assistant to the regional manager

today was my first day as team leader. it was exhilarating. i did absolutely nothing that i normally do. i talked with people. i took a notebook and pen into an office for a meeting. i read zero articles, wrote zero abstracts, and didn't have to keep track of my moment-to-moment activities. i was even invited to a lunch by Ellen (head big wig) and the rest of the managers. i feel like i get to play with the big girls now. it's so very strange. at break i went to the gym and ran an easy mile. i felt as if i could run the five k. that must be adrenaline. i guess i've never had that kind of high off of work before.

and part of me is scared that when the dust settles i will find myself looking with envy at the peons reading articles and writing abstracts.

for now, this interests me. i was getting bored. not with reading, but with the tedium of doing the same thing day in and day out. now i will be learning every day and doing something new and making my own projects. they say i will still be able to write abstracts when the work is slow, but for the foreseeable months ahead it looks like a lot of training and quality control. will this become tedium, too?

i guess i feel proud of me. i feel like others are proud of me. i've got this title and new tasks and importance. and yet i loved my old job.

i wonder if i would have to take a pay cut if i decided to go back to being a lowly abstractor?

one year. six months. and counting...

definitions i want to remember:

ad nauseam: making the same point over and over

ad hominem: attacking the person, not the issue

ad numerum: appealing to the majority as if the majority is right and has no possibility of being wrong

routine is good

so i've been sick. it started with a scratchy throat and promptly turned to gunky coughs and sleepless nights. okay, one sleepless night. but it sucked. now every two minutes my eyes water and my nose tickles and i sneeze. my upper lip is getting raw from blowing and wiping. j.l. called today and left a message. she sounds just like i do. so now i know, eh?

being home for three days gave me plenty of time with j. unfortunately, neither one of us is good with changes to our routine. we're getting better about resolving things quickly, but for some reason we got on each other's nerves faster the last few days, too. the pattern: b. gets upset. j. gets upset. j. talks a lot. b. talks a little. b. and j. hug and cuddle and say nice things and fall in love all over. then the pattern begins again. i'm hoping it's just our need for normalcy (my being home all day during the week with no energy to do anything not being part of normalcy).



last night on a walk i asked j. about who our hypothetical kids would go to if we were to hypothetically die and have to leave them to someone in our hypothetical will. which, note, is a horrible question (though, eventually, necessary) that of course causes all kinds of arguing and can't help but get personal. my advice: don't discuss this question with someone unless A) one of you is an only child B) you actually have a kid and C) you're semi-inebriated.

anyhow, we got past that question and moved on to our dreams for future finances and living (a fun topic for poor newlyweds where one spouse works so the other spouse can go through graduate school so that the first spouse can eventually quit work and the other spouse can make lots of money just because of the level of educational achievement)... i received an email today from my friend j.c. asking if j. and i want to come on a sailing getaway in the British Virgin Islands in february. all we'd have to pay for is the airplane tickets.

and this to a couple who is still trying to save enough to make the last $150 payment on a couch bought from this very same j.c.

(not Jesus Christ, btw).

anyhow, now that i'm getting well, j. and i can just go back to being happy in our normalcy.

which we really are. j. keeps me laughing. he's good at coming towards me to meet me in the middle. sometimes he even goes further than the middle if i'm not quite there yet. it helps me to meet him right back, and then we somehow forget that there were sides we came from and we just rest contentedly in our collective space.

an amusing anecdote (taken from an email to a.)

So the other night at the Creative Memories workshop I had about four women over, including mom B. We spent most of the night in the kitchen around the table. Afterwards, mom B. stuck around for awhile, sitting on the couch with j. in the living room. At some point she was looking up at the wall and commenting on the pictures hanging there. Then her eyes shifted to the white board we have up on the wall where j. writes his “goals” for the day. she started reading some of the things out loud and suddenly j. jumped up in a panic at the same time that I called out “No!” Written under Monday’s Goals was “Sex” with a box next to it! I’d written it there jokingly on Monday and forgotten to A) erase it, and B) check the box. j. erased it really quickly but his mom was so confused that j. said “It said sex!"

she laughed so hard she cried.

if you've ever wondered if it's worth it...

last night i hosted my first "creative chef/pampered memories" party, as j. would say.

a creative memories party, that is. "get together" as my "consultant" called it.

before throwing this party i almost canceled my weekend trip to vermont out of fear that i wouldn't get the house cleaned in time. i came home early monday evening to vacuum and dust. i had my mother-in-law purchase honey roasted peanuts and lemon tart from Trader Joe's. i guilted j. into picking up a bottle of wine and moving our cedar chest into the living room to be used as a coffee table. i ignored a friend when she emailed to say she couldn't come (i've gotten over it now and can't wait to see her tomorrow). i rushed home with my stomach in knots and raced around putting all my piles in the bedroom along with the body ball and two boxes of crystal that never made it to storage. i carefully arranged the plates, wine glasses, forks, tea, honey, and sugar on the counter and placed chocolates and peanuts in little dishes around the room.

so was it worth it?

i can honestly say i had an absolute blast. only three other women came (mom B., a.h., and j.l.) and it was the perfect size. i was so afraid that the consultant would find that we're all too poor to buy anything, but surprisingly she made a lot of sales. i was given a lovely hostess gift, we all made two scrapbook pages, and to top it all off i was credited $55 worth of merchandise for being the hostess.

best of all, as women we were able to sit around a table and focus on encouraging one another in the creation of something beautiful.

even j., when he came home from orchestra rehearsal, expressed excitement to see how our albums turn out in the future. so funny to hear him talking about how great "corner rounders" are.

i hope the girls and i can continue to get together and create memories...

climbing the ladder

speaking of The Office...

i am being promoted to Team Leader.

floods

here is a difficult topic--one i was discussing with j. and his mom the other night.

having grown up in an avidly pro-life home--traveling to D.C. every year to stand with signs in front of the white house--i find this debate difficult. a few years back, having realized that my understanding of faith was no longer simply that of my parents (but not knowing what it was) and in order to avoid any pretense, i cleared the table of all i'd once believed so that i could start from the beginning and build from that which i knew as truth. i've been adding to the table ever since. basic tenets, like: god exists. jesus was god. without jesus i could not have a relationship to god (not only in the whole sacrificial/substitutional way, but in a more personal way: In the midst of all this human pain, if god hadn't come to earth and experienced it, how could he relate to us, and how could we respect him?).

since i went back to such basics, abortion really hasn't been an issue i've thought long and hard about in recent years. and, anyhow, it's not an issue i've had to deal with personally. (side note: why is it that people who don't have to personally deal with issues like abortion or homosexuality have such strong opinions about them? why is it that these are the issues that bring them out marching or cause them to vote a certain way? why don't these same people who get so mad about abortion or gay rights or whatever deal with their own issues, such as greed, pride, self-righteousness, etc?)

but j. and mom B. and i were talking about abortion the other night. i guess because of an episode of E.R. where it seemed every woman on the show was dealing with different aspects of the abortion issue. one of them was a teenage girl who was raped.

i hate the idea of killing a baby. who likes that idea? i think the pro-life movement likes to paint pro-choice advocates as people who just want to kill babies. it's not true. people call hillary clinton or john kerry hypocrites because they want abortion to be "rare, but legal". they are not hypocrites. they are not secretly hoping that more babies will die.

in the days of Noah, god looked at the earth and saw how the generations screwed up the generations that came after them. the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children. when you have generation after generation where parents abuse or otherwise mess up their children (and then many of these children grow into abusers and otherwise incapable parents of future generations of messed up kids)... i guess what i'm saying is: i understand the flood (!) i get why god would look down and see layer upon layer of tangled sin and do what he did. how do you fix that? how do you change such a messed up society into a society where all children are cared for and there is no abuse or sin [or premarital sex, drugs, rape, unwanted pregnancy, teenage pregnancy, etc]?

you start over.

you have to start over with parents who have not been screwed up themselves. parents who will raise their children to be healthy and wise. parents who will provide an environment for their children that will be conducive to bringing the kingdom of heaven here to earth--that will reflect god's true intentions for human life.

but in this imperfect world... without the ability to flood it and start over... how can we expect people to act as in a perfect society? our world is as it was in the times of Noah. and god wiped out every man, woman, and baby in that day.

couldn't it be a possibility that in some cases god offers abortion as a way of starting over? as a sort of mini-flood? so that in this or that single instance, the sins of the father will not be visited upon the children?

working on a saturday

it's a sunny winter saturday. everything is slightly melting and everyone is out adventuring. it's a day when people get up early just to walk under the blueness of the sky and above the whiteness of the glistening snow. the gold in the air makes us all think of spring...

a case, yesterday, of my physician's office refusing to prescribe six little, individual antibiotic pills without seeing me in person so they could diagnose me with what i knew i had and prescribe me for the drugs i knew i needed has landed me here: at my desk, at work, on a saturday.

an ebscoland rant:

i have sat here since nine-thirty. i have completed over sixty articles, which comes out to more than seven hours worth of work. i need to put in an eight hour day. so you would think i could go home in an hour...

i have three hours left to sit here.

where is my incentive to keep typing? will i get paid more?

i will get my fifty-cent-an-hour raise next september, like every other peon in The Office.

of course, i could have taken a sick day yesterday. paid, at that. which is a benefit i admit i'm very thankful for. but the reason i'm here today is that i couldn't bear to lose two hours of overtime (time and a half) that i had already worked for during the week and which would have been null and void had i just called in sick.

to spend my entire saturday in The Office, on one of the only sunny new england days of the winter, so that i can make forty some-odd extra dollars is sad.

how do you make it in this world from being desperate for forty extra dollars to having a home with kids and a dog and two cars? i feel like it was easier for our parents. somehow they figured it out.

but then, there are the stories of my mother surviving off of a tomato plant that seemed to keep producing tomatoes for her to eat while my dad was away in the navy and she was desperate for food. stories of the family who took her in once a week for dinner and sent her home with the leftovers that she would try to stretch into as many meals as she could. stories of the homemade christmas gifts that she and my dad made out of scraps because they had no money to buy presents. stories of the boxes and cement blocks and boards that they fashioned their furniture out of in their first apartment.

so maybe i'm not so badly off. maybe it's all right.

i'm luckier than many. i have an example to follow.

but what about sasha?

at a certain point in life, you start to believe that some things will always remain the same. for example, that your parents will stay in the same home that they have lived in for over twenty years for the rest of their lives.

so my parents are both having mid-life crises.

here is my take on it:

having just turned fifty-five (and having experienced troubles at work at roughly the same time) my father went through a sort of existential "what is it all about?" phase. since he had attended a missions conference just weeks before, he then decided that god must be calling him to the mission field. which means moving to a carolina, or africa.

my mother, having experienced her first six months as a retiree, has decided that making life a little more interesting than the constant Curves/bible study/errands life she now lives would be completely lovely.

i, for one, think the whole thing is nasty. they are now "praying for god's guidance." i am praying for god to slam the door. are parents allowed to do that? can they just up and move ten hours away? leave a salary job for a job that requires raising your own support from churches? what about my babies? when will they see their grandparents? what about my inheritance? when will i have the money to fly to a carolina? and where will i stay when i want to see the mountains and A. and N. and L. and C.?

and what about sasha? how can we abandon my childhood dog???

okay, so i know sasha is dead. but having lived in that home for sixteen years with her i always still feel like she's just somewhere in the house. i sometimes still block the doorway when i let people in because i don't want her to run out like she used to. she will never live in another house. how can we leave her there?

and part of me feels so unsure of my own future. who knows where J. and i will settle. we could go anywhere. my heart strings lead to vermont, and specifically, to Brookwood. how can my parents uproot the most stable part of my past?

of course, i can't make choices for them. and maybe god really does want them to leave... want me to be separated even further from family... want me to realize that "home" is where i am, not where i'm from.