“If” by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son!

Special thanks to Syntactic Gymnastics, who (whom?) I’ve never met, but whose posts I connected to greatly. You have had a rough time of it, doing what you love but not being able to love what you are doing. So have I. And here we both are, two strangers, feeling a little lost and trying to figure out what to do with our idealism and, perhaps more urgently, our life directions. I wish luck for both of us.

What word do you think of when you hear…

1. Gossipping ::
2. Misplaced ::
3. Spaceship ::
4. Ignore ::
5. Bodily ::
6. Tweezers ::
7. Goodnight ::
8. Curls ::
9. Faucet ::
10. Right? ::

I think of blogging sometimes and don’t know where to begin. Much of the activities of my life have been more of the same– loving my job and hating how destructive it is to me. Wishing I had more in my life– or more OF a life but not having inertia to do what needs doing about it. And in some cases not knowing WHAT to do. I have been exploring the outer edges of this crossroads in my life and wondering how it will all come out on the other side.

My vacation starts today. I want to clean my apartment. Maybe that’s a bad way to spend a vacation but a clean apartment really would make me happy. I promise I’ll do fun things too. I’m dropping my keys and my laptop off at a friends’ house for the week. I may go into withdrawal but I’ll have to come up with something to do with myself… Clearly I need this break, hoping it helps.

I have a cold. I’ve been in bed most of today and have hit total boredom. Ever the workaholic, I’ve checked my work email a few times today, but managed not to do (much) actual work since I did after all call out.

My job is sort of a nightmare these days. It has often been that way, so I can’t even say that its more or less so than many other times in the past three years, but right now I’m at a low point in my ability to let things slide off my back. I know I need to leave, but I don’t know how, I’m struggling with when, and I’m absolutely terrified of what it will mean for my future– financially, career-wise, everything. It’s clear that the people who care most for me will probably want to throw a party when I finally find a way to walk away– but I have not yet figured out what it will mean for me. I find the whole situation utterly heartbreaking. I define myself by my work and for work to be such a constant source of anxiety is frankly tearing me apart.

I need a break.

And I do. Been meaning to update on our birthday and such, and answer her question about whether I’m excited about this new year. The answer is yes… I think. I feel strongly that my life is about to change or transform on some level, I’m just not entirely sure how and my one fear is whether I’ll have the courage to embrace it. But it’s time and I’m ready.

All that aside, I’ve been tagged. I’m supposed to tell five unusual things about myself. I feel like I’ve shared all the unusual things there are about myself at one point or another here, but hopefully something here will be original…

1. I have unusual allergies, including horses and sunshine. I know, its freakish.

2. My house was hit by a tornado when I was five. My strongest memories of it are of thinking it was cool my dad was carrying me around and of thinking it was weird all our neighbors came over with flashlights to examine our feet.

3. When I was in high school I studied Russian for a year in preparation for an exchange student trip. I discovered that my handwriting in Russian is better than my handwriting in English.

4. I live on the second floor of a house, in an “in law apartment” of sorts.

5. I have a kick-ass long-term memory. Can’t remember where I put my keys most of the time, but I remember things people said and did at various places 10, 15, 20 years ago…

Wow I just talked about something being 20 years ago. THAT makes me feel old.

What should I do with my life?

Ucellina had her babies yesterday. A little boy and a little girl. I think I’m slightly jealous. On the other hand, I’m sure if I’m ever faced with the prospect of recovering from a C-section and setting about to raise twin infants I would probably call such envy crazy.

Things are doing okay. I’ve actually had a really productive couple of days at work lately and its kind of been nice after a long stretch of the frustrating-sort-of-busyness and a lot of tension in the office. The tension is still there but I work around it and get left alone enough to breathe a little. It is not perfect, but it is manageable and that’s a lot.

The repair people broke my office phone (well actually the rats from days gone by had chewed through my telephone cord almost to breaking and the man was silly enough to pull too hard and make it official…), which I have LOVED because the thing that makes me craziest in my office is a constantly ringing phone. Newest Office Manager sends a lot of phone calls my way that her predecessors would have fielded themselves, and the interruptions make me crazy. As I’ve probably said before I think I have a short term memory problem– or at least an insufficient short term memory as compared to my stellar long term memory. So little interruptions like ringing phones seem to put me into a disarray at times, constantly trying to remember what it was I was doing before the phone rang. That somewhat valid excuse aside, however, I do have a sneaking suspicion that my lack of interest in the phone lately has a bit of social inhibition  at play too though. After years of being anti-texting I’ve now become a full fledged textaholic, and I’m sure it has as much to do with an unwillingness to connect with people in so intimate a manner as real-time talking, as with any actual usefulness I find with the technology. I’m a little cautious, a little more into myself these days I suppose.

I realized the past day or two what it really is that has been bothering me about my job and about the question of whether or not to leave it (and if so, how soon). Having poured myself into something that had value, something that I ultimately believed in– it’s extremely difficult to see it trivialized by people I respect. And people I respect have continually looked at this particular NonProfit and found it just a little fucked up. We have our good days and our bad days, and we certainly have our fans and supporters. But for quite a long time, on an organizational level, there has been a disconnect between what we profess to be and what our reputation is. I knew this going in, but I wanted to be part of a turn-around in that department– and maybe part of what I’ve been struggling with is a sense of failure that I didn’t make enough of an impact to change this Place into something respectable, even admirable.

So I’ve renewed the ArtSEARCH subscription, and investigated various Ed.D. programs, and tossed the Peace Corps ideas again. I don’t know where I’m going or what is next, but it’s becoming more clear that a change will need to be made.  In the mean time, time to start planning a road trip to see someone’s Babies of Awesomeness.

That means I’m turning 30. BestNieceEver is turning 1. It’s been a long strange year all around.

I’m not wild about this turning 30 business. I’m even less wild about it happening on a certain five year anniversary of a certain war.  There are few birthdays I ever was excited about in terms of the getting older part, but I do like the it’s-all-about-me have-a-good-day part. So, with that in mind, I’ve started thinking, what should I do to honor this upcoming occasion? I can’t decide what to do for my birthday, so your advice is appreciated. Maybe Silligirl will have it all figured out…

I am a “Director” in my little sometimes-struggling NonProfit, meaning not a “Manager”. I’m the senior staff member, and in this long strange “transition” I’m the only one of the now 3 full time staff who’s been here longer than a month. There are 3 part time employees 10-20 hours a week, the longest standing of which has been here since end of July.  And then there are a variety of independent contractors that provide services to the company but are basically around on a per-project basis. This is my third boss in four months, and it’s fair to say I’m grieving the other two in one way or another, but most particularly the most recent of them.

Yesterday was a pretty lousy day. NewBoss is angry with me because… oh it’s a pretty long story. But among the highlights are that she feels I have a bad attitude and that she feels “taken advantage of” by the fact that I’m in and out of the office as much as I am. My hours are odd at times and a strategy I’ve had against my Workaholism has been to try to keep track of my hours and “make up” extra time as it comes up. So, for instance, when I got called in for my supposed day off this week, I worked less hours one day later in the week. To this point, flexible hours has been one of the few benefits of my position and all the stress it causes me. I’ve been lucky to be in a job where I can schedule a doctor’s appointment one morning and not have to jump through hoops to clear it, because everyone knows that I will work several hours “overtime” in the long run. This isn’t working for NewBoss, which is her right to determine I suppose, but her intense reaction (considering we’ve never had a discussion about my hours or her expectations in general) and a few things she said greatly concern me.

She wants me to have more regular work hours (9-5 or 10-6 or something) no matter whether there was a late night meeting or event I was required to go to or not. She basically said that telecommuting isn’t really “doing work” and that if I have to “do some typing at home” its on my own time. The implication is that if I was using my time well in the office I wouldn’t have work to bring home. And that as a “Director” if one of my staff calls out on my day off and I have to cover for them all day, I still need to put in the additional hours above that.  I am a salaried, at will employee. So my question becomes, if salary means I don’t get overtime and am expected to come in above and beyond the traditional “8 hour day plus a lunch break,” is there no upper limit to what could be reasonable hours or workload?

One of her other issues is with one of my two assistants, J, who has a young daughter and is currently sharing a car with her husband because she has to save the money to get her car fixed. I hand-picked this assistant because she is nothing short of amazing and helps me out in innumerable ways. She comes in when she is sick, and she goes above and beyond with the tasks I assign to her. When I ask her to do something, I do not worry whether it will be done or done competently. But there have been times where her child care has fallen through, and so she has called me to see if there are possible tasks she could do from home, or in two cases brought her daughter to work with her. The other day it was raining and she was driving to the office from a mountainous area where it was more slippery than in Office’s City, and she called to say she was a little delayed because of traffic and safety but that she was on her way. NewestBoss has serious problems with all of this because it did not “look that bad” outside, and because she “raised two kids while working and never had any trouble.” I care about J and I’m protective of her in a way, but mostly the tenor of NewestBoss’ objections is what really bothers me. It seems like her view is that there aren’t other priorities in life, and that it’s reasonable to expect that J would choose to put her family after her job.  And when she says to me that the 50+ hours I worked last week aren’t that big of a deal, and that in fact she doesn’t consider time I spent subbing for an absent staff member, making phone calls on the way to the office, having business related lunches with potential partners, or typing up multiple reports on my laptop at home count as work done– that in fact she feels I’m trying to get away with something by NOT  WORKING ENOUGH… well, its been a difficult thing to process.

She wants to structure my hours, fine. She wants to define her expectations, fine. She thinks her lifestyle choices have worked for her, fine. But suddenly my struggles to create a life outside of work seem to have another obstacle, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.

They have meetings for this you know. AA style. So I’m told. I’ve been flirting with checking it out, but I have a sense like its a little bit of a cult and I don’t know if I want to be in a cult exactly. Maybe that’s a dumber reason. Can’t be any dumber than “I’m too busy,” though. But that’s the excuse I give myself, the same excuse I have for not setting foot in my church for a few months now, even though I think all the time how good it would be for me to go.

I am sliding along the edge of my twenties and I wonder, is this a young life crisis? Is this some kind of rite of passage that just has to be gone through; is that all this anxious depression these past few months is really about? Does it have more to do with a biological clock or developmental stage than the details of my life? Or is it I just have a toxic job and so much unhappiness would dissolve so easily if I just moved on, whatever that entails. I have this tension inside of me lately, this SOME CHANGE HAS TO HAPPEN within me, gnawing along the inside of my shoulder blades, pushing me to something, but what? Do I just up and move somewhere? Adopt a kid? Go teach third grade? Join the Peace Corps? Would any of that HELP? Or am I just looking for a distraction from pain that will be there no matter what major adrenalin rush I force into my system with some catastrophic new life for myself?

Blogging is well-suited, for better or worse, to whining, and I feel like I do a lot of whining lately. When I imagine the person I wish I was, I find her far more content. My childhood and my early adolescence were particularly characterized by a drive to be all-tolerant of people and situations, to block any negative opinion about much of anything from coming to even the surface of my consciousness. Certainly I had my criticisms of Sister, but they were well-tempered by guilt I felt over pain I saw her in– and I would have been hard pressed at that time to find a bad word to say about anyone. As I grew older I gravitated towards the opinionated and passionate around me, who I could love with a well-disciplined tolerance and somehow deep down live vicariously through. I learned from them and changed who  I was– or maybe, found who I was because of them. I did not own the rules I held for myself exactly, they just appeared and functioned as a sort of endurance test for puritans that I thought I must do well in for some reason. Be perfect. Do well. All the time. But my perfection wasn’t of a Donna Reed variety that got me to create a put-together appearance for myself or to practice a seeming relaxation amidst chaos. Instead it required me not to care how I looked, dressed, was perceived within the strange culture of other teenagers– it required that I pretend not to care if anyone thought I was pretty and in fact to discourage the notion entirely on the basis of its clear frivolity. It required that I be too wrapped up in school, in shows, and in 12 page letters to penpals to participate in my own life in any “normal” way. So I guess some of this life is a matter of habit. But it developed as a strategy for protection from the risk of being disliked, or looked down upon, or seen as interested in meaningless things– I successfully prevented the thought from ever occurring to anyone. So maybe the question has to be, what makes me so fragile that I feel the need for such life paralyzing self-protection?