Slow boat to hell

Last week my family came together to talk about Mom. Mom was there, in case you were wondering. It's not like the kids met in a secret cabal to decide what cliff to throw her over. No, we are good kids, now that we are old and tired. We weren't when we were younger, though. We made her life a living hell. I guess it's payback time. All those years of not cleaning our rooms. All those years of biting, kicking, and punching each other. All those years of ignoring Mom yelling at us. Maybe we collectively recognize our cosmic just desserts are about to smack us in the face.

I say we, but really it's more like me. My sister has escaped back to Boston. My older brother has retreated back to the sleepy beach town on the coast. That leaves me and my little brother, and he's got a full-time job, ten cats, three dogs, a rabbit, a dilapidated house, and a wife. Eldest daughter, self-employed, no kids, close proximity to Mom...I leave it to you to connect the dots.

Mom sat on her beige flowered couch next to my sister. My brothers and I sat in the three battered old armchairs that my parents carried from living room to living room over many years. I noticed, not for the first time, how Mom's noisily patterned couch clashed with her Home Depot oriental rug. I blame myself: I helped her choose that rug.

I self-consciously handed around the one-page spreadsheet I had prepared for the discussion and explained my rating system. Before I could start my lecture, my scrawny mother commandeered the floor.

“I hope everyone understands if I want to give Carol a little something to compensate her for being my caregiver,” my mother said to the group. Oh boy. Despite my self-admonition to remain calm, my heart rate increased slightly. A little something could be $1,000. On the other hand, it could be $20 for gas. It's always money, though. It's never a banana cream cake or a slice of tiramisu. Or a trip to the Bahamas. Or enough money to actually make a difference.

I was embarrassed. She could tell. “No, I just mean, you have done so much work!”

“My sister came all the way across the country to help you sort and pack up stuff,” I reminded her, trying to get the focus off me.

“Well, as my designated care-giver, the burden has mostly fallen on you,” she said. “That is why I want to give you something extra.”

Knowing that my sister plans on killing herself when she runs out of money in eight years, I said, “Can we talk about you, Mom? This family meeting is to support you in your decision to move.”

“Okay, okay,” she grumbled. The conversation turned back to evaluating the five retirement communities she and I had toured. My brothers asked rationale questions. We all agreed Mom and I would see a financial planner to talk about the relative advantages of selling or renting her condo. Then we ate Chinese food. My brother left to drive back to the coast. My younger brother went home to his zoo. Mom, my sister, and I sat in a row on the couch and watched a DVD of Singing in the Rain. Then I went home and collapsed.

I'm beginning to see my ongoing vertigo as a metaphor for my out-of-balance life. The vertigo started about the same time Mom made her choice of retirement community. She had told me, even before we all met, which place suited her best. In our family discussion, we all agreed she chose the best deal, but she'd already made up her mind. She chose the least expensive option, which oddly was the one that had the best food. She also chose the one that would allow her to rent a second bedroom in preparation for the time when she might need a live-in caregiver. (All eyes can now swivel toward me.)

The mere possibility that I might choose to give up my sacred sanctuary, AKA The Love Shack, to move in with my scrawny maternal parental unit has been percolating in my brain since she made her choice. Nothing has happened yet, nothing is different, but I think some part of my psyche recognized that the metaphysical rug is quite possibly about to be pulled out from under my feet. Hence, vertigo.

Of course, it could just be I'm more likely to get vertigo because I'm female and in my late 50s. It could have nothing to do with emotional stress and fear of the future. It could have nothing to do with the prospect of leaving my nest to orbit my mother and watch her die. I mean, how can you know if your emotions are killing you? I think we know in general stress has physical consequences, but how do you know that your stress is killing you? Could it just be random chance? Of course it could.

Life is constantly killing us. That's not random chance, that is 100% guaranteed certainty.

Merry ho ho ho from the Hellish Hand-basket

It's the end of the year again, time to get maudlin over mistakes made and opportunities missed. All those wasted moments spent networking with people whose names I've forgotten ten seconds after they hand me their business cards. (Even the ones I sort of liked.) All those frustrating minutes spent writing and posting content to the white meat version of social media to support a business strategy I never really believed in but adopted on the pompous recommendation of some so-called experts. All those long tedious hours spent editing other people's lousy essays instead of writing my own lousy essays. Woe. Woe is me.

Time to regret the past as it muscles its way around me into 2015. I'd shut the door on it if I could. Or at least, on 2014. I'd shove it out on the porch and slam the door on it so fast. Take that, you stupid past, you.... go fight over the birdseed with the squirrels and rats! I guess I could say it's been a tough year. But that would just make me sound whiny, self-centered, and chronically malcontented.

Is this a happy time of year for you? Do you get all amped up with the high-voltage season? Do you like all those smells you mostly only get in December? You know the smells I mean: recently cut and soon-to-be-dead fir trees? Egg nog lattes? Nutmeg and cinnamon? Bayberry candles?

Do your eyes bug out of your head with all the twinkling lights? Are your neighbors trying to outdo each other with their yards full of tasteless glowing Santas and radioactive snowmen? Oh, sorry, I mean snowpeople. And the sounds! Zounds! The endless loops of insipid music playing from staticky speakers in the grocery store an orchestral rendition of The Little Drummer Boy, pounding holes in your head?

Oh, sorry. There I go, projecting my stuff onto you. Maybe you like The Little Drummer Boy on an endless loop while you are grousing over the price of zucchini. And what's not to like, really. Drums and boys, I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

I finished a particularly tedious editing job last night about 11:00 and uploaded it into the magical cloud, whoosh! Off it went into cyberland where I assume some cranky elves are parceling each massive wretched tome back to its author, who will open up his or her nicely wrapped file in the morning and exclaim in horror at the red ink bloodbath. (Well, red, blue, and green, if I turn on all the Track Changes options.) Super festive editing for a super festive season. The author of yesterday's debacle will probably feel a little sick when he sees my hatchet job and my terse warning about the consequences of plagiarism, but it won't be anything that a little eggnog and a shot of rum won't cure.

There was nothing new in my inbox this morning, so I decided I would spend the day cleaning up around the Love Shack. If you have followed my blog over the past year, you will know that the number of times I talk about cleaning up the apartment corresponds to exactly the number of times I have cleaned up the apartment. That is to say, twice. Maybe three times at the most. So you can understand, it is a momentous occasion when I pull out the vacuum cleaner. My cat opts out, slinking under the couch until my conniption fit is over. I guess if I revved up the vacuum cleaner more often, he might not find it so frightening. Oh well. Three times a year, dude... that hardly qualifies as torture.

I changed the sheets on the bed and fed all my quarters into the greedy machines in the basement to do two loads of laundry, one of cotton stuff and one of fleece stuff. I folded all the warm undies, t-shirts, and towels and put everything away out of sight. Next, I figured out that I could use a small fine-toothed comb to remove the clingy cat hair furballs that dot my fleece jackets, pants, and blankets. That took a while and made quite a pile of cat hair. Finally, I vacuumed the bedroom rug. I even swapped out the bulging cleaner bag. By that time, my nose was in full protest, and it hasn't stopped protesting since...achoooo!...three hours later. Maybe that is why I'm a grinch tonight. It's hard to feel the joy of the season when one's nose is constantly dripping.

Well, happy holidays from the Hellish Hand-basket. Thanks for reading. (Or visiting and clicking away with an annoyed curse, which is what I suspect most visitors do.) I hope your holiday season is happy and filled with just enough joyful surprise to remind you that life is worth living, even if the future is bleary and the past is a bully. Somewhere in the now is where we'll find that old holiday spirit, kicked back in an easy chair with a glass of potent eggnog in one hand and a cigar in the other, watching reruns of Gilligan's Island. Enjoy the season, Pop, wherever you are.

Portland, the land of plenty

My sister perused the photos from my high school reunion and sent me an email complimenting me on not getting fat. (Isn't that sweet?) Compared to some women in the photos, it's true, I'm a stick. But it's all relative. At the height of my vegan debacle, some six years ago when my body was feasting desperately on muscle and brain cells, having burned up all available fat, I guess you could say I was pretty thin. To be more precise, I could get into the same size Levis I wore in high school 40 years ago (30x34 in case you are curious), and those scruffy Levis hung on my frame like my own droopy skin.

Then, to avoid dying, and because I could (since I live in America, the land of plenty, and back then I had a job), I started eating real food: eggs, chicken, beef, fish, and lots and lots of vegetables. Over the next two years, my muscles returned, along with all of my fat cells (which were never gone, just deflated, darn it), which ballooned to fill all the spaces in my now too-tight clothes. The Levis went into a drawer, replaced by various forms of loose, stretchy pajamas. Black, of course, because it is so slimming.

For the past year or so, as my system has stabilized on the low-carb real-food food plan, some of the extra weight has started dissolving, first from my face, then from my boobs, then my waist, and—if I live long enough—maybe from my hips and thighs. It would be nice to have thin thighs like I did in high school. The good news, in relative terms considering the world is spontaneously combusting right now, is that I can finally fit into my Levis again (although I admit it's a bit of a struggle to get them buttoned up).

So, thanks, Sis, for the moral support. Keeping in mind of course, that it's not really true that outward appearances trump emotions, behavior, and character. That is to say, it matters more how you feel than how you look. In the big scheme of things, we are lucky to be alive and living in the land of plenty (plenty of everything, good, bad, and in between, but mostly pretty good in Portland). Things could be worse. We could be living in Baghdad, Aleppo, or Ferguson. Seriously. Land of plenty, indeed! Gratitude list!

Let them eat cake

It seems like every time I write about an event I attended, I start with “I survived the...” Is that odd? Do you do that? No, probably not. I guess the best I can do these days is survive. Thriving, or succeeding, or seizing the day are all way outside my current zone of expectations. That's okay. I'm clinging to the short branches, breathing the rarefied air of entrepreneurship. I expect things to be challenging. Like camping at the Oregon coast, for example, which I vow never to do again (rain).

I am happy to inform you that I survived my 40th high school reunion, held yesterday at a park situated on Hwy 224 past Estacada, which, if you are familiar with the Clackamas County area, is part of the exurbian hinterlands. It was a lovely drive, though, along winding tree-lined, single-lane roads, I admit.

I left about 9:15 a.m., and got there a little more than an hour later, delayed ten minutes by an overturned panel truck, lying on it's side in the roadway. Luckily for me, a civilian directed traffic around the truck. More relevant, luckily for them, it appeared no one was injured. As I drove by, I got a 5-second look at the underside of a large truck: not something you see every day (unless you are a truck mechanic).

The other three members of the reunion planning committee were already there when I arrived. Everything was in place except the balloons and the easel, which were in my trunk. I unloaded my stuff and took a look at the layout.

“Having the registration table here is going to create a bottleneck at the bottom of the stairs,” I said, hands on my hips.

They looked at me skeptically, but gamely helped me move the table about ten feet away into an L-shaped alcove. Good call. For most of the rest of the day, I manned the table, checking people in, taking money, making change, filling out receipts, and peeling off name tags. I was safely barricaded, with plenty to do, and blessed with limited social interaction. My perfect job. Too bad it didn't pay.

The park was small, perched on a low bluff over the Clackamas River. Tall fir trees provided abundant shade. The picnic structure was partly covered by a barnlike shed with a huge stone fireplace at one end, and partly in the open, where chairs were scattered around the edges of a wide wooden deck. Picnic tables spanned the length of both spaces. The two committee members in charge of the food arranged a staggering selection of fruit and veggie trays, chips, salads, and other dishes neatly on the tables under the shelter. Flies immediately descended on the croissant sandwiches. I snapped photos of the decorated cake, offering a silent prayer to the reunion gods that I might be allowed to avoid eating any of it.

The weather was perfect: the air was warm, just a tiny bit humid, and there was plenty of shade. The sleepy Clackamas River basked below us, accessible by a short but steep trail, at the bottom of which was an unoccupied wooden dock built for boaters and kayakers. We had none of those, and there wasn't much river traffic, so the River provided a silent but picturesque backdrop for the mini social dramas that unfolded on the deck above.

There was a fair amount of squealing among the women, as they stared at and then recognized former classmates and friends. There was no shortage of hugs. I had a ringside seat behind the registration table. I would eyeball each newcomer as they came down the concrete steps from the parking area, trying to guess his or her identity: is this a classmate or a spouse? Even after scanning yearbook photos and printing name tags, I got only about half of their names right and managed to call at least two people by the wrong name. Can I blame early dementia?

Few classmates looked like their high school yearbook photo, which I had thoughtfully provided on their name tags. Most of the women were obese, the men not so much (although for some reason there were many portly male spouses). After 40 years, it's no surprise we all look somewhat haggard. A few, though, seemed especially aged, while a few others seemed untouched by time. Many of the classmates had major health issues: diabetes, pacemakers, knee replacements... not to mention the challenges of dealing with aging or dying parents and adult children who refuse to grow up, hold down jobs, or marry the right partner. I was so glad to be single and childless. And I hereby declare that I'm going to stop complaining about my mustache: Clearly, it could be a lot worse.

On the other hand, many classmates, when asked what they do, replied that they were retired. They put in their 35 years at their electrician jobs and their telecommunications jobs and their healthcare jobs, and then they gracefully bowed out of the workforce. Ouch. Luckily for me, nobody cared about my life: They were far more interested in talking about their children. And their vacations, cruises, and volunteer activities. I didn't have to try to explain my unsettling financial predicament to anyone and in the explaining inadvertently reveal my fear and anxiety. Sometimes I am relieved that other people are so self-obsessed.

Still, I had a great time. I enjoyed seeing people I hadn't seen in 40 years. Seven of them were people I went to elementary school with. We have history. And as I talked with each person, a strange thing happened: The years seemed to fall away from their faces. I saw past the bald heads, puffy skin, and wrinkles to the 18-year-olds they used to be, the people I knew and the people I didn't know, as I endured the long hellish years of high school. I wasn't afraid of any of them. I felt a deep affection for all of them. We had survived a shared experience. Not all of us lived to tell this tale: We lost some along the way. But those of us who are left have figured out how to live. I'd like to think I'm one of those survivors, although it's always one day at a time for me.

The afternoon wafted to a close, and people drifted away with promises to keep in touch. Yeah, let's do this in five years! You bet. I helped clear away, pack up, and wash down, and eventually just the planning committee was left, plus one stalwart helper, whom we will no doubt recruit for the next iteration, should we live that long. I drove home thanking the reunion gods that I escaped without tasting a single crumb of the cake. It wasn't really such a miracle: It wasn't chocolate.

Exhaling at the speed of life

I'm a living example of efficiently working at being ineffective. I stay busy. I'm proud to say I'm not quivering in a closet, waiting to be hauled away to the poorhouse. For one thing, I only have one closet in the Love Shack, and it has no place to sit except in the laundry basket. I'm not that far gone. And secondly, what used to be the county poorhouse is now a swanky hip hotel, with a movie theatre, a brewery, a concert venue, a 9-hole golf course, several restaurants, and a multitude of bars. I went to a marketing conference there a few months back. I definitely can't afford it. I don't think there are poor farms anymore, are there? Well, there's always the Burnside Bridge. Under it, I mean: I'm not planning on jumping, in case you were worried.

I'm not lazy. I do a lot of stuff. I make long lists of to-do tasks and knock them off, one by one. That's good, right? No skulking in my one and only closet. Something is not quite right, though. I feel like a cartoon character, with spinning circles for legs, tearing up the air four inches above the pavement, going nowhere, fast. My logical left brain says I just need to work smarter, find the right strategy, I need to figure it out. My right brain is twirling in confusion, alternately euphoric at being saturated with freedom and morose at the prospect of losing it.

I feel like I've stopped breathing. For the past few months, with no income, my sense of accomplishment at finally finishing the Ph.D. is slowly seeping away. I'm deflating, a belch here, a hiss there. Nothing is coming in to replace what is trickling away. I say to myself, I'm living on air, and it feels true. Stored up air. Air from last year, when I still had a job. Musty stale air, sluggishly metallic as it seeps out of my checking account lungs.

Over the weekend I applied to three jobs: instructional designer, student adviser, and online professor at an unreasonably snobby for-profit university. In a few weeks I'll receive three politely terse emails (if I'm lucky) stating that my qualifications were not a match for the position.

I also recently published the Hellish Handbasket ebook, Welcome to Dissertation Hell. So far there have been 27 sample downloads. That's cool. But no sales. That's not so cool. That indicates to me that people are reviewing it and not finding a compelling reason to buy. Why does that sound familiar? Everything I've done: close, but no cigar. A-minus: Magna not summa. Vinyl, not leather. Just a few pounds away from thin. Just a little too angry, a tad too bitter.

I know if I just hold out and keep taking action, sooner or later, I'll begin to inhale again, and my blues will brighten. In the meantime, I hoard my stale dirty air.

Overlapping realities in the grocery store customer service line

Today I ate my last four eggs for breakfast, which triggers an automatic foray to the store. (Yes, I eat four eggs for breakfast every day, and no, I don't worry about cholesterol.) Before beginning my foraging foray, I stood in line for 20 minutes to return a plumbing repair item that I didn't need. (Yes, I fixed the leak under my bathroom sink all by myself.) It was a long queue, maybe a dozen people, and the line got longer as I stood there. A woman came to stand behind me, accompanied by a wizened older woman with gray hair and black glasses. I recognized her as the store employee who usually greets and good-byes at the entrance. Have a nice day. The employee stood with the customer. I listened to their conversation, and formed an image in my mind of the woman behind me, based on her voice and use of language.

She was Latina, that quickly became clear. The store employee asked her if she had some ID, and the woman replied, no, only a passaport. It was a friendly exchange, repeated several times, with no animosity on either side. No ID? No driver's license? No, only a passaport. Finally, the existence of the passport appeared to be established to their satisfaction. A comfortable pause followed. Other people arrived. I didn't look directly at anyone. Oddly, the store employee didn't leave, as I would have predicted. She stood off to the side and continued to talk to the woman.

“When are you due?”

“Next month, May 11,” the woman replied. Ah. Pregnant.

“Do you know what you are having?” asked the store employee. Uh, a baby? Steak and eggs? What? Is that any of her business?

“Issa girl,” came the reply. “I'm going to name her Genesis.”

“Genesis?”

“Yeah, you know, like from the Bible?”

The line moved at a glacial pace toward the counter. I admired the pattern of rafters overhead, holding up the ceiling.

“Where are you from?” the store employee asked chummily.

“Mexico.” I could have guessed that one. “Since 1990.” Her English was heavily accented, but her grammar was good.

“Have you been in Portland long?” asked the store employee. Why is she was still hanging around? Was this pregnant Latina woman on a store terrorist watch list or something?

“No, I came from San Diego. My family is here,” the woman said. “I came here to escape a violent domestic situation.”

“A what?”

“A violent domestic situation.”

“You can't change them,” the employee remarked knowingly. Hmmm. A lot of backstory, unsaid. I stifled my curiosity and remained facing forward. The line inched closer. The dialogue continued to spool out behind me. I pulled out my receipt and got ready for my turn at the counter.

“Where are you from?” The Latina woman asked the employee. Why was she keeping the conversation going? I imagined everyone in line was listening, although no one else participated. A baby wept.

“Originally I'm from Utah,” replied the employee. “Then I went to California, then Seattle, and then I ended up here. I hope you like rain.”

“Yeah. Do you have children?”

I got distracted by a father who was managing three little girls over in the furniture section. Two were in a complicated stroller contraption. One child sat in a shopping cart, kicking her heels. All but the baby were arguing loudly, including Dad, and it looked like the baby was about to join in at any second. My mind began the self-checkout process. I wondered, am I a member of the childless minority? (As a member of a minority, do I get any special rights? Like a special right to peace and quiet, maybe?)

“Next in line!” My turn. The slice of life was over. I never did turn around to see what the pregnant woman from Mexico looked like. Even in a grocery store, people deserve their privacy, even if they choose to violate it themselves.

The chronic malcontent gets on with the business of living

I'm pleased with myself tonight. If I weren't so tired, I'd be typing this dancing. Well, maybe not dancing, but shuffling. Why am I pleased? I figured out how to give a special gift to the wonderful folks who register on my website. No, it's not a box of chocolate, sorry, in case you were thinking of signing up. It's just a boring white paper about a topic I fear only I am interested in. But whatever. I'm dipping my timid toe into the raging current known as content marketing. So, kudos to me.

That's my technological victory. Not terribly impressive, I know. In a few months when I want to offer a different gift, we'll see if I'm able to remember how I did it. That's the problem with technological victories. They don't come with handbooks my brain can retain. I have to start over from scratch. Thank god for the Internet.

Any other victories to report? No progress on the ant situation: I continue to battle for space in the kitchen, and I'm not above eating them (although fear of being dinner doesn't seem to faze their industrious foraging).

I can report a little forward motion on the networking front. I went to a marketing event on Wednesday evening. Once again I braved the rain to join the unwashed masses on mass transit. The vent was at an independent theater near the famous Powell's bookstore. The event was a lecture by a marketing research guy. The topic: writing effective survey questions. I went to find out what I don't know. You know, the holes in my knowledge. As it turns out, I know a lot, which is nice, and (almost) worth the $40 it cost me to attend.

There weren't many people there, maybe 30 at the most. Not surprisingly, almost all of them were much younger than me. They're so attractive. And they talk so fast, these young marketers. So energetic. Where do they get their energy? Oh, I know, don't tell me. Red Bull. Mountain Dew. Well, I wasn't born yesterday. Obviously: I remember when Mountain Dew was a hillbilly beverage. Now Mountain Dew's former tagline is the name of my email provider. What the f—?

I managed to participate in and even instigate a few conversations, but failed the next day to convert anyone into a LinkedIn connection. I've lost steam on my quest to gain connections. I haven't even hit 100 yet; I'm bogged down in why bother? I get the idea in principle, but in practice, it seems like a futile bit of ego-stroking. Look how many connections I have! Nobody cares.

I wish life were only full of victories. But I guess I have a defeat to report. Victory... defeat... who is to say? It feels like a defeat to me. My mother thinks it is a victory. What am I talking about? This week I agreed to teach one two-hour marketing class per week for the next 11 weeks at a for-profit university in the Tigard triangle. That is the area of the city that has become a hub, a mecca, a swamp of higher education. I won't name the place I signed on with. Who cares. The gig starts Tuesday.

The good news is their rate is more than twice what I was paid at the career college that laid me off last year. The bad news is the class is only two hours a week. The good news is I'll be teaching marketing! (Instead of keyboarding, or Word, or Excel...) The bad news is that it could take me almost an hour to get there if there is traffic. The good news is my car gets pretty good gas mileage. The bad news is... there are only four students in the class. Argh. But the good news... and why my mother is pleased: it's money. It's postponing the moment when she feels compelled to swoop in and rescue me. And more good news: it's blog fodder.

So... victory or defeat? Who knows. It's like any situation: It has pluses and minuses. After a while, when your head stops spinning, you slow down and realize it really doesn't matter. In the end all we have is right now, this moment. Tomorrow is out of our control. Time to stop judging and get on with the business of living.

Cold remembrances of someone else's past

Self-imposed house arrest, in limbo, waiting for Monday, oral defense day. I made it to the store today, yay me. I had to go; I was out of eggs. Can't live without eggs. It's cold. The temperature almost made it above freezing, but I'm not going to complain: Minneapolis barely made it to 8° before the mercury plunged back down to 5° above. 20° I can handle; 8° would drive me under the covers. After a long hot bath.

While I wait for the waiting to be over, I am building shelves. As if I didn't have enough shelves already, you would no doubt say, if you've ever been lucky enough to see my place: The walls are papered with homemade wooden book shelves, which sag under the weight of books, binders, and more books. Most of the shelves are full. But you can never have too many shelves. The simple wooden shelves I build now will receive my journals as I continue to fill the pages and discard them, one per month, year after year since 1995. The boring story of my life, literally. It takes up a lot of space. Physically and otherwise.

And while I wait for the loden green latex to dry, I scan old family photos. I have only myself to blame. My mother wanted me to look through a stack of musty photo albums one day, and I made the mistake of saying, Hey, we need to scan these! Thus, I volunteered for this self-torture. The albums sat around my worktable for a few months while I wrote the massive tome we call my dissertation. Last week I realized now would be a good time to start clearing up the clutter (considering my compulsively neat friend Sheryl is coming over to be my proctor for my oral defense). Hence, scanning.

It's a mindless, tedious task involving removing old black and white photographs from little paper corners that someone painstakingly positioned 60 to 80 years ago. The album pages are dirty, dusty black paper, and reek of ancient cigarette smoke. It's fairly gross work. While I place five or six images on the scanner bed, I can see if someone wrote something on the back. Sometimes there are useful comments: Ray, Ruth, and me. (Me is my mother.) There are many pictures of my mother and her brother as children, fewer of them as teenagers, and hardly any of them as adults. I'm guessing by then my mother was the one behind the camera. My uncle was behind a glass of wine.

Other annotations were less helpful: This is a picture of the loading dock. Where, Grandpa? When? My mother's father was a sailor and then a longshoreman, first in San Francisco and then in Portland. I didn't know him well, although I could have if I hadn't been so nervous around him. As a very young man, he sailed on the Moshulu, a merchant sailing ship that went from the States to Australia and the Philippines. Some of the photos are obviously taken from the rigging, looking down on decks awash with ocean. Yikes. Now the Moshulu is refitted with fake masts and sails, serving as a restaurant in Philadelphia. And Grandpa is long gone.

Looking at all these photos of people I barely knew or didn't know at all, most of them dead now, makes me feel a little sad. It's a year-end kind of sadness, the sadness you get when it's garden-to-bed time, when it's fleece hat, electric blanket, and rice-filled foot-warmer time. Every summer there is a moment when I stop what I'm doing and think about how I will be feeling in six months, when I'm bundled in cat hair-covered fleece. When the electric baseboard heater is clicking and clacking as it churns out warm (ish) air. When I don't go outside for three days in a row and only then to refill the bird feeder and break the ice on the bird bath. Every summer I drag my feet on the paths of Mt Tabor, hoping I can make summer last a little longer, trying to postpone the horrible moment when there are more leaves underfoot than overhead. Time passes so quickly. Even though this week seems endless, next week will speed by, and the week after that, until all that is left of me and everything and everyone I love is a bunch of old photos in a stinky photo album.

What I have learned about the dissertation journey

Earlier today I logged into the online course room and clicked the Accept button to give permission to the university to suck $794 out of my bank account. This gives me the privilege of earning one more credit and the delight of toiling another 12 weeks toward the goal of earning this wretched Ph.D., which lies somewhere off in the hazy distance where it's been for the past seven years like a ship that never comes to port. Ho hum. After seven years, I'm tired of waiting. The glow has faded. It's just a job, and not one that pays well. Actually, it's sort of like being a slave. A slave to a scholarly pursuit.

This evening I logged into the university course room again, after a technological meltdown resulting from a fight between Wordpress and Mailchimp, during which I inadvertently closed all the windows. Bam. Problem solved! Should have thought of that sooner.

On the university website, there are a handful of discussion folders in which students post questions, concerns, complaints, kudos. The only folder I visit is the one marked Dissertations. There are roughly 300 new posts a month in that folder, mostly along the lines of Oh, no! I'm starting Comps in a week! What can you tell me about Doctor So-and-So? Help! As if Doctor So-and-So is going to help them at all with Comps. Come on, people! It's a test!

I've lurked in this discussion folder for seven years, reading posts from all kinds of people on all kinds of topics. When someone successfully passes Comps, forty people shout out, Way to go! Congratulations! When someone's cat died, a crowd of students rushed to offer condolences. When someone is put on academic probation (which happens regularly), the students rally around with email addresses for the ombudsman, the dean, and the accreditation agency, urging unflagging persistence, don't back down!

I've seen people come and go. Some of them graduate and, before their email is disconnected, they come back to wave good-bye, to collect their litany of congratulations, and to exhort the rest of us to keep moving forward, never give up, we can do it, rah rah rah. Some of those left behind mention these winners in later posts, usually in response to a post in which a lost soul is bleating for help with their wretched concept paper or their confounded dissertation proposal. Call Dr. Nina! Call Doc Crock!

We've had our share of wackjobs. The discussions are like any other comment thread, where people say what they mean without really thinking about it, and other people take offense and retaliate, which provokes another attack... it can be just slightly less vitriolic than the comments I enjoy reading at the end of a Yahoo! article about the latest doings of the White House (but not nearly as entertaining. Just sayin.')

So immersed was I in the discussion folder, I almost failed to notice that my Chair had updated my first assignment. I haven't even posted an assignment, so I opened up the Activities tab to read her comment. The IRB has approved my revised recruiting methodology! Congrats!

Well, isn't that nice. I can now ask the administrator at the career college to forward my email invitation to the cowering, resentful, bitter, fearful faculty that remain after the closure of one campus. If I'm lucky some of them will express their willingness to participate in my study. They ought to have some interesting things to say.

Oh, what have I learned about this dissertation journey?

• You are on your own. No one cares.
• It always takes three times as long as you think it will.
• You can't force anyone to participate.
• Just do what your Chair tells you, don't whine and don't argue.
• If you feel compelled to argue, be ready to cite APA page numbers.
• Don't use their templates, because they don't know squat about styles in Word.
• Don't waste time in the dissertation folder reading the complaints of your classmates. Get busy.
• Don't think about how great it will be to finish. It will just depress you, because you aren't there yet. You still have to write the manuscript and defend it.
• If you have a cat, put your nose in its fur and be here now.
• If you don't have a cat, borrow one. Seriously. It may be the thing that gets you through.

The chronic malcontent has a close encounter with the Mall of America

Greetings from the Chronic Malcontent. There is more than one of us, as you may have discovered. I'm the one that illustrates her prolific whining. I may not be much of an intellectual, but I can illustrate the crap out of malcontentedness.

I returned from a weekend in Minneapolis, vacation capital of the world... well, maybe not of the world. But you got your Mall of America there, and that counts for a lot. I stayed in a hotel right across the street from the Mall. It was a very wide street, too wide to walk across. The hotel provides a shuttle to and from the Mall every half hour. I did not make the trip, but I did take a photo of the giant Mall of America sign to commemorate the moment the shuttle from the airport sped by on the way to the hotel. In my photo, the three-story sign is barely discernible, lost against the massive edifice of the Mall.

Time divides into two time streams when you travel. Do you find that to be true for you? There's the home stream, where life carries on in the usual routine. Back at the Love Shack, the cat dozes on the window seat. The cat gets up, stretches, jumps up the strategically placed chairs to the food court, crunches some kibbles, licks a paw. Looks around, wonders what is missing, slurps some water from the jug, jumps down, goes to another sleeping spot, curls up, and falls back into a doze. That's life at the Love Shack.

The other time stream is me, moving and being moved through the world of transportation. Parking the car in the Economy Lot (remember Red Lot, F9!), waiting for the bus to the terminal, looking back with some melancholy at my largest asset, hoping it will start when I return. Hoping someone will find and reclaim it if I die somewhere en route.

Falling into line at the security checkpoint, hoping I don't look so eccentric I am pegged as a suspicious character. Shoes off, hat off, jacket off, boarding pass clutched between dry lips, stand on the footprints while they take an x-ray of my naked body. She's clean! Not even an underwire bra! Rushing to grab my shoes, my hat, my backpack as the crowd shoves from behind.

All of that just to be allowed to the gate. Continual fear that I will lose my identification, my boarding pass—oh, no, where's my boarding pass? On the floor of the restroom, where I dropped it. Whew. Still there. (One thing you can count on is people don't pick up anything that doesn't look like money.) The flight to Phoenix was delayed 20 minutes. I'm late! There was just enough time to hit the restroom and rush down the hot gangway onto the plane. I would have liked to have stayed in that warmth, that light, but no, gotta go!

I arrived Friday evening, met my friends, ate horrendously expensive hotel food, slept in a fabulously comfortable hotel bed, and then repeated the entire journey in reverse and in the dark on Sunday evening. The plane lifted off into the setting sun at about 8:50 pm. I wondered if we would keep up with the turning of the earth, speeding along at a standstill like Alice and the White Queen, but no, it got dark. I was barely awake, but I couldn't stop watching for the clusters of lights far below, all the little towns in the middle of nowhere. How can they... what do they do out there, so far from anyplace worth mentioning? Gather string and make it into large balls, I guess.

Back through Phoenix at almost midnight. The place was lively, packed with travelers, like a galactic hub, so much activity. I found my gate. We boarded. We taxied and taxied and taxied, clear around the huge terminal, and back to a gate. Wha—? Something's wrong. Passengers began to mutter when they realized we had been diverted from the runway. Eventually the pilot fired up the intercom to tell us an “alarming” passenger had been removed, and all is well, we are cleared to depart. Yikes.

We leaped into the darkness, headed for Portland, and two and a half hours later, we landed so softly I wasn't sure we weren't still airborne. It was 2:00 a.m. The Portland terminal was deserted except for cleaning crews, vacuuming in circles. A far different picture from lively Sky Harbor. We shuffled en masse through the empty terminal, beyond weary. The bus to the Red Lot arrived, driven by a maniacally cheerful driver, who commented after her third joke fell flat that we must be very tired. Someone muttered, “Plane...an hour late.”

My car was waiting where I'd left it, looking strangely desiccated in the fluorescent light. The air inside was dry and flavorless. The engine started with a hesitant cough. After a detour or two, I found the place to pay the $30 that would allow me to exit the parking lot, and I wended my way home through empty streets. I pulled into the parking area at 3:00 a.m. I staggered to my door in the dark, wondering if someone would hear me mumbling and come out to shoot me. My cat met me at the door, like he'd been expecting me.

And that's the story of my weekend. The reality show of my life began again on Monday morning, with calls to the career college, resubmissions to my Chair and the IRB committee, laundry, shopping, rent... life picked up almost where I left off. But I am not the same. I've seen the Mall of America. I've seen a real Minnesota potluck. I've seen the half-moon and the brilliant stars from 36,000 feet. I know my place now, and it is good: I am a speck on the skin of a big, mysterious, and beautiful planet. It's not a bad place to be.

If you can't make a decision, it means you don't know who you are

I once overheard someone say, “If you can't make a decision, it means you don't know who you are.” I chewed on that idea for several years while I floundered my way out of a disintegrating relationship. Should I stay or should I go? All those years invested, all that crap to box up and move... but no more companionable TV time together, no more sex...on the other hand, no more snarky comments, no more walking on eggshells, no more of that peculiarly profound loneliness you only get when you are in a relationship... weighing the pros and cons of uprooting the status quo in favor of embracing the unknown.

Breaking up is a big decision. I don't know how you make the big decisions, but I have to roll around in the muck for a long time before all of a sudden my perspective shifts, and I wake up. It's like someone turns on a light switch. One moment I'm in the dark, the next moment, things are bright and clear as day. All that remains at that point is logistics. My heart and mind leave long before my body walks out the door. By the time I carry the last box to the car, I've been gone for months. Each partner (I was always the one to leave) accused me of being cold and callous, of leaving with no advance warning. What can I say? The time for tears passed ages ago. It just took time for my body to catch up to the rest of me. Bye-bye.

I left my last relationship ten years ago, Independence Day weekend, 2003. My only regret is I waited so long. Decision making takes as long as it takes. You can't rush it. It's a process, it's organic, like mold growing on bread. Like yogurt, like beer. Like growing a garden. When you are in the middle of the process, it seems never-ending, a nail-scraping eye-gouging eternity of frustration. Why can't I decide! Clearly we aren't happy! But we used to have so much fun together... But now it sucks. Why can't I just leave? But how will I pay the rent on my own? Argh!

I have an acquaintance who telephones me regularly, presumably to witness her chronic indecision. She (I'll call her Kaylee) has elevated indecision to a high art. The simplest decisions—where should I eat? Should I go out with my friends or not?—are torn apart into microscopic moments that must be examined and discussed in excruciating detail. Kaylee does not enjoy this process. Frequently she weeps. Each decision has the weight of life or death behind it. The wrong decision really feels like a death sentence to her. Me, I'm like, just make a decision already, who cares? Either way you learn something. But she can't; she's paralyzed with fear.

Twice in the past year I've persuaded her to flip a coin to make a decision. The first time was a big decision. She was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to break up with her partner, a man who lived in her basement. (I know, really?) They hadn't had a real relationship in years, yet she was terrified to let him go. For months she told me she didn't love him, she wanted him gone, she just needed to gather courage to ask him to move out. Then she found out he had been seeing someone else. Finally, I thought. Now she'll be happy to see him go, but no! Suddenly her love for him revived. She declared her desire to marry him, to have his baby, to commit to him forever, because she loved him so much. Oh, why hadn't she seen it before, while she kept him relegated to the basement!? Oh, woe, alas, alackaday! She wept, she gnashed her teeth, she went without sleep and food.

I'll be the first to admit, love can make anyone nuts. Leaving a relationship is not for the faint of heart. It's advanced decision making, a 400 level course. It requires guts. So I let her wallow in her indecision on the boyfriend. I witnessed. Hey, it can happen to anyone. Love is a battlefield, right?

The second time we tossed a coin, though, she was trying to decide if she should drive to the coast for a vacation with her friends. The problem was, her cat was sick. Should she stay with the cat, or go on vacation? Hmmmm, a classic dilemma. Should she apply a Kantian approach? The good of the friends would surely outweigh the good of the measly cat. On the other hand, you could apply the Golden Rule: if you were a cat, what would you want? Walk a mile in my furry paws.

I always ask, when confronted with what appears to be two obvious options, are those my only choices? Like, when I go to a buffet, I scope out the whole thing, from lettuce to pudding, before I choose my entree. I like to know the whole picture. Kaylee sees only two options, and both are fraught with the danger of making a wrong decision. I suggested she let the universe decide. She flipped a coin, and it came up heads: go on vacation.

“Great,” I said. “The universe has spoken. Have a good trip.”

“No, I can't go, I can't leave Tippy!”

“Ok, then don't go, stay home.”

“But I really need a vacation!”

“Ok, so go on vacation.”

“But what if Tippy dies while I'm gone!”

“Tippy's a cat.”

“Tippy's like my child! If something happened while I was gone, I'd never be able to live with it.”

“Ok, so stay home with Tippy.”

“But my friends are going to be there!”

I did a lot of eye-rolling while she raved and wept in anguish. When we finally ended the call, I heaved a sigh of relief that I didn't have the disease of indecision. When I decide, I just go with it, whatever it is, if it seems right at the time, I just go with it. I let the universe take care of the outcome. I don't always make the right decision, but I always learn something. Isn't that one of the purposes of living? To learn? Maybe it means I finally know who I am. Or maybe it means I'm ok with not knowing.

If your life could speak for you, what would it say?

My family reunited for a brief few hours today. My older brother drove in from the Oregon coast for the day. My sister came in from Boston for the weekend. My little brother pried himself away from his menagerie (two dogs, umpteen cats, a rabbit, and a pigeon) to traverse the endless block between his house and our mother's condo. I set aside my weekend for family stuff. The weather has cooperated nicely so far. And we haven't killed each other, which is good. In fact, we haven't even argued.

My guess is we are feeling too old to pick a fight. Memories fade. Old rivalries evaporate. I hazily recall that my older brother broke my nose when we were kids. (The statute of limitations has long since expired.) I doubt if he remembers. It takes too much energy to hold a grudge. I've come to terms with my crooked nose. If I ever got it fixed, no one would recognize me. I'd be another Jennifer Gray. Who, you say? See? I rest my case.

The high point of my day was a conversation I had with my sister as the afternoon was winding down. High clouds streamed over Portland, filtering the sun we've enjoyed all weekend, but it was still bright in the little coffee shop we found a block away from the famous Powell's City of Books. We sipped our fancy coffee beverages from tiny white porcelain cups and talked about turning points, crossroads, and intersections.

I may have mentioned in previous posts that in a week I will join the ranks of the unemployed. I'm thinking of starting my own business, and every time I think about it, a burning wave of fear rushes up from my stomach out to my fingertips. Prodding me toward self-employment is the suspicion that I am very nearly unemployable, due to factors beyond my control: age, introversion, and chronic malcontentedness.

My sister has her own big decision: move to Europe or stay in in Boston. I've always felt she was a European at heart. Somehow she was inadvertently dropped into a lower middle class suburban household in Portland, Oregon, when she should have been raised in Paris or London or Rome. To me, hearing her talk of moving to Europe is sort of like hearing someone talk about moving home after being away for many long years.

This special time of turning points is a fertile time. My sister and I stand together on a cliff, metaphorically speaking, peeking anxiously toward a new future. It's in the air. Several of my friends are also standing on the same cliff. Who can say if it will turn out to be a leap of faith, or a leap of foolishness? At our backs, nudging us toward the edge, is the prospect of a lifetime of boring jobs working for companies that don't appreciate our unique gifts in industries that don't nurture our souls, where we earn just enough to sustain our sorry unfulfilled half-lived lives, until finally we die withered and bitter with our stories untold.

Well, hell, when you put it like that! Even though we don't know what will happen (and who ever does?), I think we would all agree there will never be a better time than now to take the chance, to bet on ourselves. If not now, when? The alternative is unacceptable. For half our lifetimes we have half lived. We know what that is like already. And nobody else cares if we die as grouchy, dissatisfied malcontents. It's up to us to claim our future.

All together now!

Ants

One of the consequences of embarking upon the journey toward an advanced degree is that some parts of life must inevitably receive less attention. The chore of writing coherent sentences is all consuming. There is little time left for things like personal hygiene, housekeeping, or car maintenance. You already know I live in squalor. I've written about the dust balls and cat hair before. But I don't think I've mentioned the ants. Have I mentioned the ants?

I'm beginning to suspect my sole purpose in life is to transport ants from one location to another. I'm really good at it, mostly (although I will say that not all of them survive the trip, most notably the ones that inadvertently trod upon my neck). They load up the gangway to my shirt while I'm washing dishes at the kitchen sink. Then they sample the various activities of my scarf, hat, and pants. At their own risk, of course. Then I walk into another room, where they disembark on my computer keyboard or my television remote control. They are thrill-seeking tourists, looking for that next adventure. And I'm just the human who can give it to them.

I've spread a concoction made of mineral oil and cayenne pepper along my kitchen counter, but I always miss some spots. These become ports of entry for intrepid scouts, who navigate between reeking hot puddles of pepper, like humans traverse Yellowstone. It's comical to watch them stop, back up, turn, start up again, stop, like little matchbox toys. Sometimes they are boxed in. Then they just have to sit there. I don't usually save them. But when I return to the kitchen the next day, they are gone. Who rescued them? Maybe there is a superhero for ants trapped on kitchen counters. Save us from the evil human!

Sometimes they organize a coup. They try to take over the kitchen. The little buggers have almost succeeded a couple times, especially when their spies locate the cat food. The supply lines are long and thick as your finger, little workers trundling back and forth. Must bring home the bacon! Feed the children! I would invite them in as guests, but my cat is less hospitable. He won't fight them, or eat them (I assume they aren't that tasty, although I'm sure I've accidentally cooked them into my scrambled eggs a few times). The cat gives me the evil eye when his food dishes are overrun. I can't live long with the evil eye.

I don't like killing anything, even ants. I also hate eating meat, but that is another story. In the flora and fauna of the Love Shack, I let spiders live, as long as they aren't in my bed. I save bees, hornets, wasps, and yellow jackets. I even save flies, if I can catch them. Any one critter, I will attempt to rescue and put outside. But when critters attack in hordes, I can't save them all. Moths and ants overwhelm me with sheer numbers. I'll tolerate a few, but eventually the tolerant giant is moved to retaliate.

Out come the big guns. No, I'm not talking about pesticide sprays or ant motels. I'm talking about the oldest remedy for what ails you: alcohol! Rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle sends them to ant heaven. I mop up their sopping carcasses with a paper towel and toss them to their final resting place in the trash. Then I spray bleach on the battlefield. And finally I salt the earth (all entry points I can locate) with the hot pepper oil concoction. That buys me a few weeks of peace and ant-free scrambled eggs. Such is the life of a (slightly crazy) doctoral student.

The surreal night off

What a surreal night. I got news from my dissertation chair that she's sending my revised concept paper on to the committee for the second time, and if they approve it, she'll forward the paper to the Graduate School for approval. Or rejection, as the case may be. I'm hopeful.

At the same time I get this good news, I am at home because classes were cancelled for this evening. There was a shooting at the shopping mall across the street from our Clackamas campus, so the entire area is on lockdown right now. The freeway, the buses, the MAX train line, all are shut down.

My new phone arrived today in the mail: A cordless phone with a second handset and an answering machine. I've been answering machine-less for a week, which isn't really so bad. I rather like being incommunicado. So with mixed feelings, after my mid-day nap, I opened up the box and got the system installed. Three minutes after I hooked it up, all the phones in my apartment started ringing. Loudly. And my cell phone started buzzing. That is how I knew that something was going down. Something to do with work. Something bad.

The robot voice said: There has been a shooting at the Clackamas Town Center Mall. I turned on the radio, but they didn't know much. I called the campus. Our perky receptionist said they knew about the shooting, and they were all leaving. Oh, and by the way, night classes are cancelled. A few minutes later all my phones rang again. Another robot: Classes at the Clackamas campus are cancelled. Lucky me, I got the news just before I left for work.

Unfortunately, my unexpected night off comes at a cost: three dead (one the shooter) and one seriously wounded. Some apparently random gunman with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire in the mall. He shot three people and then took his own life. The mall is lit up like a Christmas tree. I'm glad I'm not there. I'm glad I'm watching the aftermath unfold on the local news channels. I'm warm, I'm dry, I'm alive. I was never in danger, but I cried a little bit listening to the stories of the witnesses.

We see this kind of violence on the news all the time. Until it comes close to home, we always imagine it happens to someone else, someplace else. It is bizarre to recognize the location, the buildings, and know that I've been there, I've shopped there, I've eaten in that food court. If I ever go back to that mall, I'll walk the marble floors and wonder, is this where that woman died? Is this where the shooter walked? This event will ripple out into the community as stories get shared. It will take on a larger life.

Random violence is like an earthquake: unpredictable, uncontrollable. You can't avoid it by being a good person, hanging out with good people, living a clean life. It can get you anywhere, random violence. No one is safe. Children, old people, nice people, anyone can be cut down. The feather of death brushes by us all the time, doesn't it? On Thursday when I go back to work, I will drive by the mall and feel a little sick. I'll pray to whatever deity I may subscribe to that day to keep us all safe from random insanity. If I live through the day, I hope I remember to be grateful.

More to be revealed

Finally, at the age of 55, I think I get it. This is it, this is my life; whether I like it or not, this is my life. It doesn't matter how much I complain or whine. Having hope that things might be other than what they are is a waste of the time I have left. Today I am pondering the idea that what I focus on reveals what I think is important.

I have spent so many hours, days, years thinking if-only thoughts. You know what I mean. If only I were thinner, if only I were pretty, if only I had a new car, if only it were 90 degrees everyday, if only people loved me for who I am.... then I could finally be happy. But if-only thoughts are a pointless dead end, leading me nowhere but down, back into the hole in sidewalk I've tried so hard to crawl out of. Today I am taking a new approach to the if-onlys.

If I am not thin by now, then it was never that important to me. If it were that important, I would have spent more time watching my diet and working out. Bah, who cares about thin! I'm giving it up. From now on, no more obsessing over my hips. I wear huge baggy clothes anyway. People already think I weigh 200 lbs. Who cares about a couple camel hip bumps! At least I'm balanced. And if there is a brief famine after the earthquake, I'll be able to live off those hip bumps for a couple weeks at least. Na na na.

About the whole pretty thing. I'm old now, so pretty, like baby-making, is no longer on the bucket list. But grooming is always possible, if one cares about how one looks. For example, if I don't have manicured nails by now, then clearly I must not rate manicured nails high on my priority list. Nails, shmails. That is an easy one to give up—I have never cared much about grooming. (Just as a for instance, this morning I looked in the mirror and found a white hair growing among the coarse dark hairs in my right eyebrow. It must have been there for quite awhile, to be so long. I confess, I rarely look in the mirror. Grooming is highly over rated, in my opinion. Before long my eyebrows will be non-existent, if my mother's eyebrows are any indication of the future of my facial hair.) Anyway, so when it comes to manicures, I don't care what my nails look like, or my hands either, for that matter. I'm just glad I have hands and that they work, more or less. At least I can point to things and carry a cup of tea.

How about cars and self-image? Americans are obsessed over cars. Not me. If I'm not driving a Lexus by now, then I never cared about how my vehicle communicated my status, not enough anyway to earn the money or marry the rich husband so I had the resources to buy one. I've never participated in the must-have-new-car-every-three-years mentality. (Or the earning thing or the rich-husband strategy either.) I know some people would rather die than drive an old beater. Just like there are those who wouldn't be caught dead shopping at a thrift store. Not me. I happily shop Goodwill, and I'm content with my 11-year-old Ford Focus, with all its dents and scratches. It reminds me of me.

The weather thing is a non-starter, but I'll say something about it anyway, because this morning I had a conversation with someone about the issues of powerlessness and control. She admitted she didn't understand the concept of powerlessness, because people control the weather all the time. I was like, what? People control the weather? How did I get left out of that seminar? She proceeded to tell me that there is a cabal of powerful folks controlling the world's weather, so apparently there's no longer any point in complaining about it. Wow, think of the implications! Humans have been complaining about weather since at least the dawn of history. There will be a huge void in the water-cooler conversation if we all get to choose our own micro-climate. Maybe we can get some work done. Anywho, sign me up! Ninety degrees sounds about optimal to me.

The last one, being loved for who I am, is a tricky if-only. I'm demanding unconditional love, and I know enough now to know humans aren't capable of delivering. Somewhere along the line I guess I must have figured out if I wanted acceptance, I would have to be something or someone other than myself. Naturally I resented that realization, and fought it hard in ways both covert and obvious. Which may explain in part why I chose the difficult path of creativity. (And why my relationships have always been such a mess.) But what I think I'm really asking for is acceptance of my creative self. And it hurts to imagine that, applying the same logic I so glibly applied to my hips, if I haven't focused on my art or my writing by now, then maybe I never really believed in them to begin with.

I can't leave it there. I think my mind is trying to kill me again. This happens when I get close to achieving a meaningful and terrifying objective—and my educational journey might qualify as such an objective. After six years, I am beginning to think I might actually one day finish this Ph.D., that the objective might really be achieved. The thought is terrifying. My instinct is to turn my back on the possibility, revert to my childish self, and declare I never really wanted it anyway, this stupid Ph.D., all I really want is to create, and isn't is sad and unfair that no one loves me? Well, that might have worked when I was 25, but not at 55. Nobody cares about my angst. I have a squad of cheerleaders prodding me to make more art, sell it on Etsy, turn the blog into an ebook, sell it on iTunes. Who am I to say it can't be done? Who am I to put some if-only condition on the dreams I have claimed as mine since childhood? Why can't I make art and earn this Ph.D? Maybe it's not an either-or but a both-and. Memo to Self: This is life. So get over yourself and live it, already.

The archaeological wonderland under my kitchen sink

Loud noises are coming from the basement under the Love Shack (the 1940s triplex I live in). A minute ago, the landlord George pounded on my door and cautioned me not to run the water into my kitchen sink, which has been well and truly clogged since last week (see previous rant). Now he is in the basement banging on the pipes. I'm hoping today he will be able to remove the clog, although I fear that it will take more than pipe-banging to do it.

The clog-busting endeavor began on Thursday. George interrupted my after-work nap. He's an middle-aged white-haired guy, but I imagine his work as a contractor keeps him fit. He looked pretty svelte in his loose faded jeans, old mud-colored wool sweater, and hiking boots. He hesitated a split second on the threshold, eyeing my carpet. Then he strode past me toward the kitchen. In that tiny moment he had discerned that I am house-keeping-challenged and walking on my rug with dirty boots would not be an issue.

He took command. First he ran water into the sink. Within seconds the sink was filling. We stood and watched as the water swirled around and came to a calm standstill. Nope, definitely not draining. He stabbed a plumber's helper over the drain and leaned into it, shooting water all over the kitchen. I stepped back. When he stopped, I moved back in, and we peered at the water. Still not draining.

"Do you have a bucket?" he asked me. I quickly provided a cheap blue bucket, which he placed under the drain. While I hovered nearby, George contorted his middle-aged body in front of the under-sink cabinet and began to unscrew the pipes under the drain. Water went in the bucket. Wow. What a pro.

He took apart the pipes. We were both hoping to see one easily-removable clog of cat hair, olive oil, and dirt, stuck in the curved part of the pipe. Well, I know I was. But no, the pipes were all clear. I could see his shoulders deflate a little.

He went out to his truck and brought in a coil of metal rope: a snake. On one end was a little whisk device, presumably intended to scrape the muck off the sides of the pipes. There was some kind of a sliding gizmo that he could tighten and untighten as he forced the metal rope into the hole in the wall. Donning rubberized gloves, he shoved the metal rope into the hole, twisting it with his hands, grunting with the effort. After a couple minutes, he took off his pullover sweater and handed it to me. "Now I see why plumbers get paid the big bucks," I said.

He worked the snake into the hole, but I could tell it was slow going. "I can't get it past the bend by the floor," he said. He didn't sound angry or frustrated. He sounded like a scientist working on a challenging experiment.

He yanked on the snake, bringing out blobs of gloppy brown muck. We contemplated the blobs. He poked at one with a screwdriver. "Looks like hair," he said. I thought of my constantly shedding cat and grimaced. "I try so hard to keep stuff out of the drain," I whined.

He went out the back door to the basement, leaving a pile of tools, the snake, and glops of goopy brown gook around the sink, the counter, and on my handwoven Ikea rag rug. After a couple minutes, I heard a loud ratchety sound. "Yay," I said to myself. "He's brought in the power tools." I hovered around the sink, waiting for a miracle. Suddenly the water rushed down the drain. Success!

I trotted down the steps to the basement to tell George the good news and saw that he had cut the drain pipe in half at about eye-level with a cordless chain saw device. Radical solution! There was a spray of water all over the cement wall, across the washer, and on George. That's one way to get the sink to drain, I thought. That would never have occurred to me.

He pulled off one section of the pipe and shone a light into the end. At first, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Around the inside of the pipe was a one-inch layer of gloppy brown muck. Down the center of the entire three foot section of pipe was a tiny opening, maybe a half-inch across: the water channel. "Did I do that?" I asked in awe. George shook his head. "Fifty years of grease did that." Whew. I felt a little like an archaeologist looking at the remnants of a long-dead civilization. I bet they cooked with lard, I thought with smug superiority. How primitive!

He didn't have the supplies to finish the job on Thursday. He replaced the pipes under my sink with lovely new white plastic tubes, but told me not to run much water, because the pipes in the basement were clogged and needed to be replaced. Yesterday I became ultra conscious of how much water I use. I toted dirty dish water and vegetable rinse water in my little blue bucket the fifteen steps from the kitchen to the bathtub, and thought about people who walked miles carrying their drinking water back to their villages. My little personal plumbing problem pales in comparison.

At a little after noon today I went to a meeting and when I returned, George was gone. My drain is now unclogged. The secret life of plumbing is once again hidden from view. Life goes on. I washed some carrots for my salad, thinking that the next fifty years of cat hair, olive oil, and carrot shavings begins today, something for the next tenant to contemplate when I'm long gone.