: she's a truly lovely person, one of my favorite people in the world, and she's made it all the way from eastern Washington to my city, and I can't muster myself to drive HALF an HOUR to go see her? Did I mention she's traveling with her almost-two-year-old son, and her husband will have the car today, so she can't come to me?

Yes, I'm a bad person. I know. I'm the kind of person who gets a dog that violates homeowners association rules, and who has a teetering pile of dirty pots and pans in the kitchen, and who doesn't want to leave the house to see her friends.

Good dog

2009-02-15T21:26:00.001-08:00

Sam had his second (and final) two injections of immiticide this weekend, one Friday and one yesterday. Right now he's asleep in the hallway with his legs stretched out. At the vet's recommendation, I'm dosing him regularly with Benadryl, and he does his best to stay awake but his little eyes just can't stay open. Resting is important during these critical days.

Despite having one shot in each hip, Sam doesn't seem as uncomfortable as he was after the first injection in January. He hasn't been incessantly pacing, thank goodness, and he seems to be sleeping at night. He just has some general soreness, which my mom was very sympathetic about. She has general achiness every week after her regular shot, with flu-like symptoms that are so predictable we've taken to calling the day after her injection Side Effects Day, knowing that she shouldn't make any big decisions or plan to cook elaborately or commit to any activities on that day. She came over on Friday and commiserated with Sam (i.e., took a nap together) while I ran some errands.

Sam also gained five pounds in the last two weeks, which is great news. (Wouldn't that be nice?) He has lost quite a bit of weight due to the heartworm, and his collar is too big for him now. The fact that he's gaining some back is good. The vet was very excited about that.

And Sam seems to be tolerating the treatment well so far, which is good news, although I'm not basing that on any scientific analysis. This month is critical, because the heartworm have been loosened by the antibiotics and the first month's shot and the preventive heartworm medicine--and now, these two shots 24 hours apart are the big push to get rid of all the adult heartworm. But that means that as they break apart, they could potentially cause problems in his lungs, which is why he's supposed to be kept very quiet for the next four weeks.

You're probably thinking to yourself, how is that good news? Well, compared with this: the original antibiotics for his (possibly) bladder infection were apparently not effective, and he will require more antibiotics.

As instructed, I collected a urine sample--Sam's--and took it along to the vet on Friday so they could test for bacteria after the first round of antibiotics. It was easier than I feared; I just took him outside and waited until he started to go, and then bent down with my plastic container, stuck it under the stream (sort of like filling a water bottle in a drinking fountain...) and prayed that he wouldn't get spooked and splash me. Ugh. But he hardly seemed to notice me kneeling there.

My big dilemma was what to carry it in after I collected it. I didn't really want to arrive with a clear plastic container of urine in my hand, so I found the smallest paper sack I had, which was from Williams-Sonoma. Seriously, how suburban middle-class did I feel, arriving at the vet in my Subaru with a bag from a moderately-pricey kitchen store concealing my German Shepherd's urine?

The technician took the bag from me, and asked if I wanted my container back. I said no and laughed, and she told me I'd be surprised how many people get mad if their containers aren't returned.

The vet will call me tomorrow with the first results from the urine culture. That should tell us which antibiotic will be most effective to treat this particular infection, and then I'll go back for a prescription.

After I listened to the vet's voice mail Friday night saying the first round of antibiotics hadn't worked, I sat down at the foot of my bed, rubbed my cats' ears, and wondered what I had gotten myself into. When I factored the cost of owning a dog into my monthly budget, I had no idea how far above food and treats and an annual rabies vaccine I was really committing to. His adoption fee seemed like such a bargain at the time.

Was it a mistake? Was I too far down this road to change my mind now? I thought about the money I've already spent on my dog, and the seemingly infinite possibilities for more expense. He could get another infection, or the first round of heartworm treatment might not work, or he might get some other ailment that afflicts older dogs. Was this all worth it?

Yes. I think so. So far.

This is what I know for sure: Sam has the sweetest disposition. He makes me feel safer at night. He makes me laugh, with his goofy grin and his obsessive focus on anything edible. He's always so thrilled to see me when I get home (the cats are, too, but they aren't so demonstrative), and I look forward to his greeting me at the door with tail wagging so hard it makes a reverberation on the closet door that I'm sure my neighbors think is a drum kit. I love that everyone admires him when we're out together, and that he has very nice manners. My parents love him and have adopted him as their part-time dog (or granddog, as my mother has embraced on her own). He just makes me happy. I don't regret bringing him into my life, and I don't begrudge him the expense. I just have to remind myself now and then, that I made an intentional decision to go down this road, and why.

Someday I'll look back at this time and think about the wonderful, sweet dog and however much time we have together--and not about the money. He'll be a bright, funny, bittersweet chapter in my life.

But there's no need to eulogize him yet, since he is very much alive and waiting to have his belly scratched beside my chair. Good dog, Sam.

A new decade of adventures

2009-02-04T20:59:00.000-08:00

First, I think the weather gods have finally forgiven me for however I wronged them, because today was beautiful and sunny and 60 degrees, and it's February fourth. Usually my birthday is greeted by rain, or sleet, or snow, or ice--or some combination thereof. I can't tell you, because I lost count long ago, how many birthday parties I had to cancel as a child because of the weather.

Yes, that's right--it's my birthday today. I'm thirty. The big 3-0. The introduction of my fourth decade of life (calm down, super-technical people--I know that I won't really reach that until 31; face it, the millennium debate is long over and you lost to 2000). Thirty, flirty, and thriving (bonus points if you know what that's from).

Lots of people have been asking me, with a certain amount of glee (these people are usually younger than I am), if I am freaked out about turning THIRTY. Honestly, I'm not. I kept waiting for the feeling of dread, and I woke up this morning and checked myself for signs of anxiety. But I'm really kind of relieved to be leaving the turbulent twenties behind. Twenty-five was much worse than thirty. I remember the horror of looking in the mirror on my 25th birthday and panicking that my life was dripping away while I lived with my parents and worked swing shift in a call center and did nothing else. But thirty doesn't feel like that.

If I were the sort of person who made a list of things to do in my life--a "bucket list", if you want to be completely asinine--I would have included the following things:

Live in a foreign country and learn a second language
Learn to play the piano
Buy a home
Get a dog
Go to library school and work in the library field someday

So far: I lived in China for two years, although I only learned Chinese well enough to barter and order food. I am two-and-a-half years into piano lessons. I am about 27 years away from paying off my mortgage, but every month I get a little closer to owning my home outright. I have the sweetest dog ever, expensive health problems or not. And I have applied to library school for next fall, and hope to hear something next month.

So you see, I haven't been completely wasting my time. I look back now and see that I really did accomplish some things in my twenties. And now, I have all that helpful experience and perspective to carry on into my thirties. I'll probably feel the same way in ten years at forty (yikes!), smugly looking back and wondering what that crazy thirty-year-old was thinking. Isn't it funny how we can feel so mature and together at any age, but looking back we recognize that we had no idea what we were doing most of the time? My current self thinks my younger self was kind of lost and made some strange choices--and yet, here I am as a result of that younger self, feeling fairly good about life.

Of course, there are still things I would like to accomplish in my life. I want to write a book someday, and have it published, even if I can't live off the royalties. I want to learn a foreign language well enough to dream in it. I would like to learn watercolor painting, and colored pencil drawing, and calligraphy. I want to visit Australia and Russia and Egypt, eventually making it through all seven continents, even Antarctica if I can do it in a way that doesn't damage the environment there. I want to actually read all the books I own, and get rid of the ones I don't like. I want to learn to make a roux and decorate a cake. I want to find a way, cliched though it might sound, to contribute something to the world while I'm here.

So bring it on, world. I'm ready for a new decade!

Sorry, Pollyanna...

2009-01-29T21:55:00.001-08:00

(If you're just reading this to see how my dog is doing, my apologies for the upcoming rant--you can skip to the end for Sam news.)

Okay, I'll admit that there are some times during each month when I am a little more irritable. Right now I'm experiencing one of those times. But the world is just driving me crazy this week! Here are some things that seem designed especially to annoy me during these magical days:

1. Watch Alarms That Beep Every Hour. There are two people in the orchestra I play in who have these. You would be amazed at how carrying those little digital beeps can be; even when we're all playing full volume, including the powerful brass section and all the cellos and everything, I can still hear the BEEP-BEEP, BEEP-BEEP announcing that it's 9 o'clock. Or close enough, since one of the alarms is set a little fast, and the other is a little slow. I'm pretty sure the watch owners don't even hear the alarms anymore, and I'm guessing they might need to take pills every night at the same time. But that doesn't make their watches less irritating.

2. Politics at Work, Part I. I don't write about my job much here, and that's intentional. I don't want to offend anyone who might happen upon my blog, although I'm careful not to mention names or specifics, and I am not stupid enough to badmouth my job and my coworkers by name and get fired as a result. But it's just been one of these weeks. I've changed some of the details to protect...well, me, and also the innocent.

First we had The Door. There's a back door through the copy room that is an excellent shortcut to the bathroom, but it opens into the reception area of another department behind ours, and they really, really, really don't like us to use that door. Supposedly it's because, when the receptionist is not at her desk, someone has to get up and check to see if anyone has come in needing help, but I think they just don't like us disrupting them. Before you suggest it, they already have a bell to ring for service, but that's apparently not good enough.

I was chastised by said receptionist during my first week of work (here's how it went: she stopped me and said, "I don't know what you've been told, but this door is not a shortcut to the bathroom"--this was not prefaced with, "I know you're new, but--" or her name or even "Welcome!"...not that I'm still offended by that, obviously), and as a result I never used the door to cut through again. Plus, I forgot the code to the keypad to get back into our office. Oh, well. But almost everybody else in my office cuts through, so if I'm with someone else who goes that way, I'll go along.

Other than the obvious advantage of a shorter path to the bathroom, or an escape from assassins (I guess I shouldn't joke about that, considering I work for a government office--sorry), it's also convenient to go that way if you know there's a client or someone waiting for you in the front lobby, but you really want to brush your teeth before your meeting.

Yesterday I was with one of my coworkers who always goes that way, and I asked her what the code was as we were going through the locked door. The receptionist must have heard us, because she sent my friend an email saying she was sorry about giving her a stern look, but she had told "Angela" (we eventually figured out she meant me, and not the other girl in our office who also wears glasses but is named Angela) that it was not a shortcut and that I shouldn't go that way.

My friend and I rolled our eyes about that and agreed that everyone has to have own little their sphere of control, as she put it, within the building. In a formal, rigid administrative system such as ours, there are only so many places where employees, and especially women, can exert some influence over others. I've seen it every place I worked, but I'm still annoyed by it. This brings us to...

3. Politics at Work, Part II. This involves a couple of hours of overtime I worked last weekend, which inconveniently happened to fall on the Monday holiday, and were consequently worth more. If I had thought about it first, I would have just recorded the hours for Sunday and not worried about it, but my HR training kicked in at the wrong moment and I decided to ask someone connected with our timesheets about how to properly record my time. This triggered all sorts of alarm bells, because apparently I can't work overtime without authorization from my supervisor--not that he minded. The timesheet person interrogated me briefly over why I had worked overtime, what I was doing, and why I couldn't finish it in my regular hours. Not that she necessarily needs to know this. At all. She even said that, but then she kept asking questions.

To make matters worse, the reason I hadn't managed to get my work done during the week is that I was helping one of the big bosses with a project that isn't really my job (okay, it's not my job at all--it was my immediate supervisor's job in her previous role, but because she had done it the last time and she's not in the office right now, somehow it fell to me and not to the administrative staff who directly report to this person--not that I'm complaining). I don't really feel I can say no to that level of authority, and besides it was kind of a fun project and I really don't mind helping out. I want to demonstrate to my present employers that I am a helpful and friendly employee, who gives the impression that she *can* be bothered! But it was a time-consuming task, especially since more revisions kept coming back to me for several days, and consequently I had to take home my actual work that needed to be done by Tuesday. When I told the timesheet lady why the overtime was necessary, she told me that next time I should say I was too busy to work on the other project. Yeah, right.

But I just nodded and smiled. In my head, I was shouting, "Sphere of influence! Sphere of influence!", to remind myself that she was just exerting her power where she could, and it wasn't really about me or my two hours of overtime, and therefore I should not pelt her with paperclips.

4. Irritating, Inconsiderate, and Annoying People. I don't mean all people--and of course I don't mean you!--but wow, there are a lot of crazies out there. There are the people who live in my complex and let their dog run around without a leash, and he seems to see the patch of grass in front of my particular condo as his own personal crap depository. The problem with that is, I take Sam out there to do his thing, and I'm afraid others may believe I am the inconsiderate pet owner not picking up after my dog (not true!--I have a bag dispenser on the leash so I'm never without one).

Then there are bad drivers, who fall into two categories: too fast, and too slow. The too fast ones always seem to be right behind me, and I'm forever following the too slow ones. I suppose everyone feels the same way, because there's always got to be someone going faster than you, and someone slower you'll catch up to. Oh, and a third category of general stupids: people who wander between lanes while talking on the phone and smoking and drinking coffee and putting on lipstick.

5. All right, that's enough grinching it up for one night. If you work in my office and recognize yourself, accept my sincere apologies, and you have permission to complain about me on your blog all you want...as long as you get my name right!

Oh, and if you're just tuning in for a Sam update, he seems to be feeling better! He has been peeing with much less difficulty, since I'm sure you want to know that, and has had no further accidents in the house. I don't want to jinx it by celebrating too soon, but I think the cheapest option may actually be working this time. Thanks to all of you for your kind words.

It's never as easy as yes or no

2009-01-27T15:33:00.000-08:00

The vet called as I was pulling into the parking lot after lunch. I was going to be, not just on time, but early back to class, but instead I sat in the car and talked to the vet for twenty minutes, and they started class without me.

The doctor said that Sam did, indeed, have blood in his urine, but no protein and not many white cells in his urinalysis--which means it's probably a bladder infection, not a kidney infection. But he also said that there's no way to know for sure without running some more tests, including:

(cue cash register sound effects)

1) More bloodwork, for about $80; and/or,
2) Urine culture, for about $80.

He said that 95% of dogs, presenting with the symptoms Sam has, turn out to have bladder infections and not kidney problems. But on the other hand, most of those dogs are not on immunosuppressants, which can result in more serious infections.

The treatments for kidney vs. bladder problems are similar: bladder infection means ten days of antibiotics. Kidney infection means four to six weeks of antibiotics. I asked if, supposing Sam was not better at the end of the ten days, we could run additional tests and put him back on antibiotics for his kidney. The doctor said that he could prescribe an antibiotic that would work for either bladder or kidney infections.

That's what we decided to do, although of course now there's a risk that his kidney could be damaged in the intervening time between courses of antibiotics, but it'll only be a few days at most.

The vet also suggested that I could collect a urine sample from Sam (there's a lovely picture for you) three or four days after he finishes the antibiotics, and take it in so they can test again for bacteria--the lack of which would show that it had been a bladder infection, as suspected.

I feel mostly okay about deciding to treat for a bladder infection and not do more tests yet. I asked the vet if he thought I was being negligent by not testing for kidney problems right away, and he said "no!".

When I arrived to pick Sam up at the clinic this afternoon, I was faced with the second choice of the day:

(cue cash register sounds again)

1) Antibiotics that will probably work fine, although resistant strains of E.coli might not be killed (and we don't even know if he has E.coli), at $22 for a ten-day course; or,
2) Antibiotics that are more likely to kill E.coli, at $112 for a ten-day course.

After much discussion, I chose the first option, and paid for his exam and antibiotics (kah-ching). The technician told me that Sam should be much better in two or three days, and if he's not I should bring him back in for the other antibiotics--or for the kidney tests. If the first treatment doesn't work, I'm only out $22, and Sam won't be in any danger. So that's what we did.

Sam is currently sound asleep on the floor with his legs stretched out. He's had a big day, although he didn't seem too traumatized when they brought him out to go home. I was afraid he'd think I had abandoned him; but he was much more interested in whatever was in a cage that a lady brought in, than in the fact that his person had arrived to take him home. I also heard the two technicians giving him treats in the back room first, saying how sweet he was and fussing over him.

No one at the clinic tried to make me feel guilty at all for choosing the options I did today, but of course I still feel it. My emotional reaction is to spend whatever it takes to make sure that my dog is okay; but I know that rationally, I can't afford every treatment option, and maybe I shouldn't spend thousands of dollars on my dog, however much I love him. He's not my child; I am not his mother. My responsibility is to see that he is properly fed and housed, that he has somewhere to relieve himself, and to make sure he is not suffering. I also throw in a few belly rubs for free. In return, he provides companionship and affection and general enrichment of my life. But he's not a person, however much he has a personality.

It's a tricky issue. I read a recent article in the New Yorker about people spending money on their pets, and thinking of them as family--because many people see their animals much more than they see their actual relatives, and feel more bonded to their feline or canine companions than to any other human. One example in the story was, of course, Leona Helmsley leaving all her money to her dog, Trouble. Whatever you think of that, and not doubting that she loved her dog very much, I have to wonder if all those millions could be put to better use somewhere else--say, supporting a local animal shelter, or even a local homeless shelter.

So even though I love my dog--and I really do--I also have to remember that he's still a dog. He's happy to sleep on the couch and pee in the yard and go for a walk. I think he has a pretty good life here. I hope he agrees.

Another trip to the vet

2009-01-27T08:26:00.000-08:00

New development today: Sam has been doing pretty well with his treatment, and I have meant to post an update saying as much, but yesterday he had three accidents in the house--he's never even had one before--and there was some blood in his urine. He can't seem to go when we're outside, even when he assumes the usual stance of concentration.

I called Dove Lewis last night (emergency clinic, well respected in this area and kind of pricey because it's a real emergency room for animals--ask my father sometime about how our cat had pins put in her hip there), because my vet was closed, but the doctor said I might want to wait a couple of hours and observe him before bringing him in.

Logically, I knew this was the right thing to do, but emotionally I wanted to bundle him into the car and drive him to NW Portland.

Instead, I closed Sam up in the bathroom overnight (so he wouldn't pace, and so my carpet could have a break), and this morning rushed him off to the vet's office at 8 AM when they opened. I didn't even call ahead, figuring that my sweet dog in the waiting room would be harder to say no to than just telling me over the phone.

The vet doesn't get in until 9, so they offered to keep Sam until the doctor can see him. A cat scheduled for surgery has the first appointment, but the technician assured me the doctor should get to my dog right away, and I can probably pick him up at lunch time.

The vet tech said it sounded like a urinary tract infection, which is exactly what I suspected it was. I spent half an hour last night googling "prednisone" and "immiticide", looking for side effects that might include Sam's symptoms, but didn't find much. I am guessing it's a result of how much water he's been drinking, since the prednisone increases his thirst and his urination. But I won't know for sure until later.

Fortunately, I'm taking a class today for work (Adobe InDesign--fun so far), and the class center is even closer to home than my usual commute, so I shouldn't have any trouble picking him up on our class lunch break. Also, the class doesn't start until 9, so I am not even using any PTO (personal time off, for those lucky enough not to know what it means--a combined vacation and sick time bank) this morning.

In other news, I submitted my online application Sunday night for the University of Washington's Master of Library and Information Science. I should know something by late March. In the meantime, I have to do my financial aid paperwork (yay, FAFSA), but first I have to do my taxes, and before that I'm still waiting for my W-2s from last year.

I'll post an update as soon as I know something. I just wanted to let you know what was up, since I know so many of you are concerned about Sammy. Thanks for reading.

The dog days of January

2009-01-14T20:12:00.000-08:00

Sam had his first immiticide treatment for heartworm tonight. I raced home after work, changed into jeans, took him out to pee in the yard (a much quicker process, now that he's on anti-inflammatories that make him very thirsty), and quickly loaded him in the car to get to the vet.

We had to wait a long time at the vet's office, because there was a dog ahead of us who had taken off his own cast and had to be rewrapped. So we sat and waited. Sam was very good. He didn't whine or bark, as he sometimes does at the vet. He sat down beside me quietly, sighed a little, and lay down.

We waited.

There was a lady in the chair by the door with two Llasa Apso puppies in her lap. They looked like old ladies' curly gray-and-brown wigs. She held both of them without leashes, and they drowsed over her knees.

The woman whose dog was being re-casted sat opposite her; she was a thin, fiftyish woman with glasses and short hair, the sort of woman who looked like she bought online from LL Bean and voted Democrat, and who probably had a stack of half-read trade paperbacks beside her bed. She looked kind.

Another lady came in with a mesh carrier containing a large orange cat, which pressed itself daringly up against the side closest to Sam and meowed loudly at him.

Several people came in to buy pet food, and went away again.

We exchanged a little small talk. I learned that only one of the Llasas belonged to the woman; the other one was her boyfriend's, they were littermates, and he owned the mother as well. I also learned that she had named her dog Marley, "after the book". (I was glad she didn't say "after the movie," although she told us that she'd both read the book and seen the movie, and encouraged us to bring a box of tissues. I probably won't see it/read it, at least not until Sam is well again.)

At first we all sat quietly, but then the woman with the Llasas said, "I've never had a pet before. It's amazing how they change your life. My mother and my family and my friends all told me I should get a pet, but I can't believe how much she's changed things already."

"I'm thirty-six," she said, "and I live alone and I'm single, and my family is back in the midwest. I love having something to come home to."

We all smiled and nodded, possibly recognizing ourselves in that remark. She gave us a pretty, wide-open smile; she looked much younger than thirty-six, with straight brown hair.

The cast-lady asked her, in that insightful way that LL Bean-wearing, glasses-clad, middle-aged women have of asking direct questions, "You said she's changed your life. How so?"

"Well, I've decided I have to break up with my boyfriend," she said. "Marley showed me that." She told us that the boyfriend's dog isn't being trained very well, and she doesn't even like her puppy to go to his house in case she picks up bad habits from his dog. She didn't say so, but maybe she was thinking that didn't look very good for future children.

"So she's helped you already," the cast-lady said.

The lady with the cat, who sat holding the carrier on her lap and putting one hand through the top to pet the ginger feline, had brought a hardcover book. She kept opening it, looking at the page as if she didn't want to eavesdrop on the rest of us, and closing it again. She admired Sam, saying he was a beautiful dog (which naturally endeared her to me), and said she'd had German Shepherds growing up. "Me, too," I said, stroking his nose. She told me, "This is my first cat." The cat yowled in reply, and stuck its claws through the side of the carrier.

Sam squirmed a little at my feet. He knew that there was a cat in that case--not to mention, someone had dropped a dog treat under the cat-lady's chair.

The vet tech came out in her dog-print scrubs and took one of the puppies back for its vaccination. A terrible high-pitched squeal came from the back. The vet tech came back and swapped one furry dustmop for the other.

Finally, a male technician came out of an exam room holding a chart and said, "Sam? We're ready for you," just in the way that a nurse would at the doctor's office.

I said goodbye to everyone in our little waiting group, and walked Sam down the hall after the curly-haired technician, who looked like a teenager but probably wasn't. As we got up, I was distracted for just long enough that Sam scooped up the treat he'd been eyeing on the floor and swallowed it in one bite.

The vet came in after only a minute. I really like this vet. He is obviously very smart, and he clearly loves animals (I guess that's a requirement for the job, since I understand it's harder to get into veterinary school than many medical schools--that should worry me more than it does), but what sets him apart for me is that he takes time to patiently answer all of my questions. Sometimes I have a lot. My friend R, who went with me for Sam's last appointment, said it was "only a little like a cross-examination". It's because I know I only have a short time with the vet, and I want to get to everything and understand what's going to happen.

Tonight I apologized for interrogating him and he laughed it off, very nicely, and petted my dog and told me what a nice healthy coat Sam has. I trust him with my dog's well-being, which is especially important as we undergo this potentially risky treatment.

So now Sam has had his first injection to kill the adult heartworm. He is currently sleeping on the floor of my bedroom, or at least lying down quietly as he's supposed to. He's been very lethargic since we got home, the same way I am after I get a shot at the doctor's office. I dosed him with three Benadryl, as instructed, which will help keep him still. He has to stay quiet for four weeks now to prevent the dying heartworm from getting into his lungs. In a month, he goes back to the vet for two more injections twenty-four hours apart (one of them on Valentine's Day), and then he'll have another four weeks of quiet. No walks for these two months, although I can take him out to pee, and he's allowed to roam around in the house if he doesn't get too excited. He can even go in the car, so he'll continue to visit my parents (who consider him their part-time dog).

I feel anxious, but mostly hopeful. I am armed with all the information I could possibly want on the treatment of heartworm, and so far I believe I have made the right decision for me, and for my very sweet dog. I just have to believe that this will work and that he's going to be okay.

What hath Irving Berlin wrought

2008-12-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

I would like to make a promise: I will never again wish for a white Christmas in Portland.

I'd like to promise it, but I can't. I'm sure that some distant year in the future, the memory of all this slush and ice and gravel and general nastiness will have blurred into a hazy, romantic recollection of this magical December of snow, and I will gaze out the window in a vain hope for even a few white flakes to coat the brown streets and lawns.

I will have forgotten how I had to continue to drive to work these last weeks, even Monday morning when we awoke to four inches of fresh powder on top of the weekend's ice, because the show must go on at work. We were open for business, even though buses and emergency vehicles all over the city were getting stuck. It's something to do with the union; all public employees in the union who work for the city have to be treated equally, so management can't say that the office workers don't need to report but the police have to come in. (Consequently, I found myself in our office with only the mayor and two other employees. Not only that, but neither receptionist made it in, so I got to answer the phones all day. Which was fine--I've been a receptionist often enough in my life to feel perfectly at home at any front desk. And it's not like I could concentrate on "real" work, anyway. And the mayor brought us hot chocolate, bless his heart.)

I'm the first to admit, I am not the most confident of snow drivers. I don't have a lot of experience in the snow, and despite owning an all-wheel-drive Subaru wagon, I prefer my pavement dry. But I'm getting plenty of practice in the snow this month. I am now expert at putting on and removing my chains, and I managed to drive successfully through some of the choppiest intersections and side streets without spinning the car 360 degrees or anything. Although I was still kind of terrified.

I felt better when my dad said this week that the roads were treacherous, because he is a highly skilled snow driver. He used to be on a ski patrol and drive his car through all kinds of weather (this was back before he was saddled--uh, privileged--with wife or children), so if he says it's bad out there, it's officially bad.

The problem is, we are not set up here for extended winter storms. In defense of the Portland area, why would the cities in the metro area invest thousands of dollars in snowplows and sanding equipment that would spend most of their time sitting in a warehouse, rusting from disuse? You think the taxpayers would like that idea? And someone would have to be kept trained and ready to drive said equipment at a moment's notice.

Also, as a group, we are not good snow drivers. We do not see snow often, and we tend to panic when we do, abandoning our cars on the freeway and sliding sideways down hills (and, if we are very lucky, having those moments immortalized by the frenzied local news cameras lying in wait to capture the footage and play it over and over and over again on TV, while a list of school and business closures scrolls across the bottom). Probably we should all be forced to take winter driving school. But how often would we get to practice?

And furthermore, we get damn sick and tired of transplants from the East Coast and the Midwest and Canada telling us all about how we are bad snow drivers, and how we should get more snowplows, and blah blah blah back where we came from we wouldn't have this problem and everyone drives to work in a blizzard with no snow tires or chains. Okay, transplants, but do we make fun of you because you act like you've never seen rain before, and there you are going 20 in the fast lane and managing to hit every puddle?

But I do have to complain a little (which I am entitled to do, because I live here) about the lack of plowing on major roads. The most terrifying day of driving for me was Tuesday afternoon, when it warmed up a little and ruts were worn on all the streets with huge banks of snow in between, and I had to circle a rather large area because I couldn't get from one lane to the other to turn. I screamed quietly all the way home.

So I've been thinking "dreaming of a white Christmas, my ass!" as I coach myself aloud while steering slowly through several inches of frozen slush. In the bah-humbug spirit of the season, I went online tonight to prove that Irving Berlin, composer of the aforementioned song (minus the ass--sorry, Irving), lived a cozy life in southern California, where Hollywood really did dream of a white Christmas as a welcome alternative to all those palm trees and golden beaches. Only, unfortunately for my preconceived ideas, wikipedia reports (and therefore it must be true!) that Irving's life was a lot more challenging than I'd expected. He was an immigrant to the US, and he spent much of his time in New York, where they really know what snow is and how to deal with it and they can't understand what's the matter with us wimps out here. Which squashed my plans to rail against Hollywood.

I still love the idyllic snowy Currier-and-Ives Christmas pictures, with the horse-drawn sleighs and lights in the windows. But I love it better on the wall than outside the window.

As for me, I am dreaming of a gray Christmas next year and every year after. Bring on the rain! God bless us, everyone.

Merry Christmas!

Dog update

2008-12-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

I just read over my blogs for the last few weeks and realized that I never gave an update on Sam. I know, two posts in one day after weeks of silence, but here's a brief overview for anyone who's been wondering.

First, Sam still has heartworm, and he's still living with me. I called the vet the day after my last post in November, and he told me that he had done some research and there was a new treatment regimen for heartworm that has had 80-90% success. This treatment process takes ten months:

1. In the first month, the dog takes one preventive heartworm pill, and is dosed with antibiotics every day. This is supposed to weaken the existing heartworm. The dog should be kept inside and not walked during this time.

2. In the second month, the dog has a preventive heartworm pill, with no walking again.

3. In the third month, the dog gets an injection of immiticide, which kills the adult heartworm. The dog then has to be kept very quiet for four weeks, to prevent a clot of worms from moving into the lungs--for which there is no cure.

4. In the fourth month, the dog has another injection of immiticide and is kept quiet.

5-10. In the fifth through tenth months, the dog is on restricted activity indoors.

The vet told me all this, and at first I was elated because his odds had improved, but then I began to think about how a year is a long time in a seven-year-old dog's life. And the vet said I had to keep him inside except for bathroom breaks outside. Sam began to get restless, and wouldn't pee when I took him out for a few minutes at a time, as instructed. I wondered about his quality of life if he couldn't go for walks, and was confined to the house. I couldn't very well explain it to him.

I knew I needed to make a decision for his sake. What was fair to him? What was fair to me? I spent two agonizing days crying and talking about it. My parents felt terrible, but couldn't do anything magical to fix it. Two of my coworkers, who had been through animal-related situations in the last year, told me that whatever decision I made would be the right one. I read about heartworm online. I considered calling the humane society and giving them a piece of my mind, but that wouldn't have done any good. And finally I called my counselor and had him meet me for an emergency lunchtime session. He listened kindly as I sobbed through our hour together about how I wished there was a third option, and he very gently helped me see that I had already made up my mind. I called my parents, who offered to take him in for me if I couldn't do it myself.

So I called the vet, and told him I was thinking that perhaps it would be kinder not to treat my dog, but to have him euthanized. Only I couldn't even say the word. The vet got very agitated when he finally understood me, and immediately said that there was only a very small risk associated with half-hour walks at this stage of treatment. He told me that Sam could continue to go for walks and go out in the car with me, as long as he wasn't running beside a bike or chasing a ball in a field, anything that would get his heart pumping too hard.

There it was: my miraculous third option! My tears stopped right at that moment. He said that Sam will still have to be kept pretty quiet for two months of immiticide, when there is greater danger, but I could see the end of eight weeks of confinement.

It was like the clouds broke open and the sun came out. I put my shoes on right then, got the leash, and asked Sam if he wanted to go for a walk. (He did.) We walked up the hill to the vet's office, where I picked up his antibiotics and Heartgard. And finally, as we walked home, Sam stopped outside the catering place on the corner, in full view of the food prep tables through the plate glass window, lifted his leg against a column, and let loose an enormous stream of urine that cascaded down the pillar in a yellow fountain, and pooled at our feet. Happily, he lowered his leg, looked at me with immense relief, and trotted off toward home.

We're now halfway through the second month of treatment. He'll have his first immiticide injection in January, and then he has to be kept inside most of the time for the next two months, but who wants to go out in the cold rain in January and February, anyway? I feel much more confident that he's going to be okay. He even seems to be feeling better already.

In spite of the vet bills and the roller-coaster of potential heartache, in spite of the idea that we might not have very long together, I do not regret getting him. I feel completely safe when we're out together, and he has the sweetest nature. He never barks, even when he's home all day by himself, except to alert me to something potentially dangerous walking by. If he would just stop getting so excited when one of my cats walks by, things would be perfect. I feel safer at night, too, with an 85-pound German Shepherd patrolling on my behalf.

He's asleep right now on the couch in my office, dreaming with his legs stretched out. Lucky dog.

PS--Not to get on a soapbox about this, but if your dog (or cat that goes outside) is not on preventive heartworm medication right now, please call your vet immediately. It costs about $75 a year and is painless for your dog to take. On the other hand, if your dog develops heartworm, it will cost you hundreds of dollars and be potentially deadly to your pet. Please tell your friends and family to put their animals on heartworm medication, even if the vet says it's not common in your area. It's not common in Portland, either, and my dog still has it. You don't want to go through what Sam and I are experiencing right now.

Snowbound, sort of

2008-12-15T18:13:00.001-08:00

Good news for local news teams and Les Schwab profit sharers: it snowed in Portland. It started yesterday morning and continued through most of the day, accompanied by a fierce cold wind that the meteorologists have described as "arctic". With the wind chill, the temperature outside "feels like" 9 degrees F. Yes, really. Today it melted just enough to become a giant sheet of ice over the entire region.

Since Portland is not a city accustomed to such weather, everything shut down. It took ten minutes for the closures update crawl to get from "All Saints Academy" to "Westside Christian School" on TV last night. Unfortunately, I have learned that being a government employee means not automatically getting the day off when it snows. It's something to do with the union treating everyone equally (including emergency personnel), and with taxpayers not liking those lazy city employees getting to stay in their warm houses, and so my office was open for business.

But that doesn't mean I went to work. Despite having all-wheel-drive on my Subaru wagon, I didn't have snow tires or chains currently on the car, and I don't get enough practice driving in the snow to feel confident out there. My dad came by later and drove me over to get some work from my desk, so I could at least do something at home, because the cold weather is supposed to persist through the week.

I took the dog for a walk this morning, up to the grocery store to mail my sister's birthday card. We did fine on the sidewalks and grass, but crossing the major street between me and the store was a little terrifying. It's just one big long thoroughfare of ice, and Sam pulled insistently at the leash while I was trying to tread slowly across. We made it, but then we had to do it again on the way home (downhill, this time). Next time I will wear my cramp-ons.

There were children skidding down the hill behind my house on sleds, toboggans, garbage can lids, or just their snowsuits. It looked like fun. The girl from upstairs met me as I was taking Sam out, and told me her brothers wouldn't come out to play with her. I don't understand that: the best part of a snow day (especially a sunny one), other than getting to skip school, was going outside to play in the snow. I would have offered to join her for sledding, but I knew I had to go by the office soon. Also, it hurts a lot more when I fall down in the snow now than it used to.

After he took me to work to pick things up, I treated Dad to a hot drink, and then he helped me put chains on my car. It's supposed to stay below freezing all week, with another chance of snow on Wednesday, and I can't miss that much work. I'm almost out of personal leave as it is, because I'm still in my probationary period and I get about 1.2 hours of PTO (personal time off) per week. I'll get the rest of the time I earned in February, but I can't use it yet.

Dad very kindly rode around with me while I tried out the chains, and then helped me tighten them on the wheels. I've never driven with chains on before. Please, cold-weather-dwellers and skiers, don't make fun. I am an excellent rain driver, but it doesn't snow here often enough for me to develop my skills. Other than a general bumpiness, I found driving with the chains on quite easy. We'll see how it goes when I drive to work tomorrow.

I also put up my Christmas tree this weekend. I tried to get Sam to pose in front of it for a Christmas picture, but he loses interest quickly in sitting still if there's not a treat involved. And if you're wondering, Sam is feeling pretty well (or so it seems). He'll be receiving his first injection of immiticide, the stronger heartworm-killing medicine, in January, with another in February, and he has to be kept pretty quiet for two months. But I think he's going to be okay, because I have to keep thinking that, and he seems to be happy here. He's content to sleep on the futon in my office at home all day while I'm at work, and he and the cats continue to adjust to one another, slowly, slowly. He looks forward to our walks together, and so do I.

And now, I'm going to make myself some dinner and gaze at my Christmas tree.

The Tree Hunt

2008-12-13T21:09:00.000-08:00

I went to get a Christmas tree with my parents today. This is a time-honored family tradition, dating back as far as I can remember from the mid-1980s. Some families get a tree from one of those well-lit, convenient fenced lots in grocery store parking lots. They spend a few minutes looking at the pre-cut trees, wearing plaid scarves and laughing, and then they go to see Santa and drink hot cocoa.

We were not one of those families.

Two weeks or so before Christmas, we would all load into the Volvo, bickering, bundled in our warmest long underwear and raingear (it was western Oregon, after all), and drive way out in the country on bumpy roads to a particular Christmas tree farm that we visited every year.

A chilly and bored-looking attendant would wave us into a parking space between two massive trucks. We would get out of the car, all of us changing from tennis shoes to boots for the mud, my dad standing around impatiently with his arms crossed because he was always ready first. He would pick up a handsaw from the table inside, and we would be off.

Mostly what I remember is watching the back of my dad's baseball cap-clad head disappearing between the trees, and struggling to keep up in my stiff boots without tripping over any tree stumps or stepping in a hole. I usually did both.

Then followed much discussion: this one was too sparse, this one had a bald patch, this one was too fat to get through the front door, that one was too tall or short or narrow or thick. Sometimes we four would each have a different favorite, and stand stubbornly beside it in separate areas of the field. Sometimes we would form factions, two against two.

My mother would usually settle quickly on a tree she liked. (Recently I read that women make faster decisions than men; it's something about evolutionary necessity and needing to protect their young from predators. It seems to be true, except perhaps in deciding what to order off a restaurant menu.) She would stand by the tree of choice, with her arms folded, trying to flag down my dad who was a quarter of a mile off by now, way down among the bigger trees that had been overlooked in previous years and were consequently growing too large for most living rooms or town plazas.

Eventually my mom would grow tired of standing there, and she would find something to mark the tree for later in case we wanted it, because we knew that if we took our eyes off it and turned around, the tree would magically transform itself into an exact copy of all the trees around it, and we'd never find it again. Sometimes she tied a kleenex around a high limb. Sometimes it was a glove stuck on the very top like a leathery star. We could have brought along a ribbon or piece of bright tape, because we had this problem every year, but we never did.

Then we would rush to catch up with my dad, who would be tramping in deeper and deeper mud, still not satisfied. My sister by now would be growing tired, because her legs were the shortest and she couldn't see over most of the trees. There was a tractor driving around the lot on which she could have ridden, but it would have slowed my dad down and he knew that someone else was going to get our tree if we didn't find it first.

After making a wide circle, or deciding we'd gone too far and turning back, we would inevitably end up at the tree my mother had chosen. It looks good, we would resignedly say to one another and nod, and my dad would kneel and cut it down while instructing me on how to pull the top toward (on top of) me.

Then it would be my job to help carry the tree back to the car. This involved a reversal of our earlier procession, except that now giant bushy green limbs blocked my view of the ground or aforementioned stumps and holes. I tripped a lot.

By the time we reached the car, we were all tired, cold, grumpy, and usually wet from the rain. Thus, more bickering. One year, when there was an enormous ice storm, I shut my sister's hand in the door while trying to keep her out of the car (I think she wanted to use my hairbrush? I honestly can't remember what we were fighting about). I felt terrible. I mean, she was annoying, but of course I didn't want to hurt her. We had to rush her to the emergency room, where we waited forever because so many people had fallen on the ice. Even now, she still brings that up every year, and I apologize again. It's a holiday tradition.

This year, though, it was different. My sister's in Arizona, so she got her own artificial tree a few weeks ago, and she wasn't around to remind me about the hand-slamming incident. Mom and Dad picked me up in the truck this morning at my house, and we drove out to a different tree farm where they selected their tree in less than five minutes, and we found one for me not three minutes later, both near the road. A nice young man came and carried them for us, and they put them on an ingenious vibrating machine that shook all the dead needles off, and helped us carry them out to the truck. We were there less than fifteen minutes. It was effortless and easy and no one got hurt.

But I kind of missed the drama.

Good news, bad news, good news, bad...

2008-11-02T09:56:00.000-08:00

So, I have good news: I got a dog.

His name is Sam. I adopted him from the Oregon Humane Society ten days ago, and they estimated he's about seven years old. He is a German Shepherd mix, although I can't figure out what he might be crossed with--he's almost all German Shepherd in temperament and looks. He's very sweet-natured and quiet (so far), which is also good news. Living as I do in a condo with close neighbors, I can't have a dog that barks all the time while I'm at work. And my parents love him: good news.

He's good company, and he makes me feel safe at home and outside (it's easy to tell who likes big dogs and who doesn't), and although I had a little freak-out 24 hours after adopting him that this was a completely insane idea, I'm really glad I have him.

My cats, however, do not consider a new dog in their little kingdom to be good news. They've been spending most of their time under my bed this week, coming out only when Sam is closed up in the office. I did a little research on introducing a dog to resident cats (what did we do before Google? I honestly can't remember), and learned that patience and vigilant supervision are key. I don't let Sam in the same room with the cats unless I'm with him, and he wears his leash while he walks around the house so I can grab him if he gets too close to them. Flora, who is usually meek and silent as a rabbit, growls constantly every time Sam is near her, but I've read that that is a normal reaction and doesn't necessarily mean their relationship is doomed. I hope. Louie growls too, but I'm less surprised by that, seeing as he's the alpha-cat in this house.

Sam loves to go for walks, and he does not seem afraid of people (even men) or other dogs, which leads me to believe he's never been abused, so that's good news. And I have found him to be the most reliable workout partner I've ever had; he has not once called me to say that he doesn't feel like going out because it's rainy and dark. I've even lost some weight already. Since I put on several stress-pounds while I was out of work this year, that's also good news.

I took Sam to the vet yesterday for his new-dog checkup, for which I had a coupon from the Humane Society. The vet said that, despite the terrible state of his teeth, Sam might be younger than seven. He might even be as young as four years old, based on the condition of his coat and his pristine back teeth. That was good news, since I might get to have him longer than I was counting on.

But then, the bad news. (You knew we were leading up to something, right?) After Sam had his rabies shot and his exam, and everything was great, the vet did a heartworm test just as a precaution. He went away to check the results, and my mom and I sat in cartoon-dog-patterned chairs in the exam room and petted Sam and chatted.

And then the vet came back in, and he wasn't smiling anymore. This test is positive for heartworm, he said. This is pretty serious. He showed me the turquoise control color, and the blood-red strong positive Sam had turned up.

Somehow I found myself standing up, listening but not-listening to him, as he explained that we would do a second and more conclusive test that had to go out to a lab, and then if it came back positive, we could treat him for heartworm if that's what I wanted to do. He also suggested gently that I could probably return him to the Humane Society, although there was a good chance he would be euthanized.

No, I said, and it came out louder in the echoey room than in my head. No, I'm keeping him.

So he did the second test, and the results come back Monday from the lab. I will await a phone call, but since the first test is 94% accurate, and since Sam exhibits some of the symptoms I read about online for heartworm-infected dogs (lethargy, tiring after moderate exercise), I think we all know what this test will say.

And then he will be treated for heartworm, an expensive and potentially fatal endeavor that he has a 70% chance of surviving. The vet told me that he's only ever had to put one dog down when it didn't respond to the treatment. But I still don't like those odds. Sam will have to be closely confined for 24 hours after each treatment, to prevent his heart from pumping the worms into his lungs and bloodstream, which probably means an overnight stay at the vet's office. It's not going to be cheap. But I wasn't even thinking about the money.

I was thinking about how I could already love a dog so much that I'd known for only nine days, and how I didn't really want to cry in front of the vet and my mother. Peppery tears pricked the back of my nose.

Later, after a good cry and a nap at home, I thought about why it was so much easier for me to cry for an animal than a human. I thought about when one of our two kittens died in China, after we rescued them from the most depressing outdoor pet market I've ever seen, and about how I sobbed with tiny orange-and-white Kito in my hands, wailing like one of those professional mourner-ladies in the Middle East. I didn't even recognize myself in the weeping; it came from some deeper place inside me.

It's not that I don't cry when someone I love passes away, but it's a more complicated grief. With an animal, it's a very clean pain that cuts right down to the nerve, and there's no guilt for not having been a better granddaughter or friend or neighbor. I think it's because it's so much easier to love and trust a pet than another person. I know what Sam wants, what he likes, what he thinks of me, because he has no reason to hide those things from me. I know what Flora and Louie think, too, because they're not afraid to tell me with a purr or a scratch. But a person is a hidden hand of cards.

I wondered if everyone felt this way, if they had to cover their ears and change the channel when a story came on the news about neglected dogs, if they wondered why it was so much harder to read about one dog breaking another's neck on a bus than about an actual person's death. All I know is, although I feel sadness and may cry for a human being, I don't get that same physical pain in my heart that I do for an animal.

So, now we proceed to treatment. I look at this way: we just have to assume that Sam's going to be okay. There's no point in dwelling on the alternative, because there's nothing I can do about it, and because Sam will pick up on any anxiety I feel. Seven out of ten dogs are successfully treated. And his odds are already better than the average dog, because I'm keeping him and not taking him back to a place where he probably wouldn't get treatment at all. That's in our favor, right?

If you are a praying person, and you don't object to praying for a dog, please think of Sam this week. All we can do is hope for good news.

Finishing what I started

2008-10-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

I am a world-class procrastinator.

You have only to look at the length of time between my blog entries to know that.

I am terrible at going to bed on time, and even worse at getting up. I set multiple alarms, one of them all the way across the room, but in the morning I very rationally get up and reset them for ten or fifteen more minutes of sleep, and then ten more, and every morning I run out of time and rush out the door with almost-dry hair and possibly mismatched shoes. I would love to be one of those people who gets up early, calmly irons a shirt and drinks a cup of tea while scanning the international headlines, effortlessly applies makeup, and saunters into work ten minutes early with a smug expression.

But I’m not one of those people.

I never have been. I was never great at doing my homework first thing after getting home from school (my main motivation to finish was my parents asking me, annoyingly, night after night, whether I had finished my homework yet, for the love of God). Honestly, that’s one reason I’ve hesitated about grad school—do I have the discipline to get my work done? Even now, I have nightmares in which I have a college research paper due the next day; and not only am I not finished, I haven’t even checked out the books yet. Which is not too far off the truth, in some cases.

I often end up having scrambled eggs or grilled cheese for dinner, because I can’t seem to focus early enough in the evening to make something that requires more than five minutes of cooking. (Don’t worry, I eat fresh fruits and vegetables too, but there are not a lot of fancy dishes prepared in my kitchen, at least during the week.)

Right now, in fact, there is a load of towels tumbling for the second time in my dryer. They were just washed and dried last night, but left in the dryer overnight, and I would ordinarily ignore them for a few days, but I need the dryer now for the clothes which have been waiting patiently for a week to be laundered. (Come to think of it, there’s also a bag of dirty dry cleaning which has been resting beside the door for a month. Does anyone know a good green dry cleaner in Beaverton?)

The Lives of Others, the highly acclaimed best foreign language film at the Oscars this year, has been languishing beside my TV for three-and-a-half months. (I love Netflix because there are no late fees—and because they have almost every movie ever made, and because I love getting those red envelopes in my mailbox, which never cease to feel like a present sent just for me—but it also indulges my natural laziness. If I won’t get charged more, I have no incentive to watch it now, therefore I will not watch it now.) It’s not even the German subtitles; I’ve kept English-language movies nearly as long.

When I check out a library book for three weeks, I don’t start reading it for the first two-and-a-half, and then I end up with fines because of course I want to finish it after it’s due.

There’s a perpetual pile of newspapers and unopened mail on my kitchen counter, bills, pizza coupons, yard cleaning services and political flyers and credit card offers and weekly magazines, all demanding my attention. I clear it all off in the occasional organizational frenzy, but the very next day it regenerates itself.

My general goal is to clean the house every other weekend. Guess how often that happens. Ha ha ha ha ha.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I saved all the Living sections (pardon me: now it’s “How We Live”) from the Oregonian while we were in Europe, because I like to read the comics every day. I read the front section, too, but not with as much zeal. It may seem unimportant, but for me it’s like talking to thirty different friends each day, and if I skip several weeks, I will miss things that happen to them. I might still get the big news, but I miss the small everyday happenings that make a friendship, so to speak.

I know it’s a little OCD, but I really wanted to read them all, even though I knew it would take me a while. So for the past six weeks, I’ve been trying to read at least one a day, sometimes several, and meanwhile I had to put each current day at the bottom of the stack, because I had to read them in order. (That’s the other thing: I don’t like to read or watch things out of order. If I watch a TV series, I have to start from the first episode and work my way forward. I hate having the ending of a movie ruined for me. Unless a book is really boring, I never skip ahead. I don’t know why, exactly, except that I like the surprise of discovery, and not knowing more than the author/creator intends me to know. Does that make me crazy?) So the stack has continued to get a little smaller every day, but it still stared reproachfully at me as I moved it from dining table to coffee table to floor to dining table again.

When I was out of work, I made myself a list of about ten projects. I think I might have accomplished two of them. In my own defense, though, that’s kind of a different issue, involving financial caution and mild depression. For instance, I need to have my piano tuned, and I was home all day for several months, but I didn’t want to spend the money on it; so now that I have a job, I have the money, but I have no time off to be home for it. Same thing with having the carpets cleaned.

Not to mention the recipe file I wanted to make, the paint I need to touch up in the living room and master bath, the closets to reorganize, the novel to write, etc.

This weekend, though, I really set myself to work:

I watched The Lives of Others on Friday night, as well as Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (I’ve only had that one for six weeks) on Saturday, and returned them. Incidentally, I recommend them both.

On Sunday, I read all the accumulated Living sections and recycled them. (Today I sat down for lunch and read today’s and only today’s comics. It was a great relief.)
I finally cleaned the house, took out the recycling, washed the dishes, put clean sheets on my bed, finished all that at 11:00 Sunday night, and then couldn’t sleep because I’d been rushing around like a crazy person all day. (If I had started at 10 AM, or on Saturday, I would have been finished at a reasonable hour, but first I had to sit in my pajamas and read my stack of newspapers, and clean out my email, and go to the movies….)

So it was an especially productive weekend, full of little triumphs.

One last disclaimer: I don’t want you to think I live in squalor, because I really don’t—there are no vermin in my kitchen, no piles of clothes on my bedroom floor, and no stacks of yellow newspaper surrounding all my furniture. But I am not good at going beyond the bare minimum required to prevent embarrassment at my mess, should I ever have to be rescued by firemen.

Oh, and a picture of the new haircut is forthcoming, as soon as I have a day in which I manage to both style it properly, and have someone to take a picture of it…. (And, I am also very proud to report that I created my own bullets in this post using HTML tags, which I took a level 1 class in last week. Aren't you impressed?)

But now I have to go get the damn towels out of the dryer, or I’ll just have to tumble them again later.

Talk to you soon. Probably.

Can it be? A blog update? I am shocked! Shocked!

2008-09-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, it’s been a while. But here’s what I have been up to:

I arrived home from Europe on Monday, August 18, spent two days trying desperately not to sleep in the daytime but then waking up at 5:30 AM, and started my new job on Thursday the 21st. (The new job is great, by the way. I love my coworkers, and they really seem to like me. I am constantly being praised and petted—hardly a day goes by when they don’t tell me how much they love having me there, and what with my constant need for positive affirmation, it’s almost enough that I don’t agonize over every tiny conversation and task. I’ll tell you more about the job itself in another entry.)

So after working two days, it was the weekend already. Friday night I was really tired. Saturday I started sneezing. (Do you see where this is going?) Sunday I was a little congested. By Monday morning, I officially had a cold and was in no condition to leave the house, let alone go to work. But here was my dilemma: I’d only been at my job two days; could I really call in sick?

No, I couldn’t, obviously. I didn’t even have anyone’s work phone numbers besides my own. So I got dressed and valiantly dragged myself to the office with a pocketful of Kleenex and Ricola. I felt like my brain had been replaced by jumbo marshmallows. I honestly have no idea what happened that day, although I had HR training and sat in on a meeting in the morning, and had lunch out with my boss (I remember the soup, though—I ordered chicken soup, which was delicious, and also made me want my mommy to come get me and take me home to sleep). By early afternoon, my supervisor was explaining something to me when she suddenly stopped, looked at me, and said, “You just aren’t tracking, are you? You should go home and rest.” So I did.

I stayed home sick Tuesday, figuring that I had demonstrated Monday that I was dedicated to my job, but that I really was too ill to work. I slept all day, and my mom brought over soup and applesauce and jello.

I decided I really had to go to work Wednesday. After all, what kind of an employee works two days and then needs two days off? So I got up early and showered and got all ready to go, but then was so exhausted by the effort of all that, that I didn’t think I could really drive to work and concentrate all day. I called my boss and asked him what I should do. “Stay home!” he said. “One, I don’t want you to get me sick. Two, I want you to stay home until you’re well.” So I hung up my work clothes, got back into my sweats, and spent another day on the couch.

When I returned to work on Thursday, finally feeling like a human person again, they were all happy to see me and teased me about being a slacker, which I thought was a good sign. (If they really thought I was a poor hiring decision/lazy, they wouldn’t have said anything to me, right?)

I haven’t missed even an hour of work since, and so far I really like my job, although I am especially wary of any political maneuverings/alliances/manipulation, because of what happened to me before, and I work in a government office now where there’s plenty of that going on. I’m also hyper-sensitive to being perceived as anything but a conscientious employee.

Toward that end, I decided it was time to upgrade my work wardrobe. Although most of the city government for which I work is semi-casual these days (no jeans and no open-toed shoes are the only hard and fast rules), the office of the mayor is not. Those of us who work in that department have to present a professional front. So goodbye khakis and cords and polo shirts, hello tailored wool pants and oxfords. Although I still look substantially younger than I am (which everyone keeps telling me I’ll be glad about later…), I have not been treated like anyone’s teenage daughter brought in to do the filing, which is how I always felt that the managers at my last job perceived me. They were always inches away from patting me on the head and asking me what colleges I was planning to apply to.

Oh, and I cut my hair. I had never really planned for it to get as long as it was, but it had gotten out of control; my hair is pretty thick, and it took me about ten minutes to dry at full heat. If you know me at all, you know that I never have two minutes to spare in the morning, let alone ten. Overall it’s not much shorter now, but I added some layers (well, my stylist added them—I have not yet been reduced to cutting my own hair—she was really excited to try something new, especially as I had brought in celebrity pictures as visual aids; what did we do before the internet?). Anyway, I don’t look quite as much like an earnest high school student anymore. I hope.

That’s about enough information for now. I’ll do my best to write more; now that I’m settled into my job a little, I will have more energy for other things.

So how was your summer?

Almost Home

2008-08-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello. I am finally back in civilized land. There was really no chance for internet use once we left Stockholm. The woman who runs the farm where we stayed has a computer which we probably could have used, if it was urgent, but all I wanted was to check my email and see if anyone wrote to me on Facebook. Not urgent, unfortunately. And then yesterday, we stayed at a weird hotel near the airport in Stockholm, but their "business center" consisted of two computers which you had to stand up at the reception desk to use, and the internet was down besides. I was not happy about that. It really was a weird hotel. I felt like I had landed on a space station somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It was all glass and steel and odd round hallways. It was not homey at all. And there were round portholes in the bathrooms, which looked out into the main room. I guess this was to allow natural light in the bathroom, but it also made me feel like I was having a shower in a submarine.

We are staying in Frankfurt tonight, preparatory to leaving for Portland in the morning. (Yay!) I am ready to go home. More than ready, in fact. I have had many interesting adventures and have enjoyed my trip for the most part, but I have grown weary of digging through a suitcase for my shampoo, and of worrying that I will run out of clean clothes before we can do some laundry again.

I know, I'm a whiner. Here I am in Europe, seeing the great cathedrals and castles, and partaking of delicious cuisine, and all I want right now is to go home and sit on my couch in clean pajamas with a cat in my lap and watch a movie in English.

Except maybe no cat in my lap, since I hear it's been 105 degrees in Portland this week! Ugh.

I will get back to our Swedish adventures once I'm home, since it's costing me €4.50 for 45 minutes of internet time here, but here is a short anecdote to tide you over: when we landed in Frankfurt today, we immediately got the shuttle to our hotel (sort of--we waited and waited and waited for the shuttle outside the airport, and when it came we got seats, but a group of about 8 with suitcases did not fit into the small van and they were mad). It was already after 2 when we arrived and took our heavy bags up to our hotel rooms for the last time, so we decided to have lunch here at the hotel and then go to town to explore a little. I expected that the restaurant would be deserted, maybe even closed, but when we walked in there were several tables of people chattering away, and the food--oh, the food!

There was a table of desserts right inside the door, strawberry cakes and chocolate mousse and cherry sauce and blueberry cake and apple cake and chocolate pastries. There was a table of fruit and cheeses. There was a table of green salad, with sliced cucumber and mushrooms and olives and mozzarella balls and other things to choose from. There were two kinds of soup, and a whole spread of salmon and white fish. There were pastas and beef tips in wine sauce and brussel sprouts and broccoli au gratin. There was a carving station with mediterranean stuffed turkey. There was even a crepe bar.

I couldn't believe it.

So we sat down, and the waiter told us the price per person, and that it included sparkling wine and juice and water. And that's when it occurred to my dad that it was Sunday. This was Sunday brunch that we had stumbled upon. I didn't even know what day it was, but it certainly explained why groups of dressed-up Germans were eating a plentiful feast at 2 in the afternoon.

It was delicious. We stuffed ourselves (some more than others), having had a very bad dinner last night at our Stockholm airport hotel. (Seriously--it was awful. I had a shrimp sandwich that turned out to be fishy-tasting salad shrimp, partially congealed hard-boiled eggs, enough mayonnaise to coat the outside of the Vatican, and a small piece of cold bread. It was disgusting. I had to go to the supermarket afterward and buy a bag of nuts, the only thing I found that sounded good and didn't require cooking. And that was after they told us the damn internet wasn't working until Monday!)

And for lunch yesterday, we had eaten at McDonalds while traveling back to Stockholm. Yes, I know. But as I told my parents, it's kind of interesting to see what different things are offered, or what is not offered, at McDonalds in another country. Basically, the Swedish one was a lot like the American one. Not as different as China, where they serve taro pies in addition to apple, and pork nuggets. Anyway, it was fine for one meal but I was hungry and disappointed last night after all that.

Hmm, this has been a food-heavy missive, but you can see what's been on my mind.

Tomorrow, all things going in our favor, we fly home to Portland! I am so ready to be home. I am hoping to recover quickly from jet lag, because I start my NEW JOB on Thursday. Yay.

I will write more about Sweden as soon as the jet-lag wears off at home.

Out into the wilds of Sweden

2008-08-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

Greetings from a gray and drizzly day in Sweden. It reminds me of home, in a good way.

In the morning, we will leave Stockholm, a safe and fairly friendly city where most people speak English very well (I hate to be an Ugly American, but it's so nice not to have to resort to hand signs, gestures, drawing pictures, and using the few words of whatever language I know to get directions or order food--is that so wrong?--but in my defense, I always try to ask if someone speaks in English in their own language, or at least say excuse me in their language before I launch into English). We are leaving for...well, I am not exactly sure where.

We are going tomorrow morning to pick up our rental car from the Stockholm airport, the first time we will have our own transportation on this trip. This is both good and bad: potentially less walking with our luggage, especially for my mother, and we are not at the mercy of bus times or unscrupulous taxi drivers. But it also means we have to navigate streets, learn parking (and no parking) signs, and find our own way in the world. We also have to pay for our own gas, which I understand is perhaps the equivalent of $15 a gallon. Feel better about paying $4.50 at home now?

Today we saw the Vasa, a ship that sank 380 years ago on this very day in Stockholm Harbor: August 10, 1628. It was a coincidence that this was the anniversary of the sinking, and no one at the museum even mentioned it, but my mother noticed the date of the sinking. It was even a Sunday. I told her that if this were a young adult book, we would have been transported back to Stockholm in 1628. She said not to even think that! (By the way, if you're reading this and steal my idea, I will find out and demand royalties.)

The ship was pretty interesting. It is HUGE and impressive-looking, made of black oak and massive ropes. Sadly, it only sailed for 20 minutes on its maiden voyage before it tipped to one side, righted itself, and then sank right in the middle of the harbor. The king had given everyone the day off to watch his prize vessel sail, so there were hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses.

A team of divers was able to raise it from the harbor in 1961, but it spent over 300 years buried in silt below the water. Consequently, it was very well-preserved. They even recovered many human remains, some of which were used to reconstruct what several of the passengers and crew may have looked like. It was eerie to see the model heads in the museum; it really brought the events to life, so to speak.

Tonight we had Mongolian barbecue for dinner. Yes, you read that right. We went to a restaurant near our hotel, and recommended by our concierge, which had a genuine Chinese buffet and Mongolian barbecue (where you fill a bowl with raw meats and vegetables and noodles, and a chef cooks it for you on an iron stove). It was delicious. We all inhaled our vegetables, and then we had fruit and ice cream for dessert. It is the first buffet I have been to in Europe, except for the spread at our hotel breakfast every morning. That is good, too. I had cornflakes this morning, with dried apricots and prunes and hazelnuts; and Swedish meatballs, and grapes, and sweet bread with cardamom, and orange juice, and a cookie. Yesterday I had all that, and some cheese.

We are not exactly starving in Sweden.

This is our last night in the land of free hotel internet, so I may not write again for a few days. I don't really know what to expect when we are away from the city. Tomorrow we will tour the home of Carl Larssen, a famous Swedish artist and designer (who once painted a picture of his daughter that looks exactly like I did when I was ten, braids and all). And then we are going to a farm near where my father's side of the family lived, in the hope of doing some ancestral research and perhaps locating some long-lost cousins.

Write to me!

The last nine miles

2008-08-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

There comes a point in traveling when you just don't want to do it anymore. You don't want to rifle through a bulging suitcase to find your socks. You don't want to do battle with yet another inscrutable hotel shower. You don't want to keep moving every few days to a new place. You don't want to learn thank you and where is the bathroom and check, please! in yet another language. You don't want to drag your bags through any more airports, or train stations, or strange foreign streets.

For me, that day was today.

They say that marathon runners hit a wall sometime before the end of the race. In Run, Fatboy, Run, which was one of the four movies I watched on the plane from Portland to Frankfurt (only two weeks ago, but it feels like several years), this is portrayed as a physical brick wall a thousand feet high blocking the entire road, which, if Simon Pegg's character can break through it, he might just finish the race.

That's how it felt today. Here we are in another city which I really wanted to see, but I was too tired and too tired to enjoy it. I discovered this morning that the head of my razor had cracked in my bag, and I cut my leg with it in the shower. A few days ago, the hairbrush I have had for nearly twenty years simply snapped in half while I was brushing my hair one morning. I have been using the stump with the bristles ever since, but it's not quite the same. (Yes, I am pretty sure they sell hairbrushes in Europe, so I could get a new one, but I have never found a replacement that I liked as well as this brush.) In Italy, I sat back on a park bench and got gum stuck to the back of my shirt, which I then got on the strap of my bag and everywhere else.

Which is how, with all of us tired and weary from traveling, wanting to make the most of our time but also not anxious to leave our hotel rooms, I came to be weeping on the street outside our hotel in Stockholm in broad daylight this morning.

Don't worry, I'm fine now. That's the thing about a good cry: I feel so much better. And we had a pretty good day, with a boat tour of the harbor and some shopping for Swedish glass, followed by dinner in the hotel. I have always wanted to have dinner in the restaurant of a nice hotel where I was staying, but I never have until today. It was raining too hard to go out, and Stockholm itself is expensive enough that the hotel's meal prices were very reasonable. It felt very decadent to eat salmon and new potatoes, drink white wine, and finish off with a chocolate petit four.

And now I am going up to my room to watch a little TV and read my book before bed. On today's boat tour, we learned that Sweden's national television service never dubs movies or television shows, but broadcasts them in their original language with Swedish subtitles. Hurrah for the Swedes!

I hope all of you are well. Send me an email or a comment when you have time!

An international day

2008-08-08T12:29:00.000-07:00

I am in Sweden! This morning I was in Germany, and tonight we had dinner at an Irish pub (I had grilled Irish sausage, french fries, and hard cider--oh, and chocolate cake with berries and whipped cream). It's been a little of everything today.

Our hotel in Stockholm is beautiful. The lobby has dark brown stone floors and interesting red Scandinavian chairs--very spare and clean, but surprisingly comfortable--and my hotel room looks like an Ikea ad, in a good way. Everything is white, from the bedding to the walls, except that I have one turquoise wall with an orange and white square on it, and an orange lamp, and a turquoise cushion on a gray chair. It sounds a little bright, but really it feels very peaceful and calm.

I sat for a while after we arrived and watched a movie. Apparently the Swedes prefer subtitles to dubbing, or at least on the channels we get here, because the American movie was in English for once! I learned how to say "thank you" in Swedish from the subtitles (tach), and also some interesting profanity, although I don't know how to pronounce all of it.

Germany was nice, but we only had two complete days in Heidelberg, and we managed to fit in a tour of the Old Town, a couple of churches, the university library, the students' prison, a castle for dinner and an operetta (The Student Prince, which is American but set in Heidelberg--the songs were all in English but the dialogue was in German, so our friends had to help translate); and then a three-hour boat trip, lunch on the river, a tour of the large manor house in the next town with beautiful gardens, and a very nice dinner.

Needless to say, we are all completely exhausted. I have reached the point in traveling where I am ready to go home. Not that I don't want to see Sweden, of course, but I grow weary of having to make several trips to my suitcase for things I forgot for my shower, and wearing clothes that have been rolled and sealed into plastic bags for transit.

We did a great quantity of laundry in Heidelberg, in a combination washer/dryer that is a great mystery to me but managed to get everything clean. Between the three of us, I think we did about six loads over two days. Our hostess was very gracious about it, though, and even managed to get some stains out and hung things to dry. She was wonderful.

Tomorrow we will go explore Stockholm. There is a very old ship to see in a museum, and an open-air folk museum displaying ways of life from different parts of Sweden, and many other things to choose from. I am also interested in eating at a Chinese restaurant. We have seen them in every country so far, and I am curious about Chinese food in other countries.

Today I watched part of the Olympics opening ceremonies on television. It made me a little homesick for China, since every holiday and festival and any occasion is marked by pageantry of the sort they put on for the Olympics, although this was on a much, much grander scale. Lots of swirling skirts and ceremonial swords and dancing and singing, all topped off by enough fireworks to cancel the clean-air initiative entirely.

I think I forgot to write before that I met some Chinese men in Rome. We stopped at a sidewalk stand where my sister had metal card stands made for someone--they're wire with the person's name and decorations twisted into them. Hard to describe, but I have pictures. Anyhow, next to that was a man painting scrolls with elaborately decorated names on them. I decided to have one made. I wrote my name down for the man, and he turned it into a multicolored festival of colors and flowers and animals. It's really beautiful. But partway through his drawing, I realized that he did not look Italian. So I asked him, in Chinese, if he was a Chinese person. He looked up in shock. Yes! Chinese! he said, and rattled off with an accent I couldn't quite follow. I explained in very basic Chinese that I was an English teacher at a university. We both smiled at each other, knowing that this was a special moment despite the language barrier. When we left, I thanked him in Chinese and then used an informal way of saying goodbye. The man from the wire stand next door looked over in surprise and repeated it. We all laughed, and I waved as we walked away. I felt very international.

There is a very comfortable-looking feather bed calling my name. We have free internet at this hotel, although they're down to one computer while the business center is being remodeled, so I should be able to write again from Stockholm. I don't know what will be available once we head into the hills with our car. Oh, and our taxi today was a Volvo station wagon! Ah, Sweden.

Another travel day approaches

2008-08-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

Short post tonight. It has been bloody hot in Venice, although I have enjoyed my time here. Tomorrow we leave for Heidelberg, Germany, where we will stay with a friend of my father's from many years ago in the Air Force. He and his wife (who is German) are taking us in. We are all looking forward to doing some laundry and possibly eating a meal at home instead of a restaurant.

Not that I should complain, I know....

Our hotel in Venice has air conditioning, but they are using the term loosely. I have had the AC on full-blast the whole time I've been here, but my room continues to be sweltering. Unfortunately, I cannot open the windows at night because there are mosquitoes the size of rhinoceroses that will eat me alive. (I know this from the last time my sister and I were here, in a hotel with no air conditioning, and we left the windows open the first night. The next day we looked like we had chicken pox, or bubonic plague.)

We have been eating very well. I have pretty much gotten enough of gelati, pizza, pasta, wine, and the other delicious things Rome has to offer. At least for this trip.

Almost, that is. After this, my mom and I are going to buy one last gelato, and take it over to the steps of a church where there is a Vivaldi concert going on inside. I was kind of thinking I'd like to go to the concert, but I'm guessing it is very, very hot inside the church! We're better off on the steps like everyone else.

Today we stumbled on an exhibit of musical instruments at a small (relatively--it would still hold a couple hundred people if they were friendly) church. The door was open, Vivaldi music pouring onto the street, and there was a sign saying Free. So we walked in, and there was a display of violin-making materials, and many old instruments, including an Amati bass from the late 1600s. I saw several violas (yay), and two viola d'amores, which are like a viola but have a great many more strings. As a string musician, this was the highlight of my day! Imagine, we had already passed this church twice, and never known the interesting treasures within. But that's what Venice is like.

I will end now, since Mom is finished with her computer and ready for gelato. Take care, everyone, and I'll talk to you soon. I'm not sure whether our hosts have email in Germany (probably--but I'm more interested in whether they have a washing machine since I am out of clean clothes!!), and I don't know what the situation will be like in Sweden. So goodbye for now.

Learn Italian the Tourista Way

2008-08-03T02:28:00.000-07:00

The thing about train travel is, it seems terribly romantic and exciting unless you are actually doing it. Every time I see a scene in a movie with a character taking a train trip, she is sitting in a quiet compartment that rocks gently, trunk safely stowed above, gazing out the window at green fields, usually wearing a stylish hat and gloves. What you don't see is how she had to run through the train station with her suitcase, looking desperately for a ticket machine which then would not take her credit card, and hauling her heavy bag down the stairs and then up the stairs to the right platform--she hopes--before heaving her bag up the steps onto the train that finally arrives, and then seeks out an open seat that might or might not be reserved for someone else, and hoists her bag onto a luggage rack about 50 feet off the ground; and, praying that the train is going the right direction, she sits there sweating through her last clean shirt, too tired to look out the window at anything except station signs that might or might not be correct.

In fairness, I really do like traveling by train. I think the US was very shortsighted not to develop a national rail system (I know that is a popular opinion these days, now that gas prices are more expensive than running liquid gold through your car, or burning big piles of cash for fuel). And it is fun to look around and see what is going on.

There were rows of grapevines threading through vineyards that began to look like lines of leafy elephants, nose to tail, stretching their green trunks toward the train tracks. There were red and white church towers in every village, and medieval towers fortifying the hills. There were very local-looking people on bicycles, women's skirts mysteriously not flying up in their faces as they rode.

And we made it to Venice. Only just. Our train was late arriving in Bologna, where we changed to the Venetian train. I don't know why it was late, exactly, but there was a great deal of shouting in Italian at the ticket collector as we sat at one station (sweating, because the AC goes off when the train stops) for nearly 30 minutes. I tried to ask the man across the aisle about it, but he didn't speak enough English and I didn't speak enough Italian, and my Rick Steves phrasebook was way up in my suitcase. Oh, well. We caught a later train and got here only an hour later than we would have arrived, and the sun was lower in the sky so there was more shade for us.

It may be a cliche, but I love Venice. I know I have picked an obvious choice, but I think it's my favorite city. Ever. Even though it's so damn hot right now that I can't tell if I actually dried off after my shower this morning.

I love the little twisting Venetian alleys that seem to go nowhere (like the dark hole where we watched lines of tourists disappear, and others come out, for hours last night while we had dinner until 10:30--I still have no idea where they were going or why). I love the canals, with their vaguely decaying smell that wafts across the stone bridges and narrow streets. I love the big boats puttering along, and the small wooden crafts that zoom about, and the fact that you take a water-bus instead of a land bus.

And on that note, my father, who for the last week has been ordering water in English at restaurants, has finally learned an Italian word: vaporetto, water bus. He just used it casually last night, like he has been speaking Italian all along. "How late do the vaporettos run?", he asked me, and I almost dropped my camera in surprise. When it comes to boats, he is always interested.

So in the spirit of that, here are some helpful Italian words and phrases I have learned. For you Italian speakers out there, please forgive any errors I may have made:

Dove: Where (doh-vay). As in, "Where is the train station?" or "Where is a gelateria?" or "Where is the nearest fountain I can throw my crabby family into?".

Gelateria: Ice cream shop. Although that is a terribly inadequate description for the heavenly nectar that is gelato. I believe it's made with a very great deal of cream. There's a reason that people bring elastic-waist pants to Italy. My favorite flavors this trip have been cherry, lemon, and peach. It's just too hot for chocolate hazelnut, pistacchio, and my previous favorites.

Quanto costa: How much is it? As in, "Are you planning to drive me all over Rome in this taxi and then charge me 50 Euros more than normal?". Side note: I have unfortunately not learned my numbers beyond 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, so if it costs more than that, I'm in trouble.

Caldo: Hot. Which seems backwards, because it sounds like "cold". As in, "It's so hot that I have had four gallons of water in four hours and not needed a bathroom all day."

Troppo: Too (much). As in, "You are charging too much for these cheap tourist knockoffs," or "It's TOO HOT!" Even the Italians have been saying that last one, which is how we know we're not just wimps.

Basta: Stop. This is a confusing word for me, because it sounds a lot like "bastard" and I wondered why people were yelling that at each other so casually. But really, it's more like, "Stop here for the light," or "Stop, thief!".

Portare via: To go. As in, "I would like this pizza to go." (Really.) This was a personal triumph for me, as I learned and used this phrase on my own to get my breakfast to go, and then taught it to my sister, who studied in Italy for several months but had never heard it. We were able to get lunch to go at a train station and carry it back to our group on the platform while we waited for the next train. I'm sure we could have also gestured to make the woman understand, but it was nice to be able to use real words for once, instead of my usual pointing and thanking.

All right, class, you can put away your pencils. We'll pick up again soon.

Today we are going to Piazza del San Marco (St. Mark's Square), one of the most famous sites in Venice, and I hope we will tour the Doge's Palace, which was the site of the influential political dealings of Venice's most powerful days. My sister and I saw it in 2005, but my parents haven't been here before.

And just in case you're confused by the mention of my sister, she and her boyfriend are also traveling in Europe, and we met up with them for a couple of days to travel to the small town in Le Marche where she studied for a semester. We had the most delicious dinner with homemade pasta at her favorite restaurant, and she took us on a tour of her favorite pizza stand, gelateria, and her school. Now they are back in Rome and headed for Greece (so sad for them), and my parents and I went on to Venice.

Thanks to all of you who have written. I appreciate the emails and comments! Sorry I can't write to everyone individually right now. My offer of a postcard still stands, though, if you send me your address!

It's hot in Italy

2008-07-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

Hello, all. We made it! This is not going to be a long post, because I am tired and also this keyboard has a backspace key that sticks and deletes everything I just wrote. Damn it! There it goes again.

It is very hot here. That is kind of an understatement, actually. It is so hot that although I have had about four gallons of water today, I have not had to find a bathroom at all. Sorry if that is too much detail for you....The air is so heavy that I feel like I am inside a warm cloud.

This morning we saw the Borghese Gallery, which is on the former estate of the Pope's nephew. Unfortunately, I do not remember which Pope, but you can look it up if you want to know. He owned and commissioned many beautiful pieces, including some by the sculptor Bernini. No cameras allowed, of course, so no photos of them unless I sprung for a 40 Euro souvenir book, but Google Bernini if you are curious.

We had a delicious lunch at a restaurant called La Bruschetta (literally "the burned toast"), at the recommendation of our hotel owner who is an American woman of about my age, and who apparently knows good places to eat wherever we might be going. She hasn't missed yet. We had mixed vegetables, which turned out to be marinated zucchini, eggplant, green beans, spinach, red peppers, small roasted potatoes, onions, and (inexplicably because it contained no vegetables) a piece of delicious quiche. Then we had an order of breaded stuffed olives (YUM), and a plate of gnocchi with tomato-basil sauce. It was all delicious. Oh, and we finished with a piece of custardy lemon cake with almonds. The three of us just shared one order of each of these things, which was plenty.

This afternoon we had the longest walk known to man, trying to locate the Pantheon. My father, who is usually very good with maps and directions, must have been suffering from heat stroke or jet lag or something, because he led us on a labyrinthian tour of local piazzas, taxi stands, and careening scooters down back streets. When we finally reached the Pantheon, everyone was too tired, hot, and crabby to enjoy it. (Had someone listened to me when I said to turn left out of the bus stop instead of right, we might have avoided such a hike, but we did stumble upon a very nice square with a Bernini fountain along the way, so it was not all bad.)

But not to worry! We were quickly revived by some delicious gelato: I had almond sorbet and wild cherry sorbet, and wow were they good. My mom especially loves the gelato. She is anxious to have it for breakfast, since we have heard somewhere that locals do that.

This was followed by another forced march through the heat. I am the only member of our party not suffering from blisters on my feet. But at last, we got back on our sightseeing bus and got off at the Colosseum, which was particularly exciting for me because I missed it the last time I was in Italy. For some reason, it was unexplainedly closed the day my sister and I tried to visit it. A very impressive structure (which the audiotour on our bus went to the trouble to stress was never used for martyring Christians or sacrificing people, contrary to popular legend--but they would hardly admit it, now, would they?), and we were there at the perfect time to get photographs of the crumbling stone in the pink-orange late afternoon light.

And now, I believe it is bed time. The jet lag yesterday was torture, but my body has adjusted quickly. So far....And also, there are some obnoxious Americans yelling in this Internet cafe. Why is it that Americans seem to think that speaking LOUDER IN ENGLISH is going to make someone who doesn't speak English miraculously understand them?

Thanks to everyone who sent messages. I will try to write back soon! Ciao!

I got the job, I got the job, I got the job!

2008-07-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

I GOT THE JOB!!!!!!!!!

An official offer is contingent on successful drug testing and criminal background checks today, of course, but I haven’t had so much as a poppyseed muffin or a traffic ticket. I think it will be fine.

On Monday, I had my “informal interview lunch” with the three members of the department, and I felt like it went really well. The hardest part was just figuring out what to wear (new black polo, black-and-tan flowered skirt, new brown sandals, in case you’re wondering). There was a lot of discussion of the job and the department, a little casual conversation and joking around, and I felt very comfortable wit them. I left them with a solid handshake and the sense that I had done well. But then, of course, I had to wait for them to call me, which is when my brain started its over-analysis of every casual comment and signal.

I know I promised an update sooner, but I was just too nervous to sit still and type anything. It’s been a long week of pacing around, nailbiting, and waiting for the phone to ring but being too scared to answer when it did.

Which it did, this morning, while I must confess I was still sleeping. (I won’t tell you how late it was, or you’ll hate me.) But I might as well enjoy sleeping in while it lasts. Soon enough I’ll be waking up to an alarm in the dark, and rushing off to work like the rest of the world.

The voice mail message they left (because I wasn’t about to answer the phone in my half-awake state and let them know what a layabout I am!) was fairly neutral, which was both good and bad: either they were calling with good news and wanted to give it to me live, or they were calling with bad news and didn’t want to leave it on my voice mail. Or maybe they had offered it to someone else yesterday, who had turned it down this morning, and now I was their second choice. Or maybe….

Erin, enough already! I planned out how I would graciously respond to either a yes or a no, and then called.

Which is how I learned that I was their top choice, they felt there was “good chemistry”, and they were going to offer me a very fair salary (more than I had been expecting!).

When we hung up, I actually jumped up and down like a lotto winner, fists held aloft, whooping. (In my pink pajamas, no less—there’s your visual of me for the day.)

And then I called several people who I knew were holding their breath on my behalf—my parents, my personal reference, my counselor. We were all excited. This was good news. Yay. Etc.

I’m just so relieved, that I will be coming home to a good job and a regular income and health benefits and all that! Now I can enjoy my trip to Europe that much more, and I know that I can spend a little on souvenirs and gelato without worrying that it will affect my ability to pay the electric bill this fall.

Thanks for listening. I may not write again before I leave for Europe, because I’ve got a lot to do and I’ve been putting it off this week, but I plan to update the blog with travelogues while abroad. The 2005 European dispatches were very popular, so feel free to share with your friends. More readers can’t hurt me.

A second interview!

2008-07-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

The phone rang tonight at 6 o’clock. My heart always stops when the phone rings these days, but I figured it couldn’t be anything job-related at that hour. It was, however, one of the interviewers calling to say that I am one of three finalists for the job!

On Friday morning, I will do some testing in Word and Excel (because the other two finalists are not local, we will all be doing our testing by email instead of in person to make it fair—I will get an email with the test materials at an appointed time; and then the person sending them will call to make sure that I received them; and then I will have an hour to finish and return them by email; I feel like I'm getting instructions for dropping off a ransom), and then next week they plan to schedule final interviews.

Tomorrow I’d better take my one and only suit to the dry cleaners. I’m glad now that I got a plain suit instead of pinstriped, because I think I can get away with wearing the same black suit to both interviews (with a different shirt, of course).

I appreciate how quick they have been to make decisions so far. They told me yesterday that they know it’s hard to wait over the weekend to hear about a job, so they were planning to notify everyone by Friday whether they would be called back for a second interview. But I certainly didn’t expect to hear from anyone by today!

I would love to know one way or the other before I leave for Europe a week from Monday. And it would be so great to know that I was coming home to a job. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too far. But cross your fingers or say a prayer for me.

At last, a good interview

2008-07-15T12:16:00.001-07:00

I just had a job interview, and I think it went really well! Actually, I know it went really well, because while he was walking me out, the head of the department I’d be working for said, “That went really well”.

You know how sometimes you have an interview (or even just a conversation) and you end up saying all kinds of weird, wrong things and giving more information than you meant to, and the interviewer asks questions you don’t know how to answer, and pretty soon everyone is looking at you like you’re completely psycho?

This was nothing like that.

I nailed it. I was prepared; I gave honest, well-thought-out answers to all their questions; I praised the work their department has been doing; I asked what effect the upcoming leadership change might have. They were clearly impressed. (Can you tell I’m on an adrenaline high right now?) They seem like a good team to work for. They laughed at my jokes. I even saw the main interviewer write down “SMART!” on his notes and underline it, and he called me smart.

Truthfully, as of 7 o’clock this morning, I really did not think it was going to go well. I got very little sleep last night, between nervousness and heat and my cat who wanted to cuddle (why, Louie, why? It’s 2 AM and 75 degrees in my room—why would you want to sleep on my stomach??). So I woke up in a fog this morning and blundered around, pretty sure that I was about to blow it.

But I didn’t!

They’re supposed to let everyone know by the end of the week whether they’d like to have them back for a second interview. I told them that I’m leaving soon for a long-planned vacation in Europe and that I hoped that wouldn’t affect my chances. I think it’s a good sign that they asked exactly when I was leaving, and all of them wrote down the dates of my trip.

I will post an update as soon as I hear from them. Even if I didn’t get it (although I’d say I have a decent chance unless they’re just that effusive with everyone), I was heartened by the positive experience. No one has called me “smart” in a professional setting for a long time. Take that, old job!

Old friends

2008-07-13T23:09:00.000-07:00

Old friends, old friends sat on their park bench like bookends. You know that Simon and Garfunkel song? It gets kind of weird and discordant in the middle, but I like the images of old men on a bench, watching the world go by. Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly?

Today I went to a party at the house of my oldest friend (oldest as in time I’ve known her, not her age). You know how there are some people in your life, no matter how long it’s been since you saw them, you can still pick right up where you left off as though no time has passed? Our friendship is like that.

We met in the second grade after my family moved into the house where my parents still live, and my new friend lived only two blocks away. I used to cross the creek behind our house by myself, and cut through the neighbor’s yard—with permission, of course—to go to play at her house. Her family had a frisky black poodle who would beg to play fetch for hours. I babysat her younger brother a few times, and I think she watched my sister once or twice. We worked on Girl Scout badges together. I went to the beach with her family, and she went skiing with mine. On summer evenings in our adolescent years, I would call her most nights after dinner to go for a walk through the neighborhood above us, where we would stroll up the hill past massive homes with lawn sprinklers spraying cool mist.

When we were in fifth grade and tired of the afternoon program at the elementary school, our mothers decided we were responsible enough to come home alone after school, if we were together. So on alternate days, we would ride the bus to her house and then to my house. Her home was clean and peaceful and silent in the afternoons. I remember the pungent, yeasty smell of their kitchen bread drawer, which seemed strange and wondrous to me—bread at my house was kept on top of the refrigerator in plain sight. We would eat whole wheat bread and thickly spread raspberry jam, and do our homework or play with the clothespin dolls we made outfits for from fabric scraps.

In the summer, we made our younger siblings perform in plays that we wrote and directed and designed the costumes for. We would spend hours in my basement, rehearsing and planning and trying to convince the younger ones to go along with everything. Somewhere, I still have a cassette tape with a radio play that we produced; it was about a princess, of course, and our voices sound childlike and precocious over the hiss from the microphone. We decided that my sister and her brother would get married, and then we would be related. Unfortunately, neither sibling was as excited about that plan as we were. They’re still not.

Later, she did not drive and I did not have a car, so we rode the school bus together all through high school. I remember many mornings falling asleep shoulder to shoulder in the pre-dawn gray, hunched over our bulging backpacks in our laps, me with my viola case between my knees. The worst was on rainy days, when we had to squish together on the crowded bus, wet coat pressed against wet coat on the damp green vinyl, the windows fogged with the breath of fifty groggy students, the floor slick and gray from soaked shoes.

Our families are friends, which probably helps us to stay in contact. (I am not in contact with anyone else from school. I wonder from time to time how some of my old classmates are doing, but it doesn’t trouble me enough to find out.) Our parents have dinner every few months. Our mothers talk on the phone, and update us on one another’s activities. Her dad and my dad play their guitars together for fun, and even go to concerts (by which I do not mean screaming mobs and mosh pits and overpriced T-shirts—I mean two guys with guitars and microphones at a church multi-purpose room). So I generally know where she is and what she’s doing.

Still, it was nice to see her in person. I can’t remember the last time I saw her, actually. But when we sit and talk together in her backyard in the heat of a July evening, it feels like no time has passed.

Seeing my friend makes me realize anew that I am lonely. A little lonely, I mean. I have my family nearby, and I see people and talk to others on the phone, but I don’t really have any close friends here in town. There’s no one I can call here when I need to vent about something. My college friends, because we have taken different paths and live in different places, have inevitably drifted away, although we still have the bond of common experience and genuine affection. I’m not surprised by the drifting away, but I miss the connection of real friends. I miss having people I can call for spontaneous meals or movies. Does this make me sound pathetic? I’m afraid so.

I was talking to my counselor about this last week, because he’s been encouraging me to get out more. But the thing is, I do get out, or I try to. I stretch myself beyond my level of comfort nearly every week. Sometimes it’s hard for me to even leave the house when I know I will have to talk to strangers, or go somewhere I’ve never been before. Still, I am involved in activities like the community orchestra I play with, where I make myself go to practice every week and usually enjoy it once I’m there; and I have taken several classes through the community college, but I just don’t seem to make friends—at least not within my peer group, and not in as short a time as a weekly class with ten sessions. It takes me a while to warm up to people. And right now, I don’t even have a job to go to, where there would at least be some work friends to have lunch with or talk to about my day.

I have met some very nice people in the orchestra, but they are older and have families and other commitments, and it’s just not the same. And yes, I’ve tried online dating, but I found it very impersonal and weird. Either I made a snap judgment about whoever I was matched up with (and believe me, some of them were for good reason—like the guy who listed “tattoos” first on his list of things he couldn’t live without; I’m sure he is perfect for someone, but that someone is not me); or the person I was matched up with made a presumably hasty judgment about me, based on my profile picture or one of my statements. After a few months of this, I decided that: a) I couldn’t afford it anymore since I’m unemployed; and b) it wasn’t really helping me to make connections with anyone. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d still like to meet someone the way people used to. Whatever that was.

As I said to my counselor, I don’t know where my peers are! I am not going to hang out in bars, and I am not involved in a church, and those are the only groups I see with people my age, other than the young married parents who are friends with other young married parents. I’m not quite at the point where I want to join a “singles” group, although I’m not ruling it out yet. So where does that leave me? If you live in Portland and have a group of friends who could use a quiet, wry addition who enjoys movies and good cheap dining and has a station wagon that would hold several people, think of me for your next event.

I’m afraid this has taken a rather melancholy turn. I didn’t intend it. I read in Newsweek recently that mental health professionals are recommending blogging to their patients as a form of therapy. Because blogging has a built-in audience, or so we believe when we do it, we get that sympathetic ear we are really looking for, that helps us feel better about our problems. That’s what sets blogging apart from keeping a journal or diary, which is also something therapists recommend, but you know that no one is going to see the journal, and you don’t get the same psychological benefit from it. I guess what I’m getting at is, tonight’s entry has been therapeutic for me, because my (presumably) sympathetic audience is out there reading and nodding your heads. So thank you, dear readers.

Bad dreams

2008-07-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

Woke up tired and grumpy this morning. I discovered that it was already too hot to have the windows open for a while (at 8 AM, no less!) to cool the house down. But it’s only 72 inside now, and 75 and climbing outside.

I had been in the middle of a bad dream, in which someone was in my house. I have a recurring series of dreams in which someone—always a man—breaks or sneaks into my home. Sometimes the man forces his way in, sometimes he’s hiding somewhere in the house. In last night’s dream, I realized that I had forgotten to lock the door at all, and he was behind the shower curtain. I saw him hiding there and ran to the neighbor’s house, but no one answered the doorbell. I kept trying to dial 9-1-1 on my phone but couldn’t seem to push the right numbers.

It doesn’t take a professional therapist (that reminds me, I’ve got an appointment today…) to figure out the cause of these dreams: sometimes I’m afraid of living alone. Especially at night.

In the daytime and the evening, I love being alone in my house. I love to look around and smile at this place that belongs only to me. I enjoy the peace and quiet, the solitude, the freedom to wander the halls in whatever I happen to be wearing (or not), and to eat right out of the refrigerator with my fingers. I like having control of the remote, and I like being able to stop a movie in the middle if I want to do something else for a while. I like to read in the living room without someone else’s stereo or TV show blasting me out. I like having 100% approval over all decorating and furniture decisions. I love that if there are dishes in the sink, there’s no one to blame but myself—and I don’t have to wash them until I get tired of seeing them there. I love vacuuming only when I feel like it. I love that there’s only one lap for the cat to choose from, so I don’t have to watch him cozying up to someone else when I’m cold. Most of the time, I really love living alone.

But at night I get nervous. I’ve been living here by myself for more than two years now, but the creaks and settling sounds of the dark house still worry me. Anything that sounds like a window opening, or a footstep in the hall, still freaks me out. I glance around at the slightest scrape or shadow, and I hate it when the cats stare at something behind me that isn’t there. In my bedroom, I turn the TV on with a half-hour timer and fall asleep that way, because otherwise I hear everything with that superhuman, extra-alert hearing that magnifies every tiny squeak into dangerous intrusions. (I know it’s not good to sleep with the TV on, but it’s only on just long enough for me to get to sleep, and then I can usually stay asleep just fine.)

Consequently, I dream from time to time about someone breaking in. I’m very careful not to watch movies or TV shows where women are attacked in their homes, because while my memory has conveniently erased all the geometry and state capitals I ever knew, it can play whole remembered film scenes of women being threatened/attacked— in glorious Technicolor, no less.

I know, I know that it’s so unlikely that anything will ever happen to me, but it’s hard to convince myself of this while lying helpless in the dark. While the rational part of me knows that my statistical odds of a break-in or attack of any kind are very low, my racing pulse tells me otherwise. It makes me want to get a big dog, but then of course I remember the urban legend about the single woman who did just that, and then the psycho who broke in simply killed her dog first. You see what I mean? Why would my brain possibly retain that ridiculous story, except to torture me?

When my building was being fitted with new siding and windows last winter, the workmen went off and left a window open one evening. I got home from dinner at my parents’ house to discover it wide open in my living room, no screen, plastic sheeting flapping ominously. I knew that I had to search the house to make sure everything was okay, but my knees were shaking so badly that I couldn’t do it. That’s always the scene in the movie where the crazy man is hiding in the closet with the hatchet, and you’re yelling at the hero/ine, “Get OUT of the HOUSE!”, but they never do. So I called my dad, who (fairly) graciously came over and did a sweep for me, and then suggested I get to know my neighbors better so they could do it next time.

The construction went on for several weeks, during which time they had a lockbox on my door so that they could come and go as needed. Every night I would come home and make sure all the windows were locked, and then look in all the closets and under the bed with my breath held. I was very relieved when they finished up. (So were the cats, who would greet me at the door after work as if they were trying to tell me, Someone was IN the HOUSE while you were GONE, and I would reassure them that it was just the men installing the new windows, but their nervousness made me edgy too.)

Okay, I’m freaking myself out here, and it’s the middle of a beautiful sunny morning. Like I said, most of the time I love living alone. It’s just once in a while that my imagination is too much for me. But I never forget to lock the doors or windows.

(In other news, I am eagerly anticipating the arrival of my GRE study materials. No, really, I am. I opted for the Super Saver free shipping from Amazon, but now I kind of wish I had paid the $6.99 to get my books sooner so I could get started on relearning all the math I’ve forgotten. I’m even looking forward to studying, if my brain hasn’t completely atrophied from lack of use in the last few years.)

A new plan

2008-07-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

I’ve made a decision: I want to go to library school.

A couple of weeks ago, I applied for a job as a library assistant at a nearby public library. (I haven’t gotten a call yet for an interview; when I called to confirm that they had received my application, they said they had gotten a lot of applicants, so I’m not holding my breath. Even though it sounds like a great job for me.)

Regardless of whether I get it, I realized that I was more excited about that job than anything I have applied for yet, or anything I’ve read about in the paper or online. And that got me thinking. I don’t want to be a business executive or manager or something, so why would I want to work in an office for the rest of my life? That’s mostly where I’ve been applying, because I know I can do office work and can probably get hired. But I don’t want to be an assistant forever, either, letting someone else take all the credit and all the money. At the wise old age of 29, I’m starting to think about the idea that we only get one shot at this life. If there’s something I really want to do, I should do it now! What am I waiting for?

I’ve always loved libraries. From elementary school on, I have volunteered after school or during lunch to shelve books. I even spent a semester of my senior year in high school as a library aide (being in the orchestra messed up my schedule, and there were no electives I wanted to take during my free period), where I was entrusted with processing the new periodicals and helping students use the card catalog, and the librarians loved me and encouraged me to pursue a library career. It was my favorite part of the day. Yes, I was one of those kids. I sought refuge in the library because the harsh world of school was too much for me. But I also chose the library because I loved books and reading, and the smell of old books, and the delightful order of rows of spines on shelves.

I even looked into library school a few years ago, after I moved back from China, but I just wasn’t ready for it then. I was tired. I didn’t want to go back to school yet, and I didn’t want to study for and take the GRE, and I didn’t want to move. But it’s always been at the back of my mind.

Suddenly, something clicked for me this week. I think I’m ready now. I’ve had a few months of unemployment to figure out what I like and what I hate, and what I might want to devote the next 30 or 40 years of my life to. I read the classifieds every week with a highlighter, and the jobs I’m actually interested in all seem to require a Master’s degree. Most of them require a Library Science degree or something like it.

I still want to write, but I don’t think I am going to be a full-time writer anytime soon. In the meantime, I would like a job where I actually want to get up and go to work in the morning.

So, having said out loud that I want to go to library school!, I have started planning:

Where? The closest program is at the University of Washington, and that’s where I hope to be accepted. They have a part-time distance learning program, which takes three years instead of two to complete, and involves some time on campus and a lot of coursework online. This would enable me to continue living and working (I hope!) here. I could easily get to Seattle for the on-campus times, and I know a lot of people who would take me in up there. It’s also not a great time to sell my condo here, so I would be glad to be able to stay.

When? Fall 2009 is the next enrollment. Applications are due in February. This gives me a few months to study for the GRE, take the GRE, get my test results back, and take it again if necessary. (My math skills are pathetic. Really. My junior high and high school teachers would weep if they saw me trying a basic algebra equation lately.)

How and Why? I am still working out the financial aspects. I’m not thrilled about more debt, but the distance program is cheaper than the residential program overall. And once I graduate with a Master’s, my earning potential goes up considerably. Also, there’s only so much I could make as an administrative assistant or (shudder) call center employee. In the long run, I think the investment will pay for itself.

I’m getting excited about this, in a way I haven’t been in ages. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real goal. Even though I will have to take some kind of drone job while I’m in school, at the end of it I will have so many more options. With a Library and Information Science degree, I could work as a researcher, a librarian, an archivist, or many other things that I would enjoy. I might actually get to do something fun with my life.

In other news, I had a found money experience today, which was a little more impressive than a folded twenty in my winter coat pocket. I got a letter from my bank saying that there was a tidy sum of money in my name that needed to be claimed. Don’t worry, this is not a Nigerian bank account scam (the deposed Nigerian prince in the letter assured me of such); it’s a long story involving a savings bond, but I’m pretty sure it’s legitimate. I can’t believe I now have an additional cushion between me and the cold, dark world of unemployment and foreclosure and living in a box and all the other things that keep me awake in the night.

So all in all, it’s been a good week! Happy Independence Day, everyone.

Wide awake

2008-06-26T01:06:00.000-07:00

It’s almost 1 AM here. I have just finished folding and putting away two loads of laundry, and I made scones, and then I washed the dishes, and then I started the dishwasher. I’m not even tired yet.

I realized something this week: I am really bad at going to bed. I always thought I was just a night person. That’s true, actually: I am a night person. A night person who is really bad at going to bed at night!

I am fortunate never to have suffered from insomnia. Usually my face hits the pillow and I’m out until my alarm goes off, no matter what time it is. It didn’t matter whether I have had chocolate before bed, or whether the TV is on. But lately, I’ve been having trouble falling asleep. Each night, when I finally finish brushing my teeth and washing my face and all the other nighttime rituals that seem to stretch out for hours, I get into bed and turn off the light. And then I lie there, staring at the insides of my eyelids for what feels like several weeks. Eventually I drift off and sleep well (although I’ve been having some very weird, vivid dreams lately, which I can’t usually remember in the morning—one recent dream involved a woman with red-gold hair spread out around her head, and she was laughing as she lay on the ground with her hair on fire, but I couldn’t make her understand the danger).

Apparently, I was not the good sleeper I thought I was for all those years. I was just chronically sleep-deprived. Now that I am unemployed and have time to get my eight hours of sleep regardless of what time I go to bed, my body is not constantly crying out for rest.

Consequently, my bedtime gets later and later each week. First it was midnight. Then 1. Then 1:30. Now I’m almost up to 2. Regardless of the time, my body and my mind are wide awake and do an effective job of convincing me that they can stay up for another hour! Maybe two! They’re like toddlers, putting off bedtime. If I’m out of work for much longer, I will be going to bed at 4 AM and getting up at noon. The only way to fix this is to start getting up earlier, and then I will be tired at night. Except I don’t want to get up earlier. And it doesn’t help to set an alarm—I just hit the snooze and go back to sleep (and that’s the alarm that I place across the room on the dresser, so I have to get out of the covers and walk over to it).

I’m not sure what the solution to all this is, other than more daylight and more exercise. Oh, and maybe just getting a job. Wouldn’t I love that. I got a no-thank-you letter from the arts nonprofit at the end of last week. It was a nice letter, actually, saying that they’d had 160 applicants for one position, and only chosen a few to interview. I could be mistaken, but I believe the program manager added part of it just for me, because she made reference to something I’d said in my cover letter. So it wasn’t all bad. But it still wasn’t a job!

I applied for four more jobs last week, though. Tomorrow (today, if you want to be technical, but I don’t count late night after midnight as the next day—too confusing), I’m going to make phone calls to see if my application arrived and if there’s anything else I can do and wouldn’t you like to hire me, please?

Also, I almost fell in the shower over the weekend. I had just spent half an hour scrubbing the shower, and I must not have rinsed the floor well enough, because as I stepped out with one foot, the foot still in the shower slipped and I almost tipped over. (This would have resulted in hitting my head on the toilet, among other things.) When I told my mom this later, adding that I probably wouldn’t have been found for a couple of days if I fell, she said, “Yeah, and by then your cats would have eaten you.”

Thanks, Mom. Thanks a lot. She hasn’t even seen the Sex and the City episode where Miranda’s afraid her cat will eat her if she dies alone. But she has seen Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which Ms. Jones ruminates that she may expire and be half-eaten by wild dogs (in the book, it’s an Alsatian). Whatever the case, I gave the cats extra treats tonight and taught them how to dial 911 on my cell phone.

My date with me

2008-06-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been to a movie by myself.

I’m almost 30. I’m single. I love movies, and I love seeing them in the theater. I’ve had my fair share of obnoxious roommates and infuriating family members to drive me out of the house, and I know I’ve contemplated taking refuge in a movie theater more than once on a hot day.

But somehow, I have never been to a movie by myself. Really.

Today, I decided it was time to remedy that: I would go to see Sex and the City. Alone. (There’s a subplot here, which I won’t get into all the details of, except to say that a certain younger sibling and I were supposed to go together on opening weekend to see SATC, but there was some confusion about which day, and I had a commitment I couldn’t get out of on opening night—and said younger sibling, not able to wait until Saturday because she had made additional plans with other people for Friday, went without me and convinced my very kind mother—who had promised she would go with me the next day—to go with them instead. I called a friend who I was pretty sure would have a girls’ night out planned to see it, hoping that I could maybe hint my way into an invitation if it wasn’t opening night, but she never called me back. I then went through everyone I know who I thought might like to see it, but they’d all seen it. All of them.)

Anyway, I’m pretty much over all that now. Obviously. In the defense of my family, both my sister and my mom did offer to go see it (again) with me later that weekend. I declined. Partly that was because I wanted them to think of me sitting all alone in the theater (yes, I’m a martyr—soon there will be statues of me at your local religious institution, where you can stare up at my likeness and contemplate my lonely state). The point is, everyone I know who wanted to see it had already seen it, and I didn’t want to see it with someone who had just seen it. It’s not the same experience. I hate going to a movie with someone who has already seen that movie, because inevitably that person starts watching you instead of the movie, looking for your reaction at key scenes, and he/she doesn’t laugh as much or react to scary/shocking moments because he/she already knows they’re coming.

When I said to my sister, “No, I’ll just go by myself, thanks very much!”, it occurred to me that I have never been to a movie by myself. Not once. And I was curious to see what it was like. I’ve been thinking lately about being single, and how every year the odds increase that I will stay that way. I’m not being maudlin; it’s the truth. I don’t have the exact statistics, but I know that the chances of marrying decline steeply for women after thirty. We live in a culture that puts a high value on romance and marriage. If you’re not paired off, your life must be missing something. I’m not saying I will be single forever, but I don’t want to live in fear of it, either. I can’t let it stop me from doing something I want to do, just because I don’t have someone to go with me. I understand that single is not the same thing as lonely, but sometimes I need reminding.

So tonight was it. I was going to a movie alone. The beginning part was pretty much the same: I put a water bottle and ziploc bag of candy in my purse, drove to the theater by myself, bought one ticket at the window, and went inside. The difference was, I wasn’t meeting anyone in the theater this time.

Actually, as I sat down, I realized that going to a movie is the perfect thing to do alone. It’s not like you are expected to talk to or look at someone else while the movie is playing (in fact, they rather frown on that). And no one can see you sitting there by yourself.

Also, in the last few years, the theater companies have very thoughtfully provided twenty minutes of vacuous advertising-disguised-as-entertainment before the movie even starts, so you’re spared pretending to read a book in a darkened auditorium so that no one thinks you’re lonely (has anyone ever really been fooled by the “reading a book” trick? When I’m the one reading alone at a table or on a bench, I am aware that I am sitting there alone, and that people are looking at me as I sit there alone. Maybe it’s just me; probably everyone else who is furtively hunched over a library book is actually reading. I’m not.).

Of course, I did have to pick the most date-friendly, girlfriends-going-to-the-movies-together movie currently in theaters. It was a Monday night, but the theater was still about two-thirds full of groups of women of all ages, and a few young couples. I admit that I put my sweater over the seat next to me. I might have been saving the seat for someone else.

But it didn’t really bother me. In fact, I was amazed at how little it bothered me to be there alone. I still enjoyed the movie. I still laughed aloud, and yes, even cried a little. I still felt that rush of camaraderie that a live crowd in a full theater watching a good film brings.

Driving home, I thought about how, even though I really like going to the movies with someone else—because you can nudge each other when a familiar actor appears, share smuggled snacks, and pick apart the plot in the car afterward—I’m going to promise myself that, when there’s something I want to see or do and no one to go with, I will go by myself.

No, I will go with myself, and not worry about what anyone thinks.

Applying myself

2008-06-20T00:55:00.000-07:00

I just applied for four jobs. I should be getting ready for bed now, but I’m pretty wired. Although that might have been the chocolate-covered pretzels earlier. (I went to Costco last week and bought a bag of said pretzels. Unfortunately, it was a warm day and they spent several hours in my car before I went home. I opened the bag to have one, and came up with one naked pretzel and an arm covered in chocolate goo up to my elbow. Damn it. It was my watch arm, too. So I put the whole bag in the freezer, where it solidified into a chocolate-coated lump. Even defrosted, I now have to chip off uneven shards from the giant pretzel ball into a bowl. They still taste okay, but I have learned my lesson for next time.)

I’m sick of typing or writing my employment history on applications. It’s the same thing, over and over again. Months and years of employment. Starting and ending salaries. Name and address of company. Supervisor. Job duties. Reason for leaving. (Telling the same almost-truth.) You’d think I could cut and paste, but every application has its own format, and some can’t even be filled out online! I had to handwrite four pages earlier for one job; fortunately my handwriting is pretty legible, but I was terrified of making a mistake and having to start over (I think white-out on an official document looks tacky), and now my hand hurts from gripping the pen so tightly.

The accompanying cover letter is the hardest part, though. For each one, I have to envision working at that job, imagining what I would like about it, what I would bring to it from my previous jobs, submerging myself into the advertisement and job description so that I can tailor my skills list to catch the hiring manager’s attention. That means that tonight I have already been a grants person for a nonprofit, an assistant for a city visioning department, a library assistant, and a technical writer. No wonder I can’t sleep!

I don’t know if the Great Spring Depression of ’08 is finally coming to an end, or if I just got a look at the balance on my savings account, but suddenly I feel motivated to find a job. I have been fairly content to stay around the house all day these past months (although lately I’ve been trying to dress so that I could potentially answer the door or go outside—that means no sweats, pajamas, or bathrobes in the middle of the day), but I’m feeling better and I wouldn’t mind having somewhere to go in the morning. I say that now, anyway.

I’m most interested in the library job, although it would mean possibly working some evenings and weekends. I would love to be paid to talk about, touch, and be surrounded by books all day. Could anything be better?

Well, good night, dear readers. Send up a prayer to wherever you send yours, that I will find something quickly. And if it’s not too much trouble, something that I like and will look forward to doing every day.

Let the sun shine in

2008-06-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

My counselor and I have been talking about the importance of getting enough sunlight during the day. (Here’s my non-scientific, possibly inaccurate account of what he told me.) I have heard before that you need at least fifteen minutes of direct sunlight each day, but I didn’t know why that was the magic number: apparently that’s the time it takes for your blood to circulate once through your body. Your eyes absorb the light quickly because the receptors are closer to the skin than at other places on the body, and so your blood cells file past and each get their sunshine booster shot for the day in about fifteen minutes. Did you know that the backs of your knees are another place where light is absorbed quickly? The skin is thinner there, too.

My counselor told me that the fifteen minutes of sunlight also help you sleep better at night, because when you close your eyes, chemicals from the light are released into your body that help you sleep. Or something like that.

So in the interest of my health, today I rode around in a convertible with the top down. No, really. It’s my sister’s car, and we were going shopping (I bought new pants!); she drove, and I enjoyed my daily dose of direct light. I love riding in her car, but I feel like a bit of an imposter. Usually I see convertibles driven by: a) middle-aged men whose jaunty leather driving caps scream both “Balding!” and/or “Midlife crisis!”, and who have custom license plates like MYPORSH; or b) spoiled blondes with expensively manicured nails and rhinestone cell phone covers (both of which are noticeable as they yap into the phone while weaving through traffic). As I am neither of these things, and neither is my sister, what are we doing in such a cool car? She can pull it off, actually. But not me. I wasn’t even wearing sunglasses.

Anyway. Yesterday I took a walk in the park. That’s not just an expression; there’s a beautiful park that I’m ashamed to admit is right across the street from my house, but I’ve only been to it a few times since I moved in more than two years ago. Yeah. I even changed into workout clothes and took my iPod. It was an overcast day, but fairly pleasant. I walked briskly for almost an hour. It’s a beautiful park, laid out on a long grid so that you can walk for some distance in one direction; parts of it are quite narrow and lined with ivy and blackberry bushes, so you feel like you’re in the forest, even as you hear traffic over the hill, and other parts are wide and grassy. I hiked along while my iPod shuffled through the Shins, an aria from The Marriage of Figaro, Joan Baez, and other incongruous choices. I had to skip a few ballads whose sad tempo made me slow to a crawl (I typed “to a shuffle” first: is that why Apple called it that?). ;-) At one point near the end, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof played, and it was all I could do not to break into song. When no one was in sight, I admit I twirled a little with my arms outstretched.

There were a lot of people out for a Tuesday afternoon. I met bikers, joggers, dog walkers, mothers with toddlers, and little boys zipping along on Razor scooters. There were teenagers hanging out at the basketball courts, a young man with a backpack lying in the grass, and a father and son throwing horseshoes. As one fortyish man approached, also wearing an iPod, I could see that he had something in his hand. I squinted and looked closer. Yes, it was: a lit cigar. After we passed each other, I could smell it for at least twenty feet, a stinking cloud trailing behind him. I’m guessing he’s not allowed to smoke in the house.

I am resolved to go to the park more this summer. As long as I’m home and in a position to enjoy it whenever I want, I should take advantage of it. And even if I have a job, I can go in the evening after work because it’s still light.

And no, nothing new on the job front. There’s a local library hiring assistants, which sounds kind of perfect for me, and the wages are decent. I am applying for that, and a few other things. It’s so time-consuming to apply for jobs. My pet peeve lately is that many companies don’t list the pay rate in the ad, and then they say “no phone calls!”, so I can’t even call to find out the pay rate without ignoring their instructions, and I have to either assume it’s low and not apply, or apply anyway and hope they’ll negotiate to something I can live on if they offer me the job. What would be nice is everyone could tell the truth. I would just send in my resume with a letter that says: Hello. I’m Erin. I’m a hard worker. I was let go from my last job because someone thought I didn’t work hard enough, but that’s not true. I will be a good employee as long as you treat me well, but I’m not planning to stay at your company and answer the phones and be talked down to for the rest of my life. I’m loyal, but if something better comes along, I will probably take it.

And the company could post an ad that says: We need someone to file, put up with a crazy boss, and empty the dishwasher in the morning because the executives are too lazy to do it. We’ll pay you just enough so that you don’t quit, and our accounts payable department will gossip about you behind your back. Serious inquiries only, please.

Don’t you think that would make life easier for everyone? We could eliminate all the game-playing, the subtle salary negotiations, and the misunderstandings about exactly what the job will be and how long we plan on doing it.

Also, in a perfect world, companies would CALL ME when I apply for a job, even if it’s to tell me I’m not getting an interview or the job has been filled. Have I mentioned that the endless silence bothers me? It’s just rude never to call. In no other sector of society would that be acceptable. We RSVP for weddings; the dentist’s office calls to remind us of appointments; even the library is kind enough to let us know when a book is overdue. But somehow, it’s not necessary to let me know that the job has been filled and I can stop holding my breath that they might deign to meet with me.

That’s enough of that. I am now going to do some laundry so I can wash my new pants and wear them tomorrow. Yay.

A comic(s) day

2008-06-16T23:02:00.000-07:00

Big day today.

I got up at 9:45 this morning (I woke up several hours earlier, because my cat Louie was very kindly washing my exposed arm, but I didn’t get up—because I didn’t have to, and I’m enjoying that while I can), ate breakfast, took a shower, and then spent a couple of hours highlighting the Sunday classifieds and looking at job sites online. There are a few promising things that I intend to apply for; I entered the pertinent details in my jobs spreadsheet (yes, I have an Excel spreadsheet for my job search with multiple tabs by category; I don’t see how else one can keep track of all these various applications floating around! Also, I can refer to it if someone calls me back, because I’m afraid otherwise I will forget the company name, the job title/duties, etc., and end up sounding like an idiot when I don’t remember what I applied for).

I haven’t heard anything yet from the nonprofit job I applied for last week, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I am now having retroactive guilt for having taken so long to respond to job applicants at my old job. Sometimes it would take a few weeks, or even a couple of months. My idiot colleague who was in charge of the recruiting process before me would often never notify the applicants who weren’t selected. Why, as I believe I’ve asked here before, don’t companies realize that we would rather just know when a job has been filled? I won’t be angry if I didn’t get it. I’m not going to yell at you. I just want to know, so that if something else comes along, I can take it without wondering if you’re ever going to call me.

Yesterday I gave my sister a ziploc bag of earrings to take home. My old boss made them for me because she loves beading, and they’re all very pretty, but I just can’t wear them right now because they have negative associations. Every time I lift the lid on my jewelry box, there they are, staring at me, whispering away, reminding me that I quit my job and haven’t found another one. I can’t wear them. So I loaned them out. Let them talk to someone else for a while.

I had my family over for Father’s Day dinner yesterday. I spent about five hours cleaning the house (guess when the last time was I really cleaned? that’s right—Mother’s Day!), then showered, mixed up a batch of rolls, and dashed off to the grocery store while they were rising. I only had twenty-five minutes before my family was scheduled to arrive. The grocery store is close to my house, and I had a short but detailed list of what I needed, but I still impressed myself by returning within twenty minutes with two bags of groceries.

It was only when I began unpacking the groceries into the fridge that I realized that I had forgotten: the chicken. Because I was making parmesan chicken for dinner. Without the chicken, it would just be breadcrumbs and cheese on a plate. I had written chicken on my grocery list, and I was carrying my list as I walked around the store toward the chicken, but I veered off at the last minute into the freezer section because I remembered I was out of orange juice, and I took a different route to the produce section and didn’t go by the poultry. So I called my mom and arranged for them to stop and get a package of chicken breasts on their way over to my house. It worked out fine (especially for me, since they wouldn’t let me pay for it…), but still. What the hell is the matter with me?

I also did something crazy/OCD today: I read three-and-a-half weeks’ worth of daily comics. It took me over three hours. Yes, I take the daily newspaper—I know that a lot of people in my generation just get their news online, and that newspapers create a lot of recycling waste, but I really like getting the paper. It makes me feel like a real grownup. I like how, no matter how early or late I wake up, it’s always tucked into the handle of my screen door, waiting for me. I like to read the headlines on the front page and the metro section while I drink my orange juice in the morning. I like to spread out the living section on my dining table during lunch. I like the advice columns because my problems don’t seem so bad, and I like the comics because it’s like reading a paragraph from each of thirty different novels at a time, and I like doing the crossword puzzle and the sudoku and the jumble because they’re fun and good for my brain. (I do not do the word find. I think word finds are boring, and there’s a limit to how much time I can waste in a day. Apparently.)

Occasionally, I don’t get to the living section one day. Either I get up late and have to go somewhere all day, or I am reading an interesting book that I can’t put down, or I just don’t feel like it. So I set it aside for the next day. This may go on for another day or two. I try to stay current, because the more days I have to read, the less I feel like catching up. Somehow, despite being home most of the time these days, I got two weeks behind last month. And then I went to Seattle for the weekend, and before I knew it, I was almost four weeks behind! The stack on my coffee table was beginning to reach Crazy-Old-Person-With-Paths-of-Periodicals proportions. So I decided today was it. Yes, I could have recycled them without reading them and not suffered too grievously. Yes, there were probably better uses of my time (I’m trying not to think about what I could have done with those three hours, even though I probably would have just wasted them a different way). But I just couldn’t seem to let it go. So I sat down in the comfortable spot on the couch with the light on and a fresh glass of water, and Louie on my lap, and got caught up with my friends in Sally Forth, Luann, For Better or Worse, Pearls Before Swine, Mutts, and all the rest.

I really need to get a job.

And a parting note: why do we say we “find” or “lose” a job? It’s not like I misplaced my job. It’s not like my job ran away from home and I’m putting up posters on utility poles. And when I get another job, it won’t be because I discovered it fallen through the bars of a storm drain.

Still here, still jobless, not quite broke

2008-06-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

Hello, again.

When there’s nothing to fill your days, or to compel you to get out of bed before dawn every morning and set off for work, it’s amazing how fast a month goes by. I’ve given some passing thought to the blog now and then, but I keep waiting for something to happen that would be worth reporting. Although I’m sure you will be interested to learn that:

*I have played more National Geographic jigsaw puzzles online (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/jigsaw-puzzles) than a person should spend time on
*I have watched many episodes of Friends and Gilmore Girls
*I have not used my treadmill in long enough that I am embarrassed to type the number of days (weeks?) here, and you’ll just have to take my word for it
*I have knitted at least another 18” of the yellow afghan I’m making my sister as a graduation present (don’t worry—she already knows about it; I had her pick the color and pattern)
*I have not cleaned the house for three weeks
*I have spent quality time with the cats
*I have worked on two substantial sewing projects with my mom (I can sew! sort of);
and,
*I eagerly anticipate the arrival of the first two discs of the most recent season of Weeds tomorrow from Netflix.

As you can see, it’s been a busy month. I have also been reading the classifieds every Sunday and I made a list of possible jobs to apply for, some of which sound kind of interesting. Still, I’ve been unable to work up much enthusiasm for the job search. I don’t know if that’s because I am getting used to having all this demand-free time at home, or if my confidence is shaken after being chewed up and spit out by my last job, or if it’s just that everyone hates looking for work.

My counselor and I agreed that it might be good for me to take a little time off, anyway, to recover and consider what I would like to do. At his urging, I’ve been thinking about what I am passionate about. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Books
Writing
Art
Music (both playing and enjoying)
Social justice/elimination of world hunger
Animals (especially the prevention of cruelty toward them)
Movies
Food
The natural world (okay, I hate camping, but I believe in the preservation of nature)

I believe I could center my life around one or all of these things and feel that I was working with a purpose.

Also, here are some things I do not want to focus on:

Money
Power
Fame
Cars
Consuming of expensive goods for their own sake

My counselor gave me a book of advertising photographs and asked me to make a collage of my idea of (good) work. (This, by the way, was a really fun assignment.) I ended up making two: one positive and one negative. The negative one has tall black office buildings and people in suits at meetings and clocks and a bag of money with a dollar sign. The positive one has a woman in casual clothes who is surrounded by art supplies, and another woman on her couch with her laptop, and waves hitting a beach, and green trees, and a lighted cabin in the snow at night.

If there were any doubts about my aversion toward a corporate career, I think the collages said it all. Not that I am unwilling to work in an office; and of course I realize I will have to make some money in order to live. (And fairly soon, I must add, if I don’t want to move back in with my parents.) But I don’t want to work in an environment where money-making is not only the means, but the objective itself.

Now that I have had a little time and distance from the Job-that-must-not-be-named, and I have some idea of what will make me happy, I feel (sort of) ready to start looking in earnest.

That said, there’s a job I want to apply for (an administrative person at an arts non-profit), and tomorrow is the last day for resumes. Also, another job I applied for a few months ago has reappeared online. I’m going to take a chance and apply again. Wish me luck.

And I’m hoping to get back into blogging, now that my self-imposed hibernation is drawing to a close, although I can’t and won’t promise to write every day.

Point of view

2008-05-07T12:57:00.000-07:00

I learned something new about myself this month.

I was at my annual eye exam a couple of weeks ago. The doctor looked at me and said, “You have a bit of a head tilt.” He asked if I ever have my head tilted in photographs.

I just stared at the doctor. The thing is, I always have my head tilted in photographs. Slightly to the left. I’ve noticed it before and thought it was odd, but because I’m often on the right in the picture, I figured I was just leaning toward the person next to me.

My doctor said that I have a bit of “up and down” in one eye, meaning that it doesn’t hold its focus properly in some tests. He sent me home with a prism to do some exercises to see if it could be corrected. (The prism sat on my kitchen counter for two weeks. I did the exercises once, but they gave me a headache.)

For the next two weeks, I was constantly aware of my slightly slanted view of the world. I noticed it when I was driving, or when I was looking in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. When I was at my counselor’s office last week, listening as he discussed something important, I was thinking, Is my head tilted now? Okay, lean to the right. Just lean a little bit to the right…My God, what’s the matter with me?

Monday I had a follow-up appointment. My eye doctor had done some research in the meantime, and he believes I have a “trochlear (fourth) nerve palsy” in my left eye. (He said that the only way to know for sure would be to dissect my eye and look, but that that wasn’t such a good idea. I concurred.) He even showed me some pictures in a medical textbook. The pictures were slightly off-color, making everyone’s eyes and skin appear yellow. The subjects’ eyes were slightly crossed.

My doctor explained that the palsy can be caused by a virus, and asked if I’d ever had measles or mumps. No, but I did have the chicken pox when I was eight. He said that might have been it. The damage to the nerve, whenever it occurred, caused my eye to weaken. My brain compensated by having my head tilt slightly to the left.

My doctor asked me if I have double vision. I said no, because I don’t, but as I was lying in bed that night at home, I realized that when I let my eyes go completely relaxed, I see two images that do not line up vertically. It’s been like that as far back as I can recall, even from childhood. I remember learning as a child that I could control it, moving one of the objects in line with the other until they came into focus as one. I just took it for granted that everyone’s eyes did the same thing.

But now, I begin to suspect that they do not. I suspect that when you, dear reader, are looking at a television or a plant across the room in an unfocused way, you still see only one television or one plant.

This has thrown me into a small identity crisis. Now, not only am I someone out of work who doesn’t want to get another job in the same field but has no idea what she wants to do, I am also someone with a slightly tilted head, someone with possible palsy in one eye. It’s weird.

Yes, I realize that this is a narcissistic pursuit with no constructive outcome: I don’t think my slightly inclined head is going to cause me to solve global hunger or develop alternative fuel sources. I haven’t noticed any new superpowers. But it’s changed my view of the world all the same.

Where does the time go? (for Tuesday)

2008-05-07T12:22:00.001-07:00

I am amazed that I ever had time for a job. Just yesterday, for instance, I had a dermatologist appointment in the morning (where I was kept waiting for thirty minutes in the waiting room, which unfortunately gave me time to start the library book I was going to return after my appointment, because it’s due Saturday and I hadn’t gotten a chance to start it yet, but now I have to find out what happens, meaning 15 cents a day until I finish it).

Then I went to the library to look at magazines for an assignment my counselor gave me last week. While I was there, my sister texted me (don’t worry, I had my phone on vibrate, because if there’s one thing that bothers me—other than all those SUVs with just one lady driving around with her coffee and no passengers—it’s cell phones that ring in quiet places, like libraries and movie theaters and orchestra rehearsals; I mean, c’mon, if you can’t figure out how to turn off the phone, maybe you should just leave it in the car) to see if I wanted to have lunch with her. Which I did.

So I checked out twelve magazines and left, stopped at the Goodwill donation center to drop off a bag of my old books (a small bag, I must admit—it’s hard for me to get rid of books, even books I don’t intend to read again) and several jackets I never wear, and picked my sister up at her office for lunch.

After that, I came home and practiced the piano for an hour, looked for jobs online, and went over to my parents’ house to help get dinner ready because my grandparents were coming over, ate dinner, and then went home and did three loads of laundry.

That’s a pretty full day. Imagine if I’d had to fit eight hours of work in there, too. (But yes, I do realize that I will eventually have to find employment. Anyone want to hire me to stay home all day and play computer games?)

Home improvement

2008-05-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

One of the things about home ownership is that you are responsible for your own repairs. I admit that I am not overly handy at these things. I am capable of unscrewing a light fixture to change a bulb, even while balancing on a ladder; and I can hammer a nail into a wall—but I can’t guarantee that it’s the right kind of hammer for that type of wall, or that whatever I hung won’t come crashing down in a few minutes.

When my father comes over, he usually finds something that needs to be done: a picture to hang, a chip in the bathtub to caulk. I admit I save the things for him that I either don’t know how to do or don’t have the tools for. (In my toolbox, I own: one hammer, one steel measuring tape, two standard screwdrivers, one wrench, one Phillips head screwdriver, one set of socket wrenches, one pair of pliers with red handles, assorted nails and screws that my dad shopped with me for at Home Depot because “it’s good to have them on hand”, and some duct tape.)

My tools are all hand-me-downs. When the husband of some elderly family friends died, his wife offered us anything we wanted from his enormous workshop. He had at least four of everything. I chose the socket wrench set because it came in an adorable green metal case that looked just like a lunchbox. I used the wrenches to take apart and move my bed more than once in college, in blatant violation of dorm rooms. It made me feel very Rosie-the-Riveter.

But I don’t have an instinct for repairs. Most of the time I wouldn’t know where to begin. I believe this stems back to junior high when we did a six-week rotation of wood shop and metal shop as part of “the wheel” of required electives (back when there was a budget for electives). I was terrified of the equipment, more so when the shop teacher (who used to invite students, mostly girls, into his office to view pictures of his horses during class—I believe it was innocently done, but still…) shouted cautionary tales over the sound of sawing, of careless students getting their fingers cut off because their attention wandered. I was so frightened of amputation that I didn’t even finish all the class projects, but I got an A anyway. I made a very crude birdhouse in wood shop that fell apart many years ago, and a welded tin basket with a curved handle that I still have somewhere. After that, I didn’t want to get anywhere near sharp blades or dangerously hot metal. No, thank you.

But I’m an adult now. I am worldly and experienced and capable, and I can fix things at my own house. Right?

The sink in my bathroom has been draining poorly for a while. I noticed it a few days ago, but now that I think about it, it’s been progressively slower for weeks. I could have called my dad, but I wanted to fix it myself.

So I called my mom instead, and requested her secret recipe for unclogging drains: pour one cup of bleach into the sink, let it sit for at least 30 minutes, and then pour boiling water down the drain. I did this, even letting the bleach sit for 45 minutes as I practiced the piano. My house smells like a community pool.

Unfortunately, this did not work. If anything, it seemed to be worse. So I removed the stopper and poked down into the drain with an old toothbrush, trying to keep my hand above the water level. Not wanting to look too closely, I stabbed blindly with the toothbrush, deeper into the recesses of the drain. At last, as I met with some resistance. A rusty cloud burst forth, and I pulled a substantial clump of long hair from the drain with my clenched toothbrush. Gross, gross, gross, gross, GROSS!

I threw away the slimy clump, and rinsed the brown residue out of the sink. The water rushed away as the drain drank greedily. Triumph!

That’s right. I fixed it myself. I guess I’m just handy like that.

The phone that wouldn't ring

2008-04-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

Today I waited.

I waited. And waited. And waited.

I hoped they might call yesterday, but they didn’t. So today was it. They had to call today!

They said they would.

I carried my phone into the bathroom while I took a shower. I set it next to me on the counter as I washed the dishes. I put it where I could see it on my desk while I ate lunch. I slipped it in my pocket and walked around the house with it. I checked it every few minutes to make sure the ringer was on (it was) and I had service (I did).

Then, it rang! Hurrah! My stomach did a nervous turn.

It was my mother. She wondered if I’d like to run an errand with her. Why yes, I would. Anything to distract me from the phone.

I like my phone most of the time. It’s pink, and it takes pictures, and I like the satisfying sound it makes when I snap it closed. Today, though, it was the frustrating symbol of silence.

I spent the afternoon with my mom and had dinner at my parents’ house, checking my phone (in my pocket) every now and then to make sure I hadn’t missed a call, until it was well after regular business hours. Then I drove home. I parked in the carport and walked over to get my mail. Usually it arrives around lunchtime, but I hadn’t bothered to get it before I left to meet my mother.

And there it was in my mailbox, where it had been patiently waiting since noon (why didn’t I check my mail before I left today?): a letter from the company where I had applied. I could tell from the slim envelope that there was only one sheet inside. I slit it open with one forefinger as I crossed the parking lot in the dusk. “Dear Erin…” (skim over the ‘nice to have met you’ paragraph—ah, there it is)… “We have decided to continue our search.”

So there you have it.

I immediately checked myself over, as though I’d fallen from a second story window and might have broken some ribs. Do I feel…sad? Disappointed? Happy?

I decided that I mostly feel: relieved. I was conflicted to begin with, because although I knew I could do the job competently, it wasn’t going to present much of a challenge for me—and in some ways it would be a step down, since there were more mundane tasks (copying, filing, assembling packets) than in my previous job.

This way, the decision has been made for me. I didn’t have to agonize over whether to accept (or kick myself six months from now, when I’m eating ramen and living in the back of my station wagon, that I didn’t take it when I had the chance). It makes me feel perversely better that, even though they didn’t want to hire me, they didn’t want to hire anyone else, either.

And they may have suspected that I did not intend to stay forever, based on some of the questions the interviewer asked me about my career goals. Maybe, dare I say it, they thought I was overqualified and might be bored?

Well, tomorrow is another day. Of unemployment. I meet with my counselor again on Thursday. He mentioned career assessments he has that I could take, and an exploration of what I want to do with my life.

My mental self-check reveals that I’m feeling nervous but excited about the possibilities before me.

The interview

2008-04-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t too bad. In fact, I think it went well.

I’ve been nervous for several days. I hardly ate at all yesterday, and I had to force myself to have breakfast this morning. I dried my hair very carefully today, and put on my new suit and gathered up my resume, and then I got in the car and drove to the office. Well, sort of—I got lost once along the way, but since I had allowed myself 48 minutes for a 15-minute drive, I had plenty of time to turn around once I figured it, and I still had time to sit in the car and breathe for a while before I went in.

My counselor told me yesterday that depression manifests itself in different ways. For some people, they don’t sleep much, or they sleep more, or their eating habits change. Some people, he said, get lost easily. I thought that was an odd statement, but I have gotten lost several times lately. It’s like there is a loose wire somewhere in the section of my brain that is supposed to say “turn left!” or “this doesn’t look right”.

He also said that depression is repressed anxiety. I’d never heard it put quite that way. I am prone to depression—no secret there—but I hadn’t thought about it in terms of anxiety. The times I have been most depressed have also been at times of extreme anxiety: my freshman year of college, my first winter in China, any time I’m out of work (now, for instance…). The difference is, I am better at managing depression now than when I was 18. I know that I need to exercise every day—or as close to it as I can manage; and I need to get outside every single day, even if it’s only for ten or twenty minutes in the rain. I need to eat. And I need to sleep a reasonable amount, and at a reasonable hour.

But now back to the interview. I took the elevator to the second floor (not the stairs, although I always take stairs when I can, and I felt a little guilty riding up one floor in the elevator). As my sister said, you don’t want to arrive out of breath for an interview, and when you’re already nervous and then you climb a long flight of stairs, that’s not a good combination. I didn’t want to pass out in the lobby.

I signed in at the busy reception desk, where I was given a packet with my name on it and an application, and directed to a little desk in the corner. I was relieved to see a desk, because it’s hard to write neatly while balancing a folder on my knees. While I concentrated on writing neatly and not forgetting any questions, I listened to the receptionist answering the phone. “He went cuckoo?” she said at one point. “Cuckoo?”

After I finished the application, I handed it in up front and sat down in the reception area. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. I scanned through the materials in the packet and pretended to read the information while I sat up very straight and tried not to do anything noticeably nervous or embarrassing. I drank some water. I wiped my right hand dry over and over on my pants so I wouldn’t have a clammy handshake. And I waited some more.

Finally, twenty minutes after the scheduled time, the interviewer came out to get me.

I did fine, I think. The handshakes went well. She got me a glass of water. She and the assistant whose job I was applying for asked me a series of fairly easy questions about my qualifications for the job, my organizational skills, etc. That lasted only about twenty minutes, during which they were seemingly very relaxed and casual. (They were also both wearing jeans, which surprised me since I was in a suit. “Casual Friday,” my dad said later when I told him. It occurred to me that everyone I had seen in the office was wearing jeans. I guess it is Friday, isn't it.)

I didn’t even feel nervous once I got in there and started talking. My hands weren’t even shaking, as they do whenever I’m anxious. They were both friendly and laughing, and I wished I had met the supervisor before I had my phone interview with her, because I might have been able to read her better over the phone when she asked me the original series of hard-nosed questions that made me cry later.

Then they asked if I had any questions for them. I did, in fact. I had written down several thoughtful questions in my notebook the night before, and then I memorized them. There was a question that related to the computer system used by the department, and a question that demonstrated that I had reviewed their website, and a question about the scope of the organization itself, and a question that referred to a detail of the job description. (I have learned in HR that having thoughtful questions prepared sets one apart from other applicants, and demonstrates one’s real interest in the job. I hope that came across.)

The whole thing took only 30 minutes, not counting the application and the waiting. I left with a good feeling about the interview. I thought to myself, I could be content working here. Maybe not challenged or deliriously happy, but content. I don’t want to be unemployed forever and lose my house, and I know I could do this job. Is that so bad?

They’re supposed to let me know either way by Tuesday. Why is it that these decisions always seem to take the length of a weekend to make? Couldn’t they interview everyone on a Monday and let them know by Wednesday? Then I could at least enjoy my Saturday.

Honestly, I’m okay either way. If nothing else, it was good practice, and I did so much better than I thought I would. Is this the return of some confidence?

Interview suit

2008-04-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

Well, apparently the phone interview wasn’t quite as bad as I thought: they called me for an interview! I will be meeting with the head of the department on Friday morning. I’ve decided that I am too old and experienced now to get away with a sweater/jacket and black pants for a job interview, so yesterday I spent several hours shopping for a suit to wear to said interview. My mom, who went with me to provide advice and put things back on hangers in the dressing room, observed that if you just walk into a store with nothing in mind, you can happily walk out with a bag full of stuff in no time. But if you are shopping for one specific item, it can take a whole frustrating day!

I went to several different stores and tried on at least fifty things, many of which made me look like Miss Marple (apparently I can’t pull off the skirt-suit look—regardless of what top I wore underneath, I looked like I was auditioning for the maiden aunt role in the school play and probably had knitting needles in my purse). On others, the trousers were so wide-legged that I should have been wearing a rainbow wig and a red nose. I tried on dark brown blend suits, medium brown wool suits, light brown linen suits, purple pinstripe, gray-and-pink pinstripe, navy, and more varieties of black than I can possibly recall.

At Talbot’s I found three jackets I loved—on sale!—but no pants or skirts to match. (I did, however, get a light blue sweater on sale, and a skirt with dragonflies, and one black jacket that was just too good to pass up.) Finally, I went to Nordstrom. I knew Nordstrom would not disappoint me, and they did not. I am now the proud owner of one tailored black suit, the trousers of which are currently being shortened on a rush order so that I can wear them on Friday for my interview.

The thing is, I'm conflicted about the job. I never set out to work in the field where I have been for the last three years, and which recently burned me badly, so why would I want another job in that field? It represents immediate financial stability instead of months of uncertainty, but will involve many of the same things that I didn’t like at my last job. But I am going in with an open mind because:

1) It’s good interview practice, since the last time I actually interviewed for a job was in 2003;

2) Maybe I’ll be less nervous in the interview itself if I’m not desperate to get the job;

3) I might meet my potential supervisor and decide that I really do want the job if they offer it to me;

4) If I don’t get it, I will not be (as) devastated.

I have to arrive half an hour early on Friday to complete an application. I asked if I could pick it up during the week and bring it with me (my handwriting gets shaky and inconsistent when I’m nervous), but she said I have to complete it in the office. My mom remembered that a family friend, whose son recently changed jobs, told her that the newest trend in applicant psychology is to have you arrive early for the interview and then observe you: How do you treat the receptionist? Are you friendly? Do you seem overly nervous? Do you bite your fingernails, nap, or eat a pastrami sandwich while you wait?

It’s a smart idea, actually. When I worked as the receptionist in a temp agency office, many people who came in to apply for a job were just horrible to me. They were rude and abrupt, argued with me about completing the application, and often groomed themselves or made out with a companion in my view. But when the interviewer came out to collect them, there would be a complete personality change. Suddenly, they were polite and friendly and eager. What they didn’t know was that I had the power to make them “not eligible for hire”, based only on my observations before the interview. So I think it’s a good idea to ask the receptionist what the applicants are like. I just don’t look forward to being on the observee end of things for once!

I'll let you know how it goes.

(In other news, I got my very first blog comments this week. I was kind of excited, because it means at least two people out there are actually reading what I write. I am enjoying the blog format, because it’s a lot like my journal except that I am writing for an audience, which forces me to craft everything a little more carefully. So thanks for the encouragement!)

Is there anything more demoralizing...

2008-04-17T22:37:00.000-07:00

…than looking for a job? I had an unscheduled phone interview today—the resume I sent by email was received, and the hiring manager called me late this afternoon to talk. She offered to schedule it for a later time, but I figured I might as well get it over with.

Of course, that was before she asked me why I left my last job. And I choked. I need to work on exactly what I will say to answer that question, but today I just wasn’t prepared. First I said “I wanted to find something else”, but since this job is in the same field as my last job, I couldn’t say that I wanted to do something different, which is what I plan to say for non-HR jobs. And then I got nervous and just kept talking while the voice in my head said to shut up! shut up right now!, and then she started to ask me some very direct questions, and pretty soon I’d said way more than I meant to. Damn it.

Eventually I said that I didn’t think I was explaining the situation very well, and she suggested we move on. I thought it was a good sign that she didn’t hang up on me right then (I could almost hear her putting a big red X through my name), but went on to ask me questions about my computer skills and the challenges of working in HR.

I was also given a small gift, in that she put me on hold for about three minutes (when she came back, she said that her boss sometimes walks into her office and just starts talking), and while I was on hold I frantically wrote down what I thought might help my case a little, which was, “I don’t want to say anything negative about the company, but there were some things going on in the upper management that frustrated me, and I decided that it was a good time to go….” When she came back on the line, I asked if I could clarify my earlier statements, and we talked about it a little more. She said that if she decides to interview me, she’s going to want to hear more about the situation. Great.

We talked for about half an hour (only a generous third of it devoted to why I left), and then she told me she’ll be making calls for interviews by Tuesday at the latest, and I should hear either way by then. I don’t necessarily expect an interview, but I’m okay either way.

It was a tough phone interview. I’ve had a few before, and usually they’re just looking for whether you can speak in complete sentences and whether you actually read the job ad. But here, there were no getting to know you questions, no easy “tell me about your duties at your last job” softballs. She asked very pointed questions. I think I did okay except for that first big one. I just don’t think very fast on my feet when I’m nervous.

Honestly, I don’t know if I’m ready for another job. It’s a little like I just got divorced, and I have to find someone else to marry in the next three months before my money runs out. No mourning period, no reflection, no sympathy—just go, go, go! But I’m afraid of getting hurt again. I started to cry (just a little) after I got off the phone today. Does that sound like a healthy employee who’s ready for the work force?

You know what’s not fair? I did nothing wrong at my last job, but I’m the one who has to lie/creatively stretch the truth about why I left, so I don’t alarm potential employers like I did today. Not only did they take away my old job, but they are making it harder for me to get a new job.

That’s why tomorrow I am finding a counselor. Someone who will help me phrase answers to the tough questions, and help me recognize again that I am a capable person.

Now would be a very good time for my book deal to come through, meaning that I don’t have to get another job in another office, but that would require: a) that I write a book, and/or b) that I find a publisher willing to advance me to write a book.

Don’t worry, readers, today is just a dark day. They come and go; the signs are usually wearing my sweatpants and watching TV/playing computer games all day (check, and check). I know I’ll come out of this okay, and that someday this will be a funny story, but in the meantime I’m not having any fun!

Tomorrow my college roommate and her boyfriend are coming to stay. I’m sure their visit will cheer me up (no pressure, R!), and it also gives me the needed push to finally clean the house in anticipation of their arrival.

The classifieds

2008-04-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

I saw my job in the paper yesterday.

I’m not being ambitious in a “that job is perfect for me! I’m going to get that job!” kind of way. It was really my job. The job that—until two weeks ago Wednesday—I got paid to do. (The fact that today would have been payday has not escaped my notice or that of my checking account.) I was just reading through the Hs and highlighting anything that looked interesting in Human Resources, and there it was. 19 lines of insult, injury, and some more insult.

Reading it—c'mon, of course I read it—my hands started to shake with emotion. I hadn’t realized I was still that angry. And I was surprised. My boss had indicated that maybe they wouldn’t fill my position right away, because the Big Boss thought that I wasn’t doing anything and therefore they wouldn’t need to replace me. But apparently it took them less than a week after my departure to realize that, hmm, maybe I had been doing something after all. Which doesn’t really make me feel better.

Unfortunately, they’re taking applications through the end of the month, so every time I read the classifieds I’m going to see their ad again.

But right next to it, one column over, was a job that I applied for this morning. The starting pay is decent and I know someone (okay, it was my sister) who recently temped at that organization and said everyone was very nice. It’s a job I am definitely qualified for, even if it’s not my perfect dream of someone paying me to practice the piano and bake cookies all day. So keep your fingers crossed for me.

If nothing else, even if I don’t get this job or the next one or the one after that, I am proud of myself for applying for something, for crafting the perfect cover letter and sending it off with my resume, for believing that someone will want to hire me because I am a good employee and I am a good person. I refuse to be paralyzed by the events of this year. They may have taken my job, but they won’t get my spirit, too!

The viola personality

2008-04-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I was sitting at my desk reading the Sunday job classifieds and chewing on my highlighter (I know it’s a bad habit—if I get too carried away, I end up with fluorescent pink or green lips) when my phone rang. It was my section leader in the community orchestra I play with, offering me an extra ticket to a chamber concert tonight because the friend who was originally accompanying her was sick.

My first impulse was to say no. Why is it that I never want to leave the house? It’s not that I’m physically afraid of the outside world—I’m not agoraphobic or anything—but it just seems like too much trouble to go anywhere, and I’m an introvert (obviously), which means that extended time with people sucks the energy right out of me. I am okay with small groups for short times. I really prefer to be tucked safely at home, though, reading a book or watching a movie.

But I’ve been home alone a lot lately. In the last week and a half, I have re-watched all of this season’s 30 Rock and The Office online and played Hexic for hours (highly addictive game by the makers of Tetris, free online through zone.msn.com) and worn my pajamas until noon and eaten cookies for breakfast and watched a movie in the middle of the day if I felt like it. I have raided the pantry for salty snacks and let my hair air-dry and not bothered with any makeup and stretched out on the floor of the living room with the cats on sunny afternoons. I’ve played the piano for hours at a time and I decadently read a whole book in one day just because I could.

And now, I’m ready for something else. I hate to admit it, but that was enough vacation for me. It’s been glorious, but now it’s time to find something to do all day.

So when my friend called, I bit back my reflexive “no” and said, okay! Yes, I will put on real pants and brush my hair and go outside for the first time today. Yes, I will drive my car somewhere (I’ll say one thing for unemployment: I’m saving a ton of money on gas!) and sit in a room with many other people.

And I really enjoyed it.

Trio con Brio Copenhagen, composed of two Korean sister string players and a Danish pianist, played works by Beethoven, Shostakovich, and Brahms. (The friend I had come with, a fellow violist, complained about the inclusion of Shostakovich beforehand but declared it her favorite afterward. I had to agree. I’m not usually one for the dramatic, emotional composers—even Brahms can be a bit much for me sometimes—but the trio obviously loved Shostakovich so much that the audience loved it, too.)

I was surprised to see that all three looked fairly young. They were dressed a little oddly: the man wore all black (with no belt, my friend pointed out), and both women wore dresses that were cut like bridesmaid’s gowns, the violinist in a fitted strapless bodice and the cellist in a plunging halter. They were made not from typical shiny satin or velvet, but some kind of wrinkled matte cotton-linen blend in a light blue. The dresses looked nice and cool for playing under hot stage lights, but they weren’t very formal. And they reminded me of something. But what? As I sat listening, I finally figured it out: bed sheets. I have a set of cotton queen-size sheets in that very same light robin’s-egg blue fabric, that wrinkles so badly in the wash that I hardly use them. For a moment, I wondered if they had pulled a Maria von Trapp and made industrious use of some hotel bedding.

Usually I get bored after about ten minutes of live music, even something that I really like. I just can’t listen with concentration for that long. I’m a visual learner. But tonight I was rapt for two hours. The trio played with such passion, animation, and energy. The young pianist played with his mouth hanging open over the keys, almost but not quite smiling and giving the audience a clear view of his European teeth, his substantial fingers moving like a stenographer’s taking dictation at great speed. The sisters’ faces were constantly moving as they flung themselves into the music, bows flying across strings.

I couldn’t look away.

In the musical world, there’s a personality type associated with the player of each instrument. First violins are divas, trumpets are cocky, drummers are a little out of it. These are stereotypes, of course, but isn't there always a grain of truth in a stereotype.

Most string players begin on the violin. Some go on to the larger dramatic cello, others to the slightly more glamorous upright bass. I started on the violin as a fourth grader in a class of screeching players of “Twinkle Twinkle” (which my parents patiently tolerated my butchering of over and over again in my not-very-soundproof bedroom). I played second violin for several years.

But I knew that the viola was where my true destiny lay. The viola which has a deliciously mellow, melancholy tone that the smaller, brassier violin can’t match. (For the uninitiated, the viola looks like a violin and is played under the chin, but is larger and has the same strings as a cello).

And I recognized my people in the viola section. Violists are nice. We are shy, modest, reserved but usually friendly when approached. (For those reasons, we are an easy target for teasing. The “viola joke” is as well-known in an orchestra as a “blond joke” anywhere else, and often employs the same punchlines.) Violists do not boast or posture. We have little patience for the second violinists who really want to be first violinists, and who sometimes try to commiserate about the boring parts we are assigned as middle sections.

We have chosen this road. We usually play the unadorned mid-level notes that fill out the sound of a symphony or a string quartet but that the audience does not really hear. We grumble a little about being unappreciated by composers and fellow orchestra members alike, but when we get a solo, we almost universally panic and mess it up.

But we are a peaceable group. There is very little muttering about our section leader not being good enough, because none of us wants to be first chair. That would mean sitting in the front row, where someone might hear us! We prefer to keep the peace from the back, enjoying the feeling of being part of beautiful music without the pressure of performance.

There was no viola in the piano trio, of course. But two violists enjoyed a very nice night out.

Several older posts

2008-04-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

I just moved my blog from another location with a title I didn't like as well, so here are the three posts I had created. Read these and you'll be all caught up:

Friday, April 11, 2008
vacation week draws to a close
It's 9 o'clock on a Friday morning, and I'm trying not to get back into my warm bed (where the cats are still sleeping peacefully).

My natural sleep cycle (or at least natural in this age of the internet and television and electric lights, when a person can stay up as long as she wants) has set in. This week is officially my self-designated vacation, so I'm allowed (by me) to sleep in if I want, but I also know that if I don't retrain myself to sleep during normal hours, I will be in for a terrible shock once I get another job and have to get up at 6:30 AM instead of 9:30--or worse, have to go to sleep at 10:30 PM instead of 1:30 AM.

Since I have been unsuccessful in going to bed earlier (I'm not tired, since I didn't get up until 9:30 in the morning, so I just lie there in the dark), my only recourse is to get up progressively earlier, and eventually I will be able to fall asleep earlier at night. Today I got up at 8:30! Baby steps.

Next week begins my "regular" unemployment schedule, to make the most of this time off. I intend to:

*Work out five mornings a week for at least 30 minutes
*Write for at least an hour every day (I'm hoping to do more, but I don't want to set myself a three-hour-a-day goal and then fail)
*Practice the piano for at least 45 minutes a day
*Practice the viola three times a week for at least 20 minutes
*Job-search for at least two hours, five days a week

I'm trying to balance looking for a new job/panic about money, with enjoying the time I have off from a full-time job. I am also planning to make an appointment with a counselor in the next couple of weeks. Two people whose opinions I trust have told me I should see a counselor. One of them told me that potential employers can "smell" a sense of defeat, and that I need to regain my own self-confidence before I look for a new job.

I had a long session on the phone last night with a friend who's still working at the office I recently left. She's just as cynical and bitter as I am, but her circumstances are such that she can't quit without another job. Not that I could, either, but apparently I did! We talked about what's wrong with the management of that organization: she said very insightfully that they love the power, but they're afraid that someone will find out that they are incompetent at their jobs, so they keep us in a constant state of fear to distract us. And I added, they want our respect, and don't realize that fear is not the same thing.

I told her I think it's time she gets out, even if she doesn't have the perfect job lined up. There's something about that office that crushes one's spirit, until you don't believe you are worthy of any other job, and you start to feel grateful that they haven't fired you for being such a terrible employee and person.

I've only been gone for a week, but already I'm sleeping better, eating better, my skin is clearing up, and I find myself smiling sometimes for no reason. Smiling even though I have plenty of new reasons to worry (no job, no money, mortgage to pay, etc.).

The sun is beaming through the window of my office here at home, and I think it's going to be a good day.

Posted by EG at 9:06 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, April 6, 2008
Sunday
I'm supposed to be grocery shopping right now. My list and purse and keys and coat are all sitting right by the door, waiting patiently. I was hoping to walk to the store, which is less than half a mile from my house and makes me feel very virtuous (especially when I remember my reusable cloth shopping bags), but it looks like it's going to rain. I live in the Northwest so that's not unusual, but I'm not sure I feel like a rainy walk today.

I don't usually shop on Sunday afternoons, but between being sick and dealing with last-minute job details for the last two weeks, I'm pretty much out of food. At least, that is, the good food that I would ever plan to eat. Today for lunch I had a sandwich and the last of the chip crumbs. No carrot sticks, no grapes, no glass of milk. In my fridge there's a shriveled lemon and some dubious sliced ham, and in the pantry there are several open bags of pretzels and assorted canned chicken noodle soup, but nothing I'm too excited about.

When I was working, I would often shop on Friday nights after my piano lesson. It's important to run errands when I'm already out of the house, because (as I'm demonstrating right now) once I am inside in my sweatpants and sock feet, the inertia is hard to overcome.

I have discovered that single men near my age shop on Friday nights. Unfortunately, what they're shopping for is beer. Usually microbrews because this is after all the Northwest, but in cases. And one time I saw one with firewood under one arm.

A few weeks ago there was a girl I'd never seen at the deli counter. I'm pretty sure she was new, because I asked for a third of a pound of turkey (I just can't eat a half-pound of lunchmeat before it goes bad). Several minutes went by, during which she tried to cut it without putting the blade back in the slicer, and then spent a looooong time in front of the weighing/pricing machine thingy. Eventually, she handed me a bag with less than a quarter of a pound, the pieces folded up like origami, and the label she printed for pricing said "Jo jo potatoes--$0.85". I admit I noticed it before I left the store, but I knew that if I went back it would take another ten minutes for her to straighten out, so I just let it be. The store was only out a dollar or two.

Usually I make a point of saying something I'm getting more than I should. Like when I had limited basic cable installed at my house (crystal-clear broadcast and some exciting community access channels, in case you're wondering), but the technician forgot to turn off the standard cable at the connection outside. I discovered it right away, had one of those debates with the angel on one shoulder and the demon on the other, and called the next day:

Comcast: "Comcast. How can I help you?"
Me: "I just had cable installed, and I have too many channels."
Comcast: "What?"
Me: "I have too many channels."
Comcast: "Too MANY channels??"
Me: "That's right. Too many channels."
Comcast: "Wow, that's the first time I've ever heard that one."

It took them a week to come out and switch it off, during which time I enjoyed the many-splendored delights of The Daily Show and sitcom reruns on TBS and everything on The Food Network, but one day I came home from work and it was gone. Which is just as well, since I wasn't getting anything done with so many channels to choose from.

I still get the channel information guide with my limited cable, so sometimes I play "what would I be watching?" and flip through the descriptions of what's on the standard cable channels to see what I'm missing. Usually nothing very good, which makes me feel better, because I couldn't afford regular cable when I was working and I certainly can't now.

And now, off to the grocery store! The sky still looks gray and heavy, but if I wear my hooded coat and take an umbrella, I probably won't melt into the sidewalk.

Posted by EG at 2:57 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Saturday, April 5, 2008
What led us here

I quit my job this week.

Technically, I guess that makes me unemployed. I'm not destitute quite yet, but I live in a one-income household and someone has to pay the mortgage. I've encouraged my cats to seek gainful employment and earn their keep (before you judge: I have two cats, which I consider the maximum number before achieving Crazy Cat Lady status and crocheting myself kleenex box covers and slippers with pompoms, and I hope I'm a few decades away from that, if ever). I suggested perhaps they could pursue a plus-size feline modeling contract for one of the national pet food chains, but they have not displayed any initiative in entering the work force at their ages.

Regarding the job: I didn't set out for a career in human resources, but that's where I landed three years ago and it's been mostly good. The company sent me for training in HR management and ergonomics and whatever software systems I wanted to learn. The work was varied and usually interesting. I started a company newsletter, and learned about benefits and recruiting. They paid me relatively well. The health benefits were cheap and great. They put money into a pension account for me. People brought their dogs to work. Sometimes the bosses surprised us with pizza for lunch. We were allowed to burn candles at our desk (although I suspect the people who own the building might not have been so thrilled about that last one.) I would have been content, if not exactly happy, to stay there for a few more years at least.

But things changed subtly, over the last year or two. I didn't notice right away, but there was less chatting in the kitchen and fewer dogs and less pizza. I think the Big Boss at our company was ready to retire but couldn't do it yet, and his assistant felt the same way. It became less fun to go to work every day. A few longtime employees were terminated as dead weight and just disappeared into the night. (I only knew what happened because I worked in HR.) No one knew who could be trusted, and secret undercurrents of gossip and rumors wafted through the halls. Women grouped into informal coalitions and picked on the weakest among them.

And then last month, my supervisor was called in for a meeting with the Big Boss, at which BB told her that there had been complaints (plural) about me. BB wouldn't tell her who had complained, but they were basically: that I was unhelpful, that I gave the impression I couldn't be bothered, that I wasn't friendly, and that I left right at 5 every day even when my work wasn't done.

You may not be all that shocked.

I can't blame you for that. If you don't know me, then you have no frame of reference to judge my character or work ethic. I probably sound like a paranoid crazy person who mutters about how disgruntled she/he is with the company. (Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler....) So you'll just have to take my word for it that the people I know in the real world, and the colleagues I trusted enough to tell at work, were shocked by this. Genuinely shocked and stunned and horrified!

I was completely knocked over. Against all my resources, I started to cry and couldn't stop, right there in front of my supervisor when she called me in to talk about this "perception" around the office. She was very sympathetic and gave me the rest of the day off. My supervisor is a nice person. She's very warm and friendly and always argues for the people over the finances whenever the fiscal department gets out their sharp scissors to trim the budget (who needs sick days, anyway?). But she couldn't--or didn't--step up to save me. BB had implied to her that she could be replaced if I didn't improve.

Fast forward a few weeks, and the "perception" that I had an attitude problem had suddenly become reality, at least in my supervisor's eyes. She had always given me great performance reviews, and praised me extensively. I had never been in trouble with her before, but during the last month she began calling me in to talk about my work--but not in a good way--and said she was "disappointed" with some aspects of my performance. I worked longer hours than before, and sprang to attention whenever someone asked for help. I smiled at everyone, even the ones I thought might have talked about me (I could at least guess who was capable of it). I locked myself in the bathroom to weep silently at least once a day. And I fell over myself trying to show them that I was the good employee that I knew I was.

And then, it was enough. It was just enough.

My confidence was slowly being eroded by the nagging thought that maybe I was a bad employee, and a bad person. I became paranoid that people were talking about me before I entered a room. I was up late every night looking for a new job online, before getting up extra early to go to a job that I was beginning to dread.

Last week I went back into my supervisor's office after another session of talking about my need for improvement, and I told her the truth. (I wrote down some notes first, to make sure I knew what to say.) I told her, Look, you've always treated me as a good employee and have never once given me negative feedback, but now it's like I am a bad employee. So what's going on? Was I always a bad employee, and you never told me the truth before? Or am I suddenly doing a bad job? If things are so bad, why don't you just fire me? That way I can find something else, and you won't have to worry about your job.

She said okay. She was sad to see me go, I could tell, but managed to arrange a few months of severance and paid benefits because I was officially being fired. All things considered, other than continuing to like my job and receiving the praise and increased wages for doing it well, I think things worked out all right.

So farewell, Poppy the Gum-Smacking Wonder from the next cubicle over! Farewell, Lady Talks-A-Lot, whose personal phone calls were so prevalent that I could recite her complete medical history, and who would often impressively be talking with one relative on a cell phone and another on the office phone at the same time! Farewell, Employee Who Does Nothing But Will Chat with Anyone, whose entire job I took over for 1/2 the pay when he changed departments! Farewell, Two-Faced Fake-Friendly Women who will have to find someone else to be the weakest dog in the pack now!

Tune in next time for: what I am going to do next....