pronoia

New Start

My mother would not recognize my pantry.

We joke that my mother didn't cook so much as heat. There were a limited number of things she actually cooked, but my mother is of the era that believed in convenience food. Military culture didn't do us any favors, either; military family food tends to a weird combination of ethnic food and the seriously weird. In any given potluck you were likely to see green bean casserole, lumpia, and some dessert featuring red jello, cool whip, and pretzels. My mother's pantry, as a consequence, tends towards cardboard boxes leavened with a few paper packets and some cans of tuna.

We were already far away from that model, what with my MIL's affinity for actual cooking and our sense that food should involve, you know, food. But since my chiropractor told me that I need to be off dairy, wheat, oats, and rye, we've crossed over into foods my mother would never know what to do with.

Tapioca flour. Rice flour. Xanthum Gum. Add these to the bounty of the CSA (celeriac?) and it's a whole new world.

It hasn't been a smooth transition, of course. The staff retreat featured a lunch consisting entirely of sandwiches (all with cheese) and cookies. Oh, and there was macaroni salad. So I said to hell with it and ate it all, because I am not yet at a point where I can bring my own food to such things and feel okay. I regretted it (among so many things that day), but the damage was done.

Ms. P was amazing and spent most of yesterday cooking things to have for lunch (and some dinners) all this week so that I don't walk down the street to the fish fry or, worse, eat rice krispie bars and m&ms for lunch, which I've totally done. The difficult part is still finding breakfast foods and snack foods and making sure I have enough to eat, because veggies and protein, while tasty, do not last so long in my tummy.

(By the way--did you know that raw almonds taste exactly like almond extract smells? I'd only ever had roasted almonds before, and they don't taste like that. I thought almonds were like grapes or strawberries--things for which the "flavor" doesn't really match the reality. Now I know to stay away from raw almonds.)

The BFF is on very, very, very restricted diet, so I knew intellectually that it would be hard. I wasn't prepared for how viscerally hard it is. It's hard to be the "fussy" customer at restaurants who needs things just so. It's hard to consider bringing one's own food when the provided food can't be made to work. It's hard to think about holidays and visiting people and having to either screw up people's holiday traditions or eat something sad and pathetic by myself. It's hard to plan ahead and make snacks available when I've never been much of a snacker. It's hard to give up the ice cream and cookies I love for substitutes that aren't as good. It's hard to rethink the menu so I don't have to rely on substitutes that never live up to the originals. It's hard to go to restaurants and have my choices limited to a handful of things that have neither dairy or wheat. It's hard not to go to restaurants when that's our fallback when we're exhausted or stressed or depressed.

It's hard to be the one who doesn't fit. Again.

I do think it will make me feel better, and I'm hoping it helps me get knocked up. It's likely to be worth it. But the trenches, oh, the trenches are not a very nice place to be.

Anyone got a good gluten-free chocolate-chip cookie recipe? I could really use one right now.

Because You Couldn't Stand Not Knowing

Unbeknownst to me, this work retreat was the locus of a philosophical showdown between Mr. Burns and Dean II, a woman whose only work, it seems to me, is planning happy hours and other feel-good events for the faculty (but not the staff, natch). At our biweekly meeting last Monday we reviewed the agenda, of which fully 1/2 was various forms of "team-building" and "sharing." Mr. Burns, who has never been a fan of such things, suggested she keep open the game-day option of making changes if, he posited, people were excited about working collectively on school goals.

She kept open the option of game-day changes, it it true, but instead of cutting the scavenger hunt, she cut 75% of the work we were planning to do. Eight hours of togetherness, and one hour of productive work. It's no wonder that we've got both a crisis of morale and a lack of actual plans for addressing problems.

Yes, the scavenger hunt went on as planned, despite the fact that it was raining. Reader, I ran, for godssakes, in inappropriate footwear, and my only consolation is that my team won all of the challenges. For this I am the proud recipient of one $15 i-tunes gift card, a t-shirt, and a lunch of my team's choice. Definitely not worth it.

The capper of the day was watching some (very small) subsection of my colleagues be homophobic in a sophomoric attempt at bonding. So now I get to address that with upper management on Monday, because I'll be damned if I'm going to ignore such behavior from people who are ministering to teenagers. Fuck that noise.

I put up a good front and played along (to most people anyway), but it took all the energy I had. I think I would have rather been in the office, heretical as that thought is. Good thing my day today involves washing the dishes, watching Joss Wheadon's commentary on the Buffy musical episode, and researching environmentalism for my fact-checking gig.

Pollyanna Scrooge

Back at work, although Ms. P went home today feeling terrible. Me, I'm just digging out from the stack of work that piled up while I was gone, even though I was on email yesterday and working from home as best I could.

This is a weird, weird week. Monday I felt like crap. Tuesday I was out for the count. Yesterday I worked from home. Today I've been around and somewhat productive. And tomorrow, tomorrow is our annual work retreat.

I hate work retreats.

I hate bringing an "artifact" that demonstrates my connection to the organization. (I don't supposed my paystub would go over very well, would it?) I hate sharing. I hate scavenger hunts. I hate team-building. I hate feeling forced to go to happy hour after being up close and personal with my colleagues for eight solid hours. I hate trying to negotiate food when I can't leave and everyone else is happily eating delivered sandwiches and I'm supposed to be avoiding wheat and dairy. (Ignore, for the moment, the half a pizza I ate yesterday--I'm committing again, dammit!) I hate spending endless hours in team meetings on various subjects. I hate reminding people what it is I do again. I hate that I'm supposed to be all responsible and a model because I'm in management. I hate that I can't just loaf in the back and be a troublemaker, not that I have ever actually been a troublemaker as much as "shy." I hate trying to find parking downtown at the site that is "near" the train but not sufficiently near to make walking a reasonable endeavor in the rain. I hate not being able to check my email or spend an hour vegging out with blogs.

I figure the only redeeming feature of my workday tomorrow is that I can wear jeans.

I like my colleagues well enough, but there aren't many of them I want to spend eight straight hours with. And the ones I do want to spend that kind of time with? I already do.

On some subjects I'm definitely a Pollyanna, but on some subjects, I can't help but be Scrooge.

Perfect Storm

When you have chronic illnesses, there's a kind of calculus that comes into play whenever you feel less than your best, whatever that is. How much have I been "sick" lately? Will taking a day off make a difference? Am I likely to be "sick" again, only worse, anytime soon? What's on the schedule today and what will the consequences be if I miss any of it? Have I pushed myself too much? Is this the day I need to push myself a little bit more?

Sometimes, inevitably, I choose wrong.

Yesterday I woke up feeling pretty awful. Gastrointestinal distress, achy, exhausted. I had taken the first dose of a two-week system cleanse the previous night, so I was prepared for my system to, ahem, cleanse itself, and I figured I would feel better as the day went on. As they day went on, however, I only felt worse. The achiness went from vague to located in a broad swath from the tip of my spine to the bottom of my shoulder blades, with a special point on my right hip. I called the BFF, guru of all alternative treatments, to ask if the treatment could make me feel this bad. She figured that, with the not-so-distant radiation treatment I endured, it sure could. But I had a leadership team meeting in the late afternoon and a chiropractic appointment in the early evening, so it was best to push on through, even though pushing on through had more to do with reading blogs and keeping myself upright than doing any actual work.

Of course, during the day I not only got email from my friend who gave birth last week but found out my colleague's wife is pregnant and they're! so! excited! Meanwhile, I was on day five of a kind of spotting unusual for my cycle.

Detox effects? Early signs of pregnancy? or door number 3?

After the chiropractor did some adjustments he said to me, "oh honey, that's not the detox, you have the flu!" Great. Apparently spending all day telling people it felt like when I'd had the flu didn't make me think that maybe, I had the flu. I'm blaming the foggy head.

I took a very, very hot epsom salts bath last night and slept like the dead, and this morning I felt moderately better. Still exhausted and yucky, but not achy. BFN this morning when I peed on a stick, but better.

I stayed home anyway. I probably could have managed it, but at this point I need the mental health day as much as the physical health day. I'm mostly crocheting and watching Buffy, and I'm going to head upstairs again in a minute for another detox bath, since my lower back is considering getting twingy again.

I have to say, I'm loving the chiropractor and the effects he's having on my body, but I'll be happy when everything settles back into the new normal and I can tell when I'm sick, detoxing, or just having an achy day.

Busy Bee

Of course, I'm too busy these days to wallow for too long, and that's probably a good thing. I've picked up a freelance fact-checking job for a cable channel (thanks to the divine R!), and I'm up to my eyebrows researching environmental factoids. Did you know the average American throws out 512 lbs of packaging every year? Every one of us, every year. Gah.

I thought about not taking the gig, since it would be working on ten scripts with a short turn-around in addition to my regular job. It's not fantabulous money (although it doesn't suck), but it's the kind of thing that could lead to more work, and in any case, I was whining to the universe just the other day about wanting this other, freelancing, life. So I stepped up because I needed to show the universe I was serious.

And the universe is showing me in return. Weeks ago now I had emailed a friend of mine who works at a university press about freelance copyediting. We exchanged emails, he pointed me to a colleague (to whom he'd put in good word for me) and then ... nothing. And wouldn't you know it, less than 24 hours after I take the gig, I get an email with copyediting tests attached. It's not a slam-dunk, but it's another step in the right direction.

Ms. P asked the other day, "are we adequately tying our camel?" We may not have been then, but we are getting better at knots and in the meantime we continue to pray. And as a church display I once saw reminds us, "Delay is not denial. Pray on."

Good advice for nearly all subjects these days, I think.

Clearing the Decks

Remember how, when we started trying to get knocked up, four couple-friends of ours were doing the same? The last of them has now given birth, to a beautiful little boy. (Weirdly, they've all been boys.) The oldest of these kids is seven months; the youngest is not quite 48 hours. And here we still sit, deep in the two week wait. Again.

Yesterday, when I first heard about the birth, I felt relief. Finally, they could all be done and out of our way! It was like they were a roadblock and once they were finished, entirely finished, it was our turn.

Today, I'm just sad. Oh, I'm happy for them, which should go without saying by now. They're wonderful people and they'll be truly amazing parents. But I'm sad, desperately sad, for us.

I don't know what to do with this sad. Part of what's so hard about this is that it doesn't change. Time isn't making this hurt better. Time is only making it deeper. A friend of ours once said that no one would remember the hurt once everyone had their babies, but I don't know if it's true. From all of my reading around the blogosphere, it seems that for some people who do eventually become parents the hurt does go away. But for some people it's something that colors their approach to the world forever after, not necessarily as hurt, but as a deepening of their awareness of loss and control and the lack thereof. I don't know which one I'll be, if I'm even lucky enough to get that far. I suspect the latter.

By now it just seems boring to mention it again. La di dah, another birth, another shitty day. But even when no one is giving birth, it's right here, pressed up against my ribcage. Most of the time it's less acute. Most of the time I can carry it lightly, hold our tries lightly despite my body trying to fake me out every single time. Most of the time I can hang out with the babies and their parents, give raspberries and kisses and funny faces without even so much as a pang out of place. Most of the time, having our friends call because they need reassurance about their parenting, about their choices, about the hard times they have, is kind of sweet, if bewildering. But it's here. It's always here.

With most of our friends we gloss over the times when it's hard. They don't need to hear how their luck has pained us. They know, but we don't need to elaborate. It's not their fault, and they can't do anything about it anyway.

It's hard to have hope. It seems worse than ridiculous--it seems phantasmatic. I can pee on a stick now and, when it firmly shows me one line, throw it away and keep folding laundry without so much as a backward glance or catch in my throat. I think sometimes that if we ever do get a positive pee stick, we won't even believe it.

Softening

It has not been a good morning. The cat kept waking us up, so when the alarm finally went off, neither of us could pull together the motive power to force ourselves and the other one out of bed, so we didn't have our routine. Phoebe ate my lunch, the much-looked-forward-to leftovers of fajita salad from last night's dinner, which was inadvertently left out when I had to clean up Grace's sickness. The kitchen is a mess, which meant breakfast was an apple with peanut butter. Ms. P is depressed. My morning phone call with BFF got interrupted because one of the physical plant guys was installing blinds on my office door so my colleague could, if necessary, use my office to pump.

Given that work is not exactly feeding me anyway, I decided to say screw it. If I do nothing at all today but research chakras; research the geography, geology, and history of this small plot of land; and write to my friends, so be it. It's still a day worth having.

So I cleaned out my inbox, writing back to all the people I owed emails, complaining a little bit about my health, planning a trip to Biggest City to see a friend, and ruthlessly focusing on me and mine. I started researching chakras. And wouldn't you know it, somewhere in there I got motivated.

It's not going to be a particularly energetic day. I plan to work on our organization's style manual, compile a few documents from emailed requests from earlier in the month, and keep on top of email. That's all. And in between, I'm still going to research chakras and this area, still going to email. But the very act of giving myself permission to do what I needed to do, instead of resisting it, allowed me to move through it to a space of both acceptance and productivity. This is me, today--slow, kind of achy, a little grumpy. Here is what I can give. And so I do.

Step Two

On Friday Ms. P and I took the afternoon off to spend 2.5 hours talking with our financial advisors. They had taken all of the information we gave them at the first meeting and analyzed it, providing us with a very long document full of detailed information and recommendations for what to do next.

Since I went in with a massive headache that lots of water, caffeine, and ibuprofen had failed to touch (chiropractic rebound, I think), I wasn't optimistic. Ten minutes there, however, and my headache had melted away. I was absolutely fascinated, as fascinated as I was when I read the personal finance books.

It didn't hurt that she told us we were in better shape than she expected we would be. It didn't hurt that our net worth was positive, although it was only three digits. It didn't hurt that we got called frugal except for the eating out, or that we have enough left over at the end of every month to do some serious savings, especially if we curb the eating out, which my new dietary restrictions will demand. It certainly didn't hurt that we will be able to save enough that we'll be close to "on track" for our age, whatever that really means.

Of course, it was still scary. We applied for life insurance, which was dicey at best, what with Ms. P's weight and bipolar and my endless autoimmune disorders. We'll see what kind of response we get and go from there. Life insurance sounds so ... adult. It's weird. (And let me say again, questions that go "Are you pregnant? Yes or no." are kind of difficult when you're doing two-week waits all over the place. Um, maybe? Probably not yet but ask me in a week or so? Whoever said you can't be a little pregnant never actually looked at the biology of the whole thing.)

So we're still plugging away. We have a few more plans than we had this time last week, mostly involving opening and maxing out Roth IRAs for the both of us. I've set up the automatic transfer that will help us save without thinking about it. We're a bit behind in logging our receipts and tracking everything in Quicken, but I can probably get us back on track in an evening sometime this week.

What is hard for me about this whole process is the feeling that being responsible, which is what we're doing, automatically precludes me trying to work from home anytime soon. Losing my salary would be a big blow to our plans and our process, so I know it's important to stick this out as much as possible. But at what point does my sanity and my experienced life outweigh "being responsible"? At what point is right now more important than retirement? I don't know the answers. I just know that I'm torn between making our financial house neat and tidy and finding a way of making a living that is more than daily boredom and disaffection. And don't think I'm not worried I'm supposed to be in finance somehow. Wouldn't my family just love that.

Better

I've been sick for a really long time. I almost don't realize this because being sick--in one way or another--has been so constant for so long that it's really my baseline now instead of something notable. Lately, it's only when my illnesses spike somehow--my headaches get more frequent, my abdomen aches all the time instead of only sometimes, my shooting pains come daily instead of weekly, I feel like I'll fall over when I get to the top of a flight of stairs, my sinuses never really drain, I spend all my time keeping track of the closest bathroom--that I feel sick. The rest of it, well, the rest of it is just me.

But after yesterday's chiropractic appointment, I started to remember what it might feel like to feel actually well. Despite the fact that we spent all day running around, when I got home I was centered, calm, focused, and clear-headed. Despite having eaten horribly yesterday (because I know this guy is going to restrict my diet, and I'm cheating in the meantime), I woke up able to run some laundry, journal, meditate, eat breakfast, and iron.

Living with chronic illnesses is such a strange balance. I have to be constantly on top of things, constantly on watch, and yet I can't get too vigilant, too controlling, because so much is out of my control. In the end, this is my life, not just an interlude until things get better, so I'm often more lenient with my diet, for example, than I might be if it were a treatment rather than forever.

So having, once again, some hope that this will get better, that with a few co-pays and drives across the city I can feel some energy and some alignment and some freedom of movement, well, that's almost hard to imagine. I don't exactly know what to do with it. I'm not looking straight at it right now, lest it turn into something much cheaper and sadder than I'm imagining it to be.

Who knew root chakra work would be so productive?

Trees, Raise Your Drooping Eyebrows

When we got up this morning at 5:15, we noticed an electric company truck sitting in the road. Since we had a fierce but brief thunderstorm last night, we figured it was related. It wasn't until about a half-hour later, when the dogs barked at the neighbor standing on the sidewalk, that we realized that our old, dead tree, the one I'd been trying to get a line clearance on since June so we could cut it down, had come down of its own accord.

The good news is that it didn't take out any fences, cars, houses, people, or animals. The bad news was that it had taken down two power poles. The entire block was dark except for us, since we actually connect to a different line. Not only that, since it came down just where our road dead-ends into a main thoroughfare at an acute angle, both our road and the main road were closed while they did cleanup. May I never again watch both a city bus and a full-sized moving van back up a significant distance.

We figured we needed to be around to deal with getting rid of the tree, so we called off from work. Of course, the electric company employees then told us that no, the city should remove the tree. And then they cut our power so they could replace the poles. So we ran errands instead.

Large chunks of the tree are still there, piled in our yard. I'll call our tree guy first thing tomorrow to get him to both take the chunks out and cut back the mulberry we talked about last time.

I'm doing chakra work as a spiritual discipline. I had read that working on the root chakra often means that your everyday life goes to hell in a handbasket. I didn't expect that meant that my tree would come unrooted on day two of said spiritual work. As the BFF says, we rarely get the subtle signs, she and I.