pronoia

Decisions

I'm sitting in what is becoming my favorite indie coffee shop, waiting for my colleague to arrive. Months ago we were tasked to research some best practices for the school, and our collective inability to do any research in the environments of our offices led us to make a coffee-shop date: an entire day of hanging out and researching. And talking. I expect there will be lots of talking. Since I like her quite a lot, the promise of this day is all that has gotten me through this week.

This week was bad. Really bad. Crying at work kind of bad, which I hate doing and try to avoid because hello, it's kind of embarrassing. But cry at work I did, although it was reasonably discreet and not sobby, thanks to my own stubbornness. The short version is that we threw out a mailing my staff had spent two days doing, spent three days pulling off a 3,500-person mailing that no one else on staff could see (and thus I spent two hours on Tuesday standing by the printer and making small talk so no one would accidentally or otherwise look at the pages printing out), coordinated Mr. Burns' announcements individually and collectively, and otherwise made possible the transition plan that is happening.

Monday night I had it out with Mr. Burns. I hadn't planned on it, but one of my colleagues let him know I was heading quickly for the end of my rope, so he wanted to talk, and talk we did. I had nothing to lose, so I laid it on the line for him. I told him I was angry for the lack of planning, for the way that lack of planning affected me and my staff, for all of the time and energy we've wasted lately because he can't be bothered to show up to meetings he's agreed to. He says he hears that I'm frustrated, but the only thing he really wants to fix is my targets, which are easy and, although important, not exactly the point. It's our day to day experience I want to fix, the wasted time, the holding pattern we stay in for weeks until he gets off his ass to do what he needs to do to let us move forward, the almost finishing something and having to scrap it and redo it because he's thought of something different. And that's not going to happen. He's scattered by nature, but this transition has him even more scattered than ever before, and it's only going to get worse.

On Monday I was ready to leave, to send out applications and get the hell out of dodge. By Tuesday night, however, that plan was less exciting to me, not because I foresaw work getting any better but because of the other things in our life that will be put on hold. If I switch jobs, it'll be months before we can put in an application; if I switch jobs, I won't be eligible for FMLA for a year. And we're tired of waiting.

Despite some very good jobs having application deadlines of today, we decided not to decide in the middle of a week when we are exhausted, emotional, and otherwise overwrought. This decision has too many moving parts, too many consequences to just jump. So we're holding off until this weekend, until we can breathe a little bit, until we can spend significant amount of time together talking about it.

By now I feel kind of resigned. At the end of the day, I like my team, I like my colleagues (okay, most of them), and I think we can do some great work. I don't know if I can make it to the end of Mr. Burns' reign, but it might be the best for me and Ms. P in the big picture. Stupid grown-up life.

Sunday Night Blues

We've had a lovely, amazing holiday. Although I spent Wednesday running Max to and from the vet for a teeth cleaning, grocery shopping, getting to a chiropractor's appointment, picking up the CSA, and spending some time with R (a total of 75 miles of driving, we figured out), the rest of the holiday has been very relaxed. We spent Thursday hanging out with R and my sister, Friday talking madly about adoption, Saturday driving to the campsite to take our tent down, and Sunday going to Quaker meeting and hanging out with L&S. Bliss.

I've checked my work email repeatedly, and it became clear early in the holiday that I was being cut out of the process. They had heard my concerns, they had made their decisions, and I was now just around to carry out the logistical nightmares they've conceived. This is of course upsetting, but it also meant that I was more or less work-free this weekend, despite expectations.

Until this evening. I got the final letters to copyedit, which was the work of forty-five minutes, but I'm back into the emotional maelstrom of the process. My heart is racing, I can't get a good breath, and I do not, absolutely do not want to go to work tomorrow. I had thought I was feeling more centered about things, but it turns out I was just successfully not engaging them.

I have to think very seriously about what I want to do next. I cannot live in this state of stress for the next seven months.

Changing Tack. Maybe.

As I had predicted, my period started last weekend. It wasn't pretty; my periods have been getting worse--heavier and more painful. We had both exhausted ourselves on Saturday, so we crawled out of the house on Sunday only to pick the Thanksgiving turkey up at the farmer's market and get coffee and season 7 of Gilmore Girls, at which point we collapsed on the couch and did nothing other than watch the boob tube. Some days that's all you can do.

The worst of it is that this time, I just knew it had worked. For reasons I can't explain, I had a kind of quiet, centered, assurance that it was working out. It just ... was. And then I got nervous and then the spotting started and then everything went to shit. Everyone says when you get pregnant you just know, and for some people it's true. (My friend C once told me that she thought she'd gotten pregnant the night before and wouldn't you know it, she had.) But I suspect sometimes "just knowing" is something that happens best in retrospect when the betas have confirmed that something actually happened in there.

A friend of mine is single thirteen years after her long-term college relationship ended, mostly because she really and truly thought she'd grow old with him, and how can she trust her own judgment now? (Before you pity her too terribly, know she's also worked her way sexually and happily through half of New York.) I'm not to that point, but how can I trust myself and my body when I know things that aren't true? This is perhaps the hardest part of cycling--not the endless disappointment, but the endless proof that our bodies are not legible and that we cannot be trusted.

Since R leaves for Moscow tomorrow for a week, and the next cycle is likely to fall when we're in UniversityTown for Christmas, we're on a forced break. Although the very idea of a forced break was heartbreaking last Sunday when we were in the midst of my hormone storm, right now it's also a relief. For just a little while, I don't have to pay attention to every twinge and movement and change which, given the extent to which my body is riddled with twinges and pains and odd things, is helpful to my ability to be and stay centered. For a little while, we aren't on the emotional rollercoaster of two-week increments.

And from the relative quiet of this space, we're considering adoption.

This is partially because of our experience trying to conceive. We started trying over eighteen months ago. Sure, it's only been four months since we resolved my thyroid issues (which were bad enough to completely wipe out the possibility that I could conceive), but I know that resolving thyroid issues doesn't always (or even often) resolve the infertility that goes along with it. And I've got the endo on top of that. And the longer I go without treatment for the endo (however much I don't like that treatment), the worse my periods get and the worse I feel. There will come a point in the not-too-distant future when the experience of my periods will be too much for me.

But it is also because adoption is just seeming right for us. We started reading around our local non-profit, queer-friendly agency and talking about the things that brought up, and it's sounding better and better to us. For one thing, it would put us on equal biological footing. For another, we've got some specific skill-sets and perspectives around chosen families and difference that, we think, would make us good adoptive parents. When we first started thinking about becoming parents, we considered adoption, but we chose to try conception mostly for financial reasons. Those reasons, while still real, are different now in the post-debt economy of our lives.

We don't know yet if Ms. P's bipolar or her weight will take us right out the running. (I don't think our queerness will matter to this agency.) I suspect both may be handled with doctors' notes that testify to her general health and good management of what issues there are. Our investigations and our attempts will continue. What I don't want is to get to a point where we come to adoption only through despair. It may be the second thing we tried, but it is not second-best.

So right now we're excited in that cart-before-the-horse way we have. We've got a list of books to get, thanks to some queer adoptive parents in the blogosphere. We're going to an adoption expo next Saturday. Ms. P has requested some information. We've made no decisions, but adoption is feeling more and more inevitable, the way moving here was inevitable when I started sending out resumes. We'll see if it manifests as easily as our transition did.

The Many Things For Which I Am Thankful

• I have today off and don't have to go back to work until Monday. I have to check email and keep the disaster that is in full swing to manageable levels, but I don't have to go to work.
• My team at work is wonderful and amazing, as are my colleagues.
• My chiropractor continues to make me feel better. I'd be doing even better if I were able to stay away from the wheat and dairy as admonished, but I'm working on that one.
• We're having Thanksgiving with R and my sister. Sure, we'll cook a bunch of food, because that's what Thanksgiving is all about, but we're going to hang out with plates in the living room and watch movies.
• The weather here is beautiful--too warm for November, sure, but lovely for having several days off. Sunlight can only help me at this point.
• The house, while in need of some attention, is not terribly far from being reasonably clean and tidy.
• We have very few plans for the next five days, and nothing huge or terrible.
• My chosen family is one of the best parts of my life, even when one or more of us is struggling.
• We have the things we really need, and we're talking about how to get rid of the things we don't really need.
• The blogosphere full of interesting, witty, thoughtful people I'd probably never know otherwise.

May all of my American readers have a lovely Thanksgiving. May everyone else have a lovely Thursday.

Compartmentalization. Or Not.

Once upon a time, I had notebooks for everything. I had a morning pages notebook, a journal, a reading notebook, a spirituality notebook, a keep-in-the-purse-and-write-grocery-lists notebook. I'm sure there were others, but these were the ones I remember. Inevitably, I'd stop using one for some reason, but I couldn't then use it for something else, because it already had a purpose. I therefore carried bags full of notebooks around and had piles of half-used tablets lying around.

I will understand if you call me anal.

Lately this tendency has just ... disappeared. I've got one notebook--a moleskine--that fits in my purse and which I carry everywhere. I write workshop notes, journal entries, booklists, doodles, whatever comes to mind. Sometimes I think I ought to have different notebooks, but for some reason I can't be bothered. I will of course need to stockpile moleskines, because I'm going to go through them awfully quickly, but there's a lot worse in life than a nice stockpile of pretty notebooks.

Part of me is horrified by this development. It's like dogs! and cats! living together! Oh, right.

But part of me is just ... interested. It's indicative of a larger truth, this evolution of my notebook habits. Did you ever watch My So-Called Life? In it there's a scene in which Angela's crush--Jordan Catalano--and her erstwhile friend/nemesis--Brian Krakow--start working together as tutor/tutee, and she's kind of horrified. (Or was it her old friend Sharon meeting her new friend RayAnn? I can't remember.) Different parts of her world are colliding and, worse, happening without her, and it's emotional chaos.

I so understood that scene. I can be the queen of compartmentalization. I have historically not liked it very much when my friends and my family met. It confuses me when friends from different corners of my life get together. I like my work people over here and my everyday people over here. My spiritual friends, and my stupid-movie friends. My high-school friends, and my grad-school friends. A place for everyone and everyone in their place.

Our wedding was very stressful for me, as you might imagine. But that was also the point, I think, when things began to break down. All of our friends and family inhabited the same space and, most difficult for me, all saw the real me, because if the real me wasn't going to show up to the wedding there wasn't much point. Chaos did not ensue, although I was still uncomfortable.

Living here in Big City has meant that my worlds have necessarily cross-pollinated. My sister lives across town and comes to our parties. Our spiritual friends have also become our parent-friends and our hang-out-and-talk-to-the-dogs friends. R has been taking board minutes at my workplace. I still do my best to keep my parents at arm's length, but in fewer and fewer cases do I get to keep my neat boxes.

Some of this is living with Ms. P. That woman has no compartments to speak of and shares freely. It's forced me to come face-to-face with my own habits of sharing only part of myself with any given person, sometimes because she's been freer with personal information than I'm really comfortable with. We've negotiated some reasonable guidelines--the friend of hers she set me up with who then broke my heart into a billion pieces does not get personal information about my life, for instance--but I've had to get more comfortable with better integration.

And better integration is a good thing. Internally, externally, it's a lot less work (once you do the hard work of integrating in the first place) since you don't have to create artificial separations between people and things. What else will I be able to do since I'm not wasting time and energy on such things? The mind boggles.

I know I'm not fully integrated, and I know it will take a huge amount of work on my part, but I also know I'm on my way. My notebooks say so.

Either Way, I'm Bitchy

Right now I'm either extremely PMSy or pregnantly hormonal, although this morning's spotting is leading me to believe it's the former, no matter how weird my boobs have been feeling.

Not only that, I'm going to spend the whole day folding letters and stuffing envelopes, which always makes my day better. </sarcasm>

It's a good thing I love my colleagues, but Mr. Burns better not pull anything stupid today, I'll tell you what. I'm not so attached to my job right now that my filter is in full gear.

The True Measure of a Day....

...is how many fingernails I lose because of it. Yesterday: 6. So much for serenity.

Mr. Burns is leaving at the end of the school year, and the Board just--after about a year of discussion--just approved and are implementing a search to replace him. This has put an extraordinary burden on me and my team, since we now have to coordinate communicating this transition to all our stakeholders while also doing all of our usual fundraising, which at this time of year includes sending an annual appeal to nearly everyone in our database.

Oh, and the database is down. Has been for two days. We haven't yet gotten a call back from tech support, and Ms. P's work's version went down as well. This does not bode well.

This bodes, in fact, for my spending the weekend at the office cozying up to large piles of paper. Assuming, of course, that the database comes back up anytime soon.

I'm a little stressed.

Report on the Grand High Magickal Conference

Ms. P and I returned on Sunday evening, then spent Monday having all of the appointments we don't normally get to have because of that working 9-5 thing (dogs to the vet in the am, cats to the vet in the pm, appointment for vitals for life insurance, chiropractor), and then yesterday was just an intense, flat-out day at work. I didn't really even stop to breathe until it was over. But more on that anon.

Despite my skepticism, the conference was great. Not all of it, of course: there's an amazing amount of starfuckery at things like this, one plenary session was nothing short of abysmal, there's a large number of crazy people around pagan events, and the ritual was not my deal. But the workshops I went to were transformative, we got to spend time with some friends, and we did a good job taking care of ourselves and lounging around a really awesome, comfy hotel room. Vacation indeed.

Brief thoughts, in no particular order:

• I appreciate a focus on movement as a method of doing or supporting inner work. Several of the workshops I went to used music and/or dance and movement as methods of aligning oneself with the divine, integrating one's disparate parts, and focusing on a particular working. I can be so head-oriented that I can't get out of my logical brain without the help of physical movement.
• The focus on physicality and the divinity of our physical selves right alongside our spiritual selves was really welcome. Sometimes the tenet that we are all of us divine in all of our parts--including our physical parts--can be expressed only in sexuality and not in loving our imperfectly perfect bodies just as they are in all of the things they can and cannot do.
• Tribal dancers who improvise synchronized dance-prayers to the divine? Yum! And oh, Goddess, I'd love to do that!
• It's really, really fun to share a teacher-crush with your partner.
• I don't appreciate being someone's ritual battery. I mean really. If you want me to contribute my energy to a ritual working, please involve me somehow. Don't stand me in a hotel ballroom for an hour and a half with minimal decoration to distract me from the fact that it is a hotel ballroom and then basically do nothing else with me other than ask me to give you my energy. It makes me very grumpy.
• There's a fine line between connected to spirit and just plain plumb crazy. One presenter was over that line and I could not avoid her fast enough.
• King-sized beds are awesome.
• It is perhaps inadvisable to stay inside the hotel and get neither air nor sun for three straight days.
• Somehow we never made time to go to the pool. That kind of sucks.
• I LOVE qigong. Love it. Okay, so I only learned "Eight Pieces of Brocade," but I love it. And just doing that made my thighs a little sore. Shows you how much I need to do more of it!
• I will never be an alchemist.
• My longing for a teacher can be really acute, and the repeated disappointments I get in that department are disheartening. Still, I continue my personal practice and sooner or later the teacher will appear.
• A dog accidentally trapped in the ritual room will respond by making a cat door. If the dogsitter had not returned when she did, I'm sure Gracie would have made a doggie door. [pictures to come!]
• Friends who know when to call (and when not to) and tell you that the dog has freaked out in your ritual room and made a hole in the door: priceless.

November Notes

• I intended to do NaBloPoMo, but without actually, you know, committing to it. And then our internet was down for four days. Of COURSE that was a sign!
• The swim team has swum, so we're officially in the tww. Again.
• The collective psycho-emotive flu has yet to recede, although we're each showing signs of imminent improvement. Or we were until Ms. P added a cold to the mix.
• Work is getting ... interesting. More on that anon.
• Apparently, turning the heat on means Max isn't insisting on being under the covers every single night and doesn't then knead us with his beclawed back paws in paroxysms of joy. I think we learn this lesson every year.
• Ms. P and I are going to a grand high magickal conference beginning on Thursday. I'm a little suspicious of how grand or high it can be when the whole thing is held in a hotel, but we'll see. If nothing else, I'm going to spend three-plus days lounging around and doing mostly what I damn well please.
• I'm longing for narratives of spiritual exploration, spiritual journeys, spiritual struggles. Of any faith, really, but they must be somewhat self-aware and a sense of humor helps. Got any recommendations?

Fall Milestone

We are at T minus one hour until the school dance, whereby a lovely DJ sets up shop under my feet to make a bunch of teenagers jump around in the dark for two hours. I loved the school dance in my youth, but alas, not so much these days. I can't handle the noise. Am I middle-aged or what?

We're all of us in a funk--me, Ms. P, R, L&S, J. I can't speak for N or K, but it's not so pretty around here these days. Thank goodness it's not been cloudy; that would have been a recipe for some serious disaster.

As it is we're trying to husband energy and keep each others' spirits up as much as possible. Ms. P and R and I did tarot on Wednesday for Samhain. He's keeping up with the world of online dating sites and going to yoga, Ms. P is trying to actually have down time (instead of being as extroverted as she usually is), and I'm trying not to listen to sad songs. It's too bad Ben Harper moved into my head four days ago and won't be kicked out, despite me singing Beth Nielsen Chapman's "Happy Girl" repeatedly.

Hitting that period when I arrive at and leave work in the dark is just depressing, even though I have a window and get direct sunlight for a short period every day.

So, favorite non-chemical remedies for the blues? We could all use some thinking outside the box.