***FYI: I am collecting donations for our Lakota families until Nov 17th.Details in the Giving paragraph. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
Roxane Gay’s ministry of checking bags. I used to check bags, then I tried to carry on only. Then I had a kid and that all went Hades. We check bags now and it’s nice to only carry enough on to put under the seats, plus one backpack that might go overhead if we haven’t lost our minds and we packed adequate snacks for our small black hole that we travel with. I haven’t traveled solo for longer than a day or two for a few years so I don’t recall what I do unencumbered. Are you Team Checked Bag or Carry-On?
This made me chuckle: hot people are stressful. I had a similar doctor experience once, bundled off to the ER because of debilitating pain, rolled up like pastry wrapped sausage in two coats and a robe. I can neither explain the pain nor the Michelin Man bundle. For some reason that made Mom feel better about sending me off with only my brother as driver? It was unpleasant to say the least to be greeted by a reasonably put together, not utterly disheveled, conventionally attractive doctor. At the very least, I scolded my body, have something worthwhile to justify being here and having to face THIS social interaction! Alas, it did not.
***FYI: I will be collecting donations for our Lakota families until Nov 17th. Details in the Giving paragraph. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
Holy wow this Patricia Lockwood review: Malfunctioning Sex Robot. I’m going to TRY not to quote the whole thing: “I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.” “Please tell me you’re writing something about Updike’s 9/11 book,’ another said. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11.’ Taste and tact had departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike.”
Growing up, this sentiment would have been met with scoffs of “Americans,” underlining the major differences in our family culture and the culture of our new home.
It was laughable to think that you didn’t owe your parents anything – you owed them everything. You owed them life, and everything you had in life, and therefore you owed them your unswerving obedience. Now?
In the end, I feel both sentiments can lead to toxicity. Maybe at this point, all I believe is that we owe our parents what we owe the world: kindness and care to the extent that we can give it.
Hank McCoy would say: oh my stars and garters!
Brothers Fayard and Harold Nicholas dancing in the 1943 film “Stormy Weather.” Years later, Harold recalled that they never rehearsed the jumps over each other’s heads but still managed to do the routine in just one take. pic.twitter.com/pVSAfUtLaY
***FYI: I will be collecting donations for our Lakota families until Nov 17th. Details in the Giving paragraph. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
I adore seeing people’s experiences with palaces in the sky (at least for people I like anyway).
Pay inequality is still a thing. This is why I negotiate hard, knowing that I’ll be penalized for negotiating too, but knowing that at least I show my worth many times over so I should at least negotiate for as much as I can even while a white male doing the job I’m doing would automatically be paid much more without having to ask for it.
How did your parents embarrass you? I assume mine did but I can’t remember any embarrassed by parents stories from childhood.
Making friends as adults. I do envy little kids and their ability to make friends easily now that I’ve witnessed it in JB. I was as hermitlike as you could get at 4 years old and hated the idea of people. I didn’t so much make friends as have some happen to me. I still miss that first friend I ever made on my own in third grade – it took that long – and we remained fast friends even though were in totally different circles by high school. Now only eight years into my life in the Bay Area, I’m finally making the effort to make friends and it’s still every bit as difficult now for me as it was for child me. Ugh.
***FYI: I will be collecting donations for our Lakota families until Nov 17th. Details in the Giving paragraph. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
I keep repeating this to myself: stop buying stuff!Why do I still keep getting these urges to buy cute or beautiful things?
I’m usually very thoughtful about big decisions like adding a pet to our family but even after being so thoughtful, I have regretted getting a pet.
Angela and not being perfect: “If everyone focused on doing things better – let’s say, eighty percent better – the world would look completely different.” I know that when I try to make all my actions environmentally sound, I get stuck in paralysis because there are no perfect actions. But if I can aim to make most of my actions green in a significant way, then I have to forgive myself for the other “fails”.
The crappiness of “parental leave” (hahahahaha) in the US. Our parental leave in the US is so crap. Near five years later, I’m STILL angry that my raise was less than agreed (and that I hadn’t gotten it in writing that ONE TIME) because we found out I was pregnant before the raise went into effect. It’s definitely affected my trust of my employer.
I’ve been fighting the instinctive toxic positivity in myself because I hate receiving it from others but also I note that it’s hard to gauge sometimes what’s needed because a lot of my conversations are over text / email and not in person. Better responses I’m working on: “I’m here for you.” / “That sounds really hard.” / “How did that make you feel?” or “How do you feel about that?”
I’ve spent 11 years in 3 different jobs before this one, including my college years because I worked more than full time those 4 years, but staying so long at this one (more than my usual 4-5 years) makes me wonder if I’m making a big mistake like Ali’s here: For 12 years I refused to talk to recruiters and never applied for a position with another firm. I regularly review the reasons it still makes sense to stay here that aren’t “because I’m too lazy to find another job” because the monetary benefits are fairly modest. It’s all about the day to day autonomy and flexibility but at some point it’s also got to be about the money. I think we’re still committed to this particular balance but if PiC has to leave his incredibly good benefits job, I may have to sacrifice the flexibility of this job to make more money. OR maybe I can have all: more money and all the flexibility?? Maybe. We’ll see.
Life In The Cupboard Under The Stairs: on living with the smallness of a chronically ill life. Most days, this is just normal and I accept it. But this feeing of smallness, of tightness, is renewed. I discovered a fantastic band I’d love to go see and they’re in Oakland this winter. Tickets are under $35. But it’s on a weeknight. How could I possibly scrape up the energy after a workday to be out and then also work again the next day? I still have dogs to be walked and child to be looked after. PiC volunteered to cover both (as a sitter for the required amount of time would be $100 minimum) but I still am unlikely to have the energy to cope with the bookends of work AND having to stay up late. Heck, I’m unlikely to be able to be out that late without consequences even if I didn’t have work, even if I didn’t have to expend energy to drive all the way to Oakland and back. So life gets a little smaller and I try to pretend I didn’t want to go anyway to ignore that new little spike of disappointment in my side that’s grown, trusting that it too will fade away, replaced with new cuts in time.
So many reasons to love Piggy and Kitty. I want to quote the whole post because it’s all my favorite but I’ll settle for just one. HOW DO I PICK: “Guess what happened the last time I was on the phone with my sweet, loving, stubborn, old-fashioned grandpa, and he said something racist? That’s right: I read my beloved g-paw for so much filth the trash can got jealous. Thrown off guard by my vehemence, he immediately apologized, and has successfully checked himself since then.”
A little bit on Anthony Stewart Head. ASH has a very special place in my heart as Giles and I hope that his time away while working on Buffy was worth it for him. It makes me think about whether or not he actually made enough money to make it worth it for their family, too, or whether this was one of those moves you make to sacrifice in order to build your professional reputation even if the money doesn’t make sense. I made a move like that about 8-9 years ago, forgoing the higher salary in a lower COLA to get out of a toxic sector of my industry. While it took me four years to get back up to that higher salary I could have gotten right away, the move away from the toxic sector was worth at least 30% of that salary. The amount of stress I would have been under would have destroyed my health entirely. At the time, I was stopping to dry heave outside work every day and my vision suffered. A few more years of that and life would have been over.
Totally unsurprising: “Before my transition, people assumed I knew what I was talking about.They didn’t talk over me in meetings.They trusted me when I spoke, and they didn’t look to others for confirmation of my ideas. There was a baseline assumption that I was competent and capable.Since my transition, it’s distressingly common for people to talk over me, to look to men for validation of the things I say, to assume that I couldn’t possibly know anything about [technical topic] because I’m a girl.I’ve actually had people tell me, “what could you possibly know about that?You’re a girl!””
Jonathan at My Money Blog on college tuition. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as a function of our overall budget and what we should save and why.
My car incident over the weekend that’s going to cost money when I am already feeling squeeze is making me feel this post extra hard. We COULD dig into our savings and not live so lean but we do that for a very good reason and it’s worth sticking to that reason. It is. Remember that, self.
I’ve read quite a few FinCon recaps but OFG’s resonated most with me. Not a surprise, is it? It reminds me that I loved the two FinCons I went to because I got to connect with people I only know online the rest of the year and that the money part is actually just a bonus. That’s harder to see in lean years like this one where we don’t have much wiggle room in the budget to afford, basically, a mini vacation for me.
Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture. Obviously, I use gender neutral pronouns here for JB and I like that it pushes me to change my socially instilled default gender mentally from him or her to gender neutral and to reduce my assumptions of gender outside of this blog. I know it bothered at least one blog reader enough to snark at me about it but I’m sticking to it.
Beyonce’s Homecoming and the Emmy snubs. I don’t claim to understand the Emmys but how does James Corden’s light and amusing car show (which is a lot of fun) win over Beyonce’s intense Homecoming? I’ll never understand.
How does an actual agent not teach their clients the very basic things about what an advance is, how earning out works, and how does one land an advance of that size and not ask a lot of questions to be sure you know what’s happening and why? It felt like this was very much like lottery winnings going down the drain.
I’ve decided that while I’d like to go to FinCon 2020, I can’t justify it out of my regular income that’s all committed to other expenses. Between now and the end of January, I need to earn enough from my creative endeavors / from the blog to justify that FinCon ticket and trip. I’m going to continue sharing cool stuff I made in support of that:
Thanks to SP for the nudge, I just realized (duh) I can show a preview of the interior here even if I can’t show it on Amazon! Duh.
*-* I’ve always intended to put the monthly updates that I publish about JB into a book for zir. I made two books for that: Milestones, design 1 and Milestones, design 2.
I had noticed that Tanja’s blogging schedule had changed, I’m glad to read her reflections on why.
Not going to guilt myself on the fact that I don’t remember our list of 2019 goals, just leaving this here to remind myself to check in on them next week.
What do you think of accepting money gifts from bad people, institutionally? You’d think it would be simple but it is not. On a personal level, I refused to accept money to pay for Mom’s funeral (in the neighborhood of $5000-10,000) from her horrible parents and siblings who had hurt her for so many years in so many ways. Even in my grief I knew they just wanted to publicly rehabilitate their image and I knew that by the way they disrespectfully and relentlessly badgered me up until and throughout the funeral. Good people who want to pay for things out of love and respect conduct themselves better. They did not deserve public redemption by means of writing a check. Do billionaires get to absolve themselves so easily just because their checks are much bigger?
A small moment of niceness to start the week: I lost the part of the tape dispenser that holds the roll in place. After I explained what it looked like to the 8yo, he helped me build a replacement out of Legos! pic.twitter.com/4rm7KMTfJP
