Unemployment: A Love Poem

How was my writing week, you ask? Well, in a word, it was fan-freaking-tastic.

A partial list of what I got done in my five free days:

- I cleaned out the bathroom cabinet and finally threw away those humiliating Slim Shots I bought during one especially low and vulnerable trip to Wallgreens.

-I made lentil stew so that I would not waste the bone from the pork shoulder I bought to make "shot-and-a-beer" pork. Very thrifty.

-I wrote about 30 pages of fiction, which is more than I've written in the last six months.

-I threw a potluck brunch for the neighborhood collective.

-I went running (everyday).

-I submitted two short essays to Babble.

-I gracefully received two rejections from Babble.

-I accepted a freelance gig.

-I submitted a short essay to the New York Times.

-I, together with the Mister, cleaned out the garage. Trips to the dump were made. It was awesome.

-I translated some immigration paperwork for my kids' wonderful daycare teacher.

-I played with my kids

-I hung out with the Mister.

Three times this week I have paused—I'm in bed or at breakfast, maybe I'm alone in the car—and had the surprising and utterly distinct feeling of contentment. Not the absence of complaint (which, for me, would be surprising enough) but the presence of contentment. A bodily feeling of contentment.

It's weird I tell you. So weird that I do this mental scan, looking for things that might be wrong. And, nope, nothing bugs me. I'm like the Dali Lama over here. Frankly, it gives me the jitters.

I am reading the amazing and wonderful novel Olive Kitteridge right now and there is a line in which one of the characters says, "I wonder what it was that made her so distrust happiness?" and it sticks in my memory because it is the only line thus far that has rung absolutely false.

Doesn't everybody distrust happiness? Isn't that what happens when you live into adulthood? It's absolutely just a fact that happiness, like the common cold, is fleeting and reoccurring. You're up. You're down. It's just the way of the world. And I'm ok with that.

From here

What gives me the willies are the days upon days of total contentment. Nothing is wrong. I love everyone (well, except the Republican members of congress and Sarah Palin). And really, it can only be one thing: unemployment. And let me tell you, if I had had even the least inkling of how great it would be to lose my job, I would have done it a long time ago. Like this guy. He might be on to something.

On a completely different note: There is still time to enter the "guess the date of the first egg" contest (I really should have come up with a snappier name). So far, we've got nothing, so you could still get lucky.

Quesadillas, the Solar System, and Michael Jackson

My dad and brother are in town and we are out in West Marin living the good life (there are oysters and wine and Cowgirl Creamery cheeses in our future so I am happy).

Whenever my dad is out, he tests my kids on their language skills. My kids go to Spanish immersion daycare and are getting quite good at their second language, something my dad is really into it. He's always asking me what they can say and understand and testing their comprehension. He likes to test kids. During the summers he used to make me do my times tables in Roman numerals and write essays about the solar system (mine explained in exquisite detail about how the sun circled the Earth). It sounds tortuous but I enjoyed it at the time. I've always been kind of sick about impressing my dad, hence deciding to do my junior years abroad in Hungary. Hungary? No one goes there.

Anyway, today in the minivan on the way to West Marin he was testing Maggie. And for the most part, she was doing pretty well.

Dad: Como se dice "cat" en Espanol?

Maggie: Gato.

Dad: Como se dice "rat" en Espanol?

Maggie: Raton!

Dad (entering a tunnel): Como se dice "tunnel en Espanol?

Maggie: Quesadilla!

It's the three-year-old version of the essay about the sun circling the Earth, I guess.

A thing I like

I leave with this, because, whatever else he was, he was the pop star of my generation. And this is a great song.

I don’t mean to whine, but IKEA only serves Pepsi

I’ve been kind of down in the dumps lately (I know, just what people want to read about after a long day in the trenches, but bear with me).  It’s hard to explain why, but it has to do with some curdling mix of trying to write a novel, and reading Mountains Beyond Mountains and feeling as though doing anything that is not in the service of others is shallow and meaningless.  There are so many people out there who are fucked unto the Lord, as Anne Lamott would say, and here I am trying to write amusing sentences about a twelve-year-old girl.  And, like, who needs me when the world has Michael Chabon and Lorrie Moore and Richard Yates?  

Mixed in to this existential crisis is the fact that my kids have learned the word “hate,” and the little scraps of patience I was sometimes able to muster have mutinied and fled. Then there’s my inability to be skinny, and my irritation with myself for still believing, after all the evidence to the contrary, that skinniness equals happiness. 

Furthermore, it looks as though my trip to Italy may not materialize. I’ve decided I do not like writing workshops. Our chickens are constantly shitting in their water, considerably adding to my stress levels.  I have disconcerting joint pain.  My house feels small and cluttered and there is juice on the floor that has been there a week. I wore out my expensive shoes and now they look bad.  Oh, and I’m losing my job but I don’t know when.

Guess if eating alone in the IKEA cafeteria this afternoon helped my mood. 

 

A thing I like

First of all, I forgot to update you on the completely successful neighborhood potluck I had in my backyard after the weird run-in with my icky neighbor.  It was great, really.  All these people I didn’t know came and signed up and ate chips and drank beer and, I don’t know, it was a little glimmer of hope in my otherwise shitty week.  So, there’s that—the fact that a lot of people (or at least 10 people) want to make our neighborhood a better place.

Then there’s this, which starts tonight and is a big reason why summer is my favorite season.

See? It’s not all bad. 

At least it's not Hannah Montana

Today I took the kids to exchange a few duplicate birthday gifts.  It was their first foray into a toy store.  Deprived, I know, but I try to keep episodes of sobbing materialism to a minimum.  

The agreement was that they could each pick out one replacement toy.  I was using my mind-meld techniques to steer them towards a new doll stroller (Maggie's broke) and a set of pots and pans for their new stove.   

Instead Oliver fell hard for the first thing his eyes landed on: a nifty Tinkerbell cylinder bag with a beaded handle.  He calls it "my purse" and saying he likes it is to do a grave injustice to the intensity of infatuation everywhere. He is sleeping with it at this very moment.

My only regret was my reaction.  Once I realized he meant business, I gently urged him to check out the trucks, which, duh, could never match the splendor of a lavender tin Tinkerbell purse.  I mean, in a million years. Please.

A thing I like

I just started The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After by Melanie Gideon, which, from what I can tell so far, is a memoir about my current stage of life—the what-next stage when you have the relationship and the house and the kids and maybe even the job and then, well, having it all can be a little static.  It turns out that life is like good fiction: the main character has to want something to make it compelling.  

Anyway, I liked this little passage here:

"There's this strange phenomenon. An hour after you've put your children to sleep, the ways in which you have wronged them sprawl out on your chest, all two hundred and fifty pounds of them, and suck the breath right out of you. It works the same way with gratitude. An hour after your family has left the house, you love them with a piercing intensity that was nowhere to be found when you were scraping egg yolk off their breakfast dishes. Your hope is to one day feel this way about them when they are in the room. This is a pretty lofty goal."

 

Anatomy of a good day

Today's a good day so I thought I'd maybe spend a little time boasting.  It's not often I'm feeling so Julie Andrews about things.  Soon it will be all whining and complaining again. So enjoy.

I don't mean to rub it in, but this is where I work and this is what I look out on from my office.  Do you see the fountain splashing lightly in the sunshine as my co-workers (that's Sara the wine editor on the left) sip some good Western wine? It's not always like this.  Sometimes its all about the printer not working or people hating your headlines or publicists calling you about faux-rock siding.  But all this is worth it because it's not that unusual to get emails that say things like, "Champagne and oysters in the test kitchen, get 'em while they last."

Also, this is on my drive home and only four blocks from my house.  That's Point Reyes in the distance. Again, it has its drawbacks, like dense, cold fog all summer long.  But, boy is it nice in spring.

I am perfectly aware that it's going too far to brag about my daughter, so I won't.  I'll just say that last night when my back hurt she took it upon her self to "pat" it until I felt better. So, you know, I like her.

Thankful for everything, really

Save your fork, there's pie!

So, I totally get why ladies of a certain type like to go away to spas and other quiet places where fluffy towels are provided and the only noise is the soothing tinkling of new age music. 

We have had a truly lovely Thanksgiving weekend.  The Mister was off for three days—a treat—and we had all these incredibly fun, warm, shiny people over to our house for turkey and all the fixings (meat-eaters, try this stuffing). On Saturday we even got all picturesque and trekked out to a tree farm in the mountains above Santa Cruz to cut down a Christmas tree. We picnicked in an old apple orchard and drank wine out of plastic tumblers and the kids picked pears and ate them off the tree. Really, it was just so...nice. Nice in a way I always hoped my life would be.

The Mister with our fresh kill

But here's the thing.  It's Sunday evening, the sun is down, and all that's left is the dealing part: making dinner and cleaning it up, bath time, packing lunches for the twins' first day of daycare tomorrow, putting all those damn lights on the tree, folding laundry, and well, I just now realized that that  I haven't been alone for a minute in a long, long time.  My children even accompany me into the bathroom (this is potty training, not a lack of boundaries).  

And then today at the playground where the twins screeched for me to push them higher, higher, higher and Woody dropped his ooey, gooey ball at my feet, demanding that I throw it again and again and again and I looked down and realized I had worn my darn clogs to the playground again, the ones that fill instantly with sand and make it all but impossible to walk, I just had this crazy vision of some silent pool in some cuckoo place like Sedona and even though I am so, so thankful, truly thankful, for my sweet life, I just wanted to go to that quiet pool and immerse myself in all that warm, quiet water and be alone.

 

Instead I went to Wallgreens to buy Christmas lights and gum and low fat Triscuits. Which, if you look at it from certain angles, is its own kind of blessing.

Maggie & Ollie like dessert best