About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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November 19, 2012
As a general rule, I avoid going into the city. No offense to the city of San Francisco, although I do hate driving in or having to find parking there because let’s face it – Market Street mixed among other wackadoodle streets and city parking are the pits, but this homebody is far too easily fatigued and thus unmotivated so can easily push off any single errand to SF until there are at least several things to do or someone’s come to town.
We had such a confluence this weekend with mutual friends in town so PiC and I had a bit of a lark. With nearly 12 hours of sleep under my belt, I had my fingers crossed I’d make it all the way into the evening. We had one errand each, and then an open-ended “we’ll meet with you for ….. ”
We had Clipper cards with varying amounts of money on it for travel, but his card required an agent to work some kinda something on it to make it work again.
My travel: Free.
His travel: $3.55, no agent at the booth and I’d accidentally left behind my backup Clipper card in case his didn’t work. Whoops.
It was a surprisingly long two-thirds mile trek through groddy-town to get to Hayes Valley. Disturbed flocks of pigeons there, along with all the smells of back alleys, discovered a freeway entrance where one didn’t seem to belong and then found ourselves suddenly in an utterly too-nice nice neighborhood. I guess this is how gentrification works/worked in San Francisco?
My errand: his belated birthday gift, a secret thing, a coffee, $42
Back again, through the puddles and the pigeons, and ponderings if we should just walk all the way to Union Square. Pondered all the way right back onto Bart. Hopped on, hopped off.
Meandered up and out, moved as part of the crowd up the way toward Powell, toward, Geary, toward Post, toward all the major landmarks of the Square. H&M (one of three), a new Uni-Glo, Bloomingdales looming(dales), Macy’s. The tree was up, the ice rink was out and holiday crowds were out in force. Oddly, I was ok with this.
His errand: a shirt, value, $80. Free with coupon.
Unscheduled stop, H&M: poke and pruned until we find a blouse, $30.44, with 20% off coupon. Still a little steep given my ambivalence (oh and I forgot to try it on), and btw, I was stung by the 10 cent bag fee, thanks a lot, forgetfulness!
I was chilled, nibblish and shaky by 2:30. We’d only been out and about for… an hour? Yeah. Stamina, spamina. The food and sugar kept me going for another several hours so even though I rarely buy random street food like this around home or go to Starbucks, we made a beeline for the first one we saw. NOM. There’s something delicious (pun intended) about just getting what you want.
Street dog: $4.25
Starbucks venti Hot chocolate: $3.15, free with coupon
We settled into the Westfield for a while to wait for friends who were, in fact, much closer by than we had expected, I caught up on some Twitter and PiC snagged a free Ghiradelli square. Jealous. It was peppermint. Less jealous.
Dinner was a non-glamorous booth affair at a standard chain restaurant with children clamoring and clambering all over the place. Crayons only held their attention for as long as they could race to an ungainly win, assisted absentmindedly by one adult or another; I was starting to see how the mom was so keenly aware of the judging stares of others when they went out. As normal as it is for kids, and boys at any age if I remember growing up with my cousins rightly, to be unruly, attention hungry, wound up or full up with energy, these fellas were like sprung-loose jack in the boxes, wound up and loosed to wreak havoc. It took fast thinking to talk them down from, off of, out from under, apart, or back from wherever they’d gotten to and that was entirely apart from the chattering at hypersonic speed and three decibels higher than an inside voice. Oh, kids. It was entertaining until we started becoming public nuisances, then we had to start clamping down. Gently and teasingly since they’re not ours but still. No one around us was amused when they stopped up the doors.
We trekked back, exhausted, quiet and sleepy, late.
Through heavy lids, we watched my joints puff up like wee sausages on the ride back. Cute. Chasing down and hefting kiddies was fun but more than a little strenuous.
All in all, not a bad day.
November 18, 2012
There’s been a lot of jaw-setting, teeth-gritting as a coping mechanism of late. November’s become my least favorite month. October catches short shrift for being a close neighbor. So while I’ve been searching for a way back, I’ve been just holding on. Holding still and keeping quiet.
The tougher things have been, the more we’ve been eating out. The spending sort of bothered me but I always knew it was really symptomatic of larger problems. Not the fact of eating out itself, but the listlessness with which I went along with it. I’ve always had a line in the sand when it came to the cooking:eating out ratio, both because I don’t like restaurant food that much, and it’s costly. It was fitting that it felt like there was a small turning point with trying a new recipe for the sake of experimenting, for the sake of pulling together the pantry. Baby steps.
The Quinoa and Spinach Pie
I modified this formerly gluten-free recipe to a From the Pantry version.
Personal Edits: With a search-and-advice assist from @zenvar on Twitter, I soured up some 2% milk with a tsp of vinegar to replace the Greek yogurt that wasn’t on hand, and measured out a Cajun spices mix instead of the dried thyme and chili powder our spice cupboard never has. Surprisingly, we did have breadcrumbs so we didn’t go without a crust, though it wasn’t the fancy sesame seeds.
Ingredients:
Fresh baby spinach (~ 1 lb), blanched
1 cup quinoa to cook, makes 2 cups
1 cup milk/vinegar replacing yogurt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 tsp. sea salt
1/2 tsp. ground pepper, used black but white was called for
1/2 tsp. Cajun spices, replacing thyme and chili powder
1 shallot, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Grease a baking pan and line with breadcrumbs.
3. Cook quinoa.
4. Prep an ice bath and boil a pot of water for blanching the spinach. Blanch the spinach to a bright green (no more than 8-10 seconds) and transfer to ice bath, then set aside on a paper towel.
5. Saute garlic, shallots and spices in olive oil until translucent; transfer to a medium sized mixing bowl to be combined with remaining ingredients: spinach, quinoa, milk, eggs, sea salt and pepper.
6. Pour into baking pan and bake until golden brown, up to an hour.
I served this with roasted Lime Chicken thighs and roasted onions. Optional: burning your hair stovetop. But that did add some spice to the night.
PiC loved the pie, calls it a quiche, but I’m on the fence. It’s good, but with a sort of critical taster’s opinion, maybe it could have used double the spices and it’s possible the yogurt was more important than just as a dairy component. Next time!
Posts for Perusal
This post about the manipulation of creatives (via Cloud) details a familiar journey from the perspective of a workaholic.
In my earlier years, my triggers were as easily flipped (though eventually some money followed) to overwork, to overcommit, and to make trade-offs that went against the grain dictated by the myopic “Accountants.” Though in my case, it was more frequently a would-be Creative preoccupied with playing god instead of Accountant, instead of seeing a bigger picture and so utterly failing to make the right decisions to steer the company in a positive and productive direction so that our work would be meaningful, reducing our efforts to nothing more than one sad punchline after another.
Luckily, my clarity came after just a few years and my trajectory wasn’t . Of course, I was bearing the burden of more than just my own ego so I had to snap to, pretty quick.
Because professors surely want to be even bigger babysitters than they’re already forced to be, a few universities are piloting new eTextbooks that will track student usage of assigned readings. Thinking fondly of FrugalScholar, Funny About Money, Nicole and Maggie, among other professorial bloggers.
eemusings is watching her Indian friends live life under a marriageability microscope. My parents didn’t force the matchmaking issue but they definitely asked me to “play along” when their friends did. There was more than one old village acquaintance who’d sidle up and propose a marriage alliance, and more than one awkward meeting with a proposed groom. I tried to be a good sport about it for the most part so endured no end of cackling from my parents over the traps their friends would lay to lure me in as I was notoriously busy and shy to boot. Since they never took it seriously, though, I didn’t worry about being pushed into anything I didn’t feel right about. Maybe it would have been less awkward if it were still a completely accepted practice or totally out of date but in the even more awkward phase of generational and cultural gaps, we just shook our heads and all sort of humored each other.
Speaking of gaps, Vanessa’s Money, Bridget and a few other bloggers had some things to say about the recent post by Shawanda grossly generalizing whether women should work in male-dominated workplaces.
One of the major issues I took with the article was the spurious logic and sweeping generalizations, as evidenced by the lumping in of STEM with blue collar jobs as “dirty,” “physically-demanding” and “masculine” as the reasons given for women choosing not to be in male-dominated professions. As if women don’t already face enough sexism in the workplace generally, women in the sciences, leaving out E on purpose here because I’ve seen many friends succeed in E, face a huge uphill battle with basic sexism, so much so that a recent study shows that there is an inherent bias against hiring and promotion of women by both men and women, all else being equal. Some areas of science are equally represented by men and women, but most areas are still male dominated and patriarchal.
For the record, this isn’t my field but I do see the results of that behavior frequently, I follow bloggers who do work in the sciences and have to deal with it, and it’s horrifying that we continue to have to fight for what I’d consider the right to make basic decisions for ourselves. Why are these questions even being debated on a political stage? /digression. My point is: The well worn mental image that women are delicate, women are weak, women would much prefer not to be taxed, let’s protect the poor little women is still out there.
For people, much less women, to be perpetuating any part of this utter gender-based bullshit on behalf of all women is not just insulting, it’s frustrating considering the kind of opposition we already have to fight. Like Alison said, we have people whispering defeatist messages in our ears at a young age, telling young women to worry about looking too smart, worry more about their appearance and not their accomplishments.
Do we need to keep feeding fuel to these same old fights too? It’s exhausting.
October 30, 2012
Hat tip to Savvy Working Gal for sharing this link and story of people, Redditors in this case, behaving in poor form, posting an image of Balpreet Kaur, a Sikh woman, with an ambiguous message on Reddit without her knowledge and letting the forums speculate wildly, ranging from comments of disgust at her to railing at each other.
She responded calmly and gracefully:
“Hey, guys. This is Balpreet Kaur, the girl from the picture. I actually didn’t know about this until one of my friends told on facebook. If the OP wanted a picture, they could have just asked and I could have smiled 🙂
However, I’m not embarrassed or even humiliated by the attention [negative and positive] that this picture is getting because, it’s who I am. Yes, I’m a baptized Sikh woman with facial hair. Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body – it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being [which is genderless, actually] and, must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will. Just as a child doesn’t reject the gift of his/her parents, Sikhs do not reject the body that has been given to us. By crying ‘mine, mine’ and changing this body-tool, we are essentially living in ego and creating separateness between ourselves and the divinity within us.
By transcending societal views of beauty, I believe that I can focus more on my actions. My attitude and thoughts and actions have more value in them than my body because I recognize that this body is just going to become ash in the end, so why fuss about it? When I die, no one is going to remember what I looked like, heck, my kids will forget my voice, and slowly, all physical memory will fade away. However, my impact and legacy will remain: and, by not focusing on the physical beauty, I have time to cultivate those inner virtues and hopefully, focus my life on creating change and progress for this world in any way I can. So, to me, my face isn’t important but the smile and the happiness that lie behind the face are. 🙂
So, if anyone sees me at OSU, please come up and say hello. I appreciate all of the comments here, both positive and less positive because I’ve gotten a better understanding of myself and others from this. Also, the yoga pants are quite comfortable and the Better Together t-shirt is actually from Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that focuses on storytelling and engagement between different faiths. 🙂
I hope this explains everything a bit more, and I apologize for causing such confusion and uttering anything that hurt anyone.”
While totally secular, early on, my dad communicated much the same message to me, possibly rather clumsily now that I think back on it, in his own way that nothing on the outside mattered so much as intelligence, common sense, and inner strength did.
Even while commenting on the successes of other people’s children and their spectacular or renowned looks, he’d always dismiss the superficial stuff: “But it doesn’t matter if you don’t look like her. As long as you make good decisions and you’re always learning, it doesn’t matter what you look like. You’ll always be set.”
Even if it felt like he compared me to others, (and I came off poorly in comparison!) I wasn’t any kind of a vain child to be hurt by it. The first hint was my asking him to comb my hair like his every morning; the second, my rough and tumble refusal to voluntarily wear dresses or anything without pockets. And because of that early emphasis on brains over looks, while I had a few minor gripes about my physical self, or bugs for correction when I got older (after all, I did have to buy clothes and get dressed every stinkin’ day) they were of the shrug and sigh variety.
Intelligence, strength, confidence in one’s abilities to be competent, giving, caring, and worthy were what were truly significant, not how solely ornamental you could make yourself. Even though I later figured out he did think my mom was a looker, it was always crystal clear it was her strength of mind and will, and hell, physical strength, that he admired. Oh, the stories we used to tell about my mama!
I always wondered if this was something I would know how to pass on to the next generation. Though, perhaps, with a little less slovenliness as my decided preference for pajamas and comfy tees became my mom’s despair. I don’t think that was part of the plan.
Things like ear piercings, make-up and nail polish were her domain and she introduced me to them when she felt it was appropriate. My attention lasted about as long as necessary to register and save it for later, much like rudimentary knitting, crocheting, sewing and cooking lessons. I couldn’t be distracted long enough from reading or playing outside to do much with those, though, and my skills sadly never progressed past a beginner’s.
It’s nice to look nice, I learned and later rather regretted not paying enough attention to master anything that would have adorned my professional life. What I lack was and still is slowly made up, piecemeal, by learning from a friend and the internet but that’s a slow and winding road made that much windier by indifference and spurts of interest.
That, I shall continue to reframe as transcendentalism, or balance in this teeter totter life, while I thank both my parents for gently teaching me confidence without ego, substance above superficiality. While I’m not sure I would have summoned the same calm and grace that Balpreet had in her response, I think the world could use more of the same strength of character, inside and out.
October 19, 2012
October 16, 2012
When I started traveling and doing business overseas, I knew right away that I would have a hernia over paying stupid fees like foreign transaction fees. No sirree, traveling and traveling for work may appear to be a fun “perk” to some but no way am I paying what I consider stupid tax for the privilege – nope.
Preparing for the trip to Thailand had me thinking on the BA card, ruing having missed the better bonus offer, then had the premium offer offfered when I needed to book another ticket so I figured that it’d be worth the exchange of an annual fee ($75) for the cost of a ticket. I kept that card for a year longer than I had originally planned, racked up another ticket’s worth of point so we’re now at about 120K points, paid another $75, and I’m thinking about canceling the card once I confirm I have another Chase card in the wings that serves the no-foreign-transaction-fee purpose.
Having flown BA a couple of times, I’d call the service is middling-fair. I’ve always been economy class and don’t expect much from the cattle-prod section. The food’s been nearly edible, the seats are sittable and you can generally get some rest even despite the lights-on-lights-off acts.
The thing that infuriates me, however, is the discovery that my points may well be worthless for the very reason I earned them. The point of earning mileage points and paying the fersnicken annual fees was to redeem for two free flights with a modest fee attached.
Would you believe that a search for two seats on a reward flight to London out of a local international airport costs 100K points and nearly $1400 each?!
For the same itinerary, the same cash would buy 70% of the seats. It’ll cost another $675 to buy the rest of the two tickets.
It seems I might as well save my reward points and upgrade, because why waste that many reward points and pay the majority of the price to get exactly the same seats? If I’m going to burn points and cash, I had better be getting something of value, hadn’t I?
Needless to say, this had made me incredibly cranky and though I was willing to be persuaded into keeping this card long-term as a secondary card, carrying an annual fee though it does, this ridiculous scheme firmly set my mind against keeping it. Though the service provided by some of the major domestic carriers is subpar, I will say that redeeming rewards from them has always been reasonable as long as the flights were available. Most times, if it wasn’t at the last minute, they were available.
Of the domestic carriers I use most frequently, only United has implemented a tiered fee schedule that charges higher fees for late bookings or changes to the itinerary, close in to the departure date. The highest fee is $150 per ticket to change a booked flight, which is fairly high but doesn’t touch the egregious fees of British Airways just to book.
Eventually, I’ll get around to making a decision on these points: either we’ll use the points to book some domestic flights at much lower fees or I’ll save them for a really nice upgrade when we have the time and money to travel for a little while.
What would you do?
October 6, 2012
There’s a question of whether you can truly believe what a blogger’s saying if you don’t know his or her real name, or see his or her face, of whether there’s disingenuity in hiding behind a pseudonym online.
I’ve been thinking, lightly treading, one moment to the next, about whether or not there’s any point, a benefit, to considering shedding my pseudonymity, whether, if I wanted to take a new, fresh step in my writing, that would be the right step.
Bloggers are doing brave writing, soulful pieces about their journeys; Clare and her discovery process with alcohol: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3; Andrea’s recent revelation about her PTSD. They’re able to write in the open, under their names and I admire that.
But having always been an anonymous blogger, an open identity looks like open and perhaps treacherous waters from here. Many PF bloggers have come out into the open and seem to have enjoyed the process; why not consider it?
Would it enrich my writing? Would it enrich the experience of blogging?
It’s an interesting thought exercise. On the one hand, I haven’t had the experience of people caring enough to want to be open and honest with people in my real life about my health, my thoughts about my health, and experiences stemming therein. I certainly couldn’t have been this open about my family’s life with money with, well, anyone. More of you know that genuine and authentic side of me than anyone in my real life.
On the other hand, of those who care, there’s nothing they can do and I chose not to enlighten them to the depths of my health journey and the related life choices. Mostly, it was years of knowing that if I added one more thing to the list of things for my parents to worry over, that they couldn’t fix and had to feel guilty about not being able to fix, I couldn’t live with myself. So the encroaching, progressing and overwhelming chronic pain and fatigue issues were all safely tucked away under the hood. They were never to know that it was more than just a bit of pain I just couldn’t shake, that it’d ever gotten worse than the pain they knew about, the pain that started when I was 13. Not the chest pains, not the vertigo, not the breathing problems, not the weekends of being flat out steamrollered, unable to lift limbs for the exhaustion, nor the parade of pharmaceuticals that wouldn’t breach my crushing defeat. They were to know nothing about it. Not when just the fact that I worked incredibly long hours with the little pain they knew about was so distressing.
I kept up a facade for so long that I’d forgotten it was there.
It was a sharp shock remembering this past week that knowing me, my name or my face or even knowing me since birth don’t lend itself to knowing much about me.
I got into a tiff with my dad over, of all things, weddings.
PiC and I had a very quiet courthouse wedding last year with only a handful of people. My side was represented by my parents and very close friends. The rest of the extended family saw the engagement ring at the funeral soon after and then the lying started.
It’s ironclad tradition to have an engagement party, oh well, Mom was so ill we just had to have a quick and small one. They all, of course, felt left out, but what could they say during funeral arrangements?
Then the questions, because, it’s my family and if we did a formal engagement, the date must already have been set.
Oh, well we can’t possibly think about planning anything now, obviously.
We have to wait a while, now, we thought we’d have Mom around for a while…
Oh, I hear someone calling my name, gotta go.
We never got around to planning the reception. Life and grief and work and everything got in the way. I still can’t really bring myself to want to plan one, yet. I had the worst times thinking about planning it while Mom was struggling with losing her very self.
He brought the subject up the last time we were back home and my throat closed up.
It came up again, this time with the “your aunt and I will take care of all the arrangements,” “you don’t need to worry about the guest list, I’ll deal with it,” and after several attempts to put on the brakes gently, to interject some sense into the runaway train that leads to the 18-hours of Miserable Asian Wedding, trying to compromise before it turned into the Scary Vision of Stress, he said “well, everyone just has to suck it up and deal with it.”
He didn’t know. He doesn’t know how deep my wells of grief are intertwined with my helplessness to save her and my helplessness to save myself.
I lost it.
“NO. No, because if I ‘just deal with it, I will DIE. I can’t even do normal stuff because I’m sick. I can’t even live a normal life now, get dressed, cook meals, eat meals, drive a car, walk to and from the garage without planning which things I can do in a day without falling over, so no, I Can’t. Just. Deal. With. It.”
I shouldn’t have. I really really shouldn’t have. I was tired, I was short-tempered, I had completely forgotten how much I had hidden even from him. Because in all these long years of chronic pain, fatigue and mystery illness, I hadn’t even told him that it wasn’t just the initial joint pain that he knew of in one isolated area anymore. That it was everywhere, that it was fatigue, and shortness of breath, and chest pain, and dizziness, and and and.
And he didn’t know that my years powering through work and school and work and moving and taking care of everything and more work, that was all on the Scholarship of Faking It. He had no idea that I’ve been slowly falling apart for nearly 20 years.
Because I deliberately didn’t tell him, in case he let it slip and Mom found out and worried herself into an earlier grave. /Sigh. And now I feel horrible for telling him because he’s been having survivor guilt, guilt for making my life difficult all these years, guilt for being dependent on me. And I know that. But I just ran right over him.
And of course he felt terrible over it.
So now that’s out and we both feel worse for having it out there in the open just making us both feel bad.
It’s more complicated, of course, than just a secret held too long, grief clouding judgment, guilt clouding judgment, a father feeling he’s neglected his duties. It’s all of that and more.
At the end of this, I don’t think I see a way for me to be a better blogger when I haven’t even figured out how to be a better, more open person yet.
October 3, 2012
We were stranded between consultations for Doggle miles away from home and I hadn’t eaten a meal in several hours except for some fruit so PiC found a nearby food hut to tantalize my stressiness off the ledge. He’d been feeding me bits and bites and figured something tasty would be easier to get me to actually want to eat.
It was a bit costlier than our usual fare, but heck. A tenner more wasn’t going to break the bank and it kept me functional for the rest of a very tough day.
And look, pretty pictures for the blog too! Win-win-win!
A tin bucket of oyster crackers. Two of my favorite things.
It’s possible this makes me a huge doofus but I’m sure other things already put me in that category. I love oyster crackers, and I love tin buckets. *shrug* That’d be the 5 year old country girl in me.
A cup of clam chowder
Seems like we can’t not try the clam chowder wherever we go. And this time, highly touted by the highly excitable lady at the counter. As it turns out, she was hugely excited because she actually thought we were the same customers from the night before. Had to break it to her that we were new customers who were trying out the place for the first time, so she was really happy to see, well, strangers. But nice to meetcha!
The Maine Crab Roll
Confession: Some days my memory span = life span of a gnat. We vacillated long enough between two lobster rolls and a crab roll + a lobster roll that I just forgot what we ordered entirely. So by the time this came, I just thought it was an anemic looking lobster roll. I failed to appreciate the lobstery goodness. Then PiC reminded me it was crab. Ohhh…. uh. Yeah. Good job, me. It was fine for crab but it reminded me why I’m so particular about my crab. Go Maryland Blue Crab!
The Naked Lobster Roll
The Lobster roll was pretty delicious – I’m not usually one for lobster but I skipped the butter and mayo and with just a squeeze of lemon: perfection.
~~ ~~~ ~~
It’s just pricey enough that I wouldn’t go out of my way to find the Shack but it was really good. Their “rolls” – the bread slices that were cut into the middle of and made to be sandwich-like things were incredibly good. They had to be buttered and fried, they were amazingly soft inside and just a bit crisped and crunchy on the outside but not greasy.
Definitely a treat I’d bring visitors over to try.
