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.

Summertime Sadness

I've been in something of a funk at work these past two or three weeks—not quite busy enough to feel the pressure to succeed. None of the work feels big enough to be worth doing—or else it's too big, but unimportant, and not something I can completely do on my own. I don't like that.

Last week, part of it was PMS, and then yesterday my cramps were bad enough that I let myself stay home sick after lunch. But it's mainly the lingering feeling of worthlessness from the previous weeks, at this point. It seems to me that I've been doing a bad job, so I am a bad worker, so I will do a bad job, can I go home now?

I know that every day is a new day, every day I can start fresh and I can do a great job and cross off a lot of things, even in fewer than eight hours. But if I can fix it any day, why do it today? Why not wait until tomorrow? Self discipline is hard. Fewer hours day after day, and then you try to work long and diligently and it just feels neverending.

Instead I want to read about the Greek island of Milos, where Emma is right now, and maybe chronicle a little of last year's travels in Turkey. Emma wants to take a boat to Turkey, and make her way to Odessa from there. I want to find podcasts to listen to while I work. I want to read Testament of Youth—we saw the movie on Monday night and it was so good!—and also read about nature and cultivation and wilderness, like Cooper's always trying to get me to do for him. Even though it's not like we share a brain, and I'm not going to take notes for him.

I want to leave early so I can rent a kayak before they stop allowing the river journey for the evening, so we can practice for our trip to the UP. I want to watch old Daily Show episodes because we watched it last night, Amy Schumer and Ta-Nehisi Coates with possibly my favorite television person in the world, Jon Stewart, whose show I've barely ever watched between boyfriend number one and now. I'm sad that the era is ended (Jon Stewart, not bf#1), and I didn't even take part in most of it. And the same for Colbert, but that was already over.

When I sit in my new office at the NCRC (right now I'm three days at the old office, two days at the new one), I think of ways to decorate it, to make it welcoming, truly mine. The big window is great; I love it. But it's not enough, especially knowing that for half the year, the trees will be naked and the ground and sky grey. I have an entire shelf above my new desk there, that I'd like to fill with books and maybe a small lamp and other pretty things. But my job requires zero books. There is no reason for me to surround myself with any. What a sad reality. All I need to do my job is an internet connection and this horrible window into bureaucracy and email. Nothing real like a book. And yet I have to sit here every day.

Porch Dreams

Right now I’m fixated on the back porch, the balcony—the feature of my apartment that doesn’t really exist. (In the background I’m also shopping for a new rug in the bedroom, obsessing over lighting and decor options for my drab taupe box of a windowless office, and wondering what color scheme would please me for pillows in the living room…and that’s just for spaces that are mine.)

Spring is here in Michigan, and so, like everyone else, I want to be outside. I want to own my desires and bring them to life, I want to bike through the fresh air and nap in the sunshine and read on the porch.

Before we moved to this apartment, our small but sufficient one-bedroom, I was already thinking about the fire escape. I knew a previous tenant had grown herbs on this fire escape, and I have fond memories of the fire escape to the apartment I shared with Emma, which was big enough for a table and chairs, three stories up in the trees. I thought of all the New York City stories that include ducking through the window to catch some air on the steps; hanging a string of lights and claiming a small patch of the sky for oneself. Sure, we have a bathroom with a tub in it, a bedroom separate from the living room, two closets, and a kitchen. We have space for our bikes in the hallway, and windows in three directions. It’s enough, but it also isn’t enough.

I imagined us, having just moved in together, mixing drinks and carrying them through the apartment, one of us locking the cats in the bathroom so they couldn’t escape, and then opening the door at the back of the bedroom and stepping out into the early evening to sit on the steps and savor the last of summer together.

*  *  *

It’s a good vision. Alas that our first September in the apartment came with a wasp infestation, centered on that back wall of the bedroom. I was checking out the fire escape, in the early days after moving in, and when I turned to go inside, I put the full weight of my leg down onto a wasp with my bare foot. That was the last time I went out that door until the following spring—and that wasn’t even the worst of it. After our maintenance guy and then an exterminator had sprayed three or four times, we started to find poisoned wasps languishing, first on our bedroom windowsill, and then all over the bedroom floor. Two, four, six, thirty, until, the final day, Cooper came home to somewhere around seventy-eight dead and dying wasps writhing on the carpet at the back of the room and under the dresser we had under the window, while a sadistic cat looked on. After that, we covered the cold air return in the room, and the rest of the wasps died and were no more.

That horror stunted my fire escape dreams, and although I swept the little landing at the top of the crooked wooden steps a couple times, nothing came of it. Until now! This year, I ‘m ready. I’ve got some copper-wire fairy lights I bought at Christmastitme but don’t really like indoors. I bought Cooper a curly parsley plant this weekend—supposedly it’s one herb that can actually do well inside, so hopefully he can permanently give up buying bunches of parsley that are always too big to use up in time. Soon we’ll add some other plants to enjoy for the summer, although they won’t want to winter with us (basil, thyme, some flowers). We can bring out a stool or two folding chairs, and sit on our miniature deck and look at the leaves in the trees, and into our neighbors’ windows.

It’s not an obvious space for enjoyment. It’s about three feet by ten or twelve feet (nothing like the beautiful 66 square foot original patio of that great blog). You could fit four folding chairs on it, awkwardly in a row, or you can fit two next to each other and have a nice time together. You could probably fit a very small bistro table, or one of those half-moon little balcony tables, and then two simple chairs. We won’t. Maybe one stool with a plant on it, a plant that can move to the ground if we want the stool. Folding chairs in the bedroom, just inside the door, if we don’t want to sit on the steps.

The structure is made of wood, nailed together well enough to work, but with no thought to craftsmanship. It was painted a bland bluish-grey a few times, and the paint is forever peeling off, every time you sweep the leaves and branches off the porch. Straight ahead from the bedroom, you see three wooden bars, and between the bars (if you’re seated low) or above them (if you’re standing), you can see a bedroom through a neighbor’s window, the curtain for which she never fully closes. She could certainly see us if she looked out. To the right, south, there’s the brightest sun and a nice apartment building across the street. To the left, north, another building. There’s also a door to the other upstairs apartment, making this space less private, a little less welcoming to a takeover. Oh well.

I’m not sure how nice we can make it. It doesn’t really matter—there are so many parks nearby, bike paths and the river and picnic tables. There are patios and decks and beer gardens downtown, a short walk away. After almost two years in this space, though, it’s a fun challenge to try to add another room, another dimension, to our lives here. An easy little escape—all I have to do is open that door that is usually just a window.

So I’ll see if I can grow any plants to block the house next door. I’ll see if the herbs will do okay back there, at the southern end of the little platform. Maybe with a little outdoor rug, and the fairy lights, it will become a porch instead of a crumbling afterthought. 

More Than Work

2014 was a year that I really tried to put what I wanted to do ahead of work. That meant giving up my pay to visit friends in Florida and California, requesting long weekends off for my birthday and Labor Day, going Up North for a full week, and taking an unpaid two-week vacation to Turkey and Germany, since I’d only been a permanent employee for two weeks when I got on that transatlantic flight. I got lots of drinks with friends and starting buying myself books again, made a list of summer activities and crossed them off one by one: kayak the Huron, Cinetopia Film Festival, Shakespeare in the Arb, drink lots of sangria (could do better at that one).

It’s a mixed message, because the rest of the time I was working over 50 hours a week—extremely bitter about that fact, as I had not requested that many hours and couldn’t get rid of them. I planned to quit all three pointless jobs to make room for my trip to Turkey. I didn’t have to, though, because I got one real job instead.

2014 was not a year I tried to really work on what I wanted to do. I didn’t submit to the translation contest that spring, or the extra one that summer, although I’d completed a full first draft and liked that text more than any of the others I’d previously attempted; I didn’t keep, or even make, an editorial schedule for my blog like I had intended; I didn’t make any business plans or take any classes or really try to envision my ideal life, beyond fewer work hours, more sunlight and freedom. Instead I read extensively about a lot of successful solopreneurs, creatives, obnoxiously/appealingly/but not too outrageously well-off and hard-working people in the blogosphere, and envied them, and then switched tabs to my money spreadsheet and stared at my savings account’s steady growth, thanks to better wages, controlled lifestyle inflation, and too many hours at those three pointless jobs.

You know what I did at the end of 2014? I cut my monthly contributions to my emergency fund ($16 IS TEMP fund) in half—since my employment was no longer temporary—and started what I named the BIG MONEY fund. Maybe I should call it the Big Dreams fund. Maybe I should stop thinking so hard about my savings, but although the level of my obsession and reveling in these details may be unhealthy, I love it, and I won’t. The Big Dreams fund could help pay to move to another city in a year or two, or buy my own car in a new place (though I'd rather it not). It could help throw a once-in-a-lifetime party and buy a once-in-a-lifetime dress. Maybe it will start a business, or buy a house. Now it’s time to get to dreaming and planning, so when the money’s there, I know what to do with it.

1. The beach at Olympos Valley on Turkey's Mediterranean coast
2. My little desk chez moi
3. Lunch under the citrus trees at Bayram's in Olympos Valley.

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.

The Fortress of Europe

As viewed from a ferry in the Bosphorus. Built across the strait from the older Fortress of Asia. Instrumental in Mehmet II's conquest of Constantinople. I really get a kick out of the name: the Fortress of Europe.

Happy November from a person who is happy to be back on Michigan soil, after a beautiful trip to Turkey and Germany.

(More photos on Instagram, and more to come, here and there.)