Amma Must Be Due, Because I'm a Mess

Life has been moving 90 miles an hour since my unemployment ran out unexpectedly in September (yes, I’m still tripping on that).  That’s not to assume no good things have happened, because they have.  My weight loss is steady since weight loss surgery in June (84 pounds down), I've been published with a by-line more than once in the local paper, Elizabeth is doing well in school, and Leslie is still cooking up a storm.  Despite various stress related twitches, we’re all more or less healthy.  Yet, keeping on top of home finances without busting a vein has been a challenge.

Initially, I was focused on finding work, and of course, I wanted full time work.  It wasn't happening, particularly that close to the holidays.  Thanks to previously blogged guardian angels, I got two part time jobs that I continue to be very grateful for.  They are both temporary positions I expect to wrap up by the end of March, although there has always been uncertainty around one of them. 

I was determined to get through Christmas on a good note because it’s important to me.  Not because I’m religious in the conventional sense, but for other more personal reasons.  I needed to provide my family with a decent holiday, and I was anxious about it. It wasn't a materialistic one, but it was meaningful.  Both Elizabeth and Leslie were happy and appreciative, and our little tree was the most beautiful we've had in years. I totally fell in love with it.

I've done a lot of worrying over the last four months, which isn't me.  I'm not the worrier in the family.  I'm usually confident it'll turn out alright (whatever it is) and cool with waiting to see what happens.

Lately I've been unable to see that far, if you know what I mean.

Leslie, Elizabeth and I were out last Sunday evening, and, as I was walking around, I felt normal one moment and super funky, I mean really down low, the next.  I thought my hormones were acting up, as though perhaps it was “that time in a woman’s life” (and, by the way, it more or less is, although I like to think I’m being graceful about it).  The melt-down I had the end of the night was inevitable because I tried to push through it, when I should have rested.

The next morning I woke up with my muscles stuck to the mattress, sick as a dog. The whole day was about staying hydrated so I wouldn't end up in the hospital.

Yesterday, I felt much better, but not well enough to go to work.  Still, I tagged along with Leslie on an appointment to get some fresh air. I waited for her in the car. It was the first time in months I've had a quiet hour to myself.  So there I was in the van, jotting down my thoughts on a pad and watching the people go by.  

Finally, I was able to think.

All this worry I'm doing challenges me on a basic and personal level. My last experience with corporate wasn't a good one. It was more like the polar opposite of good, or like getting a root canal that lasts a year. However, despite the personal cost and the anxiety, it gave me a way to take care of my family.  Now, as it becomes increasingly difficult to live on part-time jobs, I find myself longing for the consistency of regular full-time corporate employment.  The alternative, be it writing or another part-time job, just isn't coming through, and that isn't acceptable. 

As Leslie says, "You need to jump back into it." 

How's that for ironic.

My spiritual mother, Sri Karunamayi, is due in the Bay Area in mid-March, the same general time my temporary jobs are supposed to wrap up.  I'm convinced it’s no coincidence that these insecurities around being a provider and corporate work break out of their little cages just as Amma’s visit approaches.  It’s happened this way before.  The spiritually minded believe these things happen the way they do to highlight what we most need to work on in the presence of the masters. 

Well, I definitely get the message.  

Amma must be due, because I'm a big, nervous, worried mess.

Will writing save us again?

I woke up with anxiety today, and I’m not used to this outside of Corporate. I think all the economic nonsense we’ve been through is making me gun shy. I’m still at the gallery, but the gal I’m covering for could be back in a month. And there is only one more semester of college papers before school is out.

Then what?

I called my old boss right after Christmas because I didn’t have her address and couldn’t send her a card.  I wanted to see how she was. She was let go before I was, and then in the following months her husband was laid off of his job, as well, leaving them with one quarter of their previous income.  In our conversation, she mentioned her husband went to a seminar wherein a speaker described the working landscape in Europe as being full of contractors.  People there take a succession of temporary or part-time jobs.  This, of course, eliminates both on-boarding and benefits costs to companies. 

I wonder what it’s done to the workforce.  I know what's it's doing to me.

How do you avoid worrying about where the next job will come from?

I keep hoping, wishing and hoping, that all this writing I’m doing will amount to something. My last press release was published in the Pacifica Tribune with a by-line. That’s my second by-line for the Trib. I’ve got another article coming up this week, too.  And the work I’m doing for the AGP blog gets compliments from everyone.  I’m knee deep in my novel, too, although I’ve done numerous re-writes and changed the title.  Soon, I’ll be ready for Book 2.

I love to do art, and I have a really cool idea for the next AGP exhibition, but my writing is what saves me, I think.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it saved us this time?

BLANK WALLS AND INSPIRATION

Life has a funny way of pushing me around.  It’s been like that since I was a kid. There are times when I feel like I’m in control, but clearly at other times (like now) someone or something else is at the helm. Control is an illusion, but every once in a while, I get a hint of things to come. 

When we first moved into Pacifica, we’d drive up and down Linda Mar Boulevard. Each time we did, we went past the Sanchez Art Center.  At night, the neon ART sign was on, and I was attracted to it like a moth.  Why?

Well, now I’m working there part time and indulging my curiosity. I’m also working in a way that beneficially combines my facilities experience, my writing, and my art.  I’m learning about operating the building full of art studios.  I’m doing publicity and writing press releases. And soon I’ll learn more about marketing and putting an exhibition together.  These are all compelling subjects that take my creativity to the next level while enhancing my knowledge.

I don’t regret a moment spent in Corporate. The private sector treated me well and gave me professional confidence.  I had our daughter while in private sector, and Leslie had quite a few serious surgeries, too.  None of them cost us a dime.

Now, it seems Corporate has turned its back on me. In the past, getting a job was so easy, and done in just a few weeks after moving cross country. I’ve submitted up to seven resumes on-line a week for almost two years, and have been on only two interviews.  When I lost my unemployment unexpectedly (another story altogether), and put out an S.O.S., two jobs emerged through friends.  Both revolve around my writing. In fact, I’ve been published with a by-line in the local paper.  I even have a writing resume now, which is totally cool.  Life is steering me in a new direction, and it is exciting.

Truth to tell, I don’t want to go back into corporate full time.  It pays very well, but I find it oppressive.  The last job I had nearly tore me apart as I waited to be let go.  Naturally, working in non-profit doesn’t pay as well, but it nurtures my spirit. As I approach my mid-century mark, I need this as much as I needed weight loss surgery.

Last week, I walked through the dark, empty halls at Sanchez Art Center, and I felt completely in the moment.  The Center is between exhibitions, so nothing is up on the walls.  It was a symbolic slice of time carved out of the continuum just for me. Every dark doorway was a possibility, and every blank wall was an inspiration.

I embrace where I am right now, and I want to see what’s behind each and every door.  I want to explore each facet of my creativity, and every career opportunity that knocks.

I want this change.  

Tracey Loves John

I hated high school.  I don’t mean dislike.  I mean bonafide loathing.  People who consider high school the best years of their life are entirely foreign to me. I just don’t get it.

My first two years in high school were spent staying aloft in the chaos that was my mother’s life, fighting stress, and taking refuge in dancing school. In my junior year, over the weekend of the junior prom, circumstances with my mother and the psychopath she married got violent, so I left to live with my grandparents.

  

I lived with Thelma and Ed on the other side of town, but still went to Jonny Law High.  Each day when school was over, Miss Connie would be outside waiting to give me a lift to her dancing school where I assisted and demonstrated for the classes she taught. She was special to me. She bought me my first car, an old powder blue Rambler I named Gladys after Judy McIntyre’s grandmother. It took me close to a year to decompress after leaving the flea infested hovel my brothers and I lived in with my mother. Some days, I’d get all the way to school, driven by my grandmother; only to feel so burned out I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t bother going to first period when that happened.  I’d call my grandmother, and she never, ever squawked about turning around and driving all the way back across town to pick me up. 

“Okay, honey, I’ll be right there.”

I felt lost in high school. I didn’t fit there.  I bet many kids felt that way, but the only place I fit was at Connie’s school. I was upset, confused, and ever so full of myself. My friends kept me afloat in that sea of turmoil.  I had some good friends.

I hung out in the school library with Tracey.  She was a diehard Beetles fan and was desperately and very seriously in love with John Lennon. I went to her house once after school and was floored by her homage to the Fab Four. She seemed to have the entire upstairs to herself. One room was her bedroom, and the other room, a little bigger than a walk in closet, was devoted entirely to the Beetles. Every inch of every wall was plastered with pictures. It was the coolest, most profound demonstration of true and obsessive love I’d ever seen, and it towered miles high in devotion over my shrine to Dolly Parton, whom I adored.  I’ve never forgotten that room.

Tracy and I would spend entire class periods hanging out in the library’s private reading room listening to John Lennon and Dolly on the record player.  We were juniors when John Lennon was assassinated.  I was sitting on a desk in Advanced Biology, and Tracey appeared at the door with a black band on her arm and fresh tears of mourning streaming down her face.  She’d lost her first true love.  To this day, Tracey still carries a torch for John, just as I will always adore Dolly. Some teenage crushes never go away.

I completely lost track of Tracey after high school.  I got involved with Leslie, and our relationship moved me 3,000 miles across the United States. We had a baby; we’ve bought and sold houses, and moved across country twice.  I’m still here 27 years later.  A few years back, Tracey appeared on Facebook.  It was crazy to hear from her again.  She gave me hell for changing my name because it made me difficult to find.  We’ve been Facebook friends ever since, reliving old times and getting reacquainted.

Tracey has been married to the same man for years. She got her teaching degree and taught elementary school in Floyd County in between having four incredibly beautiful and well-adjusted children. She’s highly opinionated, politically minded, and is an advocate for the LGBT community in the college where she teaches. She runs a learning resource center, and a bunch of people report to her. What’s more, she loves her job and the people who work for her.  She’s a success story.

When my unemployment ended unexpectedly in mid-September and Leslie and I felt the bottom fall out of our financial security, Tracey was one of the few who offered us substantial help.  I got a message from her on Facebook asking me if I wanted to remotely tutor her students.  There were papers to be reviewed, and things to do!  She offered me a temporary, part-time position that I desperately needed.

I talked to Tracey over the phone the other day, and doing so was a blast from the past. She sounds much as I remember her, but she’s picked up a regional accent that I find delightful. I had trouble expressing my gratitude.   

You know, we grow up with certain people in our lives, and they have so much to do with how we navigate our world.  When I was a teenager, my friends anchored me, kept me from floating away, but I didn't expect most of them to hang around for long.  I rarely look to the past for my solace, and have gotten the hang of living in the now.   That’s what makes Tracey so remarkable to me. She wasn’t content to sit in the past on Facebook.  She insinuated herself right into my present, and she did it when I needed her the most.

Thank you, Tracey.

GUARDIAN ANGELS

Leslie at Linda Mar Beach

It's been a crazy few weeks since discovering my unemployment insurance ran out unexpectedly; a real mash up wonderful and difficult that never leaves us bored or needing something to do. I've come to the conclusion that being unemployed is a full time job, particularly when the chips are down and you're scrambling to pay the utilities and mortgage.

All financial dramas aside, I think we're in fairly good shape emotionally. Elizabeth found her groove in school and seems fully recovered from the problem she had with the Cabrillo Bullies and other Malcontents. She's got a darling new beau, one who isn't in a rush to grow up much like she, and rather than inhibiting her creative nature like she was compelled to do last year, she is more herself than ever, right down to the set of Pikachu Power Cheeks.

Leslie is hanging in there.  Being in this transitional place regarding home finances has got to be her least favorite place in the entire universe; yet to her credit, she remains poised and engaged.  There are times when, like myself, she feels like her head might explode, but rather than lighting the fireworks, she simply goes to lie down for a while. Suffice it to say this unemployment adventure has forced us to mature in many unexpected ways.  She and I, and indeed Elizabeth as well, are more a team than ever before. What buoyancy we have in the family is due to efforts by all of us to remain upbeat and positive despite the obvious.

Me?  I'm doing alright. Still losing weight although it's slowed down because I'm not working out much lately. I've been incredibly focused on getting work with little time for anything else, and some opportunities have come forward.  Without getting into details, let me say that Pacifica and it's Art Guild are peppered with Guardian Angels and a very giving spirit. Between that and the Guardian Angels residing on Facebook, I feel incredibly blessed by people who are watching out for us and contributing to our well-being in a substantial manner.

Leslie, Elizabeth & The Joker

I'm still in a holding pattern on the BIG JOB in Redwood City, the one that will pay for Elizabeth's braces at the expense of my somewhat reluctantly re-entering Private Sector servitude.    Until I am thrust back onto that Merry-Go-Round, I'll continue to enrich myself at SAC, doing what is highly rewarding intellectually.  When the irons I have in the fire grow flames, I'll have a better idea of where we stand and perhaps sleep better and have fewer disturbing dreams.

The Art Guild continues to be a source of constant pleasure, and as what I'm doing at SAC naturally intersects with it, it becomes doubly satisfying.  Some members are becoming friends in a truer sense, surpassing mere acquaintances to become something richer. I'm doing alot of writing for the Guild and had a press release with my name in the by-line printed in the Pacifica Tribune recently.  That made me so happy!  Opening night of AGP's Member Exhibition and award show was last Friday, and all three of went and had a great time.  I got a lot of compliments on my piece, and those who didn't recognize my work congratulated me on the article.  It was just what I needed.

Gonna be Pikachu for Halloween!  Woot!

I've said it before but I'll say it again.  We'll be in this place, no matter how difficult, until we are released, and in the meantime, we'll do the best we can with it.  It's a lot like surfing.  Each wave is another economic challenge.

Still, if it weren't for our Guardian Angels and their unending support, it would be so much harder.  Maybe too hard.  Offering the kind of help that my parents and extended family never did (with the exception of my maternal grandparents), they reinforce my faith in the human spirit.