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(This post will be stuck to the front page for the month of July.)

I cannot help but feel that being laid off is going to be an opportunity rather than a crisis. To support this notion, I’ve set up a website to sell a few of my short stories for $3 apiece (or 4 for $9) to supplement the funds I’ve already saved. If you like my writing here on this blog, you’re going to love my fiction.

Please leave a comment here or email me, crisitunityblog [at] gmail dot com, for the website address and/or more information.

There’s also a gallery of me in a number of yoga poses on the site, for those of you who are into that kind of thing.

Please help if you can! Karma karma karma! Thank you in advance!

-Crisitunity

I mean, why did it have to be July?

On Friday the office “closed” at 1:00. (We often close early on Fridays during the summer. Because attorneys are rich, they take nice vacations, and hence half the legal world just isn’t around during the summer, especially on Fridays.) But last week I had to stay late a few times, because I was trying to fit five days’ work into three and a half days, and on Friday I thought I would just stick around until I’d finished up a few of the things on my long-term to-do list, which has after all gotten a bit more urgent since I found out I didn’t have the long term to do those tasks.

And then in the midafternoon I got emails from the attorney asking me to send stuff to experts NOW NOW NOW MUST GO OUT TODAY. Good thing I hadn’t left when the office closed, eh?

And then a few more emails like that. And suddenly I was working even harder than I usually do during the day, and the phone was ringing, and it was as if the office hadn’t closed at all. Except DT had left her office at 1:00:01 without even a word to me.

I still have a bunch of work left over from last week, but I haven’t even looked at my list yet this morning. I had a pleasant, lazy weekend, and I don’t want to remember all the stuff that I have to take care of this week (in four days, and probably in three and a half again, as I will likely have at least one interview).

BF is at home today, and for the rest of this week, because of something I’m not sure I pointed out here. This month, I had planned to take the first real two-week vacation of my whole working life. I had planned for a week at MP’s (luxurious, blissful) summer home in upstate New York, and then I would spend most of the next week with my mother. I had already bought the plane tickets to see my mom and I was really looking forward to having all that time off all at once, when I found out I was getting laid off in a month and would have to find another job while taking two weeks of vacation in the next thirty days.

So I cancelled the week in New York, which was supposed to be this week. I couldn’t cancel the week with my mom, in part because the plane tickets were expensive and in part because I’d never hear the end of it. BF had already taken this week off of work, though, and he decided to just take the staycation since he wasn’t going with me to see my mom.

The week in New York was going to be capped with an Abba concert on Friday night. Yes, that Abba. I own my lameness. I really, really didn’t want to miss it, so we’ve decided to fly up there on Thursday night and fly back on Sunday. Ironically, this will make for a far more stressful weekend than I would have had if I’d just stayed at home, since I hate flying so much, but I just can’t stand the idea of missing Abba in concert. Who knows whether I’d ever have that opportunity again?

This is such a complicated month. I know that complaining about not being able to go on vacation is pretty stupid and spoiled of me, but I’m choosing to own that, too, because the timing fucking sucks, no two ways about it. In any case, BF is at home today, and although that means I got to drive his car to work, which makes me happy, I wish I was at home with him instead.

I have other miscellaneous stuff to say.

I wrote a few yoga classes this weekend. I wrote one for my mom with lots of twists, which wring out impurities (in theory) and I think will be great for her. I added in some moving parts so we can change it around if she’s having a good day or a bad day. I wrote a hip-opening one as well and sketched some ideas for a binding class – I’ve never done a class that’s focused on binds, and I for one love them – and for a class that aims for eka pada galavasana, an interesting arm balance I’m still trying to get the hang of. After doing this, I think I finally see the usefulness of Light on Yoga, as a textbook rather than just as an intimidating encyclopedia.

I cross-stitched a little this weekend. I hadn’t in a long time. It was fun.

We went to the dump on Saturday. I’d never been to one before, and it was SO COOL. We had to leave our old sink in the metal pile, and the whole metal area was amazing! Twisted pieces that were unrecognizable, washers and dryers laid out neatly in rows, 80’s stationary bikes, and some bikes that looked perfectly usable to me. There was a big sign out front that said NO SCAVENGING, which was fine with me, but it was still sad to see useful stuff in the pile. We also went to the consignment store with a bunch of my clothes and shoes, and the lady there was terrific. So that was neat too. I probably won’t see any money until early September, but money is still always good no matter the timing.

Speaking of which, I sold a bunch of my CDs in a lot on eBay and got a whole lot more than I expected. The buyer was an independent music store in Massachusetts, and while I specifically noted that the CDs are not in perfect condition, I hope they won’t be too disappointed that they may not be able to sell as many as they’d hoped. They haven’t paid me yet (auction ended Saturday), but when they do that’s another $70 in the bank. I also got a couple of stories over the weekend to review for $30 apiece from a friend who sells audio short stories. Hopefully I’ll get to them on Tuesday night. Hooray!

Silver linings abound this Monday…but I do wish I was in New York, writing by the water or riding a bike around town. Oh, well; next year.

on the late, lamented King of Pop

I haven’t commented on Michael Jackson here because I was just ever-so-slightly too young for him to be a major influence on my youth. There are numerous other people more qualified to lament about his loss than I. I would be lying (and also an idiot) if I said I didn’t like his music or think he was a special entertainer. The biggest feeling I have for him is just sorrow, because as successful and fortunate as he was in so many areas, he was equally unfortunate in so many others. Stuck in a ten-year-old’s psychology, unable to see the world or himself as most other humans can see the world and themselves, but blessed with talent so extraordinary that words fail us all.

On Saturday, BF and I went to Wal-Mart for an errand, and we went through the electronics department. A TV set up there was playing his videos, and “Thriller” was on as we came by. We stood and watched for several minutes, and there were a half-dozen or so shoppers standing there doing the same thing. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t passed away, but I think it’s still a neat testament to how enthralling his music and videos are – “Thriller” is 26 years old and I don’t know anyone who can’t do the zombie dance if asked, but we all still wanted to watch.

On Friday afternoon I spent some time with YouTube and Michael, as I’d been meaning to do for a couple of weeks, and I finally came up with a way to explain something I’d tried to tell BF a long time ago. He has a VHS of Moonwalker which we watched, and when I saw concert footage, and women screaming and fainting over him, I was really surprised. I was born into a culture where Michael was already indelibly famous, and I’d never in my life thought of him as an object of sex appeal. I’d never thought of him as someone to swoon over or be attracted to. But I couldn’t figure out why I felt that way.

The reason is that I consider him a phenomenon so large that he’s…just…genderless. He’s too big, too famous, too talented, too much a cemented part of our culture, for me to think of him as a human person with the same kind of sex appeal as Justin Timberlake (such as it is) or Usher or whoever the next imitator will be. He’s like a statue, or a fictional character – it’s hard for me to find any substance that is Michael to attach masculinity to.

I don’t know if that makes any sense. But that’s how I’ve always seen him.

In case you’re interested, the video I found most delightful of all the ones I watched was this one. It’s got very little actual Michael…but it’s the best legacy anyone mortal could ask for. All those touched lives, it’s just remarkable. I hope wherever he is, he is finally what he wants to be.

when dreaming ends

I’ve mentioned the Daily Om before. Because they come to my inbox so late in the day, I generally read them the next morning. This is the Daily Om message that I read on Friday.

Walking Through – When Doors Open

When a door opens, walk through it. Trust that the door has opened for a reason and you have been guided to it. Sometimes we have a tendency to overanalyze or agonize over the decision, but it is quicker to simply go through the door and discover what’s there as that’s the only way to know. Even if it doesn’t seem right at first, opening this door may lead to another door that will take us where we need to go.

Doors open when the time is right for us to enter a new space, metaphorically speaking, and we can have faith that walking through is the right thing to do. Sometimes we linger in the threshold because we are afraid of leaving our old life for a life we know nothing about. We may have voices inside of our heads that try to hold us back or people in our lives saying discouraging things. These voices, internal and external, are known as threshold spirits, and they express all the fears and doubts that arise at the beginning of a new life. Nevertheless, none of these voices can hold us back, and they will fall silent as soon as we cross the threshold.

There are many doors that open in the course of our lives, leading us into new relationships, jobs, friendships, and creative inspirations. Our lives up to this point are the result of all the doors we have walked through, and our continued growth depends on our willingness to keep moving into new spaces. Every time we walk through an open door, we create a sense memory that encourages us to move into the new fearlessly. When we enter the new space, we almost always feel a thrill and a new feeling of confidence, in ourselves and in the universe. We have stepped across the threshold into a new life.

Throughout this crisitunity, the Daily Oms have been either completely resonant with my situation or completely irrelevant (i.e. Squirrel Medicine). This is an example of resonance, and it’s the message that prodded me into finally trying to put my feelings down about getting another paralegal job.

Things seemed completely clear in the first days after I told I was being laid off. This was how I’d break out of my ordinary life, how I’d move into the life that I wanted, the one I’d been visualizing consciously for two years and unconsciously for much longer. I’d take a deep breath and I’d launch off into thin air, depending on my creative talent entirely for the first time ever. I keep seeing examples of people who manage to do this, who sustain themselves in situations when to me it seems impossible to do so. So why not me? I could try it, right?

The thing is, I have tens of thousands of dollars of debt, our household budget is pretty tight, and I make more than half the money between us. For us to live with me trying to depend on my creative talent, one or all of the following would have to happen:

• I’d have to get a book published that was successful enough to earn a good advance and decent royalties, which is highly unlikely even if you have publishing credits and a trendy book in the can, ready for publishers and agents to look at. Which I don’t.
• I’d have to be teaching yoga at least every day, to quite a lot of students per class.
  • Which means I’d have to get training immediately and find more than a couple of places that need teachers.
• I’d have to do one of these things and also have another job that could make ends meet, something either part-time or with a very flexible schedule.

When the reality of all this hit me, and when the donations slowed to an eventual stop, I realized that all there was to it was I’d just have to find another full-time paralegal job. That this was not the time for launching. That the air was thin and I truly had nothing of value to keep me afloat.

No door had opened for me. It was only an illusion; I am ever in the same room.

The feeling lingers in my mind that if I work hard to get a paralegal job, the magical thinking is that I don’t deserve and can’t live the creative life I’m visualizing. One of the little voices is protesting that if I don’t give it a college try I’ll never know, and by thinking only of my obligations without having faith that it’ll work out somehow because after all a door has been opened for me, I’m assuring that I won’t be able to do the creative thing. But I still live with too much fear, too much responsibility, to be able to trust that.

It’s not that I don’t believe I’ll ever teach. Nor do I believe that I won’t write, or live a creative life. But I grieve for the fact that it will apparently be impossible for me to walk through into a new life as effortlessly as this Daily Om would lead me to believe.

The thing is, the lesson that my life to this point has taught me is that the only risks available to me are exceedingly low-risk risks. Moving away from New England with nothing in my pocket – but I was moving back to live with my dad, quite a cushion. I live with BF in a house that he owns, but his parents pay half the mortgage and can always help us out if we need it.

I don’t want to be doing the low-risk thing, looking for another paralegal job and hoping that I land it. I don’t want to be expending my heart’s effort on that. I want to be figuring out how to live that difficult, creative life. But right now the only thing I can think to do is keep tightening my belt, keep saving my money, keep working a moderately well-paying job so I can do it later.

These difficult weeks have convinced me that this is what it is, that if I chose not to get another paralegal job and tried to make it by the seat of my pants, I’d wind up broke and missing payments and lost again, and all the work I did to climb out of that particular hole over the last four years would have been wasted. I don’t know if that means I’ve been defeated into thinking small again, or whether my anxiety has ruined this opportunity for me, or whether it truly was meant to be this way and the time is later rather than now.

clarification

What I meant about the comments wasn’t that I’m not going to reply to any comments, just not every one of them as I have been doing. I said it wrong. My bad.

universe bonks girl on head, film at 11

I worked a little late yesterday trying to prepare some of the tasks I’ve been asked to do that I don’t know how I’m going to finish in time, or at all. I’m sure that my psychological state is part of it, but things seem to be getting steadily worse and worse at this job as each day passes. I left the office in a terrible mood – frustrated and angry, but also deeply sad. So far this is one of the worst months I’ve had since the awfulness that was 2005, and I can’t wait until it’s over, even if things turn out badly for me at that time.

I drove to the yoga studio, and sat in my car in the parking lot trying to decompress. I could see Kathleen and a woman who is a teacher but also a very good friend of Kathleen’s sitting outside the studio and chatting. I knew they would want to chat with me, and I knew Kathleen knew that I’d had job interviews that morning (Facebook). I didn’t want to talk about anything that had to do with my life. I was too confused and too fatigued.

I went in the studio, changed clothes, and came back out. I managed to get away with a few noncommittal sentences and then changed the subject. Really what I wanted to do was sit there and enjoy being outside – it was a spectacular day, breezy and sunny and not humid – and so often have Kathleen and this lady had conversations roll on without including me in the slightest that I couldn’t understand why they were picking today to want to talk with me.

After a time they both went inside, and I looked out at the traffic. The studio is in a little plaza on the corner of one of the major intersections in that part of Annapolis, very busy and loud. The breeze blew and I looked at the squares of sky I could see between the signage and the power lines. And I felt a sudden desire to escape. I felt hopeless, that antique feeling that nothing is improving and the struggle will just go on and even though there are things I haven’t gotten to do, this struggle is so painful and bad that I’d rather be doing nothing at all forever than have to keep doing this. I was shocked to find this feeling inside me, after so many years without it, and hoped that it would pass in a few days.

I went inside. Class started. We did clock arms, and I struggled. We did side plank pose, and I struggled. We did half moon, and I felt some grace within the struggle. (What a learning pose that one has been. Maybe it’ll be my next column.) And, at the end, we did pigeon quad stretches against the wall, and I met the goal I have been struggling for since the middle of last year – I found myself holding my foot with my arm over my head and my foot was touching my head. It was there, suddenly. Only for a moment, before my toes slipped and I had to try to reach for it again and she told us to switch sides so I didn’t get to, but I did do it.

There, said the universe. If you’d run out into traffic, you never would have met that goal, and today was your day, girl.

I went home. BF was there. He listened. We watched the first half of Stardust over dinner (I got home too late for us to watch the whole thing before bedtime), and it dazzled me. I’m sure many people feel this way, but I often feel like Gaiman is writing just for me, just for what I want to read (and in some cases watch). He’s so wonderful.

In the movie, one of the main characters is a young man who works in a shop. This girl he thinks he loves calls him a shopboy, derisively. Later, another nicer character says that she’s watched a lot of humans (long story) and she knows the difference between a shopboy and a boy who happens to work in a shop for the time being. BF repeated this to me, later, that there’s a difference between paralegals and women who happen to work as paralegals for the time being. I didn’t know what else to do but hug him and tell him I loved him – but this meant so much to me.

The Daily Om I read this morning nudged me to write about the conflict I feel as I’m looking for another paralegal job. I will work on this post today and put it up tomorrow, hopefully.

Also, this time I really mean it: I’m going to stop responding to all comments. Doesn’t mean I love y’all any less, I swear. I just keep finding myself responding for no reason other than to respond, which is not honest.

TGIF. Srsly. What a rotten week.

he even had a normal parking lot

Two interviews this morning. The first one was with a sole practitioner in Owings Mills, an area north of Baltimore and not far from where BF works. I REALLY liked the guy and the situation (a clean office! Specialized legal software!) and I am hoping I land that one. A lot. The second interview was with a placement agency, which I mentioned yesterday, and although I don’t know a damn thing about the job (interview to come, presumably), the pay will probably be right.

At the second one, I took a typing test, and the person who picked up the results told me not only that it was the fastest result she had ever seen, but that it was an entire 20 WPM higher than the fastest result she had ever seen. She was in awe. I told her I instant-messaged a whole lot when I was younger. Yay me! (97 WPM, in case you’re curious.)

Heading back to Annapolis I was plumb tuckered out and just wanted to go home. Interviewing is hard – lots of muscle tension. But instead, of course, I came to work, and everything on my desk just seemed so unreasonable. Another one of those woops-the-deadline’s-next-week things from EP. Two tasks from MD that I wasn’t trained for, one of which I can’t believe the firm is pursuing in its current state. A request from OG that I have no idea what to do with (clear the floor of my office by next week). And a whirlwind crisis around one of our clients, who, bless her kind heart, is so brainless that I’m surprised she knows how to dress herself in the morning. This last has put DT in a foul mood, and she and I are the only ones here right now. Don’t know what to do with that either.

What I’d love to do is take my computer out to the parking lot, smash it with a sledgehammer, and go home, never to return, trailing papers out the window of my car and screaming “So long, suckers!” I feel it’s not wise to do that until after I get another job. But like I said, it’s tempting. After seeing a completely normal solo-practitioner’s office, this office just seems so many thousands of times worse – I kept remembering all the little things about it that are just unacceptable as I drove back to the building.

I still feel all this conflict in my chest about interviewing and paralegaling and so on, but I still can’t find the energy to write about it. I’ll tease you again today, sorry. I did talk to MFA about the whole “You’re fired!” “No you’re not!” thing, and he had a furrowed “that ain’t right” look on his face that I’ve rarely seen. He said he’d talk to MD about it.

Last night BF and I watched Shoot ‘Em Up. It was violent, silly, quick, and interesting, and had two people I’ve personally fantasized about in a combination sex scene/shootout. Highly recommended if you can stand the gore. Also, it’s official that the entire movie criticism complex does not make sense, as this movie got 68% and Wanted (which was just awful) got 74%. WTF?

good thing I kept my mouth shut

Yesterday was a difficult day at work, but of course everything was much better when I went home. BF and I watched an episode of Highlander over dinner, and because he is insane, BF likes to watch the little mini-featurette that goes with each episode where the behind-the-scenes folks talk about it. For this one they had the director, a British guy with an ego the size of Africa, and the production designer, a certified ninny. The show was shot in Vancouver half the year, standing in for sort-of-Seattle, and for this episode the flashback had to be in Louisiana during the 1860’s. The PD started talking about how for this episode, there was this major problem because they had to find, somewhere near Vancouver, a field and a river. “Oh wow,” said BF. “A field. You’ll never find one of those in Canada.” This was funny enough, but the guy went on, talking for several long minutes about how astonishing it was that he managed to find both a field and a river in the area around Vancouver. Our remarks about him escalated until we were laughing hysterically, the stomach-hurting, tear-squirting kind of laughter. It even induced hiccups in BF. It was a really great evening.

Tomorrow morning I have an interview in Baltimore, and possibly another interview as well near Baltimore (I haven’t gotten in touch with the guy yet, but he said on his message that he wanted to interview me). Both of these came out of ads I answered from Craigslist, which I never would have thought of in a million years for job-searching. Thanks, BF. Of course, the one interview is with a placement agency whose owners were indicted at some point in the last two years, and about the other guy I can’t find any information on the ‘net. Eep. Won’t hurt to interview, but as I tried to explain to OG yesterday, I have worked for skeezy employers and it is better by far to have no job at all.

One of our admin staff has gotten a job and will be all done here by the middle of next week. I had had, as I said, a difficult day yesterday so when I passed her in the hall next, the most terrible things ran through my head to say to her. She is the one who misfiles things, constantly, so I wanted to say something about how nice for her that she’ll get to misfile things somewhere else. I was shocked at the meanness inside my head. It was a wake-up as to how out of whack my emotional barometer is right now.

My hope is that I’ll be able to book it outta here in the same way she does – that I will be able to leave before the month is out. I kind of want to make it clear that I am not happy with this situation. MD stopped by my office yesterday to tell me that it was likely the firm would be able to afford to keep me and DT through August. This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what OG had implied to me earlier in the day. He went on to tell me about the settlements we’ve just received, but I knew about those, and I also knew about the tens of thousands of dollars that we owe to experts and copying services and so on that I figured we would finally be able to pay because of these settlements. I am so frustrated by these mixed messages that I want to scream, and the Spock half of my brain is saying calmly that no matter my emotional reaction, this is a pretty shitty way to treat your employees, to wimble back and forth so often between “You’re fired!” and “No you’re not!” over the course of a couple of weeks.

I would like to discuss how my interests in getting another job impact the phone-a-thon and the crisitunity aspect of me getting laid off, but I really don’t have it in me today. I hope I’ll be able to talk about it this week without losing my shit.

bang on the drum all day

Back to work today. Since I left in the early afternoon on Thursday and was off Fri and Mon, it was a super-long weekend. Every time this happens I remember that I like being at home more than I like doing just about anything else.

Last night we watched Wanted. It was goddamn awful, Rotten Tomatoes be damned.

My mood is not altogether stable or peaceful. I feel acutely the days counting down until the 31st, and I am not nearly as hopeful about the -tunity part of this whole matter as I was a week ago. I tried to talk to BF about how I feel about this last night and made sort of a mess of it so I think I’ll just hang on to those thoughts for now.

I had this friend in high school. Let’s call him Albert. He was thoroughly brilliant. Smart beyond the norm of we mortals. He used to spend his time making up rules for a symbolic language he invented, with a separate alphabet and different rules of grammar. This was how challenging the school curriculum was to him, that he had spare time to do this. His appearance was also extremely nerdy to the point of caricature – he sniffed and pushed up his glasses and spoke with a thin, reedy voice, a lot like the thin guy of the trio of nerds that Homer goes to Springfield University with.

I befriended Albert, and I tried my best to help him be social, to help him do normal high school things and relax his nerdiness a little. From this distance I have no idea if I affected him, or even if this intervention of mine was necessary, but at the time I thought I was making a difference in his life. He’s currently in a Ph.D. program at MIT, and the stuff that he’s done in between high school and now is so advanced that I won’t even ask him about it.  Something to do with string theory, I think. Fractals.

So anyway, he was one of the people I emailed about this teacher training thing. He wrote me back to chat more about our lives, and in there he said that he’s done a great deal of creative writing himself. Short stories, beginnings of novels, etc. He even forwarded me a story he wrote in the second round of emails.

This information made me incredibly depressed. For a while now I’ve considered myself a talented person; I am interested in many things and when I put my hand to something, I like to think I’m capable of doing it well. I’ve tried a lot of new things in the last five years and I’ve succeeded at a lot of them. But there are things that I do that I think I’m good enough at that they make me special, and one of those things is fiction writing.

To find that Albert is also good at writing fiction makes me feel as if, I don’t know, Michael Jordan decided he’d try his hand at yoga. Albert already can do things with math and science at the drop of a hat that I couldn’t do if you waterboarded me. Why does he have to butt in on this thing that I’m good at, one of the few things that makes me special? Does he want to make me feel thoroughly useless?

Of course I know this is absurd and petty. Albert writing fiction has no bearing on my talent (such as it is), and he certainly didn’t begin writing just to hurt my feelings. Also, Albert is a one-in-a-million kind of mind, and it’s ridiculous to compare myself to him. His obscene specialness doesn’t make my own light shine any less brightly.

But I still feel a whole lot more ordinary this morning than I’ve felt in a while. I value Albert’s friendship and it’s not his fault he’s a genius polymath, but it’s not easy to hear that he’s picked up yet another hobby that he’ll be better at than anyone…and which he won’t even need to make him stand out in a crowd, like I do.

If your advice is for me to read his story before I say all this, I agree that I should – but I’ll bet you good money that his story will be proficient, exact, with character depth and perfect pacing. I have no idea if he’ll have the kind of messy touches that make writing interesting, but nevertheless, I think it’ll be the kind of stuff that could give him a more profitable writing career than I will ever have. Not that he needs it; he’ll doubtless be in a lab in Cambridge for the rest of his life, doing intellectual work beyond the reach of mortals.

And good for him. I just want him to stay the hell away from creative writing.

mmm, dentistry

So, once again I’m avoiding the long and stupid story of my teeth, but suffice it to say (again) that I had less-than-perfect veneers put in somewhat against my will when I was a bit younger and now they are causing me grief. My mom and I managed to bury the hatchet a bit about this issue, but I still had some work I needed to get done on them in order for them to be healthy (and also look a bit better). Which I had scheduled for this morning.

The last time I had my veneers done, it took a couple of hours, and it was full of long, long stretches of a polishing bit on the end of a drill and I can’t stand even the normal tooth-polishing that they do as a part of a regular dental checkup, so it was absolutely no fun for me. This time it was only about an hour, and the polishing was the smallest part of it. It was still exceedingly unpleasant, in part because I was upside down in that chair for an hour and I can’t seem to get a good breath now without coughing, and in part because my upper lip is still numb and feels like a big floppy mustache, and I keep having itches on my face and when I try to scratch them I don’t feel anything, BUT! The unhealthy bit on one of my front teeth is fixed. While there’s a cosmetic issue that I thought he would fix and he didn’t, it looks and feels a great deal better than it did. All around I am happy, with a healthier mouth. Plus I had budgeted a bit more than this procedure turned out to be, so I’m pleased that I have a little left over to contribute to my savings.

I took the day off work today for this reason, and having gotten finished with the procedure in an hour I feel a little silly about it. I was expecting to be in the corner for the rest of the day eating my hair over the horrible drilling and polishing and horror, but it wasn’t so bad, and the only thing I really feel is keeping me from work is the weird mustache/upper lip thing, which will go away in a couple of hours. BF says I should stay home anyway. I think I probably will. I have emails to write and a couch to enjoy.

A couple of weeks ago BF and I bought the teeniest, tiniest little charcoal grill I’ve ever seen. It’s only about 14 inches across, and easily qualifies as “cute”. However, figuring out how to cook well on this thing has been challenging. The first time we used it (burgers), it didn’t hold a lot of heat for very long, and we figured that was just the way of the thing – too small to cook with well. The second time (hot dogs, Sunday) it held heat so well for so long that we couldn’t dump the old coals before we were ready to cook dinner on it (tuna steaks), which we did, with new charcoal, and it did the same trick as the hamburgers, with the vanishing heat. Extremely mysterious.

Sorry there isn’t much to say today. Perhaps the novocaine has gotten into my brain.

my nose hurts

This blog is not a perfect window on my life. There are plenty of things that are sort of ongoing that I rarely write about here, just because they come up for air so infrequently. One of these things is the level of home improvement that our house requires before it meets my stringent standards. When we first moved in here, I installed shelves, painted, put in new lighting, changed over a good number of the drawer-knobs and light plates, and so on, but there’s so much left to do before the house really meets with my approval. Because our budget is what it is, these improvements will come either gradually or not at all.

The sink that came with our house was a double-bowl stainless steel, very basic, with a disposal in one bowl and a horribly clogged regular drain in the other. No matter what we did, this side of the sink was virtually unusuable and collected disgusting mildew in a wide variety of colors. The sink also wasn’t very deep, and the faucet did not have a sprayer, which is one of those cases where you never really understand how useful something is until you’ve done without it for three years.

In the past year or so I saved up enough to buy a new sink, single-bowl and deep, and a new faucet set, with a goddamn sprayer, but we still had the problem of paying someone to install it. Lowe’s/Home Depot was going to charge us $400, which is not only way out of our budget but seemed a little ridiculous. A family friend on Matt’s side who does handyman stuff never got back to me; the family friend on my side who does construction and plumbing has been delaying coming over. Part of the reason I hadn’t pushed is because we couldn’t really pay him, either, not even at a greatly reduced rate – especially now that I’m losing my job.

But using this sink as it is is just no fun, and BF and I have both been tired of it for a long time. So after my plumbing triumph, clearing out the clog in my bathroom sink as easily as I did, I decided to try and replace our sink myself.

Although BF ended up doing more than half the work, we did it. We replaced our kitchen sink. No one was hit with jets of water, we only spent about $50 (on top of the sink and faucet, which I paid for long ago), and although I punched myself in the nose with a wrench in my hand and BF stubbed his toe badly on the vacuum cleaner, both of us emerged without other major injuries. The faucet works, the pipes don’t leak, and I am totally in awe of us being able to do this successfully by ourselves (with the help of the internet, of course). It took us about 5-6 hours.

We did have to do things like cut off pieces of the pressboard inside the cabinet so the new sink would fit – with a chisel, mostly, because our hacksaw wouldn’t fit – and we couldn’t anchor the sink with anything more than caulk on the front side, because this house was SO POORLY DESIGNED IT’S NOT EVEN FUNNY, but we jerry-rigged it and it will almost definitely be fine. The God of Home Improvements even gave us a break on allowing the disposal to fit to the coordinates of the new drain, when it really shouldn’t have.

What new ground shall I conquer today? Well, we have to find the local dump, which we’ve never needed before. Other than that, I hope it’ll be a quiet day with many dishes washed happily. Now we just need a new dishwasher.