Tumble Down

Now I been lookin' for a job but it's hard to find
Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line
--Bruce
"Atlantic City"

I can feel myself sliding down a ravine. It's happening kind of slowly, and I keep thinking I should grab a boulder or a tree or a clump of grass and haul myself up, or at least pause the fall until I can get my bearings, but instead I just keep slowly sliding.

Oddly enough, the fear of falling is making it worse; I know that it can get very dark and deep and painful.

Back when I finished grad school, I was unemployed for more than a year. I had some temp work, and some small jobs, but it took me 15 months to find a full-time job. On top of that, I realize, in retrospect, that I was seriously depressed for probably two years before that.

It was hellish. I was miserable, and I knew that I was miserable to be around. I was sad and angry and scared. I was unemployed and deeply in debt and being forced to change careers. Despite having spent seven years and accruing the aforementioned debt to do what I truly loved to do, I wasn't going to get to do that, and I had to find something else to do, and I had to pay off all that debt.

When I finally got a job--literally weeks before I would have run out of money--I immediately set to healing myself. I worked through the shit, as best I could (pretty well, actually), and slowly rebuilt a new life. As I left that job, four years later, to work at the startup company, I got involved with Chuck. And despite the many, many good things that came out of that, nearly eight years later, once again, my life blew up: the company for which I worked went out of business (and the companty for which Chuck work moved, so we were both in dire straits there), my marriage blew up, and I was working in a low-paying, grueling job that had been intended to be an apprenticeship before I started, yes, something else I loved to do.

And then I pieced things together again, and quit the bakery, and found a new job, where, over the nearly four years I was there, I was promoted twice, and left the job making 60% more than when I was hired.

None of that matters.

What matters, right this minute, is that I have no fucking clue what's going to happen. I have some capacity for dealing with uncertainty, and some capacity for rebuilding, or moving to a new plot and building something else entirely. But will I be able to do it this time, before my money runs out? I'm over 50. Unemployment is at record levels. The jobs that are out there are either back at the level I was at in 1994 or they're just enough above my level of experience that I don't think I can do them; there's no guarantee that I can talk someone into hiring me for the former, and I don't see the point in trying to talk someone into hiring me for a position that I don't quite know how to do and don't think I can figure out in time.

Even that, well, something could turn up, or I could maybe get one of the lower-level positions that pays enough and, once again, work my way up (or not; there's a lot to be said for not).

But I'm sliding. I've spent the better part of the past two days sitting and doing not much of anything. (No, computer cards does not count as any fucking thing at all, except an exercise in mind-numbing.) I managed to work out Monday and Tuesday, but today, I managed to miss a train and I got off at the other end 15 minutes too late to get to the rowing class I had signed up to take, and I just turned the fuck around and got back on the train and came home. Otherwise, I have done almost nothing.

I was supposed to meet an ex-co-worker tomorrow, but it turns out that there's a board meeting s/he must attend--which added to my funk, as I was required to attend a board meeting in, what, September? maybe? And that means, if anyone I met remembers me, there will be questions, and my ex-boss will be making shit up or badmouthing me--most likely the former, about how I "chose" to pursue other options. I'm fucking UNEMPLOYED. Who the fuck would choose that? All I can say is that I hope s/he breaks out in suppurating sores and bloody pustules every time s/he says something about me that's bullshit. I'm trying very, very hard to keep away from the anger--I know, from the above-mentioned experience, that it is not a good path, and will only lead to more tears--but I think I can ask that bad karma rains down upon those who spew bullshit about me.

Then again, maybe no one will even notice.

For the ones who had a notion,
a notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin
to be glad you're alive
--Bruce
"Badlands"

(Yeah, sorry, Palladia is showing "Live in NYC" at the moment, presumably in honor of Clarence's birthday, and, as we know, Bruce is my personal deity. Or, at least, he keeps me going, and I'll take what I can get right now.)

So I know I have to find a way to stop the slide, to grab a boulder or a sapling or just dig in my heels. Because i just do not want to go back down into that ravine. I lived there for maybe three years, maybe more, in the early 90s, and revisited briefly five years ago, and I do not have the energy to drag myself out again, and the farther I fall the more dragging out of it I have to do. I have no fucking clue how I'm going to do it. But there it is. Drag myself out of it, right the fuck now, figure out a way to hold on and stop sliding.

Into the Wet

At what point does principled objection become mere intransigence? Interesting question, no? And, let me hasten to add, I'm the one who has the objection, and, indeed, it's principled. It would do little harm to break the particular rule for This One Time. But it's a rule that has been broken in the past, and I have spent most of my time at the organization cleaning up various messes that resulted from such breakage, so I am disinclined to do so. More to the point, I am disinclined to break it, or allow it to be broken, precisely because of the attitude of the people who want to break it. They want to break it for the sake of expedience--and not expedience that will actually result in more services being provided. In addition, they do not seem to regard the principle as an important one, and they seem to regard expedience as more important, and that is making me dig in my heels more than I otherwise might do so. Finally, they do not fully understand some of the pieces about which they are being insistent, and I do not like when people are trying to make big decisions when they do not have full information.

All that aside, I had to act like a Senior Management-Type Person on Friday. A string of circumstances led to the ceiling falling in, in several places, because of leakage from storms. Given that I was the only Senior Management-Type Person in the vicinity, I closed the place down. There was some immediate fallout from that--I sent people home, with pay--but, as the full extent of the damages became clear, the fallout has lessened. And then, last night, at my house, in addition to having to try to sleep through lightning outside the buiilding, and in addition to running around closing windows, the electricity went out. Which, normally, who cares; roll over and sleep.

Except, now that I'm a Property Owner (or, at least, I share ownership with a bank), I have an Alarm System. Which beeps, when the power goes out., every 20 minutes or so. (The first time this happened, I looked at the display, which says, among other things, "No AC," and thought, because it was the middle of the night, "But I don't HAVE air conditioning!" Eventually I realized this was "alternating current," not "air conditioning.") I could not, for the life of me, get it to stop beeping. Finally, at 2:45 am, I dug up a phone number and called the company. No, I do not, in fact, remember my "code word," but, for the love of FSM, tell me how to stop the beeping. (The unspoken threat, in my head, went something like, "Or I will take a fucking HAMMER to the thing.") I got it to stop, I think, and then the power came back, but not much sleep was left in the night, and then today I had to put together the report that I would have put together yesterday if the sky had not fallen on everyone's heads.

Yes, I AM tired; why do you ask?

But it is what it is. There are interesting challenges, which I would relate if i didn't want sleep so badly, and I could rhapsodize about the steamy weather, if I didn't want to collapse on the bed, and so on, so it'll all have to wait.

I am arguably throwing away $30 tonight, and I am not usually so profilgate, but I simply could not face it. My tile-making class meets tonight--it was cancelled last week but will be made up, which means I haven't been there in two weeks as it is. However, I had to shlep to the other end of the city not just yesterday but today as well, as the temporary filling fell off again yesterday. This means I was up by 4 or so and out the door by a little after 5 am two days in a row. In addition by the time the class is over tonight, it will be bitter cold again, with multiple degrees below zero wind chill, and the trip home takes at least 40 minutes, on a good night with good public transportation karma, which I have not been having lately. (Today's episode: the bus on which I was riding this morning pulled over on Lake Shore Drive. We sat there for 10 minutes, waiting for the next bus, onto which we were all herded. Luckily I had left some wiggle room in terms of the buses I was planning to catch, but the driver never did explain what the problem was.)

And I just didn't feel like it. Work continues to be a steaming pile of stress, and it's been brutally cold this week, and whine, whine, whine. Somehow, coming home and sitting on the couch with a cat in my lap and working on getting on the outside of some wine just sounded like a much better idea. So far, I'm right about that. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out whether I'm just whining and I need to STFU and get on with whatever it is, or whether I really do need to skip whatever it is.

So, yes, I have hauled my sorry ass all the way to the other end of the city three times in the past week, and two of those three episodes have involved the asscrack of dawn. The dentist was a bit abashed today--but it's just the kind of thing that's going to happen with an inlay as big as mine is, so I saw no point in getting pissy about it. It also means that they'll make it a point to get me in as soon as the piece comes back from the lab rather than making me wait a month (which is when my appointment was originally scheduled). Meanwhile, I've also discovered that the culprit in the recent recurrance of the back pain was my winter boots. Last weekend, Friend hauled my new boots--purchased at the end of last winter, on sale, and left at his house--over here, and I've been wearing them all week, and my back pain and heel pain? Nearly non-existent.

What I really want is a couple of days off--to go hang at the tile studio and work on my stuff; to get a massage; to take myself out for a meal; to work out (I haven't been able to get myself to do that this week, either); to sit somewhere with a hot beverage and a good book. And somehow I'm going to figure out how to get that, despite the continuing pile of things on fire on my desk.

Snowpocalypse Now

I feel like I'm in the middle of that scene in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (yes, the one with Burl Ives and Clarice the girl reindeer) where the snowman says, "And then it hit." And you see things blowing all over the place. That's what it looks like here. My back window is completely snow-covered, despite the fact that it's on a covered porch (covered by the upstairs neighbor's porch, that is). The wind occasionally reaches 50 mph, apparently, which means some blocks are really difficult to traverse. I'm not particularly a weather weenie--not least because Friend gave me an old pair of his snow pants, which, given the disparity in our sizes, means they fit very comfortably over multiple layers of my clothing--and I even admit to being a little fascinated by things like this weather, but this is pretty brutal.

This weekend's cooking and baking adventures: wheat rolls; yet another attempt at an apple upside down cake (and this one's a winner); a variation on a whole-grain cinnamon roll (back to that one in a minute); and a venison stew, made with carrots, onions, garlic, celery, red wine, balsamic vinegar, some slow-roasted tomatos I had hanging around in the freezer, a can of tomatos, and, let's see, some fresh sage, a few cloves, a splash of regular vinegar, a splash of molasses, some maple syrup (I was experimenting with some sweetening), and I browned the meat in pancetta. It simmered for about five hours, and is extremely tasty and I think I've overcome the inherent dryness/toughness of venison. The cinnamon bread was from a KAF recipe for "cinnamon spiral bread"--a coil of bread put into a round pan. I decided to cut it into individual rolls, and fill it with apples, raisins, and cinnamon. But I think there's a problem with them; I"m not sure whether it's me or the formula, but it seemed to have way too much oats, and it really didn't raise much. They weren't inedible, but they weren't very good, either. Last night I made a cake with still more of the meyer lemons, and it came out pretty well; I'd make it again, though I'd decrease the temperature and increase the (already long) baking time.

Meanwhile, though, we're getting a bunch of snow--so much that the building where we work decided to close down tomorrow, meaning my company is closed, too. In some ways, that's a total pain for me: I have a dentist appointment early Thursday morning, and I had been planning on taking a vacation day on Friday, but, at the very end of the day, one of our funding agencies returned a budget and need some changes by Friday. If I get get it done Thursday afternoon, all will be well, but otherwise I'll have to change the vacation day. There were other things I wanted to get done this week that also won't happen, but this particular item is really necessary for reasons about which you do not care. (Trust me on this.)

But still--snow day!! I realized that most weekends or planned days off I start to fill with activities of one kind or another: chores, or baking, or cooking, or something. Because this came unexpectedly, I have absolutely nothing planned. I'll work out, maybe watch some movies or TV, maybe sit on the sun porch and drink tea and read with a cat on my lap, and that's it. I'm supposed to meet Brazen Tart for dinner, but who knows whether the restaurant will even be open. I presume we'll make the call tomorrow.

I've been putting the food channel on lately, when I have a desire for background stuff, so I have stumbled across "Worst Cooks in America." I find it absolutely fascinating, in a train wreck kind of way. "Chopped" kinda makes me nuts in a different way--mostly because I've yet to see an episode that I liked. "Iron Chef" is okay--I like that the focus is much more on the food. But no matter the show, if it's a competition, there are a few sentences you're sure to hear: "I just have to execute perfectly." "It's anybody's game." "I could go home for this." "I was really worried about the time." "You really got a wonderful smokiness (or some other adjective) out of that (food item)." Personal stories about how much this means. Dramatic pauses and dramatic music as time fillers, rather than a focus on the damn food.

The reality is--so to speak--I don't care about that shit. Of course you have to execute perfectly. Of course anyone could go home at any time; that's the fucking point. Questions about someone's "soul" are completely irrelevant; make good food for me and I don't care about your inner life. Show me the fucking cooking! (Which is what I like about Iron Chef and the later rounds of Top Chef.)

Anyway. I"m fading fast, so you'll have to add your own pet peeves.

Whinealicious

I'm going to a pity party tonight--would you like to attend? No? Well, that's okay; I'm not going to stay long either. But.

We had a five-hour meeting today, and it was actually useful: we needed to sort through how we're going to spend some pots of money we have, and, in particular, what types of positions we need to expand our service provision. In general, it went pretty well. Everyone stayed on task, and we plowed through it and got to a place where we can move forward, so that was good. But the reason for the pity party is that I've finally identified what kind of help I need (and I'm reaching the point where I really, really need that help). That position was one of the few--in the 10 or so we discussed--that we ended up just not finding a place to put on a budget.

On one hand, I understand why not; for one thing, it's an administrative position, and we have other types of managerial staff we also need, so it kind of took a back seat. And I didn't jump up and down and wave my arms around; in retrospect, I was kind of hoping that someone else would kind of go to bat for me on this position, acknowledge what I need, and that didn't happen. At all.

So that's disappointing.

But then, I have this big proposal due on the 15th, and my new overlord, and others, keep asking how they can help, and I say, oh, I'll have to do it. Their response to that is to act as though I'm somehow at fault for not letting go or asking for help or whatthefuckever, i.e., that it's All My Own Fault that I'm doing it alone. I finally realized today why I'm doing that: if I do hand it off to someone and he or she fucks it up, then it's going to be up to ME to fix it, which will completely fuck my schedule. And today's meeting fed into that feeling: if no one recognizes what I need when I actually say it, out loud, in words, and then tries to facilitate that happening, why should I trust that people will do what they say on these other fronts? I would be a fool to do so, in my opinion. And, realisitically, I know my coworkers: who, exactly, is going to "help"? Most of them do not write very well to begin with--which is not a criticism, mind you, just an accurate statement--and other people whom overlord supervises can write but do not know our programs. So who, exactly, is going to do this "helping"? And, as noted, what if they fuck it up? Or suppose someone writes something and I do a lot of editing? And s/he is the kind of person whose panties bunch up when that happens? I do not fucking have time for drama.

If we had more time, I'd be willing to risk it, and to use others, and be able to provide the guidance and support they'd need to be successful and to maybe actually provide some assistance to me, but I do not have very much time, so, no. I think I'm going to have to share this with Overlord--in a slightly more polite way, of course--so it doesn't look like I'm being a martyr. Trust me, I'd love to share this, but realistically, I know what would be involved, and what would be involved is actually more goddamned work for me.

But!

A new season of Top Chef! It was interesting for me, because I did not see very much of the early seasons and don't remember any episodes that I might have seen. I've gone back and read recaps on Television Without Pity, and I have one of the seasons on my Netflix queue, but I hadn't gone through a whole season with many of them. And? Richard Blais may be talented, but his comment that the thing his season is known for is that he lost when he "should have" won? Fuck off, dude. What a narcissistic remark. Some people may remember that season for the person who ACTUALLY won; just a thought. Marcel, the guy who was physically assaulted in S2, already has me hating him (which is absolutely no justification for the assault, period end of sentence). Stephen seems like a complete ass. And so on. It should be quite interesting, because every one of them has been around this block, and many of them made it to the final three or four, so there are some serious cooking chops in the room.

The best thing about last night's challenge is that it called on one of the things that I've been saying forfuckingever: each chef had to remake the dish for which s/he was eliminated. They could change it a little, but not a lot. First off, anything that gets served in a fine dining restaurant is likely NOT the first version of that dish that someone tried to make; the higher up the price/quality range you go, the more likely that probably is. Point being, if you're trying out a new dish, you get to REmake it, to fix whatever seemed broken--you get to learn from your experience. Second, another thing that made it interesting is that anyone who was eliminated in the finals or the final four probably had a good dish but had one flaw in it--too much salt in Jen's dish, for example--such that the dish wasn't bad, in and of itself, it's just that someone else made something better. But people who were eliminated in earlier rounds had a higher likelihood that the dish that sent them packing just sucked ass from the conception. Making THAT a better dish is going to be a bigger challenge than merely not oversalting something.

So, really, I liked the concept of the elimination challenge quite a bit. And the person who lost--Elia?--served fish that was raw (but was supposed to be cooked), and apparently didn't really change the dish at all. No learning going on there. I also didn't like her personally.

Anyway. Tomorrow I'm going to dump a bunch of text into my outline for this fucking proposal--chunks of stuff that I can steal from elsewhere, coupled with notes on where to get other stuff--and see where that gets me. And then I'm going to another hockey game. I was supposed to make chocolate ganache tonight, but I didn't get to it; maybe tomorrow morning before work, because it won't take long. (Saturday is the condo association holiday gathering, and I'm bringing the mini hazelnut smores--maybe I'll actually get it right this time--and the ganache really has to sit for a day. If Brazen Tart is reading this, I'm using the Palet d'Or formula from school, because it ends up being firm enough.)

Road Trip

It's possible I could be more useless tonight, but I'm not entirely sure how.

I'm starting to get my crap together for the Large Trip to the Coast of My Birth, With Multiple Stops in the State Where I Colleged. Friend and I are grabbing his sister and heading to, in order, his brother's place, a rendezvous in Pennsylvania somewhere, at a location yet to be determined, my parents' house, a possible day of touring Philadelphia historical bits, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because they have a Bruce exhibit I've been wanting to see, plus it's the R&R HoF and probably has some Cool Stuff. I would like to stop in the actual town where I went to college, but I think that's unlikely to be part of the adventure. All in all, though, it will involve about eight days of stuff, at least four of which will include driving.

I've been monumentally tired lately, and I've been trying to piece together why that is so, because it's not lack of sleep--I'm not sleepy, exactly. In discussion with Friend last night I decided that it's partly, or mostly, stress from work. (And not working out probably doesn't help, either.) It's not that I hate my job--actually, despite the multitude of frustrations lately, I actually like a lot of what I do, on some level. Yeah, it's boring and tedious in a lot of ways, and it doesn't engage my intellect, for lack of a better word, in any way whatsoever, but it's Good Work, and for a good cause, so if I don't get to use my smarts in ways that make me happy & fulfilled, well, at least other people get to benefit from it. There is some measure of satisfaction from that, and I make a living that allows me to do stuff and enjoy myself and even save some money, so it's pretty damn good, as these things go.

The thing that's causing me stress is that I don't have any help. There isn't another person in the whole organization who knows as much about what I'm doing as I do, and, in particular, doesn't know nearly as much about the budget as I do, and that makes me nervous. Our downtown financial folks don't concern themselves with the actual program activities or rules governing same, and they don't make any effort to learn what we're doing, and they don't particularly provide us with tools that would help; they mostly add layers of hoops through which we must jump, and communicate poorly about same, which just adds to the strain. Sometimes, when I'm really lucky, they lecture me on what fabulous tools they're providing and how we should really use them. But really, they don't know our programs nearly as well as they ought. (For example, today our controller called and asked MY opinion about a thing that the head of the whole organization wants to do that would affect one of the satellite programs in our corner of the organization, and I got the strong sense that my feedback was what made the decision, even if it doesn't go out with my name on it, plus I sent the controller to an additional person whom I knew would have a relevant opinion about another aspect of the whole thing.)

On top of that, there really isn't anyone else who knows our data needs and reporting requirements. (One of our funding agencies requires 40 reports a year. Yes. Forty. And that's just one bit of the reporting.) Some of the stuff I pull myself. Some of it I get from our IS person (who's a level above me on the food chain, so she isn't exactly support for me, though she does, in fact, do her best to get me what I need). It gets reported in multiple formats, and multiple arenas, and to multiple internal and external ends, and very little of it gets reviewed or even examined by anyone else before I submit it, and mostly people don't even know about it.

Yes, I know I need to write all of this down somewhere. I'll do that as soon as I put out whatever's on fire right now, and I can think of a half a dozen things that are smoldering or actually in flames.

My boss and I both recognize the need for some infrastructure, and I have occasionally given some thought to what it would resemble, were any of it to come my way. At the same time, I know our programs in the detail of the matter--i.e., both in terms of budgets and in terms of performance--better than anyone, and I know the huge unmet need, so I have a very difficult time taking money that could be used to provide direct services to people who's lives are much, much, much worse than my Stress At Work problems. On the other hand, I know that infrastructure is vital, so I'm willing to make an argument to hire someone when we have the dollars to do so and I have enough work to keep that person busy. It's a balancing act.

Add to it that I absolutely do not want to cheap out on the eventual position: either hire someone good, at a reasonable salary, or don't, but don't hire a warm body at 2/3 the necessary salary, and expect that person to do what I know needs to happen. To me, that's a complete waste of money, and, likely, a waste of my time.

So, really, it's the sole-responsibility part that is making me a bit anxious. I would like to have someone around whom I can trust and past whom I can run things, with some expectation that s/he will actually be able to look at what I've done and find my mistakes. Right now, I work alone, and the things I send downtown get put through some weird translation device that fucks up everything and puts it into a spreadsheet in ways that make it impossible to actually follow, but no one actually reviews things in a way that is likely to find any relevant mistakes. Irrelevant bullshit, yes, but not actual mistakes. Not the desired result.

Anyway.

All that aside, I'm still taking time off. As of February of this year I get three weeks of vacation a year, so even with this trip I'm going to have more than two weeks of vacation days left. And I'm taking this time. I want to see my dad near his 80th birthday, while all of his organs are still on the inside of him. I want to see my nephews, if I can. I want Friend to see a part of the country that is beautiful to me, but that he has never seen. (I find that I don't much care about seeing my brother, which kind of bothers me to realize but I don't know that I want to, or can, do anything about it. But that's another whole story.) And you know what? I'm not indispensible; the place will manage without me for another week. The other thing that helps is that I have worked hard to develop relationships with our various funding agencies and project officers, so if something does blow up, they'll be on our side. Who knew that someone as fundamentally grouchy as I am would have the patience for that . . .

Please Read, Damnit!

There's a guy across the street who likes to play the piano, with his windows open; sometimes he sings, too. And he's absolutely wretched. No; really; he's just terrible. There are some nights when, after he's been flailing away for a couple of hours, I just want to go over and shut the piano on his hands. Or at least close his fucking windows. Dude, have whatever hobby you please; I don't care. But don't subject the rest of us to it.

Meanwhile, as the dearth of posting might suggest, I'm a bit fried. Work has been extremely stressful lately, though of course I can't help but be grateful I have a job. Some of it is just me being whiny, but a big chunk of it is that the people who are supposed to be assisting us . . . aren't. Two weeks ago, one of the other department heads and I sorted through a bill for a particular service. It's a quarterly bill, and s/he and I each had our own way of budgeting for it--which is fine, as the cost is split between our departments, and it's spread across our department in a way, and using a methodology, that I developed. So I created a little spreadsheet, passed it along to downtown, and wrote a cover email that said, you'll be getting this purchase order, here's how the costs are being allocated, please note that it's by dollar amount not by percentage.

Fine. Except the Very. First. Response. from the person who's supposed to assist us, says, "Okay, I'll adjust the percentages." Did you READ the fucking email? Apparently not. There were then a half a dozen clarifying emails. Okay, finally everyone signs off on it, the invoice and purchase order go downtown for payment.

A week later, it comes back to me. Why? Well, the other department head budgeted the dollars for this cost under the pencils account number, while I budgeted the dollars under the erasers account number. No matter; we each have our own funds. Or, rather, it shouldn't matter, but someone downtown apparently couldn't follow along, and said, oh, the other department doesn't have the dollars in his/her budget for this, because the person downtown was looking in the erasers line in both departments, despite having been instructed otherwise. So there is yet another round of clarifying.

And today, one of my fellow directors informs me that the grand plan of downtown is to have all bills sent to them, "because you already budgeted it, and you have to follow your budget." I about blew a gasket. They fuck up everything they touch, but they want to take the bill-paying out of our hands? It will be a fucking nightmare if that comes to pass. They simply do not realize that we must obey our funding agencies: as my old boss used to say, in this world you have to follow the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

More seriously, there simply isn't any way to align three major contracts (each of which has a different contract year), and three more minor contracts--none of which has the same contract year, and none of which has the same year as our fiscal year--so everything lines up perfectly. It cannot be done, at least not with human beings involved in the system.

On a similar note, in the middle of yet another dispute on Thursday, our controller says, surely not very much has changed in the month since the fiscal year budget went into effect. Well, actually, I pointed out, it has been THREE months since the FY budget was submitted, and since then there have been several changes, and here, again, is what they are. In other words, things change, and part of my job is to manage the contracts in ways that make sure we spend the dollars and spend them appropriately, and instead of assisting in that project, the people downtown create their own agendas that have nothing to do with this and don't bother to learn what the grants are. I do all of the budgeting and make the budgets available to them, but it's like reading poetry to fish.

One of the major sticking points is that the person who is supposed to be helping us most closely really isn't up to the job. S/he was hired to do Job A, and the (now-not-so-)new boss thinks s/he should be able to do Job A+++. And s/he simply cannot do that job. Thus, we are not getting the service we need, and we have someone who is actually getting in our way--this is the person who wanted to change the percentages, after being explicitly and specifically told we'd be using dollars rather than percentages. All of which adds yet another layer of crap on top of the processes. Everything thinks helperperson needs to go, and apparently s/he is on some kind of performance evaluation, but meanwhile, we're getting crap. And also also, helperperson dumps stuff in my lap without actually doing his/her homework first, in a frantic effort to show that s/he is doing the work and is getting stuff off his/her desk.

Can you tell it's getting on my last fucking frayed nerve?

Anyway.

This weekend will feature a lot of beer-drinking, preceded by maragaritas and great tex-mex food the night before, and succeeded by french bistro food for breakfast, and then possibly a cat will make its way back into Friend's house. We contemplated going away next weekend, too, and I took off several days to facilitate that, but Friend just had to dump a whole bunch of money into his (17-year-old) vehicle, which has nearly 260,000 miles on it. And he still needs new tires for it. But after that, he mostly needs to get through this next winter with it, and start shopping for a replacement in earnest. In any case, the other trip next weekend now looks less likely, which is okay with me, too--not least because I just got a substantial special assessment.

I apologize that my first post in awhile features a lot of complaints--back to food blogging soon, I promise! And furniture blogging, too, when my shelves get here.

Our Friend the Turnip

I have apparently lost the will to exercise. I find this rather disturbing, and the rational brain lectures me that I Will Feel Better If I Just Exercise Already, and harrumphs and rolls its eyes, but it makes no progress in getting the rest of me to put on the workout clothes and get on the rowing machine, even if for only a little while. I imagine it has something to do with the huge stress machine that work has become, and I most assuredly wish I could Do Something About It, but whatevs. Sooner or later I'll figure it out, I suppose. I rather wish it would be sooner rather than later, so I could fit back into some of my clothes.

Meanwhile, the farm share adventure is underway. I've had turnips the past two weeks (along with a buttload of lettuce, some kale the week before last, some strawberries, a teensy bit of broccoli, and more lettuce), which I had never cooked before. This week's experiment turned out somewhat better: I chopped an onion, cooked it in some olive oil and butter, then threw in the three sliced turnips and also added a sliced/chopped up apple. I sauteed that for awhile, then had to turn it off so I could run to the store for some fresh garlic. I added a couple of pressed cloves of garlic when I returned, along with some chopped up chicken/tomato/basil sausages. Meanwhile, there was kamut cooking on a back burner (only soaked for an hour or so, rather than the recommended six), onions caramelized on another burner, and some red wine and leftover berries (blue and straw) and their juices reducing in the onion pan. When the venison went on the grill, I threw in the spinach I'd gotten at the store with the garlic (I'd originally intended to use some frozen collards in there, in addition to the turnip greens, but decided that might be more bitter greens than I really wanted) so it had just enough time to wilt. The sauce ended up taking about a teaspoon of honey, because it was just slightly too sour/bitter, and the sauce, though good, still ended up slightly overwhelming the venison. The venison ring bologna--which is way too salty for my tastes--could stand up to the sauce, however.

The turnip thing was served over the kamut. The verdict? The turnip thing was quite tasty; better than last week's attempt, likely because I let the turnips cook a little longer. The sweetness of the apples and the spice of the sausage really went well with the turnips and greens. The kamut? Eh. It was okay, but nothing special. I like farro and barley much better, because both have more flavor to them.

I've also been eating a whole lot of salads; I grate a carrot in there, and throw in a handful of dried cherries, nuts, pine nuts, and/or grated cheese. Tonight I got some more carrots and salad dressing, so I grabbed some little tomatos for this week's eating. I try not to make it the 4,000-calorie salad, but a bowl of lettuce with nothing else in it is really not going to work for me.

This week's farm batch, arriving tomorrow morning, includes lettuce, cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, and garlic scapes; I've never eaten either of the last two, so more adventures to be had there. I found a recipe for roasted butternut squash and kohlrabi, and I have one more squash left over from last fall, so I think I'll try that. Garlic scapes I'll probably either throw in the salads or throw in the kohlrabi thing or cook with the cabbage somehow. Clearly I've been eating extensively from the brassica/cruciferous food groups.

All in all, I think the boxes are a little bit small, but it's early in the season. It is forcing me to live on a lot of vegetation, however, which is probably a good thing, particularly with the exercise aversion I'm currently experiencing.

As noted above, work is wildly stressful lately. Yeah, I know that I say that all the time; it just keeps feeling like it ratchets up without every ratcheting down. At the moment, for example, one of our major funding agencies is completely peevish at us, because we haven't turned in a bunch of data reports. On one hand, their data requests are never-ending, and excessive, and a complete pain--but they're they funders, so they get to request whatever the fuck they want. On a second hand, however, our data person can be a bit of a challenge to work with, and I'm getting rather tired of that. So I end up caught between, with both the source of data and the requester of data pissed off at me.

What's starting to happen, though, is that I have so many things on fire on my desk I just don't give a shit any more. Each day I try to focus on getting a couple of things done, and I do them, and the rest of the stuff will just have to fucking wait. You're pissed off at me too? Get the fuck in line. I know what your request is, and it's on my list, but I cannot get to it just yet.

And our budget this year is going to be a huge fucking challenge. Is our financial person helping us at all? No; no s/he is not. S/he sends finger-waving emails, and expressions of concern, but no actual helpful advice or analysis, and I am really fucking tired of that, too. The latest suggestion, today, was another useless bit of twaddle that does not seem to encompass any understanding at all of how our program works or the financial constraints we face. If I can carve out some time before yet another Big Meeting on Friday, I am going to do a line-by-line analysis of our budget, taking care to point out just how many expenses are out of our control and/or determined by Downtown.

I wish I had more time to enjoy my condo, too; even that ends up being stressful sometimes, largely because of my own craziness. I really don't have very much furniture, but I am absolutely determined to get it a little at a time, rather than blow all of my savings. And there's a whole room--the second bedroom, and the closet in there--that has a whole lot of crap in it, stuff that I have jammed in the closet, or not sorted, or whatever, and I do not, not, not have the energy to do that. Remember the tile-making class? Well, I did make one tile--and then never got my ass over to the school to pick it up, meaning it has probably been destroyed by now. Again, completely my own fault; I'd finish a long day at work and just not feel like taking an extra hour and a half to get home (taking into account the trip to the school and then home).

Whine, whine, whine.

Mostly, despite all of this whining, I'm hanging in there. Someday I want to find the energy for blog posts about something other than what I made for dinner and the sucky things that are happening somewhere in my life. My mood is much better than all of this complaining would lead you to believe. Maybe I'll just stick to food blogging for awhile . . .

Boxing Day

Usually when people say they have no food in the house it's something of an exaggeration, but, in my case, I'm down to club soda, an unopened bottle of wine, some dried cherries, some chocolate, garlic, baby carrots, currant jelly (for glazing things), and the stuff I'm going to dump (capers; outdated salad dressing; some really old mustard).

I inch closer to the everything-is-packed state, but I'm beginning to think that it's one of those conundra--each time I hack at it, I get half of the remaining amount of packing done, which means I'm NEVER GOING TO BE DONE. Which had better not be true, as the movers are going to show up in, let's see, 60 hours, and nothing slows down movers like having crap that's not packed. Friend came by yesterday with his vehicle, and we managed to haul all of the clothes, all of the food, and the cleaning stuff; once we got to the new place, I put away the food and clothes while he vacuumed. That's a little bit of a misrepresentation, because we ended up making a second trip for the rest of the clothes, plus a bunch of them are in a pile in the bedroom, or still in bags, because I don't yet have a place to put the socks and underwear and t-shirts (I've had built-in shelves and drawers for 12 years, and, before that, I had less stuff, plus I either had a dresser or shelves).

So, really, I don't have that much more to do. Tonight I packed three boxes and a duffel bag, plus threw out a bunch of stuff, and then my back/hip was rather excruciating, so I went and found some dinner. I'll try to do a little in the morning, and then finish the rest on Wednesday night, along with a load or two of laundry. I think I'm even going to disassemble the bed on Wednesday, just to make Thursday more relaxed--get up, make some tea, wait for the movers; if I still smoked, I'd have a few cigarettes as I wandered around, checking to make sure i haven't forgotten something in a corner somewhere.

Truthfully, though, it kinda doesn't matter much if I do forget something, as the landlord wouldn't let me out of my lease early. Yeah, pain in the ass, but it also means I'm not giving the keys back until the very last minute, and it means that Friend and I can move the plants next weekend, and it means that if i do forget something, it's not that big a deal. They're letting me use the security deposit as the last month's rent, so I actually don't have to shell out anything. Woulda been nice to get that extra bump--to pay for the movers, for example--but whatevs. A few more days of hassle, and a few days of unpacking, and I'll have a fab new place to live.

It's disorienting, for sure, for multiple reasons: the last time I moved, for example, my marriage and my life were disintegrating around me; I've been in moving mode for two months, ever since I decided to look for a place to buy; and I've done a whole bunch of this whole thing by myself. Friend put in a full day on Sunday, for which I am extremely grateful, and I know that GirlFriend will take me shopping for whatever I need after I'm done moving (she was out of town this weekend), but I've been packing and hauling and boxing for weeks, and I'm tired. Exhilarated, excited, happy, but also tired. But also exhilarated, excited, and happy--and I'll be more of those, once everything is actually in the new place, rather than sitting in piles around me here.

Adverse Events

My back and hip are hurting again--between not exercising, and no acupuncture for a couple of weeks, and Wii bowling (don't ask), it's really pretty annoying. So did I come home and work out, which, as noted, I haven't done for a week and which helps? Of course I didn't--neither yesterday nor today. Yesterday I at least had the excuse of putting away crap from the weekend, sorting laundry, and generally dinking around, but tonight it was sloth, pure and simple.

I think one of the things on which I'd like to work this year is being more . . . focused, I guess is where I'm heading. I have a tendency to double or triple or quadruple any given list of things to do, and then, not surprisingly, I don't get to everything on the list. Take tomorrow, for example: the original list included doing a (as in "one") load of laundry, testing the Cooks Illustrated banana bread recipe (and I even have bananas, thanks to donations at work), returning a cooking scale that failed after only a few uses, going to the bank, working out, and maybe cleaning things up a little, though it's not too terribly bad in here. That's a manageable list: a few things to do, a couple of errands, nothing too taxing, especially given that I'll throw the laundry in as soon as I get up, maybe do the bread then too, and, voila, half the list is done before 9:00, and it's a nice day off.

So then I start . . . adding things. Clean a couple of pair of boots. Maybe pick up some polish while I'm out, and polish them, too. Repot some plants that desperately need it. Vacuum. Maybe make a batch of breakfast muffins while I have the oven on. And, oh, I really need to review the financials before Tuesday's Big Stressful Meeting, so maybe I can go to a coffee shop with my laptop and spend some time looking at that stuff. Suddenly, this relatively short, totally manageable list becomes this floppy unwieldy thing, something that will require Planning to even accomplish two thirds of it, and if I get all of it done, it will be because I raced around. That whole relaxing-on-a-day-off thing? Gone.

Unless I organize it really well, in which case, well, yeah, I maybe might could do it all.

I've realized, however, that the fundamental problem maybe isn't totally a lack of planning, or even the ever-expanding nature of my lists, it's that I don't spend enough time at my house to get things done AND relax. Some of it is the time I spend at Friend's house; some of it is that I don't take days off--so, really, what needs to change in the coming year are those two things, despite the complications inherent in both of them. In the latter case, I end up not taking off days to do errands because I know the work continues to sit on my desk--I could describe three major projects and two minor projects, other than the things I've already mentioned, that are time-critical and pressing down on me. Taking a day off isn't relaxing, it merely puts me even further behind, and more stressed, at work.

In the former case, Friend and I have gone around on this one somewhat, The short version is that he's not really willing to hang out at my place; let's leave it at that. But I have things I want to do, things that can't be done if I'm not here, so . . . more time here, less time there, and, therefore, less time with him. Not my ideal situation, but neither is spending a lot of time in a place where my chores aren't.

I wish I had accomplished more at work today. In addition to talking to a friend and generally fucking around, I ended up spending significant amounts of time on the phone, either with my mom or on behalf of my dad. His nearly-full-body rash has returned, for a third time, so he's taking steroids again. The doctors at Sloan-Kettering say they've never seen a rash as a reaction--and, indeed, it is listed as "rare"--but it's clearly a reaction to the chemo. Neither his urologist nor his internist have seen anything like it, and he's seeing a dermatologist in a couple of weeks, I think. I called the drug company today and talked to a pharmacist there, and ended up helping her submit an adverse reaction report to the FDA (patients and doctors can report or not, but drug companies must report them), but she really didn't have any treatment suggestions. I found a couple of articles on PubMed, which led me to some docs at UC SanFran, which I suggested to my mom that my dad's doc call, but who knows whether that'll happen or whether it would do any good. (I'd really like to talk to my dad's doctor, but I don't know if I can finagle that.)

I also told my mom to get some aloe gel--pure aloe, not a cream of some kind--and use that on his skin; it won't hurt him, and very likely will help, and it's not more steroids. The only thing that really concerns me is that your skin is your biggest organ: if it's compromised too much, you can die, and tissue necrosis is a possible side effect of this drug. It's typically a result of touching the stuff rather than the contact dermatitis/allergic reaction dad clearly has, but still. And it agitates my mom, who really does not need to be agitated at this point. So, let's hope the steroids do their thing, and the aloe does its thing, and everyone gets through the weekend okay.

Eat Me

Mom finally came home from the hospital on Tuesday. I didn't really get to talk to her until yesterday, but she sounded much much better. At this point, of course, the only thing that will make a dramatic improvement in her health--and even that is (a) not a sure thing and (b) still only a way to stave off death a while longer--is a new kidney. But she's still in much better shape than a week or so ago, so yay for that.

Work has been really tediously heinous this week. I have a list of things that have to be done Right! Now! that is seriously long. I cannot actually get to that list, however, because there's handholding to do. One of my coworkers is used to having people to do stuff for him/her--people to take care of this or that bunch of details--but here in the non-profit world, we don't have that in our budgets. Thus, for example, although I have put nearly everything relevant to some questions this person must answer on our shared drive, s/he still barges into my office every time s/he has a question, rather than wading through the shared drive folders and actually looking shit up. And when something becomes urgent--e.g., money must be spent within a certain time frame--this person goes flying around like a whirling dervish, demanding that everyone drop everything so s/he can deal with it. I finally lost it at one point earlier in the week.

We have to spend our federal dollars within certain types of categories; deviations require conversations with project officers and so on (which isn't impossible, mind you, but yours truly is the person who has to do all of the contacting and supporting budget modifications and paperwork, i.e., still more work for me). We also get items from two different categories from the same supplier--that is, we get things from the widget category AND things from the mergatmacater category from Hank's House of Widgets and Mergatmacaters. If these things aren't invoiced separately, then all of the bills may get lumped into, and show up on the financials in, the widget category, which means it looks like we're underspending on mergatmacaters and overspending on widgets.

So, I said, can't these things be separated somehow? Oh, no, I'm told, that would mean someone has to go through the invoices line by line, figuring out which goes in the widget category and which goes in the mergatmacater category. Well, I point out (a bit testily, at this point), if s/he doesn't have someone do that, then I end up having to do it after the fact, and our accounting people have to reclass expenses on top of it, so put widgets on one invoice and mergatmacaters on a different goddamned fucking invoice, already, because I don't have anyone at all to help me.

This person is also late for every. fucking. meeting. Which I really, really, really hate. Unless you are taking a dump, stitching up someone's bleeding flesh wound, or performing CPR (and s/he wouldn't be doing the latter two, because s/he isn't qualified to do so), it will fucking wait.

I had a revelation yesterday, though, so there's that. It's a pretty tiny one, but it's important for my daily life. In particular, I've been realizing that several things are simultaneously true:
1. I cannot eat as much as I used to eat, unless I would like to go out and buy clothes that are three sizes larger than the current batch.
2. I'm actually not as hungry as I used to be, either (say, 15 years ago), or, more to the point, just don't need as much food to keep going.
3. I really enjoy food--not as a pure comfort thing, per se, but all of the textures and colors and, especially, smells and flavors. I find eating to be a wonderful, sensual pleasure. I also really enjoy eating--I've been eating with a book in front of me for decades (living alone for many years will do that to a person), and it's one of the true pleasures, though that's more about the whole experience of meal time rather than eating, per se.

What this all means, when taken together, is that I can't, and don't want to, eat as many calories as I once did, but I end up missing the experience, because there's so much less of it. I've been experimenting with focusing more on the actual eating part of the experience (instead of chowing as I read, paying less attention to the food), and that helps some, but I still end up feeling like I'm missing something. It's really not part of my nature or habits to sit there and stare at my food and eat it a tiny morsel at a time, but I'm trying to figure out how to rethink the experience so it doesn't require big wads of food, either. Slowing down definitely helps.

The other necessity is something sweet. It doesn't have to be very much, mind you, and I don't even need or want it all the time (and I have to make sure i don't start eating sugar mindlessly, either, because it's very easy for me to do that), but I definitely have a sweet tooth. I have learned how to modulate that over the years, in that I've discovered that I really don't need or want very much sugar to feel satisfied, and I've also discovered that higher-quality sugar (e.g., really good chocolate, rather than a piece of grainy, sugary stuff, though the latter will definitely do in a pinch) is more satisfying and tastes better.

See? I told you it wasn't very big. Or that interesting, either, I imagine.

Summarily We Roll Along

I am getting some acupuncture tomorrow, and I very much hope that it helps. I've had sacroiliac joint issues for . . . nearly two years, now? Lordy. Sometimes it nearly goes away completely, for hours or days at a time; other times I can barely move, and the past two days have featured episodes of that, complete with pain around into my groin and down my leg. Usually if I sit down it improves, but tonight not so much; the two days of baking, plus the stress and lack of sleep and running around during the same two days, probably all have something to do with the severity of the pain tonight. I know--partly from my researches into these things--that the best thing I could do for it is probably regular yoga and regular exercise, and I am doing neither of those. It's been nearly three weeks since I worked out last (though there have been episodes of long and brisk walks), and we're not even going to discuss yoga, because that will make me annoyed with myself.

Today, well, today started with the fire and it didn't improve much over the course of the day; more like "improved not at all, and got worse in several dimensions, particularly the one where the phrase 'summarily terminated' would be applicable." (It wasn't me that was terminated, I hasten to note.) So, yeah. And several meetings, while we're at it, including one in which I was informed, by BB, with about an hour's notice, that I would be providing a majority of the content and s/he would be attending the meeting, primarily to inquire about that content; no pressure there!

The only bright spots are the desserts, which look pretty good, so I'm hoping some actual monies are raised by these efforts. I have to get up tomorrow and make cream cheese frosting for the carrot cakes, but that shouldn't take very long. The mini smores tarts worked pretty well; I ended up using a ganache from school that's actually supposed to be a filling for a dipped chocolate. I'm a little worried that it's not quite sweet enough, and I couldn't torch the meringue on top (because my torch doesn't have any butane and I don't have an acetylene or propane torch), so I dusted with cocoa powder.

Hmmm. I had italian meringue (for the smores) left over, so I piped it onto a silpat, turned the oven down, and threw the pan in. I'm now nibbling on the slightly browned, chewy meringue bit and realizing I should have just piped a bunch of those and plopped them on top of the ganache. Oh well; I'll remember that for next time. Meanwhile, the oven was on because i was going to roast the beets I bought at the market on Saturday; no, that didn't happen, nor did I eat the corn from Saturday, nor have I eaten the lovely raspberries or peaches.

But--this Sunday? Bruce!

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme; Want, Want, Want

I was able to relax over the weekend, and I even took off on Friday, but I was fooling myself thinking that the Big Pain Crunch was over; alas, September is going to be full of crap, too. It becomes more complicated, and more work, because it turns out that a coworker is a sneaking snake who likes to make shit up and tell these tales at higher levels. it also turns out that someone in this array (I'm being purposefully vague) apparently has difficulty distinguishing between a pile of dogshit and a pile of yummy chocolate truffles, and we are going to have to spend some time educating this person about the goodness of the truffles (and hope that the criteria one might use to distinguish truffles from dogshit might rub off on this person, but that is likely a vain hope).

Larry suggested, in a private comment, that he thought my heart wasn't really in my work, and that turns out to be complicated. Oddly enough, I actually enjoy many of these tasks, and, in some ways, I appreciate the tasks involved with dealing with people who are Difficult, because it challenges me to become better--more patient, more understanding, less quick to snap. These are not easy challenges for me, as you might imagine, but I'm finding that I like them nevertheless. Which is not to say that the challenges are easy-peasy, or that I particularly enjoy realizing that I'm saying something dumb/snappish/wrong, for which I will need to apologize or that I will need to fix, but still can't seem to make my mouth shut up, but still.

And, again, here're two of the things I still miss about teaching, which perhaps gets at the heart of what Larry is observing: first, I cannot actually teach. That is, I do, in fact, have to educate people, but some of it must be done sort of surreptitiously; I can't simply put together a syllabus, and have discussions, and assign papers, and grade them, and so on. And if the people do not want to learn? Well, they are in positions such that I cannot fail them, or stop dealing with them, or whatever; I must continue to slog along. Sometimes, their failure to learn creates an obstacle for me, which sucks. Second, I very much miss the opportunity to do work that interests me deeply. Yes, I'm getting to do some analyses, and I get to apply a kind of intellectual and analytic rigor to subjects that have not heretofore undergone such analyses, and I get to try to explain things in ways that make sense to other people (who have varying abilities and inclinations to understand) . . . but that's not nearly the same as doing research on and writing about topics that are of interest to me.

That last point gets at a crucial difference between my fantasy job(s) and my actual job. I recognize that everyone, or nearly everyone, has to answer to someone, some group, some hierarchy, and that many managers, including those in academia, can be better or worse. It's not as though tenured faculty are freeeee! and can do as they please, or even, at least at all but a handful of schools, teach whatever they please. It may even be the case that one is required to teach courses that aren't particularly interesting or are loathsome in some way.

But, and it's a crucial but, the hierarchy isn't going to tell you what problems you much solve in your research work. If your work is on 19th-century British novels, you will not be instructed to, or ordered to, or need to, write and publish a paper on econometrics. You may conceivably become interested in econometrics and decide to learn about it and, eventually, write on it, but that will be driven by your interests and choices. I, on the other hand, cannot spend my working hours on problems that truly interest me or, on bad days, even engage me all that much. I enjoy the challenge of making a complicated financial and service-provision picture clear; I can sometimes enjoy the writing, if it's not too dull; I even enjoy simplifying and codifying processes in ways that make things run more smoothly or efficiently. The fact that I do get enjoyment is no small thing--but the problems I solve are not the problems that truly interest me.

I feel a bit bad for saying that, because so many people are unemployed, or stuck in jobs that are tedious beyond belief, or doing work that is boring and dull and likely low paying. But feeling grateful that my situation is better than many people's situations does not make mine an interesting job. Overall, I get to solve problems, in more or less interesting ways; I get to apply my talents to help other people who are in much worse shape; and I get (relatively speaking) well-compensated for these tasks, so it could be oh-so-much worse. (I could be lugging 50-pound sacks of flour, for $10/hour, for example.) And some days I feel like I'm actually doing something worthwhile, insofar as anything we do has any worth.

So there you have it: yes, better, or even good, in many, many ways. And still not enough. Having a bowl of ice cream, and being extremely grateful one has ice cream, does not eliminate the desire for hot fudge sauce.

No Flour

Every time I start to write a post, I end up finding myself four paragraphs later having done nothing except bitch; sometimes I throw in some moaning or whining, for good measure. Then I reread it and I get annoyed with myself and I delete it and go to bed the end.

I had a friend in college--we still exchange the occasional email, every couple of years--who tried to teach me to juggle. I learned the basic principles and did it a little, but I didn't have the patience or enthusiasm to practice it the way it would have required to actually become even the least bit proficient. Nevertheless, that's what I feel like I've been doing lately at work. I'm juggling too many things, and I drop something every so often because I cannot keep them all in the air; or I manage to toss a thing away, but then three more things get tossed into the mix, and something else tumbles to the ground.

There are no 50-pound sacks of flour, and that still counts for quite a bit. I've had a few tantrums with my boss this week, though, because I'm getting quite tired of having him tell me that I Have To Do This Thing! Because It's Late! Or His Boss Wants It! That does not solve any of my problems. I know these things are late, and I even know what it will take to fix them, but I keep getting dragged into something that takes four times longer than it should, or I discover that the previous director of business operations--who is a friend of his--fucked us in yet another way. Next week's blowup will be because a final report for some bullshit little research project about which I know nothing but am still supposed to write was due this week, and I simply did not get around to (a) fedexing the data to the person who's supposed to analyze it (not least because I don't know what our fedex procedures are) or (b) calling the foundation and asking for an extension. I have no clue to whom I'd need to speak, and, guess what, i do not fucking care. It will have to get in line behind the various projects that bring in sums of money with two commas in them, because I deem them to be more important, and if anyone has a problem with my priorities, then I will point this out. I cannot do everything, and I refuse to try.

I hate the conflict, and I hate the timesuck of trying to be nice and polite and full of kumbayahity. I hate that people come barging into my office, no matter whether the door is closed, and then just stand there, even if I'm on the phone. I hate being underpaid, relative both to my coworkers and to the work that I'm doing, even as I hate caring about that. I hate the stupidity of several of the people who are making substantially more than I am and whose stupidity costs me even more of a timesuck. The meetings drive me batshit, especially when people are wandering in and out, answering cell or blackberry calls/messages, which I find incredibly rude. (Look, people, you are not transplant surgeons, so I do not see what could be so fucking important.)

We had a full-day strategic planning meeting this week, and it exemplified nearly everything that's good and everything that's frustrating about the whole situation.

I asked my boss if he wanted me to facilitate the meeting, and he said, sure, if I wanted to. Which I did--not because I actually wanted to do that, but because I knew that no one else would, I knew that he hadn't even thought about it (or put together any kind of agenda--for a full-day meeting!), and I did not want to waste all that damned time. It actually went reasonably well in many ways, in part precisely because I did facilitate it, with an agenda, and a vision of what we needed to do and how to get there.

One person wandered away not once but twice, and then started whining at the end of the day because she was tired of the whole thing and wanted to leave, and a couple of others wandered away briefly, but in general people stayed reasonably focused. We managed to identify what we need to do, and we started thinking about how to do those things--except then we got sidetracked because we had to come up with bullshit goals that the bigger organization thinks should be our focus. These goals by and large ARE bullshit, and they will not result in anything real or meaningful, in terms of goals, objectives, or our actual challenges in the coming year. (And, you know, if I got asked by higher-ups about the whole thing, I'd probably say something close to that--that the goals are bullshit and do not relate to the actual things we need to do.) On the other hand, we have a good team, with a lot of strengths, even if there are some glaring weaknesses as well, and we are doing good work, and we are well-funded, so it could be worse.

In addition, I have no difficulties just leaving at the end of the day, or occasionally leaving a bit early if I have something I want to do; I'm even refusing to go to the capitol city for a one-day (bullshit) conference/training session, because (people don't know this is the reason) I have tickets for the NHL playoff games and I will likely have a game one of those nights. There are very few jobs that would entice me, one way or another, to put in 70-hour weeks on a regular basis--or even 55-hour weeks; I did it at the bakery because I didn't have much choice at the time. The job could easily become a time- and energy-suck, and I won't do that. I don't have the desire or energy for it; no one else around me--either above or below me on the org chart--is doing it; and there's nothing to be gained from doing it. If I thought that, say, two or three weeks of intense effort would get me all caught up, and then it would be relatively smooth sailing, I'd maybe be convinced to do it, but it's not at all clear to me that that's true, so screw it. I may need to reevaluate that conclusion.

Meanwhile, I need to finish an editing job this weekend, and I'm hoping to do that Saturday so I can spend Sunday doing a whole big bunch of nothing much. Okay, that's not entirely true: there's an F1 race to watch, and the season's first Indy car race, and a bunch of hockey, so the only question is how long I can remain on the couch.

Irritation Overlord

I had planned to take off on Thursday, in exchange for having gone in on Saturday and so i could catch up on my editing job, but nooooooo. A person in the organization is being a pain in the ass, and I therefore have to go to a meeting tomorrow morning. I am getting mighty tired of some things, most particularly of scrambling, constantly, to fix things and get things done and submit required things and smooth things over with various funding agencies, and then getting shit because I haven't also done it while balancing on my head and I haven't cured cancer. I jumped up and down and waved my arms around and cursed loudly a lot today, in the vicinity of my boss, mostly to blow off some irritation and partly to make sure he has my back and to figure out what our approach is tomorrow, so I can sit back and mostly shut up. Which I will make every effort to do, unless and until the person who's been being a pain in the ass starts pissing on my shoes again, at which point there will be issues. And then I'm going to come home and edit.

I saw an apartment today, and it had a balcony, and if you stand on the balcony, the thing outside is the beach. That's the good thing. It gets a lot of light, which is also good. However: it's $100/month more than the current place. It's a little smaller in the living room, which makes finding a place for my rowing machine a little more challenging. The kitchen is substantially smaller, with a lot less counter space. Most important, though, my spidey sense didn't tingle even a little--I didn't stand there thinking, "Wow; I'd really like to live here . . . hmmm . . . how can I make that happen? What do I need to do? Can I live with [this or that somewhat undesirable aspect]?" The location is tempting, the lake is tempting, but then I think about the deficits, particularly in the kitchen, and the extra money, and the cost of moving, and I'm not sufficiently tempted.

So send me calming thoughts for Thursday morning.

All About Me(me) x 5

Thanks to Jonquil (whom you really should be reading if you're not already): Comment to this post and, if requested, I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your blog and elaborate on the subjects given. Here are the five that Jonquil provided to me:

Baking My experience with this enterprise has led me to begin to believe that I really have to go back to school every now and again, in order to master some new body of knowledge. Of course, one could argue, quite easily, that I have not "mastered" baking in any serious, Brazen-Tart-Top-Chef sense of that word, and, if I'm going to be doing that going-back-to-school thing, I really must either win the lottery or find cheaper ways of going back to school. Caveats aside, I find that there is, in fact, a subtle but real sense that I'm Much Better at this than I used to be. I was always a pretty good baker--I wouldn't have come up with the idea to start a bakery if I hadn't had some notion that I already had a frame on which to hang subsequent knowledge--but I can do more, and do it better, than I used to be able to do, and I like that. The chefs in school said that they would expose us to everything, and, indeed, they did. The bakery enabled me to use quite a bit of it, at one point or another, which embedded it even more deeply. This doesn't prevent me from forgetting useful bits (today, while making a batch of nougat, I'm looking at the pan of sugar, water, honey and corn syrup and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if that's going to boil over?" Answer: Yes; all over the stove), especially because, now that I'm back in Officeworld, I don't use the bits every day. Flip side, though, I enjoy using them a lot more.

Buddhism Sometimes I think of myself as the accidental buddhist. I've never studied it or practiced it, in the sense of belonging to a sangha; I (mostly) haven't read the texts (though at two different points in my life I had a lover who studies one or another of the schools of buddhist thought, and one of them read Sanskrit, IIRC); I don't meditate or even practice yoga at this point; and i suspect my grasp of some of the concepts is more on the order of misconstrued lyrics than anything else. I also don't find myself in search of a religion or in search of meaning in my life. What I find useful about buddhism is that it focuses on finding truth (and provides tools for doing so); it doesn't have any deities; and it advocates compassion at all times. I find the distinctions between engagement and attachment interesting (though I have no clue whether I think about this in "buddhist" ways). I find it interesting that enlightenment is (at least theoretically) available to all, not through the grace of a deity or other intercessor, but through one's own actions, and that each being is responsible for his or her own actions. I have to add that my own attempt to practice compassion as Chuck and I were splitting up ended up being one of the best things I have ever done.

Homekeeping One of win-the-lottery fantasies has to do with buying or building a home that is a model in some way, or a home that has a masonry bread oven in the back yard, or a home that runs on solar energy, or . . . something. Even though I have lived in a major city for nearly 30 years, I have this fantasy of living someplace that is not-city (and definitely not suburbs; I cannot do suburbs, at all). What the fantasy is about, i think, has as much to do with the various arts and sciences necessary to keeping a home, especially the arts and sciences centered around the kitchen and the hearth and the sewing space (and the writing space and the art studio, as long as we've won the lottery here). I think that's actually the fundamental truth that comes out of a Marxist analysis, that we most of us, perhaps all of us, need and want to be able to do multiple things. (This notion is explored to interesting effect in both Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" (and some other work) and Sheri Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country," in both of which the residents of the imagined societies are expected to learn and practice multiple arts, crafts, sciences, etc. Much of our capitalist society doesn't think in terms of home "keeping": instead, we're expected to use, dispose of, buy new, in order to create a market. That seems so fundamentally wrong to me, and so at odds with homekeeping.

Friendship I have spent much of the last 30 years living by myself. Since 1981, Chuck and I lived together for about 5 years, and I had a roommate for less than a year in 1983 or so, but I have otherwise lived alone. Given that my family is about a thousand miles away, this has meant that I've built multiple networks of friends over the years, and I love them all. Some fade in and out of my life; some were friends in a specific time and place; some are closer to me than some of my family; some are more casual; and, thanks to modern technology, some I've never seen or met in person. Doesn't matter. We're all a part of these great webs of life and death. Sometimes our intimate (read: marital and familial) relationships and the way our society puts those at the center of everything makes friendship seem like an afterthought, but it isn't. I don't feel as though I have friendships "instead of" marital or familial relationships, because I have or have had all of those; I feel as though the fact that marital/familial relationships haven't occupied the center of my vision and my living space has enabled me to see how friendship is the thing that makes the other relationships possible in some important ways.

Starting over again Oy. Sometimes I feel as though I've lived several lifetimes in this particular lifetime. What I mostly feel is thankful that I have some ability to be resilient, and thankful I have the friends and family who can help me and support me through difficult times. As y'all know, I can also feel sad or angry or self-pitying, sometimes even for stretches of time. But what else can you do except . . . do the next thing? Well, yes, you can blog about it, ad nauseam, but sooner or later you must get the fuck ON with it. I could easily allow myself to be consumed with sorrow & regret, and some days/times that happens; I wish I could have been a professor, or owned a bakery, or been a programmer; some days I even wish I could have had a kid. it's not that my life is somehow incomplete without those things--the Brazen Tart once pointed out, correctly, that one cannot do everything. It's that I would really have liked to do those things (or the first two, for sure, anyway), and I think I might have been good at them, and I wish i could have found out whether I would have been, and I feel like I would have been able to offer more to people if I had been able to do those things (i.e., it's not a purely selfish wish to have done them). Instead, I slog along, writing reports and proposals that maybe four other people will ever read, and it feels like a waste. But it is what it is. And I still get a comma in every paycheck and I still don't have to lug 50-pound sacks of flour up a flight of stairs, so, hey, it could be a lot worse.

Needs

I'm very whiny tonight. (For the usual reasons: didn't work out; haven't worked out in a couple of days; not fitting into clothes; am not getting the support I need at work; am tired. Etcetera. There; now I don't have to detail any of it.)

I've also been annoyed by this article. And, really, who wouldn't be? I do not give a rat's ass that the people around you are taking two vacations a year ($16k) or have a car and driver rather than take public transportation, or have a nanny, or "need" suits and evening gowns, or need a vacation spot in the Hamptons or wherever the fuck the rich people are hanging these days. Really; I don't care. The culture that supposedly requires you to do that so that you can fit in is a broken culture. And it's broken in two very important ways. For one thing--and this is my lesser complaint, actually--that particular kind and level of consumption is problematic. For the other, more important, thing, though, the level of consumption is apparently provided and expected no matter how well or poorly these bozos perform. If I did my job as "well" as these titans of industry and finance, I'd be out of a goddamned job, not whining about how I just cannot get by on a measly half-million a year.

Take, by way of contrast, someone who has been incredibly successful in the financial world: Warren Buffett. Does he live that lifestyle? Um, no. Do his kids? No, again. I'm sure he's not perfect; none of us are. But the whole notion that one should be paid exorbitant sums (a) simply because others are making exorbitant sums, (b) regardless of whether one's own performance is good, in order that (c) one can maintain the Lifestyle of those others, is simply fucked, and not in a good way.

The worst thing, for me, is that these people don't actually MAKE anything. They do not build anything, they do not own businesses that build or make anything. You cannot eat, wear, drive, live in, or hold their "products." In fact, they work very hard to ensure that the products we need are produced elsewhere, in some other country, because that makes more money for the shareholders, who are, you guessed it, another part of this immense circle jerk. Not that I'm peevish about it or anything.

Weather Report: Exhausted with a Wad of Writing after Sunrise

1. I keep starting posts and then not finishing them, because bed or a hockey game or something is calling.

2. No, the proposal isn't done yet, and I'm exhausted today--bed didn't call early enough last night.

3. I'm quite glad about who got eliminated on Top Chef this week; the person who annoyed the shit out of me the most of the remaining contenders. It was also interesting because of the cheftestants who were eligible to be booted, i.e., arguably three of the best chefs on the show. Remind me to tell you why the person annoyed me, if you care.

4. Going on a three-day walk is not, in fact, "speaking out against breast cancer in the boldest way possible." Or, well, I suppose it might be, but you know what? Breast cancer does not give a fuck. Really. All of your "speaking out" won't do shit.

5. Also? Your life does not, in fact, have any meaning, and going on a three-day walk is not going to change that.

6. W/r/t the last post, I realized, based in part on your collective response, that my self-applied "loser" label has more to do with how I have lived up to my own expectations, rather than how well I have lived up to any external demands or expectations. I also recognize that at least some of the piles of crap that prevented me from getting to do some things were simply unavoidable--shit does, in fact, happen.

7. Did I mention exhausted? With a wad of writing to do today.

8. Made the cookies again (rosemary/cherry/lemon) and Was Pleased with them. They're cakey, rather than crispy, but I'm okay with that. Otherwise, little to report on the food front; I've had popcorn for dinner a couple of times this week, which tells you all you need to know.

Why was Aretha wearing that hat?

Because she IS Aretha, and, yes, she can wear any damn hat she wants. I also appreciated the subtext of shout-out to Marion Anderson.

As I noted elsewhere in Blogistan, I was watching Tuesday's ceremony in our conference room, on ABC, because that's the channel our TV-plus-rabbit-ears received the best. (We do not have cable at work, apparently, so we rigged this up so people could watch.) One of the blatherers commentators said, on seeing Nancy Pelosi and Senator Feinstein and the President-elect come on to the porch, that we would not have seen that tableau a hundred years ago. I blurted, because I could not help myself, that we would not have seen that tableau FIFTY years ago. There was general agreement about what I said, but the fact that the commentator was so ahistorical still kind of amazes me. Seriously: how can you claim to be a journalist and say something that fucking stupid?

Tuesday was also my first exposure to Rick Warren, and what a tool. At least I got a shout-out in Obama's speech. Incidentally, w/r/t the former, a number of my non-atheist friends were completely offended by Warren's recitation of the so-called lord's prayer (including my boss the ex-priest). It took me awhile to figure that one out, because, on some level, to me a prayer is a prayer is a prayer, and I find pretty much all public prayer offensive, particularly at sporting events and official government functions. (If you want to pray at any time, please feel free--I will even, you may remember, make space for said activity at my own (possibly) damned dinner table; but invocations of a deity at sporting and government assemblies are an enforced religious observance that annoys the fuck out of me.) However, I have learned that that particular prayer is profoundly christian, and, thus, at least potentially offensive to anyone who isn't christian but is religious in some way. Apparently there's a dispute within christianity, as well, as to whether one is supposed to have one's debts or one's trespasses forgiven; ah, sectarian disputes.

I believe we have "godless communism" to blame for much of this. I know you can find piety and references to deities all throughout U.S. history, but the upheavals of the beginning of the last century ratcheted everything up a notch. Communism, socialism, and anarchism, and, with all of them, atheism: many Powers regarded them as pure evil, and anything that could be associated with any of them, and anyone who didn't sufficiently despise all of those isms and anything associated with them, could be denounced freely. Same with labor unions, in part because the early labor movements were related, philosophically and sometimes politically, with the isms; all of them had as their goal a kind of liberation and justice for the common person.

Marx's historical analyses may well have been mistaken--that is, though the workers of the world may well unite at some point, I don't foresee that OR the withering of the state occurring any time soon. In addition, the attempts to create marxist-influenced society in eastern Europe/Russia and China were wrong in practice and possibly in theory as well (I do not claim to be any kind of expert on marxism/leninism). Nevertheless, Marx's analyses of capitalism and the oppression of the workers that results from it have much to recommend them. Some teacher along the way pointed out that Smith's and Marx's analyses of industrialism weren't all that different; rather, Smith is less disturbed by the oppression of the working classes that is a necessary facet of capitalism. If that's true, it is thus hardly surprising that the monied powers that be regarded any of the spawn of Marx's analyses as a danger. (Stalin and his evil ilk basically played into the hands of the anti-communist and anti-socialist forces by providing reasons for condemnation--reasons that had nothing to do with the message of liberation and justice that is at the heart of the marxist analysis. Whatever else Stalin was about, he was not about justice or liberation.)

On a completely unrelated note, it's been kind of strange to see Caroline Kennedy in the news of late. She's very close in age to me, and she was most frequently in photographs in women's magazines, either the ones my mom got or the ones I was reading for my dissertation, in the 1970s or so, i.e., when she was quite a bit younger than she is now. The current photographs show a middle-aged woman, which is a very striking reminder that that's what I, too, look like these days (and, let's face it, I don't have a stylist of any kind). Somehow, in my head, I'm still somewhere around 35. I'm trying to figure out how to revise that.

Some of it I know has changed: the other two women that my boss manages are in their mid-to-late 30s, and they're just in a different place than my boss and I are. I can definitely enter the rant zone, I can definitely go off on a tear, but the past five years seem to have made a major change in me. I don't feel as though I've finally reached some end spot, but I also sense that I don't get wrapped around the axle in quite the same way any more. I can't explain it very well, especially because most of you either don't know me IRL or haven't known me all that long, and I know that even to people who know me well IRL it may not be obvious, because, really, I am still capable of ranting like nobody's business.

But it just doesn't matter.

I guess part of it is that I've stopped believing that I'm ever going to do anything that matters or lasts, and I've stopped believing that I'm going to get to do any of the things I've dreamed of doing. Every one of my plans has, after a certain amount of effort and expense and time on my part, gone to shit. I'm doing basically the same work I was doing in 1986 when I left the east coast for graduate school in the city in which I still live. Yes, I have done some fun things--and paid dearly for them, in several senses of "paid," as well as met some wonderful people--so I don't want to sound too poor-pitiful-me, because that's not where I'm going with this. I've also foregone a number of things that might also have been fun--having kids, for example, which was something that I wanted to do only if I had (a) a partner (b) who also wanted to have kids. Having a kid by myself while I was in grad school, for example, or immediately afterwards, when I was deeply in debt and unemployed, seemed like a very bad idea.

So, given that, what am I going to do? Sit around and feel depressed and sorry for myself because I'm a loser? Yeah, okay, whatever; that doesn't sound like very much fun to me, so, no, thanks, I'll skip that. I've experienced depression several times in my life, and I have to say that I found it profoundly boring. I can expound on that if anyone cares, but I really did find it boring.

Okay, so no job I really want; no well-paid sinecure; no kids; no meaningful and fun work (though I do like my coworkers and my current job). I can either be happy with what I have--which is nice, relatively speaking--or I can be perpetually dissatisfied and depressed and crabby. Eh; the latter sounds like too much work. I'd still like to write a book, and I'd still like to start doing needlepoint again, but I don't know whether I'll manage either of those things. I'd like to live in a nicer space at some point, but the thought of moving makes me cringe, and I really don't want to pay all that much more for an apartment.

Whatever. I've resigned myself to being a loser. As noted, it just doesn't matter, so this doesn't disturb me nearly as much as it might have when I was younger.

One final note before bed: I constantly threaten my boss that he's going to be in trouble when I win the lottery. When things get really crazy, I inform him that I'm going to drain my savings account to play. Today he informed me that I'm never going to win, that he has called in all karmic debts to ensure that it doesn't happen. Which cracks me up--the thought that he's praying that I NOT win just amuses me to no end (though I don't know that he prays or even believes in a deity, per se, any longer).

More Bitching about Family and Cookies

Well, I've been writing posts in my head, anyway, even if they haven't made it here.

I made peanut butter cookies yesterday, from the Cooks Illustrated baking book, which you would expect to be good, given the yammering they do about The! Best! Recipe! Evah!!! And, yes, I did change the recipe a little (reduced the butter; added a little applesauce to make up for that; subbed honey for the white sugar and reduced the amount, but left the brown sugar as is; didn't have a cup of peanuts, so just used two cups of peanut butter, though the peanut butter was made from just peanuts, so should have affected texture more than taste; and added chopped chocolate), but I was still completely underwhelmed by these cookies. They were still WAY too sweet, for one thing, and not nearly peanuty enough, for another, so they were kind of a fail. They're edible, and still cookie-ishy, so people will consume them, but I really rather hated them. I know, I know; y'all are looking at that list of changes and thinking, well, of COURSE they didn't taste the way the recipe promised they would! But the two biggest problems with the flavor--the sweetness and the peanut flavor--should not have been affected by those changes--should have been unaffected, or even improved by it, perhaps.

So I'll keep working on that recipe, too, because I want some peanut butter cookies, damn it. In rummaging around on epicurious, however, you'll note that there are many recipes, but none that everyone seems to like, even the ones from Bon Appetit and Gourmet and such. The other thing about the recipes is that they all have a ton of butter, on top of the peanut butter, and a couple even have oil AND butter, which, I don't know, sounds wrong on so many levels.

Meanwhile, my mother continues with her but-you'll-be-aloooooone-on-CHRISTMAS lament, which is getting on my nerves. I've been trying to be patient with her about it, but it's starting to bug me. I explained that I have to work on Friday, which doesn't stop the lamentations--what's Friend doing? why didn't I "come home"? but you're going to be aloooooone--and I really don't know what to say. I have pointed out that I really do not give a good goddamn. I've noted that I have to work on Friday, and thus couldn't travel anywhere anyway. All to no avail. She persists in complaining/whining about how I'm going to be alone, which is a state that does not disturb me in the least. If she said that she missed me and she wished I could be there, I'd actually be more okay with that, because that's an expression of her feelings about the situation and about me, but she can't or won't come right out and say that, so she instead expresses dismay at a situation that does not dismay the person who is actually experiencing, i.e., me. (Expressing her actual feelings is not something at which my mother excels.)

The other thing that bugs me about it, but that I do not have the heart to mention, given her and my father's current health situations, is that not once in the past 30 years has anyone visited me for the holidays. Never. Not when I lived an hour and a half away; not in the 22 years I've been living in this city. Never. Chuck and I traveled there for Christmas more than once, including once with his son, and I have gone to them many, many times. But there has been no reciprocity, number one, and, number two, it was legitimate for me to be here when I had a husband or husband-to-be, but not when I am (wait for it!) alone. I will not even begin to try to explain this to her, because critiques of patriarchy are not something she has ever understood, but also, and more importantly, because she cannot visit me for the holidays now. They have talked about visiting next summer, and may actually do so--dialysis is certainly available in this city--but she hates cold weather and would be nothing but miserable if she were here now (did you notice the -20-something wind chills yesterday?), and managing dialysis in a different city and bitterly cold weather and not being around her only grandchildren is a bit much to ask of her. Still, I do wish she'd quit nagging about what I'm doing (or, rather, not doing).

I've been busy at work, and I still have several things I must accomplish before the end of the year, but I must also admit that I have not been terribly motivated some days (like today). Some of it is that I really do want (a) some time off and (b) a substantial raise, but I don't see either of those things coming my way any time soon. Other days I do manage to get some stuff done, but, really, did I mention some time off? I will get some this week and next--we get off for the eve and the day, for both Christmas and New Year's--so I can get some chores (like laundry) done, and also just kinda do nothing much. I have some side work to do, too, which means a couple of nice checks after the beginning of the year. The editing has been slow since July--only two jobs, including the current one--but I'm assuming it's merely a question of timing rather than a sudden decision that I suck. And, really, much as I enjoy the extra bucks, it's been nice to have a break from it, and after paying off the student loan. It'd be nice to get some work after the first of the year, admittedly, but my situation is so much improved from last year at this time. Tomorrow will feature some actual work--or it had better, anyway--as well as some meetings and such. Plus? Warmer! And, if I get it together, tomorrow I will bitch about Top Chef for your entertainment.

p.s. Get well, Brazen Tart!!