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Month: March 2005

Practicing Nonattachment

Practicing Nonattachment

Although it looks like the job issues are starting to settle down for the short term, I’m still not sure that this isn’t the beginning of the end for me at the Big Corporation where I’ve been working for the past few years. I never thought I’d ever have a corporate job in the first place — I mean, I was a writer and an academic and in general, ever since I gave up on New York City in my twenties, had been someone who’d chosen quality-of-life over making a living. But when I finished my PhD and was so miserable and fed up, and especially fed up with being broke, I thought I’d give it a whirl. I remember driving around the Bay Area with my brother when I’d first moved out to California and I was temping while trying to find a real job. I remember looking at all those big buildings and thinking “there’s got to be a job for me in there somewhere.” Those buildings looked like safety. Those buildings looked like people who had the kind of stability that Patrick and I had never really known. I wanted in to one of those buildings. I wanted to try to build a “normal” life, to stop trying to be so special and artistic and authentic and just have a life. Make enough money to have a decent place to live and maybe go on vacation once in a while.

And so I got a “real job.” I got a real job just as the book I’d given up on was beginning to find a life. Because of this, my first few months at the Big Corporation were somewhat surreal. I was the oldest, most overeducated intern I think they’d ever hired (and the fact that I was still enrolled, since I was ABD, was crucial to their ability to bring me in as an intern), and the whole time I was madly trying to pretend I had a clue about computer networking or technical writing, I was getting emails from my agent about which publishing houses were interested in my book and which ones had passed. It was enough to make a girl’s head spin.

I never thought I’d stay at the Big Corporation as long as I have. But my novel, while it did reasonably well for a very dark first novel, never earned me enough money to even consider leaving. And then life just sort of happened. I worked my way into a position I liked, working with people I liked. I managed, after two years of concerted effort to get them to let me telecommute full time so I could move up here to My Little House in Montana. I discovered I liked having the safety net of a traditional middle-class job — health insurance, a 401K, a generous salary. And because I wasn’t paying attention, I let my debt level run up to the point where I really need to keep this job.

And so, despite the fact that the job changed suddenly and radically on me last fall, and despite the fact that I’m no longer working with people I know well and I’m having to adjust to not having that kind of trust and rapport one builds when you’ve survived the wars together, and despite the fact that this has been a very bumpy transition. I’m not going to be able to go anywhere for a while. And so I’m back in the place where I was three or four years ago, where I have to prove that I’m a solid employee, a hard worker, someone who can be depended on, while simultaneously building a new set of personal boundaries between my life and my job.

I was talking to Wendy-the-Buddhist about this last night. About how I’m trying to practice nonattachment toward my job. About how I’m trying to just accept all these changes, accept that I’m no longer an insider in my group, accept that I have to start over and prove myself again. About how I have to let go of my own ego and hurt feelings about having to start over like this. About how I’m trying to accept all that while not getting attached to outcomes. About how I’m sitting again because lately this transition experience has me not sleeping, has me indulging in worry. We talked about how many people we know have jobs they don’t really like — we’ve both weathered major career changes in the past couple of years, and in the process, we’ve talked to a lot of people about their jobs and how those jobs either do or don’t work for people.

Because as difficult as this transition has been for me, I still have a Very Good Job. All I have to do to remind myself of that is to go look at a site like Ravings of a Corporate Mommy. I get to stay in Montana. I don’t have to go to an office every day. Because of the time difference, I have a little block of time in the mornings to write, and now that the sun isn’t setting at four in the afternoon anymore, and now that the mountains are starting to thaw out, I can walk my dogs every evening in a place so beautiful that people come here for vacations. I am deeply grateful that I have a job in the first place, especially one that affords me the very pleasant life I’ve built.

But I can’t help feeling like it’s also time to start planning an exit strategy. Like it’s time to really start living small and pay off my debts, build up my savings, make a long term plan so I have some options and so I don’t wind up like so many people I know, semi-trapped in a job that is just a job, wondering what might have been, wondering if one wasted one’s chance here on the planet.

Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home

It’s funny, the things you don’t notice until you’ve left a place for a while. I’ve lived in the Bay Area twice, when I was getting my Master’s Degree, and then again when I left academia and decided to get a “real job”. I liked it okay. I never really felt at home there, but it always had its charms. There were good restaurants and fabulous produce in the Farmer’s Markets, and the landscape itself was lovely. There were evenings I’d be driving home from the South Bay, and I’d come over the hill from Pleasanton, and there would be the whole bay spread out before me, gleaming in the early-evening sunshine and I’d think, yeah, this is a pretty good life.

But having been away for a couple of years, it all seems a little much. I even tried to go clothes shopping, but when it came down to it, I just didn’t care. I went to the nice mall one evening — I don’t really need much, although the nice t-shirts I like have been discontinued and the ones I have are getting a little ratty, and since I’m picky about the fabric weight, and since I’m neither tall nor particularly thin, I like a shirt with a little shape to it, so I went wandering through the mall, looking to see what’s out there this spring. And I just didn’t care. I wandered in and out of stores and suddenly it all seemed sort of dumb. I’m really trying to pay down my debt so I have more options in my life, and as I wandered through the Stanford mall, I just didn’t see anything that I wanted so badly that it should slow down my real project, which is to free myself from the financial obligations that tie me to my day job. I thought of my dad, who when he was here last spring, said that in Europe, he feels pretty satisfied with his life, but when he comes back here for a visit he can feel the huge machinery of the American consumer machine going to work on him and all of a sudden he starts wanting stuff, not anything in particular, but just more stuff. That’s how I felt in that mall, like it was all just stuff, and there wasn’t really anything I wanted.

So I went across the street to the fancy grocery store, and bought some olives, and bread, and cheese and a bottle of wine and went back to my hotel for the evening. I’d said something to my new manager about going shopping, and she couldn’t really understand why I hadn’t been into it, which only sort of added to the general sense of estrangement I wound up feeling all week.

And so, it was with enormous gratitude that I woke up this morning in my own little bed, in my own green bedroom, with the dogs and the cat and sunshine coming through my windows. It’s good to be back and meet up with Maryanne for lunch, then stop into the wine store where Deb asked how my trip had been. Its good to be back in a place small enough that we all know one another, and what’s happening in our lives. It was nice to stop into Matt’s meats for a chicken and to comiserate with Matt who grew up in Sonoma and nice Margot who I don’t know so well yet who moved here from southern California about how glad we are that we all found a home here. It’s good to be home, where there are little daffodils coming up in my yard, and where nice Susan who cleans for me, and who is also a gardener, dropped in during the week to bring in my mail and check on the tomato seedlings, and where I don’t feel like we’re all spending our time just chasing that great carrot on a stick that is the American dream of more stuff.

Yargh!

Yargh!

I’m embroiled in a some annoying work stuff that’s taking up all my time. I feel officially middle-aged now — I have a job I’m beginning to hate that I can’t afford to quit.

Blogging will continue to be quiet as next week I’ll be in San Jose for meetings — the good news is that I’m going out to dinner with The Fabulous Pim one night, and on another night I’m having dinner with my beloved 75-year old aunt who is a nun, a practicing psychotherapist, and the best golfer in her age bracket in the state (you should have seen her back in the day when she’d go out on the course in her habit!). I find these trips exhausting — although I can be very social when I need to be, essentially I’m an introvert, so a week of meetings and dinners and breakfasts and meetings and coffees and talking talking talking just takes the stuffing right out of me. To say nothing of the doggy-deprivation — a whole week with none of my patented cure for the blues which is to lie down on the couch and apply Owen, my puppy, directly to the heart chakra (well, at two he’s hardly a puppy, but he’ll always be my baby).

Green Sauce

Green Sauce

It must be a spring thing, but every year about this time, I become obsessed with green sauce. I want it on everything — grilled chicken, poached salmon, steamed cauliflower, my morning cheese toast. Green sauce varies — this spring’s version is slightly Indian — I was going for that great green sauce you get in Indian restaurants but I wound up with something slightly chunkier. Basically, here’s what I did. I took a bunch of scallions out of the bottom of the fridge that were slightly past their time, washed them and trimmed off all the skeevy bits, cut them into chunks and threw them in the Cuisinart. Into the Cuisinart also went two bunches of cilantro, about six sprigs of mint, four garlic cloves, two jalapenos and one red fresno pepper, the juice of two limes, a big sprinkle of salt, a nub of peeled ginger, and a generous sprinkling of ground coriander and ground cumin. I whizzed it up, adding olive oil until it got liquidy and tasted it. It was missing something. So I added about a cup of leftover yogurt. And I’ve been eating it on everything.

There are variations on green sauce one can make as well — the addition of anchovies and capers adds a nice depth (or even some fish sauce might be good). Whirring in some chopped nuts — walnuts are my favorite is also a good addition. The greens can be varied as well — arugula, watercress or parsley are nice.

So, spring must be coming because after months of eating carb-y wintery food like potato gratins and rice pilafs, suddenly I want clean grilled food, accompanied by salads, or steamed veggies with a big dollop of green sauce. Green sauce on everything. Yum

Six Cubic Yards of Compost

Six Cubic Yards of Compost

On Friday, the day our Miss Martha was sprung from jail, I had six cubic yards of compost delivered. The first year I ordered three yards, then last year I ordered four and noted in my gardening notebook, that I could easily have used six. So, this year it was six yards, which is a very big pile of dirt.

At this point, I have flower beds, about three feet wide, across the front of my house, and running thirty feet along the side. I also have a long perennial bed that’s about six feet by thirty along one side of my back yard, and I just extended it by another 20 feet (eliminating two patches of lawn that were a pain to mow). Then there is the vegetable garden, which is eight raised beds, and a three-foot wide strip of flower garden running down the opposite side of the back yard where I grow mostly hollyhocks and sunflowers. My long-term goal is to get rid of as much lawn as possible, and just have flower beds and a patio (or, should my ship come in, add a convertible screen porch off my kitchen). But I’d like to slowly replace the lawn with something less thirsty, and more scenic.

Six cubic yards of compost was enough to cover all these beds at least two inches deep in lovely dark compost. Last year, I didn’t have enough to really cover the perennial bed, and the soil there really shows it — it’s the least friable soil in my whole garden. I’ve also had a lot of problem with annual weeds in that bed, so I’m hoping that a nice thick layer of compost will help with that.

I had an odd evening on Friday — I had quite an upsetting conversation with the guy who my brother Patrick drove home the night he died. This man’s had a tough time dealing with his own regret that he let Patrick drive back down that long road, and although I’ve told him on any number of occasions that I don’t hold him responsible, he’s had a hard time working through it. We’d all been out — there was a fabulous community performance — the Main Street Show — which my friend Maryanne describes as “Prairie Home Companion for the Really Twisted”. It was a great show, and afterwards everyone was dancing and having a good time. So I was really pretty upset by this guy deciding, after having had a few, that he needed to walk me home and blather on about Patrick’s last night. I really didn’t want to go there. I’d had a fun evening. I had a cute outfit on. I’d flirted a little with a couple of people, and danced, and listened to people I really like perform brilliantly. I didn’t want to go over Patrick’s last hours and what we could have done to have prevented his accident.

So Saturday morning I was a little cranky, and was really glad that there was that big pile of dirt in my back yard upon which to work out my crankiness. Yes, Patrick’s death has been a terrible thing, but I’m getting through it, and despite my sorrow, it was a lovely sunny day, and the cheery sight of my raised beds, topped up with beautiful dark compost, ready and waiting for another year’s crop of greens and tomatoes (which I’m planning to trellis this year. I saw some really interesting-looking tomato trellises in France last fall, and I want to try that method), went a long way toward banishing my blues. I layered the grass patches I’m trying to kill with newspaper, then bark mulch, then compost, then straw, then compost again. I’m thinking I may try potatoes in that section — Elwood and Nina grew some potatoes last year that were so wonderful. Who knew that a potato was that much better when fresh? I’m also thinking of putting in a raspberry patch back in that part of the yard.

A couple of months ago, Leah over at Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen mentioned in relation to Before Sunset that what seemed most interesting to her in that movie was not the much-vaunted “connection” that the characters shared, but rather, that they each responded to losing one another by creating works of art, and to her that seemed extraordinary. I remember thinking at the time, “but isn’t that what everyone does? makes something?” Maybe it’s that I was raised by somewhat artistic parents, particularly my mother, who when the going gets rough, gets out the craft supplies, so my first response to not really knowing what to do next, is to make something. It’s what I’ve liked most about finally owning a house — I can make a garden, or paint a wall, or cook a meal for my friends (or write a book, but that’s much less fun than all of the other options). So after an unsettling night out, it was a joy and a comfort to have a garden to work on. I thought of Miss Martha, volunteering to begin her prison sentence before the appeal of her conviction has played out, and wanting to do it in the winter so she’d be home in time to get her garden in in the spring. Life is generally unsettling, but preparing for spring, thinking about new roses, transplanting herbs and imagining a raspberry patch in that back corner. Well, it burned up some energy, it made things lovely, and cheered me up enormously.

Flu Strikes LivingSmall

Flu Strikes LivingSmall

We are all about the couch, the kleenex, the chicken soup here at LivingSmall. Thank goodness there was so much bad bad award show television this weekend. But it’s very sad, I missed the Spanish wine tasting on Saturday, that I was really looking forward to after Meg’s post on Spanish wines. But since I was all stuffy, couldn’t have tasted anything, felt dizzy, and really didn’t want to infect everyone else at the event, I stayed home. Tant pis.

In other news, nearly a year and a half after being orphaned, Patrick’s dog Raymond (named after the late great Northern Wisconsin fishing guide, Ray Kennedy) seems to have decided that I am indeed, his person. Now Ray’s lived with me since we brought him home (yowling all the way) from the breeder in southern California, but he was always Patrick’s Dog. In the last few weeks he’s started to really mellow out — he’ll climb up on the couch and instead of curling up in a tight, sad little ball on the other end of the couch, he’ll flip over on his back, legs splayed, and snore. There’s nothing quite as nice as the sound of a snoring dog beside one on the couch. Especially when you’re blowing your nose!