pronoia

I Am Not a Parseltongue

Last night, Ms. P, R and I congregated for dinner. We were not a cheery bunch: R was having A Very Hard Day, I was feeling awful about our finances, and Ms. P was having to deal with the both of us.

(I should have seen this coming. Yesterday, when I drew my daily tarot card, I got The Emperor--we are not amused, nor surprised, that I spent my evening feeling beaten down that I was never taught how to deal with money.)

Apparently, the animals decided it was high time they distracted us. Gracie spent the evening poking her sister to play, running around the living room like a nut, and drinking too much water and throwing it up on the carpet. Phoebe, who has a sore paw, just kept laying down closer and closer to me until I stepped on her every time I moved. Maddie had the zooms and kept caroming off of various pieces of furniture. And Max. Oh Max. Max kept jumping into the turtle tank, which he isn't supposed to do, so I kept pouring water on his head from my can of seltzer. He was very wet and very indignant, thank you very much.

After he and I went four rounds over the turtle tank, I'd cleaned up at least three different spots of vomit, and I'd stepped on Phoebe twice, R went home, noticeably cheerier, and I put the dogs out for their last roam through the jungle that is still our fenced backyard. When I brought them in, Phoebe started sniffing a rolling cart we have just inside the dining room. I thought little of it, shooed her into the living room, and looked at the cart. Only to notice a SNAKE twining around the decorative metal edging.

It was a small little garden snake, and Ms. P deftly picked it up and put it back in our jungle where it belongs, but hello? wildlife? you do not belong in my house. And animals? I would rather you barked at humans less and wildlife more. That is all.

No Really, Go Away

For reasons I don't understand, there is someone outside the building playing music REALLY LOUDLY. I thought at first it was just a car radio and it would go away when the light changed. The light has changed several times now, and the music has even gone away several times, but it seems it only goes away to change the music to something equally percussive and annoying to me.

Have I mentioned I despise loud music even when I'm the one in control of it?

Choices

As I mentioned in the last post, Ms. P and I have been going around and around about money, our favorite subject, because we plan to start trying to knock me up next month. And it might be nice to know how we'll pay for child care.

We are not very good with money. Seven years of living on a grad student's salary only made me more willing to spend money when I had some, and Ms. P's salary has been not terribly commensurate with living expenses (through no fault of hers, mind). So we've got credit card debt (hello, job search--how much am I still paying for finding an academic job five years ago?), Ms. P's student loan debt, and a large debt to repay my dad for helping me refinance our previous house and buy a new (used) car.

We are especially not good with money when a) we move; b) we're under great transitional stress; c) Ms. P is suicidally depressed and I will do anything to keep her distracted and engaged.

In order to pay off our credit card debt and Ms. P's student loans, thereby freeing up a large chunk of change every month and making it financially possible to provide daily care for a kid when we can't afford to quit our jobs, we're considering cashing out the 401(k) from my previous employer. I know this isn't ideal, and I know there will be a hefty penalty off the front end for taxes and hand-slapping, but it does seem to be the best choice for getting our ducks in a row now so we can not incur further debt and start actually saving money.

We've got a budget now (which we never did before) and we're doing better about actually living within it, so I do have faith that taking a hit now will make a difference going forward.

So here are my questions for you, my lovely readers. Does anyone have any experience cashing out a 401(k)? What tips, tricks, techniques, etc. do you have for good money management?

Right now, I'm voting for drinking champagne while paying the bills. Somehow it helped last night.

Parking Lot Sushi

Last night did not go as planned. When I left work, blessedly on time, I was glorying in the beautiful weather and the lack of work and all of the things we might do. We could go to the plant nursery! We could climb in bed really early! We could make dinner and eat it on the back porch! We could read or do research or study or otherwise happily engage our lives!

This is not what happened.

First, Ms. P and I got into another discussion about kids and money. We are not the savviest of people, money-wise, and while we are not poor, we are often broke. This does not bode well, says Ms. P, so we went a few rounds of grumpy/sad conversation about money (more about that in a later post). She had been on the phone with a friend who was heading out to have sushi, and that sounded so good we grabbed R and headed out for sushi of our own (directly contradicting the former conversation, yes, we know).

The car was a little slow starting at R's house, but I just figured Ms. P didn't have the clutch in all the way. I do that sometimes when I've been driving a bit and I'm not paying attention, but it started and we headed out. But then, just after we got into a parking garage, she stalled the car and it wouldn't start again. R and I pushed the car to a safe space in the parking garage.

Roadside assistance duly notified, Ms. P and R went to get our sushi for takeout, and I sat down to wait for the person with the nice battery jumper. As I couldn't find any books in the car (unusual, and it turns out there were two I didn't see), I watched parking garage behavior for a while. People get really amped up about parking, don't they? We usually just drive straight to the fourth floor, where we always find parking, but there are a lot of people who drive in circles on the same floor and stalk people.

Jumping the battery took less time than doing the paperwork for the roadside assistance, but we were soon enough running again. Unlike the last time our battery died, there was no external reason for the battery to have died, and we can't remember when/if we ever got a new battery for this car, so we headed up the road to buy a new one. When we got there, we decided it was in everyone's best interest to eat first. So we loaded up the plastic trays with soy sauce and passed it around. Ms. P was doing her best to blow the top of her own head off, while I was impatient to get this battery thing taken care of.

Mind you, we hadn't turned the car off, because we figure we'd need yet another jump and I wasn't all that sanguine about getting a jump in the dark in a parking lot. So I ran in and bought the battery, finding out that if I had bought it during the day they would install it for free, but at night I was on my own. Does that logic seem backwards to anyone else? But, lo and behold, the tools I usually have in the wheel well were either missing or hiding from me in the sodium lights of the parking lot.

What to do, what to do. At home we have tools, but no light. R has light, but no tools. We call his boyfriend S, who has both light and shiny, shiny tools, and he lets us come over. Then, in every dyke-ly stereotype known to our culture, I replaced the battery in my work clothes while two gay men and my wife stood around and watched.

Oh, and then R accidentally tried to brain me by dropping a wrench so close to my head I felt my hair move.

It wasn't at all the evening I had planned. But we have a new battery, and I got to grunge up some of S's tools, and I escaped concussion. And there isn't anything wrong with that.

I Am Not A Good Patient

Yesterday I finally got really, completely fed up with the lawn and my own convalescence.

I needed to mow the lawn before my surgery, but it rained. Since my surgery, I've been unable to do it, and it has rained. Friday and Saturday, it rained.

I watched the dogs in the backyard, and some of the grass was taller than they were. I am not exaggerating.

So I finally broke down late yesterday afternoon and pulled the lawn mower out. I mowed everything outside the fence (the dog-tall grass still stands) and not only did it not hurt, it felt kind of good to get out and do something.

And best of all? I found the battery charger for the weed whacker, so I can do something else about that grass.

But don't tell my doctor.

Gala Return

The first week back at work culminated with our annual fundraising gala. (My timing, I tell you, it blows.) Instead of spending my week staring at the computer and trying to figure out how we're going to fund programs next fiscal year (i.e., reading blogs), I drove around town picking up things my colleagues had ordered for the big event: 20-foot-long banners of sponsor names; enough foam core posters to kill several forests; 15 clipboards; ribbon and wrapping paper and fishing line; engraved plaques bearing to-be-assembled scales of justice and an extra period I didn't mention to anyone lest they try to have something redone at the last minute or just give up and let their head explode.

This was all more complicated than I originally thought. It meant that I absolutely had to switch from Percoset to ibuprofen, because driving with the Percoset? Not recommended. This was fine from a pain-management standpoint, but I could have used a little of the drug-fog around my supervisor this week. It also meant that I had to negotiate Nearby State, which I try to avoid like the plague because of its rabid conservatism and active attempts to legislate relationships like mine out of existence. And dude, they get conservative bullshit AND the worst traffic I've seen in a while. Why do people live there again? And perhaps worst of all, I was driving in traffic in late-spring humidity. Our humidity is legendary, and while I actually like humidity (it's what my body defines as "normal" weather), it made being more active than I had in a week and a half kind of challenging.

Oh, and did I mention I couldn't really carry anything? My surgery instructions mentioned that I shouldn't lift anything heavy, but their definition of heavy is quite a bit lighter than mine. Most of the time this involved nothing more complicated than pushing shopping carts to the car even when the packages were small and moving things one at a time, but for one notable trip it involved me taking my supervisor's partner with me all over Nearby State, and I couldn't even complain because she lives there and likes it. (I like her anyway.) When I got back, having dropped her off at home, I had to get my colleagues to come outside and carry things in for me. My contributions = making more work for everyone else.

But none of this prepared me for late Thursday and Friday. The gala was scheduled to start at 5:30 Friday evening, in our newly renovated school building, and the conceit was that people would arrive, would get "class schedules," food, and alcohol, and visit different classrooms featuring different things about the school, complete with student presenters and innovative signage. The problem? Students were using those classrooms until noon. You know, because we're a school.

Our executive director, who often has ideas that work beautifully if only there's enough time, had decided each featured classroom should have a set of posters with pertinent information about the school and our programs hung from the ceiling in a seemingly-random, attractive, arrangement that was staggered not only in height from the floor but depth from the door. So I spent Thursday evening putting plastic edging along the top of 40 different posters mounted on foam core. I spent Friday morning tracking down the building manager to find out how high the ceilings were in different classrooms, because I knew they weren't all the same. Then I had to do math to figure out how long to cut the fishing line (=2(ceiling height - distance from the floor - height of the poster)+ 2(width of poster)+ 6" for the knot), cut the line, put the hangers on the plastic ridge, tie the line tight with my teeth, and paint the knots with clear nail polish. Then I had to untangle the fishing line when one of my colleagues inadvertently got it all snagged by carrying too many posters at once and refuse repeatedly to climb ladders to hang them from the ceiling.

Ms. P, in our annual labor-sharing agreement, showed up to help run registration, which involved turning away party crashers, trying to make the credit card machine not print in teeny-tiny print on top of itself,  dealing with the inevitable numbers of people who weren't on the list, and giving running updates of banquet numbers. After three hours of that, we proceeded to the banquet, where we ended up at a table with my favorite colleague and her husband, and the architect and two builders with their wives. The nearest wife was straight out of The Sopranos--overly large breasts, darkly outlined lips, big hair, and a partying attitude. She was fun to sit next to, even if I suspect we'd have nothing to talk about otherwise. Even though I'm there every day, hearing our ED and our board chair talk about the school and what we do made me tear up.

By the time we got out of there, it was 11pm and I was so exhausted I couldn't see straight. I know that on Monday there will be plenty of cleaning up and finishing of things, but I'm hoping that all of my colleagues have spent most of the weekend sleeping. And I'm hoping this week will be a little bit more staring at my computer and a little bit less driving around.

Working Girl

Going back to work yesterday was hard. Not only was it exhausting in my current condition, it's making me kind of depressed.

Even though last week was almost entirely recovery, it reminded me of the life I want to be living: working at home, investigating interesting things, and having the kind of fallow time that produces good things. And unfortunately, I don't get to have that life, not now. Maybe someday, and that will be wonderful, but I don't get to have it now. And I'm sad.

Grad School Shuffle

I finally got to talk to Grad School Friend last night. She and her husband were on the market together this year, which is a feat unto itself. The results, however, were pretty funny.

GSF's husband took a position in UniversityTown. It wasn't quite my position, but one close to the one I left. GSF took a position at a university in NearbyCity, a position which was recently vacated by another alum of our program.

Apparently academic jobs are like those old 9x9 puzzles, the ones missing one piece that allow you to shift the others around to try to put them in order. And I thought the military was a small world.

The Glass Castle

This is how memoir should be done.

In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls tells the story of her growing-up years, which were marked by both intense love and unbelieveable craziness. Her father taught them all about astronomy, geology, and history (among other subjects), but he also spun grand narratives about conspiracies and rarely held down jobs due to his drinking. Her mother was a committed artist who resisted the kind of domesticity children required of her. They both romanticized a rootless, carefree, unsentimental existence that meant they picked up and moved every time bills came due. Walls and her three siblings learned to weather empty refrigerators, the loss of pets, leaky and insecure housing, frequent moves, casual parental manipulation, and the odd instance of emotional or sexual attempted assault.

The strength of this memoir is its lack of sentimentality or sensationalism. Through her detailed but straightforward narrative, Wells demonstrates both how this existence was normal for the Wells children and how they struggled to escape it (all four eventually moved to New York in their mid to late teens). She doesn't serve it up for our laughter or even our outrage; even as she describes her own anger and pain, we can also see the strange beauty of her parents and their approaches to life. Her family, like all families, is complicated, and she shows us the facets of her family in a careful narrative that never once feels forced and never resorts to sweeping pronouncements.

I read memoir because I am attracted to the immense tapestry of human experience. The Glass Castle is a rich example of the kind of storytelling that adds to that tapestry.

Errands

R took me along with him this afternoon as he ran some errands. It's a beautiful day here--sunny, warm, and the trees are looking fully-leaved all of a sudden. It's inspiring me to do so many things: yard work, clean the house, do yoga, meditate. Of course, I can do few of those right now, but it's nice to feel inspired to do them nonetheless.

Even as I've been stir crazy and lonely and emotional and in pain, there's been something lovely about having long stretches of time at home alone. The silence and the expansiveness, not to mention the sleepy puppies snuggling me in the bed, have given my brain some space it desperately needed, some distance from the day to day making our lives go. From here I can imagine writing projects outside of work, can see ways back into the art and life I want to have. It's a nice reminder of how much I need the downtime, not because I spend all of that time doing projects, but because that downtimes makes possible the kind of imaginative compost that creates projects.

What I have to remember is that it isn't just downtime; it's time by myself. When we both spend so much time during the week at work, I crave spending time with Ms. P, whether or not we're doing anything in particular. But I need to be better about carving out time for myself because it makes other things so much more possible.

Richard Bach says there's no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands--we seek out problems because we need their gifts. While this can shade quickly into blaming the victim, I do appreciate the reminder to slow down and pay attention to what I can take away from my experiences, good and bad alike. And this is what I can take away from this surgery: time by myself, at home, is invaluable to the life I want to have.