The High Tech Way

Must be that time of the year...

I am adding things to my "to do" list at more than double the rate that I'm able to cross them off. My days go from 7 am til 11:30 pm with nary a 15 minute break to contemplate the really important things, or even remember what they are. There's no doubt about it. I am feeling overwhelmed and unappreciated.  And I seem to remember feeling the same way around this time last year too, although last year was considerably more stressful with the new job and the move across the country, etc.

I'm thinking about taking a sick day on Friday, dropping the kiddos off at daycare, and then coming home and climbing into bed and hiding out under the covers. Because, after all, if momma's not happy, nobody is happy.

Coda

When I was 12 and a half, lightening struck my house.  It was a three-story Victorian house in a working class neighborhood. It had five bedrooms, one bathroom, cost a fortune to heat, and had no air conditioning. So there was one window air conditioner in my parents' bedroom where we all would hang out in the dog days of summer. One of those days in the late afternoon we went to pick up my brother from his little league game in the midst of a giant thunderstorm and then went straight to a party at my aunt's house.

When we came back a few hours later there were fire engines everywhere. It wasn't obvious when we were driving up what house had had the fire. But when we rounded the corner, there it was.  My mother said, "Oh my God, Peter, it's our house!"  (Peter is my dad.)

We learned later that the lightening had actually hit that air conditioner, which had been plugged in, and caused some kind of explosion and electrical fire. This burned out my parents' room entirely. The rest of the house suffered smoke and water damage. 

We were homeless.

Also, we'd lost many of our possessions.  All the books. All the photographs. All the clothes.

After a night at a neighbors and then a week at a hotel, my parents took a tiny apartment nearby and sent us up to spend the summer with relatives in the country several hours away. My parents worked to fix our house all summer.  I spent my pre-teen awkward summer away from my parents and suffering from chicken pox.  I was angry to be in the country away from my friends. I missed my home. I missed my family.  I was sarcastic and annoyed. I was itchy from the red spots that covered my entire body.  They would wake me up at 4 am, and I would slip down to take a baking soda bath. Really, as summers go, it wasn't the best.

Once you've had chicken pox the virus can lie dormant in your nervous system and reappear, often in middle age, as shingles, a painful rash that can last from two to six weeks. This is what the doctor told me my new painful rash was.  And it made me think of that shitty summer long ago.

Had we but world enough and time - My 2008 New Year resolution/goal

As a gift to myself for my birthday I scheduled the day off from work to go get a massage and facial, using a gift certificate David gave me for Christmas. Since we just moved here in March, it was to a place I’d never been to or heard of before. I was about 2 minutes away from the place this morning when I got a call on my cell from the salon saying my facial had been canceled. The aesthetician had had a family emergency. Could I reschedule?

No, no, I couldn’t reschedule. I have no time. This precious time I had today was a rare day off from work, when I left the boys in daycare to make time for reflection and being extra nice to me.

Really, I’d scheduled the facial because (1) I wanted the extended facial massage because I carry a lot of my stress in the muscles in my face, and (2) I’ve had these deep dark circles and bags under my eyes since New Years morning and was hoping that a facial might help them.

Of course I understand that a family emergency is a family emergency. Still, it did not make me any less disappointed. And I was a little surprised that they didn’t offer me any other services while I was there. (I still had a scheduled massage.) They gave me coupons for a free manicure and pedicure, but they couldn’t give me my time back.

And this lack of time is the crux of my New Years resolution. If you remember last year I set two of them – to nurture my inner Martha Stewart and to nurture my inner Cindi Crawford.

This year it’s all about nurturing my inner Leo Babauta, the author of the Zen Habits  blog, among other things. I am among many fans. He just won the best overall blog in the 2007 Performancing awards. 

But it’s not his blog success that is what inspired this goal (although it is amazing how he's built such a place in just a year). It’s his message of simplifying. And this is a message that I can take to so many areas of my life to steal time back for myself.

I recently told an old friend that everything is good with me. My life is full and I am living my dreams. Obviously this is an amazing place to be. But today I was thinking about my choice of words. Full. That means there is no room for anything else. And there are other things I want to fit in. For example, reading for pleasure, taking better care of myself, losing the infertility and baby weight, getting back into shape, among other things. All these things take time. And I have no time.

I cannot cut back on my work, and I’m not sure that I want to. And I certainly don’t want to cut back on my family time. And you should see my house now. I sure as hell cannot cut down on the tiny amount of cleaning and maintenance I do now.

So the overarching goal of the year, to nurture my inner Leo Babauta, means decluttering my space, creating systems to improve efficiency with work and home tasks, so that these things take less time than they do now. That way I can squeeze as much extra time as possible from my days for these other things.

Leo recommends having just one New Years goal. So nurturing my inner Leo is my tricky way of squeezing a whole lot into that single goal. And by doing so I plan to change the laws of physics, creating more time than I had before.

Civilization and its discontents

Just an hour and a half into my workday on Thursday, daycare called and said that Jack had diarrhea, and I would have to come pick him up.  Indeed, much of his class had fallen ill over a few days time, with bodily fluids spewing forth either one way or another. Poor little guy.  The stuff shot straight up his back into his shirt. I picked him up, gave him a bath, made him lunch, and then we watched Dora.  Then I put him down for a nap.  We kept him home on Friday too, and thankfully my mother had the day off and babysat for part of the day (since I'd already taken a sick day the week before when James had a fever.)

Jack's teacher blamed the class-wide illness on a parent who had sent his/her child to school knowing full well that he/she was ill.  By Saturday we were cursing that parent.

My mother and step dad had kindly offered to babysit both boys while David and I had a day out for Christmas shopping and whatever.  We'd been looking forward to this for weeks and we were even going to grab an early dinner, just the two of us. But on Saturday David fell ill with this disease.  He couldn't go.  It was a low point of our week when we were both crying -- him feeling guilty for being sick and making us miss our day out and me whining that "nothing is ever easy and why is it always so hard?" Pathetic we were.

We decided I would go without him and try to finish our Christmas shopping. I settled the boys down at my mom's house and went to the main drag of Chestnut Hill, which is a neighborhood in the city with a lot of independently owned shops. When I got there I was still sniffling in my self pity about my day gone wrong.  But as I walked down the street by myself, popping into stores, listening to the holiday music, the hysteria started to lose its hold.  At one point I went into Robertson's Flowers. They had converted the Victorian greenhouse in the back into a breakfast and lunch place. I walked through the orchid room  to go peek into the greenhouse, now a restaurant called "Cake."  There were about 15 tables back there and about a third of them had adults seated at them. They were sipping coffee and having conversations under the light of a gray winter sky coming down through the panes of glass high above their heads.

I glimpsed civilization in that moment. It's been a long time since I've paid attention to what I've been missing.

When I got back to my mom's place she looked harried.  She was holding James and getting the toy tea set ready for Jack's tea party.  Jack had been awake for about 20 minutes.

"I don't know how you are doing this," she said.

I don't know how I am either.  I feel like things keep slipping through the cracks. My house is a wreck.  I never have time for makeup.  I have no clothes that fit me because I don't have time to find any. But I love my boys, and rather than fussing over these trivial things, I am focusing my life on enjoying my moments with them.

When things ease up, though, I'm headed to that greenhouse for some coffee with adults.

Identity

What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, according to Shakespeare.  But if you are looking for a rose and plug the word "skeleton"  or "piano" into Google, you'll never find the rose, so you won't get to smell it at all.

In college my friends and I talked about whether we would take our husbands' names if we ever got married. I said that I would take my husband's name if I liked it better than my own.  And that wasn't hard to do. I didn't hate my last name, but it was very common.

However, when I got married the first time I was torn. I'd started building a name for myself with my existing name. But his name was much better. So I considered hyphenating the name.  He said he liked this, and he said it in a sweet romantic voice, so that is what I did.  But when things didn't work out, changing the name back was just one more unpleasant task on my long list of them to do during a difficult time.

When I remarried 11.5 years ago I kept my own name.  Part of it was that I didn't want to go through this changing names back and forth and back and forth.  Part of it was that I had an even more established career under my own name.  But now, nearly a dozen years later, I am considering changing my name to my husband's name, even though all my work over 20-some years of my career is under my birth name.

Why?

• After this many years, maybe the marriage will work out.
• It would be nice to have the same last name as my sons.
• The name sounds really good with my first name. Better than my current one does.
• And then there's the totally mercenary reason. My own first name, chosen by my mother 43 years ago because it was unusual, is now very common.  Together with my current last name I have a very common name.  Google it and you will find a Harvard professor (who happens to be my aunt), a gymnast, and dozens and dozens of other people notable for some reason or another.  Back when Google started in the 1990s if you Googled my name, I was the only person who came up.  But now everyone else is there too.

When I Google my first name and my husband's last name together, no one has that name.  So taking my husband's name for my career would be better for my search engine optimization...

On one hand there is a part of me that is afraid that it would be jinxing my marriage to take my husband's name because of what happened before. So often we waste time preparing for yesterday's tragedy after it is long gone.  Maybe it is time to stop doing that and start getting ready to take advantage of tomorrow's opportunities instead.

A merry merry Christmas

David was browsing around on the web for Christmas presents while I was doing dishes tonight.
David: Do you want a Jack Bauer action figure?
Me: Is it life-sized?
David: No, it's six inches.
Me: Does it vibrate?

Thankful

So many things to be thankful for this year: my little family -- David, Jack and James, our new house, that we have good jobs that we like.  But really it all comes down to this: after so many years of struggling to get here, I feel like I am living nearly all of my dreams.  I can scarcely make myself say that for fear the Universe will hear me and take it all away again.  But here I am today, so grateful.

Postcards from my time-crunched schedule

In honor of NaBloPoMo I seem to have less time to blog than ever before. Nonetheless, I have been vastly entertained by those who are participating and reaching down into themselves to find topics and prose when they thought there was no more. Bravo.

And also, I have been enjoying the fact that Aurelia is pregnant.

But it has been so hard for me to even keep up with everyone lately -- in fact, ever since I've been back at work from maternity leave. I have so many things to write about and no time.

Like how Jack likes to listen to classical music on the way to daycare in the morning. If there's a piece he finds particularly moving he asks: "Again?" because so far he has grown up in a Tivo/DVR world.  Someday he will be telling his grandkids "When I was a little boy we couldn't replay radio."

Or perhaps that we have heard, for the first time, little chuckles from James over the past week.  He is not one to flash some little closed-mouth smile.  He gives the full on gum-only mouth-wide-open smile. 

Or that James has been taking the bottle since around Halloween. Although not from me.  Still this opens up the possibility of doing things such as going to my NY office for the day, which I was able to do last week.  And in spite of being utterly stressed that all transportation on the east coast would shut down due to some unknown disaster and I would be stuck in NY and unable to feed my little nursling, the day went very well, and I made the trip back in record time.

Or that I went to the funeral of my 99 years, 9 months and 20 days old aunt yesterday.  I did not know her well, but I think it's important to go to such funerals because it's not like her high school buddies could make it.  That's when you really need to rely on your relatives and distant relatives to make a good showing at your funeral. 

It was in one of the city's spectacularly beautiful Catholic churches. Even though it was in a neighborhood where the residents don't have much money, the church was really beautiful inside. It had stood there for years and served many families. My step-father told me that he was baptized at that church and that there had been a fire there in 1947. It fills me with awe to think of all the people who came and went through those doors over the decades and looked at the same things I did there.

Asking for what you need

The title sounds like an Oprah episode, and I know how we all feel about Oprah after her treatment of infertility.

However, holy crap, it really does pay to ask sometimes.  When I was looking for a new job a year ago I told people I was looking for one that I could move across the country with me and that I could do mostly as a telecommute (work from home).  And I got it.

That job, however, does involve quite a bit of travel to cover various events. (I am a journalist who covers a specific industry.)  The idea of traveling was completely stressing me out, given the whole problem with James refusing the bottle and me running over to daycare every day at lunch to nurse him.

Day after day emails would come by from my bosses, asking for volunteers to go to one event or another.  And I would sit there and pray for someone else to volunteer.  And they did.

But today I decided to tell them my problem and ask to be exempted from travel for a little while.  They responded very positively, told me that they value my contributions very much, and asked if there was anything else they could do to help.

I'm so grateful for that.  And I'm so glad I swallowed whatever fear I had and asked for what I needed.

Real Complicated

This week the new issue of Real Simple arrived in the mail here.  It was very thick. And I still haven't finished looking through the last issue of Real Simple, which is collecting dust on my bedside table.  I think about it wistfully in the 30 seconds between when I climb into bed and when I fall asleep.

Maybe because my life is currently Real Busy or Real Complicated.  Nobody would buy a magazine with that title.  Or a book about how to get more disorganized.  Or tips on how to forget everyone's birthdays.  Or how to eliminate exercise from your daily routine.