More Reviews of Movies Everyone Except Me Has Seen

Much as I enjoy watching the occasional flick, I clearly do not watch enough of them to Really Truly justify my Netflix subscription. However, I am going to keep it (and occasionally get offers for friends, if any of you ever want to join), and continue to watch things that I have heretofore missed, not least because I haven't been inside an actual movie theater in, oh, at least three years? So Netflix is the only way I'm going to see most things, unless something happens to come on while (a) I'm at Friend's and (b) we're not watching hockey or racing. (Good luck with that, may I add, though hockey season is winding down.)

Anyway, last night I watched "Bad Santa," and I give it 4.5 stars. For one thing, it is insanely, marvelously profane--so, really, it's more like 4.5 fucking stars, goddamnit.* The thing is, it takes several cliches--the reprobate who is reformed by the love of a good woman; the reprobate who is reformed by the love of a kid; the wacky sidekick; the kid who learns how not to be bullied; the dysfunctional family (and that one gets a workout in several dimensions)--and twists each one of them just enough so that I didn't feel like I was being battered by them. (For example, the "good woman" is clearly a little wacko herself, though she's not a particularly well-developed character, all in all, which is par for the course in movies.) I also really liked the heart of the movie. BillyBob starts off by telling us what an asshole his dad was, but not because he wants any sympathy at all for that. Nevertheless, that information is absolutely crucial to everything else in the movie, pretty much, which doesn't become apparent until much later. For me, the payoff of the whole thing was when he told the kid, "Hey, don't ever talk about yourself like that," when the kid is berating himself and rather unemotionally calling himself the names the neighborhood kids call him. That line only works because of the rest of the movie. So, if you haven't seen it, go fucking rent it somewhere, goddamnit.

kStyle basically gave me two or three posts worth of material in her comment below, but the one that's been rattling around in my brain is the Joyless Yogis (which is a perfect name, btw). Or yoginis, in most cases, but that may be because more women practice yoga, not because women are "naturally" more ascetic. They seem to be looking for a prescription--they've rejected the mainstream religions, but they still want to be told what to do, in part because they do not fundamentally trust themselves to develop a discipline that works for them. Seriously, people; do you need to be told to alter an asana if it's painful? Not difficult-painful, but painful-painful. Yes, no matter what you do, bad shit is going to happen; it's unavoidable. Practicing yoga (or meditation, or any other discipline) isn't going to change that.

A couple of months ago, my yoga teacher told us a personal story (she has to share sort of circumspectly, because, in addition to being a yoga teacher, she's a columnist for the local big newspaper--remember the "wear sunscreen" column that everyone attributed to Kurt Vonnegut but he didn't write? she wrote that). Her frail, 80-something mother had a medical emergency, and, as my teacher was at the hospital with her mother, she realized that it was for times like that that one practiced yoga. That is, the yoga did not change anything about the situation, except--and it's a big except--the tools my teacher had on hand to deal with it.** And that, I think, it what comes with the practice--not happiness, per se, but a set of tools that enable one to center oneself, to breathe--to be able, when everything is in chaos, to figure out the next thing to do.

On the other hand--and this actually speaks to the movie again--I'm extraordinarily lucky in terms of my family. Yes, my mother is a tool of the patriarchy, in the sense that she has tried--for nearly half a century, now--to get me to be More Ladylike, and our disagreements have been heated on more than one occasion, and not just about that. Of course, part of the reason she has failed so miserably with the Make Narya Ladylike Project is that my father emphasized that I am fine--and loved--exactly the way I am, and even my mother loves me uncompromisingly, despite her endless efforts to Improve me. I think my father is actually the better feminist in multiple ways, as well. I understood my parents' love for me in an even deeper way when my sister died--and I realized that the love my mother had for my sister was the same as the love she has for me, even though my sister was, not closer to my mother's heart so much as wrapped around it in a different way, and in a way that was easier or more comfortable for my mother.

I'm babbling here, but what I'm trying to say, I think, is that the yogic disciplines come more easily to me, and I feel like joy is easier for me, because of the love and support I got from my parents (and grandparents and aunts and uncles). I didn't have to fend off abuse--verbal or physical--and I had my parents' examples in front of me. The older I get, the more I realize just how rare that is. At the same time, I was not exposed to a religion that told me I am inherently flawed or sinful, or a religion that privileged men--both of which affect the Joyless Yoginis, I think. I did learn how to incorporate the golden rule into my daily life--the times I have felt worst about my own actions is when I have done something that caused harm--and I learned how to deal with the inevitable mistakes. I did not learn, for example, that I would be loved IFFI I was perfect.

The Joyless Yoginis don't trust themselves, on some fundamental level, and they're looking for some other structure, or person, or being, to tell them they're doing the right thing. Some are probably hoping that if they do the right things, then they'll be happy, while I don't see the same causal connection there. I do want to do the right things, and I know that I am happier when I am able to do the right things, but mostly I'm happy for no very good reason at all, because, why not?

Actually, to riff on something that Ann and kstyle have been discussing on their respective blogs, part of the reason the magazine/catalogues they're discussing are so annoying to me is the nearly explicit connection those publications make between material things and happiness. (Yes, I recognize, as best I can, that I am speaking from the privileged position of someone who knows where the next meal--and the next bunch of meals, and shelter, and so on--are coming from, i.e., I already have more material comforts than many people.) Those Lifestyle Rags have an almost weirdly Calvinist ethos--beautiful material stuff is presented as proof that one has acted properly (when, given the wealth necessary and the capitalist culture in which we live, the reverse is more likely to be true, IMHO). If one does not have such beautiful material stuff in one's life, then it is proof that one is not worthy of such beauty. Which, of course, is a vital belief to sustain capitalism, but we know how I feel about that.

Okay, I've gone on for too long, and have successfully avoided doing any editing this morning. I did clean my apartment last night, however, so it is no longer a mess godawful pit. If cleanliness is next to godliness, well, I'm a little closer to the divine, but if neatness counts as well, I'm screwed. (My mother and I had a funny conversation about that this morning, which I'll recount some other time.) I must get ready to go to a yoga class and then head to Friend's house; we're going to go see the Indy cars again tomorrow.
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*IRL, I tend to curse like a longshoreperson--I've tried to modulate somewhat, at least in my current office environment, and even with some success, but, in general, I've had several jobs (the bakery and the substance abuse organization, for two) where the people around me cursed rather freely, so my tendencies have been encouraged rather than stifled, for the most part. It is not a trait of which I am particularly proud--my father regards cursing as a lazy way of getting one's point across, and I see his point--but I don't lose much (read: any) sleep over it, either.

**I used to try to help Chuck understand that he could not change his ex-wife's behavior, he could only change his own reaction to it. While he has yet to fully incorporate it into his dealings with her, he does understand that.

Cobra; Downward-Facing Dog; Go Fast; Turn Left

That was my weekend, along with editing, lounging, and eating the first of the wild turkey. Indy was fun, and I was amused to think that, in the large crowd sitting in the stands, milling about the infield, and so on, I likely was one of the very few who had spent the previous day at a yoga workshop. The workshop was good, too; I would enjoy working with him again, I think, though I'm less inclined to hang out in Montana with him for a week, given that the cost of that enterprise would be somewhere around $3k, I'm guessing, which is a tad more than I want to spend.

It's not that I heard anything particularly new or exciting, mind you, which is one of the puzzles I face when I attend these workshops (or similar gatherings). One woman in particular was asking questions: the more she meditates, she said, the less attached to/interested in material things she becomes, and yet she has kids and so on, and they require a certain amount of attachment/involvement. (I'm sure I'm not representing her words quite accurately, but I think I'm getting the gist of it.) She's conflicted by that--it sounds as though she would like to (or thinks she would like to?) renounce material things completely and just go meditate or something, but she doesn't want to abandon her kids. And so on. Erich suggested she think of all other people, including her kids, as particular instances of infinity/the divine, the implication (I think) being that disengaging from them became less required, if you will.

What was radiating from her, however, was what felt like a fear of joy, a desire for enlightenment and peace, and a fear that she was doing things the Wrong Way such that joy wasn't possible, or that she'd have the wrong kind of joy, or something. I dunno; maybe I'm missing something. I've been pretty joyful lately (the past two days notwithstanding, but I'll get to that in a second), and some of it absolutely is circumstantial, i.e., I'm in a place that doesn't hurt quite so much in so many places. (Which actually is another reference to Erich's workshop: if you're getting into an asana and it hurts, MOVE in it so it doesn't hurt! Which, hello. Yes, there are principles of alignment and it is wise to learn them, but we don't all have the same body, so one must incorporate the movement, and the stillness, into one's own incarnation, if you will.)

But it does seem that many people are kind of afraid of joy? I don't know; I can't get a handle on it, exactly. I do understand the fear that happiness will somehow cause unhappiness.

One of the personality traits that I've realized that Friend and I share is that both of us can get completely overtaken by details and fussing and planning when we're getting ready to do something or go somewhere or make food or whatever. He does nearly all of the planning for our excursions (which apparently is exactly the opposite from his excursions with his last wife, who, I just found out, planned and executed everything such that he was basically just the muscle), but I am capable of planning things to the nth degree as well (just watch me organize a dinner party, or a wedding, or a picnic). What we share, though, is that once the thing has started? We just relax and enjoy. I have found that not everyone can do that--some people cannot plan to save their souls, and others cannot relax and enjoy any damned thing. I've always enjoyed the combination in myself, and it's particularly nice to be around someone else who operates the same way.

Meanwhile, work has been a pain the past couple of days. I was supposed to go to the state capital yesterday and today for a workshop thingy, but my boss decided yesterday--about 4 hours before my train would have left the station--that I couldn't go, because this other thing had to be submitted Right Now, plus That Thing, Too, and Also Right Now. Of course, neither has been completed, because I'm waiting for budget information that I do not have and cannot manufacture--they'll both get done tomorrow, most likely, which is what I'd planned all along. Thus, the organization will have to pay me $200--I'm still getting billed for the conference and the hotel room, because I cancelled too late. Personally, I don't think it would have made a damned bit of difference whether I went or not, either in terms of getting the information they were disseminating (though that will be vital six months from now) or in terms of getting the other things completed, but it wasn't my call.

I also didn't help myself in that i completely forgot something my boss asked me to do last week. But I did that yesterday before I left--it took me all of 15 minutes; I'd just spaced out that I needed to do it. Eh; I have more to add, but I don't feel like it right now. Suffice it to say that sooner or later he's going to have to suck it up and get the budget information for various bits of the organization from the unpleasant person who used to do the finances and who wants to hold on to everything so she can prove how irreplaceable she is (and, I suspect, so she can come back, when the organization for which she's now working doesn't put up with her shit, which, if it occurs, will occasion my beginning to look for another job).

Five Limbs

First: Pilates.

My short response is, "Eh." Perhaps I've been spoiled by too much yoga, but I really didn't find the Pilates enterprise to be all that helpful. I can see how it would be good as a starting place, and, possibly, a way to maintain, but I really find yoga much more useful. On top of that, my years of handball, walking, yoga, and then the bakery have developed my leg and arm strength such that getting to my core muscles--which DO need some work--through Pilates is just not going to happen. The person doing the session was perfectly nice, and will probably be a decent teacher, but I'm not going back. Basically, everything I do convinces me that i really must practice yoga more regularly.

Yes, I know I've been saying that for several years now. In any case, I have gone to three classes recently, and I signed up for a workshop on Saturday (basically, five hours of classes during the day) with someone I've wanted to study with for awhile. He's going to be in my city for the weekend, so that rocks. (Yes, it would be nice to go visit him in Montana--for my birthday, no less--or in California or Albuquerque, but this is much cheaper.) I don't think I'm doing the Friday class, so I can have dinner with Chuck and CK, and I can't do Sunday because I'm going to Indy again (for which I can't wait). Really, yoga has many of the things I want; the next step is to make it more of a priority in my life, which maybe now I can do.

So did I go to a class tonight? No; no, I did not. I did come home and edit for awhile, which will make this weekend's festivities more enjoyable, especially if I can get the first batch done before Friday, but I did not practice yoga. I suck.

Work is sort of interesting in a whole other way now. There are three distinct things I have to figure out how to do and how to organize, but they're also interrelated deeply. And there's no infrastructure--almost none at all. What has existed has been in the form of a person knowing or doing something--and, in one case, basically hoarding the information--which isn't a system at all. (That person has left (though she lingers as a "consultant" at the moment, coming in when the mood strikes her, and sending bitchy emails meanwhile), which is a good thing, because she and I would have had some serious issues at some point.) It's a little challenging, in the sense that it's not obvious where to start, but I'll sort through it somehow.

Meanwhile, it has been nice to have the regular job thing going on, but without having the proposals hanging over my head like a cartoon anvil. The task now is to figure out a plan to get the other stuff organized, to build the appropriate infrastructure, and without getting too slacktificated.

Can't Get No?

In part because of my own thoughts on this, in part because of posts by Ann and kstyle and their job/career-search adventures, I've been musing on job satisfaction and what it involves. I've been observing, for example, that, even though the past couple of weeks were stressful, in the sense of long hours, a lack of information, frustrating moments with coworkers, and a major deadline, the stress felt circumstantial--and temporary. There was a deadline, after all, which is bad, in the sense that one must actually get the things in on time (and apparently some grantees did not), but it also mediates the stress, in the sense that one knows there's a day when it has to stop. And, let's face it, I'm still new there--I haven't had the opportunity to burn out yet. Finally, it's actually more or less the kind of job for which I was looking: working for a nonprofit, for a good boss, with a lot of work to do. The pay could be a little higher (especially now that, having done the budgets for the grants, I know what everyone's making), but even that is certainly acceptable, and I expect my boss to go to bat for me in that regard.

However.

I am finding that I continue to compare what I'm doing to what I was doing at the bakery. On one hand, there's a certain something that came from the work at the bakery: making a product like croissants, and making them extraordinarily well (if I may be immodest here for a moment), in mass quantities, while also pitching in with multiple other products, was extremely satisfying in many, many ways. It is not something that everyone could do, as I'm sure Bossman knew then and, especially, knows now. (I need to get to the bakery or to a market to see how the current product looks.) On some level, it confirmed that my original plan wasn't completely insane, i.e., if I had managed to line things up, if Chuck hadn't flaked out, if I had found the right space, and the financing, and such, it could have worked.

Yes, that's a big pile of ifs (which, in part, is why I don't completely blame Chuck for things falling apart; any of a number of other things could have failed as well), but I see ifs like that as materially different from the ifs related to whether one is capable of doing something. (For another example, I think that I would have been a good professor--if I had been able to find a tenure-track job before I had to find some other kind of work.) We could have an argument about whether I should have stuck with either of those dreams for longer, but I don't think it's an easy or obvious call for either one.* The point here/now is that I think I mastered at least a major aspect of what it would have taken to be successful, and there's a certain amount of satisfaction in that.

But, as I whined here incessantly, it was grueling and, in some sense, pointless, at least once I realized that i wasn't going to be opening a bakery after all. On top of that, Bossman was exploiting me to some extent. Ultimately, this is what made me realize I needed to get the fuck out of there--if he had paid me even a little more an hour, I might have stuck around longer, and I think that would have been seriously unhealthy, in several dimensions. That is, no matter the very real satisfactions of the job, the dissatisfactions drove me out of it. This is non-trivial (well, okay, in the context of this blogpost it's non-trivial; in the greater scheme of things, it's pretty fucking trivial), in that I found much of the job itself to be quite satisfying. That is, if I were Ann, and I were getting to design websites, but I was being underpaid, and the job was physically grueling, with little paid time off, no room for advancement, I had to do a second job on the side because the pay was so low, and there were no benefits, would it be worth it? Everyone is going to answer that question differently, and the same person may well answer it differently at different points in his or her life.

It is also non-trivial that I'm 20 years older than Ann, and I've worked not just at several different jobs but at several different careers. That may even be the real point around which I'm circling: at this point in my life, given the things I've done, I'm reasonably content to be doing work that needs to be done, with people I like, for a good boss, at an organization that compensates me in a way that enables me to live comfortably, especially with the extra income from editing on the side. More to the point, the way I keep thinking about it--and sort of unintentionally, in that this thought keeps bubbling to the surface, rather than being something of which I remind myself--is that I have a comma in every paycheck, I can take days off without it costing me money, and I don't have to lug 50-pound sacks of flour up a flight of stairs. Those turn out to be very valuable, in ways that I might not have recognized if I hadn't spent two years at the bakery.

None of these are reasons that Ann or kstyle should NOT look for more satisfying work, mind you--I hope they both find things to do that make them happier than what they're doing now.

Anyway. My critique of Pilates will have to wait until tomorrow (I did my first session ever tonight).

One update, though: Friend apparently got a turkey yesterday morning--a 21.5-pound turkey, no less (he emailed me from the public library near the farm). Which means he didn't have to get up at 3 am to go sit in the rain today.
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*We can also have an argument about whether it was worth the more than $75,000 in loans those two things cost me--that sum in a retirement account, for example, would be nice--and we have to throw in the lost income during the seven years I was in grad school and the year of unemployment after that as major costs of this whole enterprise as well. Anyway, the cost-benefit analysis is probably all a separate post.

Words

Friend left today for turkey-hunting; he'll return Sunday sometime, hopefully with a dead bird in his truck. Nevertheless, my social calendar seems to be filling. Tomorrow I'm meeting with Chuck so we can discuss the thing with which he'd like some assistance; Thursday I'm attending a baseball game, courtesy of Dayjob; Friday I'm meeting a friend from pastry school; Saturday I'm going to beer school again, albeit with J rather than with Friend. [Damn; Penguins just scored against the Flyers, making the score 3-1 with only 10 minutes or so left in the game.] Somewhere in there I must get a bunch of editing done--probably Saturday and Sunday during the day, I'm guessing. If i were sufficiently focused, I suppose i could do some in the morning before work, but I'm not betting the farm on that one.

Meanwhile, I must get to the library; I've been rereading for several months now, and I'm getting tired of that. I did buy one book, and it pissed me off--it's called "the Twentieth Wife" or something like that, and it's apparently based on a real person. It's set in 16th- and 17th-century India, which is the source of the problems. I love big juicy historical novels (or even quasi-historical), and I don't care all that much about every last historical detail being accurate, but I do prefer to read something that wouldn't be completely sporked if it were a movie. That book? Big buckets of fail, I suspect.

The author posits that the 20th wife and the emperor who married her had this incredible crush on each other for, oh, 15 or 20 years. I'm not seeing it. It does seem that, once he married her IRL she ran the place--and not just the harem--but I find it hard to believe that the whole thing was motivated by Romantic Love that lasted for 20 years until it was consummated. As far as i can tell, the Romantic Love of which our popular culture is so fond is a relatively recent invention, not least because (a) women were property in most areas of the world, or, at the very least, expendable, and (b) for the upper echelons, marriage was more about cementing political alliances than about genuine affection (although presumably genuine affection would occasionally break out). I'm guessing that such affection was much more common in the middle classes--the people about whom Jane Austen and, later, Anthony Trollope wrote--than in the ruling classes of any society. In the middle classes, despite the necessity for women without independent incomes to find a husband (and both Trollope and Austen, especially the former, detail multiple aspects of this), women had enough leeway such that the authors could posit Love and not sound ridiculous.

In short, the novel about which I'm bitching is basically a quasi-historical romance novel, with 21st-century fantasies about the meaning of love and romance imposed on the historical record. Feh, I say. It's also not particularly well-written, but it's hard for me to figure out how much is because I was so annoyed about the romantical stuff--whenever it broke out in the book, I'd start getting irritated. What's really irritating is that I suspect the true story is actually pretty interesting.

Boss asked me to help hire the new financial person, so I went through resumes with him, which was an interesting exercise. Two people had arrest/conviction records (the application asks about that). One person explained the situation briefly (DUI, I think), and then said s/he regarded it as a "moot" issue. Umm, okay, except that "moot" means "arguable," not "settled." (Yes, I know it can also mean "of no practical significance; academic," and that's how people tend to use it, but I would argue that neither definition applied in this case.) Another person had a conviction for a physical assault of some kind (I'm being intentionally vague about the actual conviction) and also included descriptions of himself that were . . . unintentionally amusing.

I realize that most of the people who stop in here are word geeks like me, but boy howdy, people CANNOT write any more! Seriously; the amount of WTF in resumes is truly mindblowing. Oddly enough, the other thing this exercise does is confirm my lack of faith in most human resources people. Seriously: I know what my resume looks like, I know what my experience is, and, while I cannot walk on water, while I have not, for example, had P&L experience, I should have been getting WAY more responses to my job applications than I did. The fact that I didn't leads me to believe that (a) HR people are none too bright and can't tell a good applicant from a bad one, or (b) there were ALWAYS internal people and the posting was merely for show (always a chance of that, I suppose), which isn't a reflection on HR people. The calls I did get typically came through someone who wasn't an HR person. (At the current place, it looks like every resume gets sent electronically to the hiring person, who then decides which ones to call; the HR people also do the reference-checking, but that's at a later stage.)

So: what fiction have you been reading and loving?

Regular Stuff

Last night I had SportsCenter on in the background, and one of the guys was talking about what sounded like "groin pain" in reference to the new head coach of the Knicks. I finally figured out that he was talking about GROWING pains, which made a little more sense and sounded a lot less painful.

We finished the proposals around 5 am Friday morning. Everything got submitted, and it was probably mostly correct. My coworker gave me a ride home, and I crawled into bed . . . and slept for about an hour. Around 7:00 my brain decided that it was time to wake up, despite the lack of sleep, so I succumbed and got up. I wandered downtown for lunch with Friend, then did some errands, wandered home, and had dinner with Chuck and CS. I had taken the precaution of cleaning off the couch so that I'd have a soft place to fall when I finally tipped over.

Yesterday I had intended to go to yoga--and, of course, found a reason not to go, though it was a pretty good reason as my excuses go. I started cleaning up crap, and I got on a roll, so i stuck with it. I threw out three bags and a box of crap--at this point, I need to plant a small forest to make up for the paper I've tossed. I got rid of several pair of shoes, some of which were way more than 10 years old and didn't fit. There are still two closets of crap through which I must sort at some point, but that project will have to wait for another day.

I even managed to haul my ass to a Trader Joe's so I could get a few things, including the eggs and milk I needed to make some cookies and some muffins today. I've made both of them already this morning, and I have to say they rock the house.

I substituted about six ounces of banana for half of the butter in the muffins (and I forgot to add the oats), and I left half of them in for an extra ten minutes, and they're a much prettier color--more golden brown. The lighter ones taste just fine, though. As for the cookies, I'd found a low-fat oatmeal cookie recipe (only 2 tblsp. butter) that called for applesauce, but I used the rest of the bananas instead (again, about six ounces). I also substituted honey for the white sugar (I left the brown sugar in, as it's getting old and I want to use it up). They're really nice--not classic oatmeal cookies, but quite tasty and not terribly unhealthy. I used dried blueberries instead of raisins--at about 73 cents per blueberry--and I like the flavor they impart. If I hadn't been planning on giving them to Friend, I'd probably have thrown some ginger in, too.

Of course, now I really must turn to some editing, seeing as how I have a pile of it. Luckily, the weather is supposed to suck ass today (cold, raining), and Indy qualifying will be on intermittently, so conditions are perfect for actually getting some work done. I must say, it feels very nice to have a normal weekend for a change . . .

Live-Blogging the Proposal Submission

Well, we're nearly done (and by "we" I mean me, and one other person at my level; senior people are all at home sleeping). It's 3:42 am, and I've been awake for nearly 24 hours. I've worked somewhere around 72 hours this week, which is a little much, even for a comma in the paycheck. Several unintended consequences:

1. I've had a crash course in who's helpful and who's not, and the ways in which they are or not, which is information that will be useful in everything I do here.

2. I've had a crash course in the organizations, which is also useful--I even have a sense where the gaps in my knowledge are.

3. My boss has been forced to learn some of the detail that the unpleasant-person-who-quit used to handle, which has been useful in two ways.

a. He actually knows some of this shit now, which means he's less freaked out about her leaving.

b. He and the other senior person who've been helping him ran into some of the same shit into which I ran, which helped them understand what a pain in the ass the past six weeks have been.

4. People have had a chance to see my good and less-good sides. My boss seems inclined to keep me, and I've been as careful as possible not to piss of his boss, so not a lot of worries there.

Anyway, what I'd really like to do is wander down to the lake to watch the sun rise, but this isn't the greatest neighborhood in the world (okay, it's actually pretty crappy), so I'm not sure that's a good idea.

Maybe this weekend I'll blog about something other than the minutiae (sp?) of a new job . . . and I want to bake again, too, damnit! And I have a wad of editing to do (an old job, which shouldn't take too long, and a new job, with a new editor; did I mention that?).

And? Not be at work. That's the other goal.

Sloggity Goodness

I keep marching forward on these things. As I observed to Friend tonight, in addition to getting a crash course on the organizations--which is helpful in and of itself--I'm also getting a crash course on who is helpful and who is not, and on who needs to be managed, and in what ways. All of that is vital information that will stand me in good stead. I have now earned more than three days of comp time--plus, my boss put me on the list of people to get a free box seat to a baseball game next week (during the afternoon, thank you very much), so I've got that, too. That, my friends, along with the comma in the paycheck, sums up why this job is better than the bakery. Yes, I've been putting in days that are just as long as the ones at the bakery; yes, I worked on Saturday, all day; yes, I'm still doing work on the side. But I can go back to a normal day and get paid the same--and still have things like paid time off! (I know, I know, I've mentioned this before, but it's still pretty amazing to me.)

(As an aside, Mom goes in for surgery tomorrow morning, probably around 6 am my time; if things go well, she should be done by 8 or so. What I really wish is that she were going in for a new kidney tomorrow, but I'll be happy if tomorrow's surgery goes well.)

As for the editing, my reputation apparently continues to spread: I got offered a job from a new person today, which I took. I'm going to take advantage of Friend's absence to finish a project and start this new one. I also finally figured out how I want to allocate the extra money--basically, I'm throwing a third of it at my student loan, throwing a third of it into my savings, and throwing the last third into my savings for now but earmarking it for Something Fun. I don't know what the SF will be, and it may not even use up all I'm allocating for it, but it gives me the freedom to take a trip, or throw a party, or whatever I want to do. I'm turning 50 this year, and I want to do something fun. One possibility is a dinner at the chef's/kitchen table at this spectacular restaurant Friend and I visited the summer before last. A second is a dinner party here in the city for some friends. Maybe both. Maybe a trip somewhere (burningman? could be). I don't have to decide now, but I feel like I've earmarked the funds and will find it easier to spend the money. Hell, if I end up being boring and doing nothing, I can always throw a wad at the loan and pay it off completely (it'll probably take me until next year to do it otherwise--which is still about 16 years early, so I'm ahead).

I'll throw up an update tomorrow when I hear about mom.

Update: Mom (!) just called me her own self. She's out of surgery and expects to go home today (and back to dialysis tomorrow).

(Some)or(Not)Suckage

Do mango DumDums count as fruit?

How about tangerine?

I know my personal favorite flavor--cotton candy--cannot possibly count, seeing as how it's a lollipop version of . . . (spun) sugar. (Cotton candy always brings back very specific memories for me--and I mean the fresh stuff, the stuff that dissolved at the slightest touch, not the dyed cotton balls that are packaged in bags and such.)

As that original question may lead you to believe, my lifestyle hasn't been all that healthy lately, what with piles of stress and lots of 10- to 12-hour days. (But? Still no sacks of flour.) I've been living on DumDums and tea with honey, with the occasional actual meal or food substance thrown in. To my credit, I've managed to make the "food substance" a piece of fruit nearly every day, so it could be much worse.

I'm still in proposal hell, slogging along. I'm beginning to think we'll be able to submit everything without it completely sucking, so there's that, but I won't truly relax until we've actually submitted every last tidbit. Okay, I won't TRULY truly relax until we actually get funded, but that won't happen until November, and, meanwhile, people actually seem pretty pleased with what I'm doing. Still, there's that deadline thing.

Among the things that suck: Friend basically becomes unavailable as soon as I finish this crap. His mother, whom I have not yet met and whom I doubt I'll get to meet any time soon (if ever), is possibly in town next weekend, and then he goes turkey-hunting, so it's possible I won't see him at all until the 20th or so. I suspect he'll make time for me sometime in the next 10 days, but who knows. Tonight he's on a Date, and, if the mom-unit is visiting next weekend, he'll need to spend some time tomorrow doing chores.

Another thing that sucks: My mom-unit goes in for surgery on Tuesday, to repair an abdominal hernia. The docs hadn't wanted to fix it before she was on dialysis, for fear of tipping her over the edge into needing dialysis. Now that she's already over that edge, the surgery still has risks, of course, but dialysis isn't one of them. The whole thing should take about two hours--I made her promise to get someone to Call Me! afterwards, which will probably be dad.

More suckage: Chuck is going through a crisis (which will remain undetailed here, not least because he asked for privacy; he doesn't know I have this blog, but still), and he's asked me to help him (not with money). I'm not entirely comfortable saying yes, but I'm way less comfortable saying no, so I've decided on a tentative okay, but with a conversation about my discomfort and my limits.

What I've come to believe is that he and I should not have been partners--married, unmarried whatever--but just friends. Maybe friends with benefits at one point or another, but basically friends. I also believe that that wasn't really an option, at least not for Chuck, at least not when we met; the wads of baggage he was carting around (most of which I could not see, and not for lack of looking) for all intents and purposes prevented him from engaging with me, or anyone else, in some authentic (for lack of a better word) way. He recognized something in me that he wanted, both in his own being/life and in a partner, and I know, as much as I know anything, that that desire was both good and true, but he was not then in a place where that could happen. We muddled along, and I know he learned a lot (although just how much remained hidden from me), even as he continued to drag along, and add to, the pile of baggage.

(One of the things my interactions with Friend have made clear to me is just how much baggage Chuck was carting along with him. I've always figured that all of us have baggage, especially if we've lived hard and well, especially if we've been willing to take chances, especially if we understand there are always risks to passion of whatever kind. At the same time, I think it's incumbent upon us to divest ourselves of baggage as we go, such that we stay within the two-carry-on limit; when someone calls for a redcap or a cart, there are going to be problems. The thing with Chuck is that he had way more than the limit, but he had it stashed in a storage locker, hoping he'd never have to deal with it. Friend, like me, has been somewhat buffeted and bruised, but we both, in our own ways, deal with the baggage. it may also be the case that we have less of it--let's not forget that Chuck has a mental illness, and it was undiagnosed for many years.)

Where was I? Oh, right. I think that Chuck and I are actually reasonably well-suited to be friends (NOT with benefits). It's an open question whether we CAN do that, given our history, among other things. I'm willing to take baby steps to find out, and I am not at all convinced that it will actually happen in ways that are healthy for everyone concerned. OTOH, it is not in me to refuse to help him. I do not want to/cannot/am not willing to do that. It feels wrong to me. Just as it felt wrong to me to press for "reconciliation" when he was doing none of the things that I said I needed.

Clearly, my life is not one that could be lived by someone who was uncomfortable with ambiguity.

Things that don't suck: my boss's boss was quite happy with my writing--she was fulsome in her praise, which made me happy. I'll still only feel good about these things when they're actually submitted, but it's nice to get some encouragement. (And my position will be changing in June or so, as well--I'm going to be working only for my boss/one organization, rather than two, and I'll be doing grant management and quality management rather than just the former, but I see it all as connected, so no problem, and kind of a promotion, really.)

More not-sucking: i contemplated making dinner tonight, but bailed nearly immediately to go let the nice people at the crunchy-granola place make dinner for me, and they did a fine job. it was wonderful; exactly what I wanted.

Also: I've made multiple appointments (dentist, gynecologist (actually nurse-midwife, but I don't care who actually does the pap smear), hair trim)--and I'll be able to go during the day, AND use comp time, up which I've been racking at a furious pace these past weeks. I like getting all these things done at once--I'm seeing the midwife and getting my hair trimmed the same day, and I'll probably add an acupuncture appointment while I'm at it, as long as I'm taking the day. I may go ahead and schedule a massage . . . for the next day.

I had thought to go to a yoga class tomorrow morning, and then follow it up with editing work, either at home or at Friend's, but I just discovered that my yoga teacher isn't teaching tomorrow morning, so not. Just as well, probably; I should do laundry in a major way. It also means I'll sit here and sip my wine.

I must get to some yoga classes, though. I'd bought a 20-class package at the end of January, and it was supposed to be good for only three months, but then I got a job. As a result, I still have 15 classes; upside, though, I managed to get them to extend the package for a month. I'm still not going to get to use all the classes, most likely, but I'm perfectly willing to take another day off of work, or some half days, to go to a bunch of yoga classes.

Yeah, well, I'm fading rapidly, so I'll leave you all to your respective weekends.