Beyond Small Talk

"What are you up to now?" a friend recently asked me one morning, when a group of us were hanging out, brought together by his re-emergence in America after a while away. I answered about my full-time job at the university, where I've been for just over twelve months now. I probably gave the shorthand answer about why it's a good job for now. I think that line of conversation ended about two minutes later, max. It's always an easy transition to where Cooper is going to go next, what sorts of jobs he's thinking about and whether or not we want to stay in Michigan.

Afterward, I realized that it wasn't the answer I wanted to give, and it wasn't the answer I had to give. No, a year later, I still haven't come up with a concrete plan for my next step, an end-goal or a career path I'm excited about. (I am excited about my first real raise a couple months ago,  and thrilled with how much money I've been able to save this past year.) But there's no reason talking about my job needs to be a fun conversation; it's a job. Going to an office and making money forty hours a week isn't the only thing I'm up to. It's not the only thing I do.

I reread Outlander books 4-6 this winter, then finally read 7 and 8 in the early spring. It was a glorious, intoxicating pursuit and I loved every minute of it. I read the third of Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Novels in June, after long holding back, and was sucked into the anguish of being a woman in 1970s Italy, of being a poor worker anywhere in the world. Life is hard, guys.

I spent a few days reorganizing my Pinterest, and many more hours dreaming up new layouts for my apartment (although the quarters are too tight for any of them to really work), plotting new combinations of colors to give a new perspective and a brighter view. Cooper and I put together a garden of pots on our fire escape, and now every couple weeks we pluck a batch of basil and make pesto for dinner—just like that, pasta and chicken sandwiches and decadent egg sandwiches for breakfast. I spread out a mat between the plant pots sometimes and eat my dinner al fresco on the floor out there. Summer is glorious.

It's been some weeks on, other weeks off, but I've been running outdoors many mornings, as well as going to the Y. My goal is to feel the ache of exercise every time I get up from my desk at work—a vivid sense of satisfaction at my commitment to my health and my goals. It doesn't happen every day, but I think it's getting easier.

I've gotten so frustrated about the injustices so many people face in this country, even as the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and legalized gay marriage across the country. The plight of the people and the planet is so serious; mass incarceration and violence and de facto segregation of neighborhoods and therefore schools and therefore life; and not enough money allocated to any of it, even if we really knew how to fix it. I've been reading articles about poverty and homelessness and student loans and money money money and the lack thereof, for years of course, but everything feels like it's coming to a head. I started to follow Bernie Sanders (and then Hillary Clinton) on Facebook; he was showing up on my feed every day because my friends kept liking his posts, and I read along, thinking, "Yes, yes, yes," so many of his succinct and successful messages on social media are things I agree with, but then I just don't even know. There are so many things that we should do as a community, a state, and a country, but in Michigan, the cards are stacked against us, and anyway, how could we ever do all these things?

So I've been up to reading, and attempting to write but never finishing anything. I've turned my creativity to my tiny garden and my home, and itched to do the same for my parents and my friends (alas that everyone has more important things to do and money doesn’t grow on trees). I've amassed my small fortune, increasing my savings with every raise, big or small, that comes my way, and I've despaired, again and again, over the state of our world.

But I've done my small part in my family circle. Ali and I reunited with Rachel in Florida; Cooper and I with Emma in New York. I drove my mom out to see her sister in Rochester, New York, the first time we'd made that trip in about four years. I helped my brother with a scholarship application, and then with the planning of the trip to Germany and the coordination with the host bakeries there, when everything seemed too big and too hard for him (I write emails for a living, although not usually auf Deutsch). The biggest victory in bettering someone's life is that I got my parents to sit down at the table with me, and put together a budget based on all of the past year's expenses, and then dig out the details on their separate retirement accounts and my dad’s small pension. Finally, my mom could see that the money was there, that they wouldn't have a lot, but it wasn't worth her working 'til she was eighty, or even until sixty-six. And so she's retiring in two weeks, at which point we'll all have to do our parts to get her working toward a healthier, more mobile life again. I hope, I insist, I decree, I demand.

I know it's not always the best topic of conversation for people who don't know everyone I do, but it turns out that the thing that matters most to me in life is my family and my friends (felines included). I thought all I wanted was to move away for college, and then when that didn’t happen, at least to move away after college, but despite the occasional regret, this is good. These people are my world. And so next time someone asks what I've been up to, after a year or two of little communication, I hope I say something more like this, and not my latest career update. It's just a little patch of who I am.

Laps, Lapse, Hello

So 2014 has come and gone, and so has January 2015. I’ve been exercising regularly again, after a lapse of more or less two years. I tell myself that this time, it’s going to stick, as if I can go to our local YMCA 3-4 times a week this week, and next week, and the week after, and again and again. (Of course, I could. This is attainable.)

As if I can win the battle with myself, whether or not to leave my cozy home or head straight from work to the gym without dinner, 200 times this year, and 200 times next year, until suddenly, I am sleepwalking to the Y, without a care in my mind. (Automation is the highly improbable end goal of my many habit-forming attempts.)

I’ve barely run at all since I fulfilled my last gym requirement in high school. I’ve used ellipticals, finding their movements fun, usually painless, easily accommodating of simple books or TV shows. But lifting one leg and pulling it forward and setting it down again, and then lifting the other and moving my body forward in space? I’ve barely tried it since escaping the gym teachers, and felt miserably out of shape every time I did.

But now, I’m going back and forth between the elliptical, and running tight loops around the track at the top of the Y building. Because running hurts, because I don’t want to discourage myself too quickly, I’ve started small. I’m running just over half a mile now, when I run—8 laps. Sometimes I feel confident and run fast; a lap later, I’m out of breath, a stitch in my side. But with the tiny track, it’s almost like progress happens on its own. The laps are so short that it’s easy, sometimes an accident, to go one lap further today than I did the time before.

I want everything to be this easy.

Accomplished

Some days I write one sentence that I like, and I'm satisfied, content to read it over and over and congratulate myself.

But then, that good sentence, it needs to be followed by another good sentence. That can really freeze you up.

On Sunday I overcame the handicapping perfectionism and said fuck it, I want to see these pictures on the wall. The gap's been haunting me for months.

I hung them up, without a ruler or a level or any kind of template. I even changed up the layout halfway through.

And it's great. I look at it, over and over, and feel a twinge of happiness every time.

Slippery Slope

I'm the kind of person who can't get started on something before she knows every single step she'll need to take along the way, and preferably the outcome as well. This worked out fine in middle and high school English classes where we still had to write formulaic five-paragraph essays. Don't get me wrong, I hated doing it, but the concept of an outline of arguments and examples worked great for me. I still have a hard time understanding people like my boyfriend, who start writing a paper with the main ideas and information in mind, but won't figure out the final flow, or even the point of the whole thing, until the end. (Maybe not 'til the fourth draft, months after it's been turned in and graded.)

With things like job applications, I have to convince myself I could do the job, I could want the job, I would be able to commute to the job, and someone might consider me for the job, before I can sit down and try to convince anyone else, via the cover letter, to consider me for the job for even a moment. I don't want to hang a picture or pick out new curtains until I know all the other pictures I'm going to hang and what the new duvet cover will look like. It's all or nothing.

With the jobs I already have, this can translate to deep (and undeserved) loyalty. The better I know the job, the less likely I am to leave. Inertia is a powerful thing.

This might be the most deeply-rooted facet of my personality. Procrastination justified by a difficult requirement of certainty.

This acceptable configuration (of disparate things) did not make the cut.

Loyalty is not a bad thing. If you're my friend, I want you to be my friend forever, and I'll do what I can to make it so. If taught convincingly, a lesson is set in stone in my mind. Perfectionism, though—I've been warned against it my whole life. It's a great way to get nothing done and go nowhere. My family taught me that.

Job Talk

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I operate as a person, and what I want from life, my friends, a career. Not really job titles or specific areas so much—I'm floating hopelessly, completely ungrounded—but what the work environment would be like; how many people, how much responsibility. I've thought about a whole wide range of work-related things, but these thoughts come and then go again, mostly without being recorded.

This week, I worked about 47 hours, maybe more. Last week was around 54. This is silly because I don't think I want to work even 40 once I have a real career with benefits and decent pay. I know that you have to work hard to move up, and I also know that high-paying jobs are more likely to demand extra hours of you. But I'd like to work my way up to a nice amount of pay and then cut back my hours, say to 30 or 35, and get paid a proportional amount. (I'll go into why in a minute.) So far, I haven't set myself up for greatness—I started at the bottom of the job-ladder and haven't hopped my way into anything remotely ambitious so far—so I should probably be scrambling to increase my income as much as I can, as quickly as I can, instead of dreaming of what I would do with my sizable chunks of free time in this easy future. (Of course, everyone I read on the internet says that as long as you're learning things and doing things, it doesn't matter what you're doing in your twenties—but don't sit them out and don't do nothing! That's why I quit my old job for a temp job: to learn something new.)

But I also know my free time is really only going to shrink in the future. Sure, one job takes less time than three, but my friends are going to have kids someday, and I'll want to see them. I'll probably have kids too. I want to travel once I have more flexibility with my income, and also start seeing my parents regularly, immediately. (Maybe I should not be so certain of this future financial solvency, these easy family developments; I hope I'm not jinxing things!) Even recently, those weeks in October when I worked just a little over 40 hours, it was hard to keep up with my friends and my laundry, my cats and my kitchen. Plus I have a boyfriend I'd like to spend meaningful time with sometimes.

I've never felt passionately about a career. As a kid, I picked them willy-nilly. I was going to be a ballerina, but I never danced. I wanted to be a piano player, having never taken a lesson (and though I did eventually take lessons for eight years, and really loved it, by then I was too scared and too behind to consider it as a career). I liked school, so I'd be a teacher. I liked reading, but almost never wrote good stories in school. Then I wanted to be a writer, assuming I'd have to have a day job, too. I didn't want to study writing or English in college. By then, I sort of thought I'd just end up with some sort of office job like my mom, but hopefully with more security—she was let go my senior year of high school, just in time for all those college bills, and didn't get re-hired for three years. I'd do my work, get paid, save for retirement, have a 2-income family, and I'd be ahead of the game. When I wasn't at work, I'd read books and watch movies and go to exciting places.

But there was that other part of me that assumed I'd have this magic moment in college where everything would click and I would have a path and goals and meaning. I needed for this to happen, and then I did my best to avoid figuring anything out. I want to rewrite, really examine the story of my college years. I feel ambivalent about them. They might not really matter, though. More important is what I've gotten out of the past few years as a poorly paid, but fortunately working person.