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[ughandalso]

On whatever passes for hanging in there

What a long strange time it’s been since I last wrote here. I say that every time I write here! Over my recent lifetime I have started and abandoned any number of blogs, some of which I deleted and some I simply left as monuments to a different time.

I won’t go down the rabbit hole of How We Live Now, you either have first-hand experience or you’re a future human studying our downfall. A recounting of what it is like to dwell in the world at present is not only unnecessary but would also upset me, and we can’t have that!

A while ago I read a tweet that said something like “imagine you were a time traveler from 2019 and drove past a road sign blinking OMICRON IS HERE LINE UP FOR TESTING, what would you think?” Girl I *am* a time traveler from 2019, I have lived through all of this shit and still can’t believe it is happening.

One thing I have been enjoying since *waves hands* this all began is making quilts. I bought my sewing machine to make masks but really and truly I have long wanted to learn quilting. I have made five quilts and started a sixth just recently after a months-long hiatus. I think I told myself I’ve been busy but really I have just been depressed. I wouldn’t say that I’m “coming out of it” so much as just “getting on with it.”

The thing about quilting is that I do get frustrated with it, but when that happens I can just put it down and walk away. I want to finish the quilt of course but if I don’t, nothing will happen. Unlike work or the state of my messy house, a quilt won’t suffer from being ignored for a while.

This week I picked up where I left off almost six months ago. I pieced 24 quilt blocks together, sewed the blocks in rows of eight, sewed the rows together. I have half a quilt top. Making progress of any kind right now is such a miracle, so satisfying.

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Look what happened to us

The last time I published here was February 2020, a post preserved in amber in terms of the world as we knew it then as compared to now. 

It has been A Year. Actually it’s been more than a year and truly, I’m not sure this experience has an endpoint, though an awful lot of people are eager to put a bow on it. Like, do you “move on” from something like this? LOL. I don’t feel like that’s possible for me but everything changes with time, I suppose.

I endured the pandemic in comfort, luxury even, and still the white-hot rage is right below the surface. So many things have reduced me to tears since March 12, 2020: tears of anger, of sadness, of relief. Every day I’m living under a veil of stress and trauma and I’m one of the luckiest lucky ones, so what does that tell you, person reading this in whatever passes for the future, about how most people have fared?

I don’t know that “trusting the government” was ever super-high on my list of philosophical keystones but I never assumed deliberate malfeasance, deliberate harm. And now I know that it’s possible for my country to want to kill me or at least to not care if I die. A whole lot of people woke up to this realization recently and to be honest with you it makes things a little uncomfortable! Because so many people have understood this very deeply their whole lives. Black people, immigrants, disabled people, trans people, I could go on but it’s easier to say everyone but white men and a particular type of white woman. 

The worst part honestly was watching people in my family out themselves as deeply and essentially selfish. From my college-age cousin who spent a year doing whatever the fuck she wanted  – sorority parties, girls’ trips, bachelorette weekends – to another relative who sat on a Zoom call with me in October and blithely discussed the full-scale wedding plans she was making as thousands of Americans dropped dead every day because of precisely this type of head-in-the-sand behavior.

If the sound of ventilators forcing breath into dying bodies can’t sway you from hiring a DJ for your completely unnecessary wedding reception then I don’t know what to say to you about that, but I do know I don’t ever have to say anything to you ever again. For me, things became exactly this simple during the terrifying fall and wretched winter months of 2020 and early 2021.

Only time will tell where I end up putting all this anger. For a year I stayed inside and stayed away from the people I love best in the world to keep them safe, to keep myself safe. The disease has potentially terrible and still mostly unknown long-term effects, but so does all this rage. It’s always there, there’s no way that doesn’t end up fucking you up one way or another. If you cut me open it would be there like a burn scar on a tree, I just know it.

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Not great, Bob!

The last time I wrote on this site seems like 100 years ago. It was the last weekend before we brought home the girl puppy and WOOF (pun intended) things have been rough (or should I say, RUFF).

We were NOT AT ALL prepared for how small the puppy was. Our first puppy was also small (they’re the same small breed), but he was on the dot of eight weeks old and weighed about six pounds. Our little lady was seven weeks and three days old (we figured this out later and I'm still mad at the breeder about it) and weighed just over three pounds. That is a VERY FUCKING SMALL dog. She did not seem at all ready to go home and even as we carried her to the car I was panicking. Are you SURE it's okay to take this dog from her mother?????

Things were not good. She was too little to do almost anything and could not be left alone for even a second. We couldn’t even leave her in the kitchen behind the baby gate because she was small enough to walk right through the slats of the gate. This was super fun because we had to keep her and our older dog separated, at least on either side of a divider, because he was so much bigger than her that we were afraid he'd accidentally hurt her. He did not seem at all charmed by her but was too curious to ignore her, which meant everyone was just super annoying all the time. Because the baby gate wasn’t an option we had to use a five-foot-tall collapsible pen, which was flimsy and noisy and which the puppy could also throw herself against hard enough to escape from. Our older dog wanted any treat or toy we gave to the puppy and thus was always trying to get inside the pen, at which point he only wanted to get out of the pen.

The puppy peed anywhere and everywhere. She did not seem especially affectionate or in fact to have any kind of personality at all. The puppy treats I bought her gave her gas. She woke up every 45 minutes at night, often having peed or pooped in her crate. Several times when we tried to get her to settle down in the crate at night she would scream and moan for hours (this never changed and still hasn't, we're just managing the behavior while we work with a trainer to figure it out). Worse, a couple of times she would get so worked up that she pooped in the crate, which was an epic, messy disaster and always seemed to happen at 4am the night before one of us needed to be on top of things for work the next day.

I began taking her to a puppy class with very high hopes. At first, it was fine, but by the third class the puppy was at her very worst, and she whined the whole time, for 90 god damn minutes, and refused to pay attention to me or the treats I used to try and get her to do the classwork. Several times I almost left. When I asked the trainer what I should do when we put her in the crate and she screamed for six hours, he replied "earplugs." I didn't go back to the last class.

She went through a phase where, when overtired, she would snarl viciously and bite us, saving the worst of this fury for me. For a couple of weeks, I was covered in cuts, scratches, and bruises because she was biting me hard enough to bruise. During the worst of this biting phrase, it is safe to say I hated the sight of her. Of course, I took care of her as much as I always have, but I had more or less made up my mind that we would not keep her. I even deleted all of the pictures of her I'd posted on my personal Instagram account. In most but not all cases, I'm a believer in you get the pet, you stick with the pet, but this puppy was breaking me.

It was really, really bad.

She is 14 weeks old now and I still haven't slept for more than three hours at a stretch and I cry about it a lot. I'm even more isolated, if possible, than I was when we got the first dog. I feel more constrained, I guess because I feel less hopeful about when we're going to be able to get her to a point where she'll go to bed and stay there all night and even less hope about getting her to a point where my husband and I can leave the house together.

One positive: It's a very good thing that I know our older dog grew out of (mostly) all his asshole behaviors, otherwise we would have rehomed this puppy already. It's hard on her to say that, but I have only recently begun to feel even a little attached to her. (She is, fortunately for her, extremely cute.) She is settling in now and may even be turning into a nice puppy. She is more affectionate and seems to have stopped soiling her crate, but she is still waking up every couple of hours. This week there was one night where she woke up once and it was glorious, but it was a cruel tease because it has not happened again.

More positives: She is over the worst of the biting. It just sort of stopped one day and now she hardly ever does it. I make her wear clothes every day and she is not a jerk about it, or about her collar either, which is nice because our older dog was and still is a drama queen about his outfits. She is better about going to the bathroom where she is supposed to, though we are still working on getting her to do it outside. We are still working with the trainer who is trying to help us figure out how to get her to be okay in her crate at night. If we can lick that, I can survive this, I *think*.

On Thursday I really felt like the walls were closing in on me. I was at home with both of the dogs, and it wasn't them exactly – we have a routine now and they were both being good. But I can't work for more than 10-15 minutes at a time, and my brain feels all over the place. When they're both asleep, I'm so grateful for the quiet that I'm not as productive as I could be. The worst thing is that I am never, ever, ever, ever alone, and it is driving me crazy. 

In desperation, I texted my husband and asked if he could please work from home on Tuesday or Wednesday next week so I could go into my office, even just for a few hours. He asked if I could get our dogsitter to come on Thursday, and this response did me in. The dogsitter is only available on Thursdays and no one goes into my office on Thursdays, so the point would be moot. All I wanted in the whole world was for someone to prioritize me for half a day and no one could manage this.

I was sitting on the couch and started crying. The dogs immediately stopped playing and pranced over to me, tails wagging, upturned faces curious. It was very cute, but they couldn't help me, not really.

Today, Friday, I am at a coffee shop. My husband had to work from home for reasons unrelated to me descending into madness, and I am temporarily free. But the morning is past and I can feel that it is almost time to return to puppy prison, plus the long unbroken weekend stretches in front of me, with nothing to do but wait for the puppy to sleep so I can fold laundry or mop the kitchen floor (dogs make everything stink, as it turns out).

The worst part of the day is late evening. I get so, so tired because I'm not sleeping, and right at the time of day when I should be looking forward to my bed, I just feel sadness and dread because I know I'm not going to get any sleep, not really. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe I will ever again be able to just go to bed and sleep until morning. 

I will never, ever, ever again get a puppy, not ever. I feel foolish for having gotten this one, to be honest! I have a lot of regrets. There have been many days when I’ve thought longingly about how nice my life would have been the past two months if we’d not made this very stupid and expensive decision.

I would like to end this post on an upbeat note, but it isn't easy. This too shall pass? That's about the best I can do.

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Little

Last weekend my husband and I took our three-year-old niece to see an orchestra concert. We're not idiots because of this! (We're idiots because we’re getting a puppy this weekend.)

It was a Christmas concert and lots of kids go to it, plus Santa arrives at the end. There is a sing-along portion and as orchestra concerts go it is sort of seat-of-the-pants. For instance, if a kid started wailing in the middle of it, you'd notice but you (probably, anyway) wouldn't be annoyed.

I bought us balcony seats because while not "cheap" they are the least expensive tickets available for the concert, and I knew that we might need to leave early. However, right as we were about to take the last flight of stairs up to the balcony, a man stopped us and asked if we wanted three box seats instead. So, on my niece's first-ever trip to the orchestra, she got to sit in the front of a fancy private box. KIDS TODAY.

Anyway, she did great. She did get bored a few times ("Are we done? I want to go back to your house") but three is really little! I do not remember the first time my parents took me to such a concert but I suspect I was older than three. After the concert she spent the night at our house and that was all fine, too.

One thing my sister-in-law often says about my niece is that she's "fragile today" or "delicate today" which, I'm given to understand, means that she's acting like a three-year-old. Sometimes I watch their interactions and I think about how it's actually very stressful to be a tiny kid and not know how to do or handle almost anything. It was similar to how I felt when I read an article about how puppies feel very anxious to "get things right" because they want to please you so desperately. MY HEART IS NOT MADE FOR THIS WORLD.

Anyway: because little kids don't know how to do anything it can feel very frustrating when they want to "help" you do something, like when my niece wanted to help me make waffles. She helps her dad make them every weekend so I guess she actually does know "how" to, for example, stir the batter, but in truth, she kind of sucks at it. I'm not being mean! It's just that the concept of stirring batter is still really new to her and she's very small.

So: she stirred the batter and once she was done I took the spoon and stirred it a few more times to get the lumps out. She said – not sadly, just matter of factly – "I guess I didn't do it good" and I reassured her that she had done a great job and I appreciated her help. But my heart still went out to her, she's just doing her best.

The night of the concert, I stopped by her parents' house to pick her up. Once they got her all gussied up her mother wanted to take a picture of her in front of the Christmas tree, which my niece was not at all interested in doing. Thus began a negotiation: just stand next to the tree. Just smile. Smile nicely. If you don't smile for a picture, you can't have a snack in the car.

Predictably this ended in tears, but not burst-into-sobs little kid tears: rather, my niece was standing in front of the Christmas tree in her princessy little dress, head tilted back, hands pressed under her eyes to stem the flow. OH HONEY, WHO AMONG US! I have literally felt this way at the grocery store as recently as a few weeks ago. I felt deeply for her, sympathized with just wanting to get through something and having the world be at odds with your desires.

At some point my sister-in-law turned to me and said, "This is probably how it's going to be all night," and while I got her frustration, I also felt really bad for my niece.

I'm not my niece's parent, and so I get to be a "fun" adult who is safe and reliable but also does not have to care too much if she doesn’t feel like brushing her teeth. I mean, she's not allowed to go nuts at my house, either – she gets reminded that seats are for sitting and occasionally must be frog-marched into the bathroom before she wets her pants out of terminal FOMO – but she’s not mine, with all that brings, so I can be lax about some things. (For instance, two cookies at bedtime and lots of crappy Tinkerbell cartoons and I also may have taught her how to ask Alexa to play a song called “Up Your Butt with a Coconut.”)

Our puppies and toddlers are all out here just trying to get through the day, pleasing people and trying to do things good. It's killing me to carry around this knowledge!

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Round 2

I've been spending some time looking at old posts recently, particularly the ones where I talk about what it's like to have a new puppy, because we're getting another puppy. In order to maximize our stress and inconvenience, we'll be bringing the puppy home right before Christmas, which...isn't smart? But that's when she'll be ready to come home. So that's when we're bringing her home.

I think we will be okay. For one thing, the puppy experience is still fresh in my memory. (And yet we're getting another one anyway! Hey-ohhh!) For another, there will be a dog here to wear the puppy out and to model good behavior to her. And also, at least we know what we are getting into.

When I was looking at those old posts, I was surprised to see how short true puppyhood actually was. That's when he started sleeping most of the night? That's when he started being pretty reliable about peeing outside? Huh. It seemed a lot longer when I was in the middle of it but I guess that is true of many things in life.

We think it will be "fun" to have two dogs, and I am sure it will be, although it will also be "expensive." There are many dumb articles on the internet that tell you it's not much more costly to have two dogs than it is to have one, but that is a lie and a big one. Vet bills x2, insurance premiums x2, daycare x2. We can't take the puppy to daycare for several months and my husband has suggested putting money aside for it, just to sort of trick ourselves into feeling better about it. "So like...a tuition fund?" I asked. "Yes," he replied. So that's what kind of people we are now: people who have college funds for our dogs.

I also realized that I have not written about my grown-up dog in a long time!

He will turn two in about six weeks, meaning he's really a Dog™ now and no longer a puppy. We of course still refer to him as a baby, or rather The Baby. He's extremely silly, and mostly good, and I would describe his essential nature as very loving and sweet. He is, probably, too licky. He does not have very good manners when people come to the house, and that is our fault completely.

I'm looking forward to a holiday season without a perplexing, stressful, and expensive dog illness, and I have reason to believe that we will have that. We did deal with some more gut issues at various points during the year but I have capitulated and put him on prescription food. Other adventures this year: he got swarmed and stung by wasps (while I was out of town for work!) and then a month or so later got bitten or stung by something else that gave him hives for three mornings in a row. That, plus the dry winter weather, seems to have set off a fit of general itchiness so now he is taking some medication and getting bathed with a prescription shampoo every third day (i yi yi). 

So, it's not as if we haven't had our issues. But we do love and enjoy him, even when he is being an asshole and refusing to sleep in the cozy bed I bought him, choosing instead to bite it. (He is doing that right now in fact.)

One day we got a note from his daycare that said he is a "good citizen" and my heart exploded. The woman who fetches him for me when I pick him up told me that he is very respectful of other dogs' personal space if they are not feeling his playtime vibes, and that he is always very welcoming to new dogs. OH MY HEART. Can you imagine? I send this tiny creature off to "school" three days a week so that he will burn off his endless, endless energy and be appropriately socialized, and he is out here making friends and BEING RESPECTFUL. 

He hates wearing the special, custom made-to-measure clothes I order him from the UK and Ukraine (hardly anyone in the US is making clothes for fancy little weirdly-shaped dogs, I've checked) and sometimes at daycare he is so dramatic about his displeasure that they take the clothes off of him. During these times I know he is thinking JAIL FOR MOTHER FOR 1,000 YEARS but skinny bois (and soon, girls) don't get to choose whether or not to wear sweaters, at least not when they live in Ohio!

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Martha & me

I get a lot of aspirational emails, most of which are designed to entice me to buy things. These include promotional emails from Madewell, Gilt, and Miranda Bennett Studio; recipes and quote-unquote lifestyle content from Food52 and AllClad; and of course, near-daily dispatches from Martha Stewart. Well, from Martha Stewart Living. If Martha were emailing me personally we'd be having a much more interesting conversation.

I love Martha unabashedly. First, she has never pretended to be anything other than a privileged WASP with high standards; I respect her for this. Second, she went to ladies' jail and emerged much more well-liked than when she went in. Third, she's still dishy at 78 (it goes without saying I will be genuinely sad when Martha Stewart dies). Fourth, this is how Wikipedia describes her: "Martha Helen Stewart is an American retail businesswoman, writer, television personality, former model, and convicted felon." Well then!

A lot of people make fun of Martha and the way she does things, or the way she talks about things that are probably really only "normal" or "routine" for rich patrician blondes from New England. I don't know if you've ever read the calendar feature that used to be in her magazine, but like duh, of course you are getting the orchard ready for fall or repairing your vintage lobster traps or whatever, why would you not need these handy reminders? As a child, I definitely read too many books about wealthy American faux-aristocrat families, and Martha is that archetype's living representative on earth.

Martha's expectation of how things should be done isn't snobbery. It comes naturally, she doesn't know any other way. As much as I wish I was like this, I grew up in your standard post-midcentury middle-class American home, where I ate hot dogs and Lucky Charms and dreamed of wearing Jordache jeans. While the Martha Stewarts of my own generation were working on their show jumping or learning French at Swiss finishing schools, I was watching Dirty Dancing for the 36th time. But because I grew up immersing myself in the habits of East Coast old money, I do like doing some things a certain way, which is why we don't use paper napkins in my house. I am barely keeping up in any number of other ways but by god you will have a cloth napkin with your leftover pizza. Martha would approve!

Anyway, I can still have a chuckle at Martha, and I did today when she (sorry, her company) sent me an email titled "Host a Chic Fall Party." Martha, I will not. I will not host a Chic Fall Party, and I will definitely not be laughing while I casually arrange wildflowers that look like they were freshly picked from some pristine meadow when in fact they were fetched from an artisan florist shop namechecked in Goop and rated $$$$ on Yelp; nor will I do any of this on my rooftop terrace high above New York City while clad in muted natural-fiber separates from – well probably from Miranda Bennett Studio. These things are all part and parcel of hosting a Chic Fall Party if the picture on the Martha Stewart Living website is to be believed.

In reality, I do enjoy hosting people. I don't know that I am that good at it? I tend to be kind of bad at estimating how much food we need (usually I overbuy) and if I tell you we're eating at five it will probably be six at the earliest, but this is partly because of my husband's interpretive approach to time and partly because we have one kind of shitty oven. Martha would not approve.

It is possible that I will use some of these Chic Fall Party tips around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Martha suggests that "setting up a drink station takes the stress out of bartending," but then goes on to say that she creates "a designated section for drinks (as I did here, using stacked vintage crates) and stock it with essentials so everyone can help themselves. I make sure I have a variety of alcohol, nonalcoholic, hot, and cold to keep everybody happy. Fall-infused cocktails like bourbon-cider are my go-to. Fill vintage milk jugs with water and juices, and use large enamel bowls as ice buckets for chilling wine and beer," which is not taking the stress out of anything unless you hire people to do all of that stuff for you. At my house, you will have to be satisfied with some good wine to choose from and of course, the cloth napkins.

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Coats, past and present tense

This isn't going to become a shopping blog, I promise, but I recently bought a winter coat and it was excruciating!

My old winter coats were starting to look, it must be said, a bit worse for the wear. According to my Gmail history, I bought my black DKNY parka from Overstock.com in 2011. (Hilariously it is still on the website. Out of stock, indeed.) 

That coat is starting to look a bit shabby because it's eight years old (plus there's a large rip in the lining because I am a very classy person who exudes elegance always) and my other jacket is a black puffer that I inherited from a friend (elegance ALWAYS). I still like it a lot, but it is starting to show its age and will probably become my walking the dog/taking out the garbage coat. 

I have been thinking about buying a new coat literally for months. In July it occurred to me that I could probably buy one at a steeply discounted price, but there was so much sweat constantly pouring out of me that I couldn't bear to even think about coats. But even though it is was 90 degrees last week, in OCTOBER, it will allegedly be cold again at some point (two days from now) and thus I recently spent three painful days looking for a coat.

The coat I really wanted is $1,100 and even for something I'll wear for years I really could not bring myself to do it. Not when I am still looking for a pair of black booties and another pair of good jeans! There are so many things to spend money on! I hate and love it.

I ended up with a North Face parka for less than half the price of the Canada Goose. It is very nice and because I could hardly stand to have it on for more than a few minutes when it arrived at my house, I think it will be very warm! It is also allegedly waterproof and windproof and one thing I can say about aging is that you no longer fuck around when it comes to staying warm in the winter. Some websites have those ratings where it tells you the temperature range for the coat, and each time I saw “25 degrees and up” I thought not good enough and kept looking. Basically, I would like a coat that will keep me warm if I happen to end up airdropped at Everest base camp.

Anyway, coats. I don't know what things were like when you were growing up, but I definitely did not have parents who knew what was "cool" or who particularly enjoyed spending a bunch of money on "fashion" for a kid. My mom tried! She got me a subscription to Seventeen, she told me to think about what I wanted to buy for back-to-school shopping, but it all fell apart when we got to Sears because Sears was in the budget and an unlimited spending spree at The Limited was not. Plus, I was too chubby and nerdy to shop there anyway. This is not me bagging on myself! It's just that at 13 I still looked like a stocky 10-year-old and not a fashion-forward young lady. “Cool” has not ever been in my wheelhouse.

As a youth, I was clueless when it came to outerwear trends but the first winter coat that I remember feeling really excited about was a maroon ski jacket with Fair Isle reindeer prancing around the front and back. I was in fifth grade and fucking amped about it. In high school, I somehow acquired an off-brand leather bomber jacket that I treasured. Oh! One year I asked for a Lands End Squall jacket for Christmas and was dismayed to discover that I hated it. An ongoing fight between my mom and I during these years was me not telling her when I didn’t want or like something she bought for me, then me not wearing the thing, then her being annoyed at the wasted money, then me wearing it out of obligation and hating it and feeling bad about myself. That Squall coat is a great example of this!

In college I think I mainly tried to avoid wearing coats for some reason, most likely because I didn't really like the ones I happened to own at any given time. I am remembering a sort of barn coat, which seems right given the era.

Later, as an independent single lady I also, for a time, bought a great many vintage coats, including a traffic-cone orange one that weighed a thousand pounds and had huge gold buttons and a hot pink lining. I got rid of that coat for some terrible reason and I really wish now that I had not! I wouldn't necessarily wear it but it definitely cost some 1960s lawyer's wife a fortune. I hope someone somewhere is giving it a great life.

Here's a coat mistake I made once: I semi-recently bought a jacket-length white puffer in an end-of-season sale. In an Ohio winter, nothing jacket-length can be taken seriously; also, it's WHITE. Why did I think I needed a white puffer! On me it is very Stay Puft™ and also I am not a 22-year-old Mormon blogger with an Instahusband who will take pictures of me while I laughingly throw handfuls of snow into the air.

Up until fairly recently I thought it was a good thing to have a large selection of coats but now it just stresses me out. More and more I just like to have one good thing instead of five or six okay things. Please do not bring this up if you are ever in my house and notice all the other things I haven’t applied this to yet.

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Go Away

Today on Twitter I referred to Gary Vaynerchuck as a "sentient Tony Robbins video" and I would like to say more about the ways in which this man annoys me.

Welcome!

I'm not really one for yucking someone else's yum, but it pains me to inform you that if you are a disciple of this Successories-spouting charlatan, YOU MUST STOP IT, now. If you genuinely have found motivation among his empty-calorie RISE-N-GRIND philosophy, well, that's all well and good but please stop paying attention to him.

I used to like Gary Vaynerchuck! I HAVE EVEN MET HIM IN PERSON. This was back when he had an internet wine show, which though fun and quite good turned out to be nothing more than a springboard from which to launch his nonsense factory.

One thing we all know about Gary Vaynerchuck is this stupid photo:

OH MY GOD WHERE TO BEGIN. 

First of all. I bet there are plenty of people who, at face value, would be more than happy to make $100k doing a job they hate. Mainly because for rank-and-file Americans that is still a huge pile of money.

Second of all. There is not inherent indignity in working for someone else. Almost all of us do it! Settle down.

Third of all. Don't ever work for free. DON'T YOU DO IT unless it is called "volunteering." And definitely do not work for free for "someone you want to be like" because you don't want to be like a person THAT DOESN'T PAY THE PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR THEM.

When you work for free, you are GIVING AWAY time. Time is precious! It is not a renewable resource. You cannot get time back, and you cannot rewind it and change your mind about how to spend it. So spend it working for someone who is paying you for your time and your skills. And then do whatever you want with the money you get in return.

Also, the “three words of inspiration" behind him are YOU'RE GONNA DIE. Oh, WHAT’S THAT, SON? You haven’t heard these MIND-BENDING words of wisdom? Well grab a seat pal! Prepare to have your mind blown!

I don't know if you've seen the insipid video of a woman stopping him on the street and asking him for inspiration, but he says YOU'RE GONNA DIE and it is supposed to be this monumentally profound thing that only he, Brave And Wise Gary Vaynerchuck, is smart and deep enough to say. It's supposed to light a fire under your ass so that you take your one wild and precious life and...

WORK FOR FREE FOR SOMEONE YOU WANT TO BE LIKE.

His stupid "advice" does not even make sense within the Gary Vaynerchuck universe! Why is anyone paying attention to this man!

Finding out that someone subscribes to the Gary Vaynerchuck XTREME CARPE DIEM way of thinking is, for me, like finding out they are super into jam bands or that their favorite novel is Catcher in the Rye because they never read another book after 11th grade American Lit. (Don't fucking @ me, this is a scientific fact.) There is no reason to give your attention to someone whose utterances are as intellectually sound as something stamped on a piece of faux-weathered "barn" "wood" in the decor aisle at Michael's Crafts.

Also, this is petty, but I can't stand people who refer to him exclusively as GaryVee. Stop this.

Finally and most importantly: THIS IS A GRIFT. You may not ever spend money on anything Gary Vaynerchuck-related, but you are spending TIME. See above!

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The tintinnabulation

I posted this tweet today.

I'm not sure what made me think about the handbell choir, which is undoubtedly the dorkiest thing about me, but I was indeed enthusiastic about it for a time. I started doing it because my frenemy Laura, who'd started inviting me to her church youth group, was in it. She didn't have a choice in the matter: her grandfather had left the church money in his will that was specifically intended to benefit the handbell choir. At one point she wanted to quit, and her mom actually forbade it!

I went to a big, thriving church that boasted a large youth group and very robust music program. There were choirs for people from toddlerhood through adulthood, three different handbell groups, a full-time music director and full-time organist. Most Sundays of my life from age 12 through age 18, I could be found at church in a choir robe on Sunday mornings and for youth group and choir practice on Sunday evenings. I didn't always enjoy it, but most of the time it was okay, plus there were boys.

Probably, I enjoyed the handbell choir specifically because it was dorky. The couple that directed it lived around the corner from my family and I'd known them and their kids since grade school; they were comfortable to me and “zany” in a way that was totally unlike my own parents (you might be familiar with this style of parent if you’ve seen the movie Easy A). Bell choir practice was small, less than a dozen or so kids, and none of us were that cool. And so I walked the three blocks from school to church until...ninth grade? I can't remember when I gave up on handbell choir, actually. I may have played them all the way through high school for all I remember. It was just never that important to me, plus it was easy, which is probably why I don’t remember much about it after a certain point.

Handbells were the ideal non-threatening extracurricular for me in middle school and my first year of high school, which were pretty unpleasant for me. I was not cute, quite unworldly, chubby, shy, a goody-goody. But by tenth grade, I'd traded glasses for contacts, shed my braces and a little bit of weight, and had a not-embarrassing haircut. I was still the same inside but my renovated exterior made things a tiny bit easier. I also found people that I genuinely liked being around, and who liked being around me. I was not as close with people who merely tolerated me, the way Handbell Laura had since middle school. So maybe I just didn’t need them after a certain point in time.

I’d probably take up handbells again, honestly. Anything is possible now that I care very little about what other people think. I recently attended one of those paint-and-sip places with some work colleagues and I did not hate it! In fact, I’d do it again. I think a lot of hobbies get a bad rap because they are almost exclusively the domain of middle-aged women, and that sucks. No one (well, not no one) makes fun of people who go to Top Golf or whatever. Embrace paint and sip! Go take a class at Color Me Mine!

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Summer of caftans and camp shirts

Since mid-July I’ve been mostly wearing my Emerson Fry caftan when I’m in the house. Despite what the product description says, for me it’s a little sheer to be wearing around town, but never say never.

This caftan is made of very light cotton. To wash it, I just fill the sink with cold water, add a cap of Woolite (because I’m your nana now) and swish it around. A good rinse, a good squeeze in a clean towel, hang it up to dry and it’s ready to wear again in a couple of hours. I wear it after my shower, I wear it before bed. I wear it when I work from home, when I do laundry, when I watch a movie. It’s the world’s most perfect garment.

I think I own five caftans now? Two I’ve had for several years, and one of them isn’t very nice to wear in warmer weather because it’s extremely not breathable. I bought it on eBay for something like $8 and while I would definitely wear it out to dinner with gold sandals and Important Earrings™ it is not cool and breezy. The other caftan I bought around the same time is cotton but not very well made. It is also extremely nice to wear after a shower, but I can tell you there is an appreciable difference between an $8 eBay caftan and one that was not $8 and not from eBay.

More recently I’ve purchased this beautiful garment from Amazon, also not cotton but very comfortable around the house and at a 40+ ladies’ bachelorette weekend last summer where it was much admired (and to my sister-in-law’s pool recently where it was much side-eyed). Just this week I bought this subtle charmer, also from Amazon, and it is a nice soft rayon that I am going to have to handle like a fine silk robe in order to not shrink it. Oh well. MY BODY IS WILLING.

Caftans aside, I feel like I came closer this summer to nailing down a style with which I am comfortable (and in which I am comfortable). I got by, am still getting by, very well with a few of these Point Sur drapey popover shirts (these are fantastic and well worth the hand-washing ass-ache they require) and some assorted camp shirts from J.Crew Factory. I wore all of these mostly with my Gap ankle jeans and Birkenstock Gizehs. 

Having these things that I like and enjoy wearing has made it easier to get rid of some stuff I’d been hanging on to for years, stuff I didn’t like or that didn’t particularly fit very well anymore anyway. It also made it easier to live with the fact of my overweight body that I try daily (and often fail) to not battle or resent.

One extremely nice thing that happened while I was packing for a weekend away recently was that I unearthed a dress I’d forgotten about. I ordered it from Old Navy at least two years ago and it’s been hanging in my closet, tags still on, ever since. I’m not buying clothes from Old Navy anymore so this was like an illicit treat! A shady workaround of my own arbitrary rules! Anyway I packed it and wore it out to dinner two nights in a row, because I’m old now and love a uniform, see above.

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Actually, you know what, don’t ask a manager

I have this habit of getting super into places/things on the internet and then very quickly tiring of them. The Forever35 podcast and Facebook group are good examples of this! I may or may not get into the specific reasons for this at another time, for now just know that I cannot with gratitude practices and being “vegetarian-curious.” Be grateful, be a vegetarian! But maybe I don’t need to hear you talk about it for an hour, several weeks in a row.

Another thing I’ve amused myself with recently is the archives at Ask A Manager, which I think I started reading when I was working at my Bad Job a few months back. I like reading about other people’s work problems, some of which are surely fake, but they are all relatable in some way. Everybody be having work problems and I want to know about alllllll of them.

I don’t always agree with Ask A Manager, she can be extremely shrill about getting a good reference, like she is Mrs. Hughes on Downton Abbey, threatening to send away a naughty housemaid without a referral. Guys sometimes a reference from an asshole is not worth your time or care. That’s the advice from Ask A Middle-Aged Woman.

Anyway, recently I found an archived post about how bad jobs can warp your thinking about working in general, and it got me to thinking about some experiences that really fucked up my perception of what vocational environments are supposed to feel like. The problem is that even when you leave a job, the bad experiences carry over into your new job, and you apply your warped thinking to environments where it’s not relevant.

I once worked at a salaried job where leadership was very, very focused on employees arriving on time, which at this company was 8:30 a.m. It became well-known that the CEO was checking everyone's computer log-in times in the morning, so it was a game of Beat The Clock every day to get that pre-8:30 log in accomplished. One day I was running a bit close and got caught at a long traffic light outside our office complex. I logged in at 8:32 and was pulled into a private room later that afternoon to be reprimanded about tardiness. That was the day I decided to start looking for another job.

At the job where I had my longest tenure, I started out in a fairly junior position. There was a woman there who occasionally acted as a consultant for certain events. She would barge in and completely take charge of these events and make life a nightmare for all of us who were staffed to "serve" her. One of these events was a professional women's awards breakfast, and on the morning of the event I sat down at my assigned table to eat next to my boss. The consultant came to the table and pulled me by my sleeve to come assist her with something menial. I pointed out that I had just been seated to eat and she snapped "You'll eat when I eat, now come on." My boss sat and said nothing, not even making eye contact with me.

I worked in the marketing department of a nonprofit institution in town. My boss was having some difficulties in her role, running up against some pushback from her own staff and from her peers about an important web project. When it became clear that the project was going to miss several deadlines, she shut herself in my office with me and demanded that I fix the issues so the deadlines would be met. When I told her that I would do whatever I could but that the project had been ill-defined and mismanaged from the beginning, she raised her voice and said "I mean to tell you our jobs are on the line!"

There are lots and lots of other stories like this, and these jobs were not even what I’d really call “bad.” They were just places where bad behavior became tolerated and even expected. Celebrated, in some cases! It takes working at a much more functional company to unlearn these negative expectations and to address bad behavior when it happens. 

It is my fondest wish that everyone eventually finds a job where most of their colleagues are grownups and where people don’t do a lot of crying.

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Economies

It occurred to me the other day that I haven't bought anything from Sephora in a while! This should not be interpreted as a sign of a new minimalist lifestyle. I just have a lot of makeup already and only one face!

The most indulgent thing I have bought in recent weeks is an AllClad oven-safe skillet with a lid. I was trying to scrub the remnants of pasta with jalapeño, corn, and basil out of my 10-year-old Paula Deen Collection (I know) nonstick sauté pan, which is no longer nonstick, when I realized that I don't have to do this type of thing anymore! I am now wealthy (I am using this word facetiously, I hope you know) enough to dispose of kitchen equipment that, much like Paula Deen's career, has outlived its usefulness and just buy new equipment to replace it. I am not 26 and living in a rented basement apartment making do with the cast-offs from my mom's kitchen anymore, as it happens!

I don't know why I keep having to remind myself that I can do this. I guess when you grow up in very average Midwestern circumstances you get it into your head that most purchases are unnecessary or that you should make do with something that doesn't work great until it literally disintegrates, and even then, maybe you can fix it. This last bit is EXTREMELY MY DAD and while I admire his cheapness-based ingenuity a lot in many ways, sometimes it is just better to spend a little money and get a new nonstick pan that doesn't need the help of several SHITS and GOD DAMN ITS to get it clean.

My husband grew up rather less modestly than I did but is still loathe to carelessly part with money, and this is also a good thing usually, but what happens is that we end up having several hilarious conversations about things like this pan I recently bought. "I figured, we cook almost every day!" "Oh absolutely, it's not like we won't use it!" "We save money by cooking so much, anyway." Like what are we even doing? IT'S A PAN.

I read somewhere once that if you spend a lot of time justifying a purchase to yourself, it was probably unnecessary. This strikes me now as a very garbage take, because it makes it sound like you should feel guilty for living well, or liking nice things, or simply enjoying spending some of the money you work to earn. I enjoy saving money, too! Not that you would know that if you were the place I order CBD oil or my dog's daycare. 

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Small Bites

Well it’s Summer, for-real capital-S Summer, in Ohio now. It has mostly been okay! It is very hot, or at least I think it’s very hot, which is to say it’s been in the upper 80s. I told my husband this weekend that I no longer have any concept of what a “normal” summer or winter is supposed to be because all the ones in recent memory have been too severe in one extreme or the other. Or maybe older people just think about the weather more because of how it can inconvenience us? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s hot!

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A week or so ago I sprained my ankle stepping off a sidewalk. I have sprained both my ankles before but this time was worse. It was the kind of thing where you can HEAR (probably just feel, but it seems like you can hear it) things popping as you go down. It was shockingly painful! I sat in someone’s tree lawn and tried not to sob while muttering shit shit shit shit under my breath while my husband went to get the car. For some idiot reason, I insisted on keeping the dog with me during this time. I guess I thought I would look less strange sitting on a tree lawn with a tear-stained face with a dog than without one.

It is a pretty bad sprain! I was alarmed at how my ankle swelled up and it is still swollen, or really my whole foot is still swollen, though less so every day. I briefly took to calling it Balloon Foot and speaking about it as I would a cranky monarch: Balloon Foot wants more wine! Balloon Foot has more demands! I think the person this amused the most was me, though, so I stopped doing it pretty quickly.

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My dad accidentally FaceTimed me yesterday and while I knew he’d done it in error (he hates FaceTime) I still picked up. “Hello? Helloooooo?” I bleated as I tumbled unheard around in his pocket. He did finally pick up and I asked him if he was at work because I could hear the sound of a circular saw. “Oh no!” he explained. “I’m cutting boards to replace some siding on the house where your mom backed into it with the car!”

I mean. What.

Let me state for the record that *I* have also backed my car into my house, not long after we moved in and my internal autopilot hadn’t yet compensated for the dimensions of our new driveway. But my mom has been backing out of this same driveway since 1970, plus it is a double driveway shared with the neighbors, so I am...concerned that this happened. My parents are 78 and I know many people keep driving far into their 80s and 90s (whether or not this is a good idea) and I am not really eager for them to be reliant on public transportation. But they are also planning on driving 10 hours to North Carolina in early fall and I am starting to wonder if maybe it is time for them to not do that anymore.

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I bought a pair of Birkenstocks this morning! 1994 Me is so excited, even though 1994 Me would have opted for the Arizona style and not the Gizeh, aka the official Birkenstock of Instagram influencers and basic B’s everywhere. 

I have a theory about things that are basic, though, which is that they are widely enjoyed for a reason and therefore not automatically bad. In my house we have a term for this, which is “high basic.” Peonies are basic but they’re really pretty! High basic. Range Rovers are hell of basic but they are also very fly cars so: high basic. 

Anyway I am not 100% buying them for fashion. Ballon Foot wanted them (sorry) because as it turns out, a sprained ankle can take weeks to return to its normal size and all of my sandals, except for two pairs of flip flops, have ankle straps. Flip flops are not, to me, really “going out in public” shoes unless I am going to the dog daycare or the skanky Dave’s grocery store down the street. (And even then: not really.) I also have a dumb but necessary and really ugly supportive wrap that I’ve taken to wearing out of an abundance of caution; it definitely eliminates all ankle strap sandals from my shoe rotation.

So: I finally bought the Birks. I did really hesitate about which style to buy, but my husband seemed very alarmed when I showed him the Arizonas. I wouldn’t normally put much stock in that (they’re not his damn feet!) but he did raise the point that the Gizehs are a bit more versatile and I can’t argue with that.

I still might buy the Arizonas at some point, maybe with some freelance money. I will add blue nail polish and a toe ring and 1994 it up.

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A Mood.

Emma Thompson.

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Inside voice

If I had to describe Memorial Day Weekend 2019 to you in one word, that word would be wet. I was damp on Saturday when it was 88 degrees and I was damp on Sunday when it rained all day. I was damp on Monday because I washed my hair and then put it up and went to my brother-in-law’s house, where there is a pool; I swam in the pool and then put my hair back up and it was mostly wet until this morning when I washed it again. (It still smells like chlorine.) It’s dry now, but I still had to put it up because it is humid and my hair, never great under the best of circumstances, is very ugly in high humidity.

I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to practice self-love and body positivity but I don’t like my hair! It’s not great hair. It’s mostly just okay. But it looks like shit when it’s hot and humid outside and that is just the fact of the matter. Deal with it, self-love movement!

I would have been less damp most of the weekend but we haven’t turned on our air conditioning yet, not because we are virtuous (I am the opposite of virtuous when it comes to air conditioning, I am an Air Conditioning Whore) but because it needs freon in order to manufacture cool air. The HVAC man is coming tomorrow, when the high temperature is in the 60s. SUMMER IN OHIO ladies and gentlemen!

When I was bemoaning my hair one recent morning my husband suggested that I wear it curly because it is “cute” that way (also, probably to get me to stop talking about it). When I was young and my hair was very long, I did wear it curly. I washed it every day and used a big damn diffuser on my blow dryer and carefully coaxed and scrunched it into a million spiral curls. My hair is very fine, though, and if I am not labor-intensive about this process (washing it every day!) it looks like sweaty baby hair or a cone of cotton candy spun by someone who has never spun a cone of cotton candy before. It’s not good. 

Anyway I casually told my husband that I haven’t worn my hair curly in years, not since someone I worked with told me I looked like Doc Brown in Back to the Future. I mean:

That’s not a flattering comparison. And when I told my husband this he got very why I oughtta about the person who had said this, and I just brushed it off by saying, “People say stuff like that to me all the time.”

He was all, “...what?” And I proceeded to explain that yeah, all my life people have said just sort of cruelly casual shitty stuff about my looks and I’m used to it and I guess I probably deserve it because my worth has been determined by these ragingly awful off-the-cuff comments about me, and now here we are, I enjoy being a girl!

I did not really say most of that, but as the words were coming out of my mouth it sort of sounded like that? Going by the look on my husband’s face, I think he was gobsmacked and it made me think how fucked up it is, that I just carry around all these mean comments starting from like...forty years ago and that they still inform how I feel about myself.

Many years ago, at my first job, a woman my own age took one look at my chubby body, which I had dressed that day in a cozy, off-white cable knit sweater that I loved, and said “You look just like a big, fluffy snowman!”

As recently as three years ago, my boss told me I looked like the Hamburglar, which I empirically do not. Not even if I was wearing a mask and a legit cape would I look like a bucktoothed orange puppet. But I never wore that black and white striped dress again. Not to work or anywhere, I donated it. And I had loved that dress.

What possesses people to say stuff like this? I have a weird thing with my hands where I can’t hold up three fingers, like when you ask a little kid how many they are. I can do it but my fingers don’t want to straighten out, they look like a little claw. It’s a thing my husband and his siblings and I laugh about, like “I’m a monster! Look away!” But last weekend we were at my sister-in-law’s house and she held up her hand to show me her (allegedly) swollen fingers. “Look!” she said, trying to hold up three fingers. “My fingers are like yours because they’re so fat and swollen!”

I know what she meant. But it still sucked. And I just feel like I have all of these comments inside me, piling up. A landfill of negativity and thoughtlessness. And mostly it doesn’t matter but sometimes it tells me how to look at myself and how to feel about myself. What I can and can’t do. What I should and should not wear. 

It’s true that as I get older I care less about this. Other things matter more, like just the fact of being alive for one thing, or seeing other people happy and healthy, or being grateful for everything that you have. I do wish there was a way to empty the trash and pour out all the bad stuff I don’t need anymore, or to tell people “this thing you said to me six or twelve or twenty years ago was rude and bad” without sounding very crazy. 

If my husband ever sees the Doc Brown comment guy he is definitely going to say it for me, so maybe I should focus on making sure they don’t meet.

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New arrangements

A thing about me – a thing that’s not great about me – is that if you tell me something is going to happen at a certain time or on a certain day, and then that thing doesn’t happen, we’re going to need to fucking talk about it. I like knowing what’s going to happen and when. We don’t get many such guarantees in life so I like to orient myself around the ones I do get! Is that so WRONG.

Another not-great thing about me is that I don’t do well with being confined and not having the freedom to get up and leave or just do other things I want to do. This is why I hate planes. It is also why unrelenting multiple-day meetings are extremely not my jam. I once attended a meeting where, on the second day of starting at 8am we were also served lunch in the same room, and then stayed in that room past 5pm and past 5:30pm and even on past 6pm. I was silently rage-screaming by about 5:15pm. It is not a situation I enjoy at all. Please let me out of this room! I am very tired of smelling everyone’s stale exhalations!

Anyway I started my new job this week and part of that process was a three-day training. This was mostly fine. It was 96% fine. It was presented logically and thoughtfully and was extremely good groundwork for the work I’ll be doing. (It was of course 1,000 light years better than what passed for training or onboarding at the job I just quit.) 

But on the second day – a company-wide work-from-home day that I did not get to enjoy – the trainer was still talking at 5:30pm and the internal rage-screaming cranked into gear. You said we would wrap at 4:30pm or 5pm! LET ME GO.

Part of this is because I have been spoiled, lo these last four years with the exception of late March through early May, by absolute work-from-home freedom. I now have a hybrid arrangement where everyone works from home two days a week and the other three days are sort of dealer’s choice. I am none the worse for wear after this minimally horrid (really, not at all horrid) three-day sentence, but I had really not realized how much stuff I had been accomplishing during the halcyon days of WFH. 

By “stuff” I of course mean household stuff, like running dishes through the dishwasher and putting laundry away and going to the grocery store. And YES, I know, many many people all over the world work in offices 8-10 hours per day and still manage their lives. As I said, I am spoiled!

The point of the story is that I made it. I am here, whole and unscathed! 

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Back to it, again

This is a draft of a post I wrote in mid-December of 2018, right after getting laid off from my cushy remote marketing job:

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In November 2001, shortly before Thanksgiving, I got laid off from my trade publishing job. I was given a month’s notice, which I mostly spent interviewing for other, worse jobs within the company; and one month of severance. I was told this was “generous” because I had only worked for the company for 11 months. At the time, I had no idea how anything worked, so I just believed them.

In May 2009, my boss asked me and my half-dozen or so colleagues to join him at a playground across the street from our office. We all sat around a concrete picnic table and were informed that the magazine we worked for was ceasing publication and that the business was closing at the end of the week. Because my boss had fibbed to the business owners and told him that none of us had taken any vacation yet that year, we received ten days’ “severance.” I also liberated from our soon-to-be-defunct test kitchen three Chicago Metallic sheet pans, a sharpening steel, slotted spoon, and Cuisinart immersion blender.

Last Monday morning I joined an all-hands call at work where we learned our company had been acquired. An hour later I sat on a video call with HR and watched all of my messaging and email access go dark as I was told that I was out of a job. I got three weeks’ severance and my laptop.

That afternoon I allowed myself to get very upset, and then I got to work telling the right people and letting my freelance clients know I was available for more work. Things began popping almost immediately, but it’s slowed now. I can’t imagine I’ll be able to line anything up before the end of the year.

Here is what I have made since last Monday: coffee ice cream, chocolate cake, a batch of chocolate chip cookies, chicken alla cacciatora, chicken pot pie soup, blueberry muffins, currant scones. Here are some things I have done around the house: clean out my closet, deep clean the master bathroom, clean out three junk drawers, list some things on eBay, put away mountains of laundry. I have bathed the dog. I’ve met people for coffee. I’ve applied for 18 jobs.

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Now that almost five months have passed since I wrote this, I remain most impressed by my industriousness in the kitchen. 

In the end, I applied for 47 jobs. I interviewed with eight companies. Most of those experiences were fine but some were straight-up bizarre – one recruiter reached out to me within hours of me submitting my resume to set up a phone screen, but she never showed up for the call and ignored my follow-up queries. I actually had a lot of people ghost me, always in cases where they had reached out to me first.

Out of all my layoff experiences, I guess I would rate this one the best overall; turns out it is less stressful to be laid off when you are married to someone who is working and when you have savings (duh). 

I feel ridiculous saying any part of this was “hard,” exactly, but the part about constantly putting yourself out there for acceptance or rejection did kind of wear me down after a while. That part was definitely easier the first two times, when I was 27 and 35. At 45 something else starts to creep in, and that something is the awareness that your “value” has diminished, or at least changed, in some way. You are not fresh and malleable anymore. You know things, including how much you’re worth, and you aren’t shy about demanding it. These are all good things, but they are less palatable to a lot of employers, some of whom would rather you know less and expect less.

Since I’ve left my Bad Job™ and have a new job lined up, I feel like I am really finally finished with the experience of being laid off. As a contractor I was working full-time in terms of hours, but nothing about it felt permanent. This might be because it sucked? I don’t know. I just felt like I was still in job limbo and the unsettled-ness of that never really left me. So in that way I do feel fresh and malleable. 

I know there will be weirdos at my new job, there always are. There is no escaping that. The only thing to do is hope they are pleasant weirdos. Perhaps I myself am the pleasant weirdo!