Fever Break

The stress fever at work has, knock on wood, broken. I had a little time off at the end of last week and had a terrible time - the weather was great, people were around to have funtimes, I have a car, whatever - but it was pretty horrible. I just could not relax. And then I ended up with a migraine Sunday night so bad I barfed. I think I have been really stressed out by work. It's bizarre to think I don't necessarily recognize that that is what is the matter. It feels so cellular to be in a state of stress, less about what is stressing me out and more about how it feels and how much I want to feel differently.

The capacity to endure stress is really curious. The reasons we endure stress are particularly interesting - all of the justifications that comprise denial - driven by (generally) false imperatives of things like money, networking, contacts, health insurance, expenses, reputation, inclusion . . . they bolster our sense that whatever we are doing is the right choice, and this is our denial about how to live.

I wish I could endure more stress - oh the things I would get done if I didn't have to sit with my cup of tea for half an hour, or clean the house just so I can sit in a chair and enjoy the orderliness. I might have a magazine publishing law firm with music lessons and yoga classes in the community space. Ah, I see - so the justifications that comprise denial are fed from an egoistic center of ambition - and this sense of ambition is created from . . . what source of values? Family? Society? Capitalist conspiracy? So the chain is like this: values - ambition - justification/denial - stress. Maybe values and ambition are really the same thing. Anyway interesting to think about.

It's funny that I just said I wish I could endure more stress. As though all the tools of living that I engage in, like yoga, health and exercise stuff, socializing, therapy, acupuncture, or whatever, are supposed to help me adapt upwards to a way of living that is not suiting me. So of course I can blame exercise and diet for failing to support me enough, and then change my exercise and diet routine instead of the core issues. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about going for walks and eating vegetables, for sure. But in some ways even that stuff is just topical ointment, too, isn't it? I remember one of my yoga teachers talking about an article called "How Yoga Ruined My Life" that someone wrote about how after getting super into yoga, a lot of things from this person's life were shed because it was clear that some things were incompatible with his/her new perspective on life. I'm sure it must feel like total ruination to abandon staples of one's identity. It's hard to change the narrative once you've so fully adopted a story's trajectory.

I wonder what my adopted story trajectory is? I don't think I can see it clearly enough to tell. Take the lawyer thing - am I bold for rejecting a legal career (yes I can change the narrative!), or is this just part of some more buried story about how I will never have an actual job (I relentlessly and unconsciously pursue my built-in trajectory and rearrange the narrative to sound as cool as possible)? Tough to say.

So what will have to change in my world for work to be less stressful? I could always stand to work on myself, so that's a given. And I've been trying to be more clear and consistent with my supervise-ees at work, and that's been an incredible challenge, but is paying off. And more time for me me me, of course, my favorite.

Holy Blog Post

I have been sucked sucked sucked sucked into my job. That is the darn truth. And I miss ye olde blog, I really do. I think what I miss is the time set aside to force me to put my thoughts into complete sentences. I think it has residual benefits in my world.

Yes, clear articulation of thoughts/feelings is something that requires practice, and I am feeling a little out of practice. I have verily stumbled over my words lately, having the idea and intention fully formed in my head, but lacking the actual terminology to translate thoughts/feelings into sentences. Yes indeedy, practice is useful.

Let's see, what have I been stumbling over verbally lately? Ah yes. Personnel issues. My job is, let me repeat, easy and fun, but oh lordy my gracious what to do about those employees? Talk about letting go of control, yep, learning a lot about that. Can't be every player on the team. And how about explaining stuff that you never thought you would ever have to explain to someone over 18, like Fibbing is Bad, and Apologizing for Blunders is Good. Do all young people come half-raised these days? Christ-y I feel old.

But anyway, I need to re-direct my energy away from too much work and back into me me me, because I am much more balanced when I get to nurture myself. Seriously, I really thrive when I don't have a job. Seems ridiculous to say out loud, but the best possible thing for me is not working. So far, at least. So anyway I'm still trying to move toward a yoga-tastic version of life, which includes a Regular Yoga gig, hooray! It starts on Thursdays in August in a church community room - I will post a link when it's mega-officially a go. And I started a Yoga Sutras discussion group on Monday nights, and it's been two weeks, and I'm loving that so far. I hope it keeps up! And I got myself a couple of subbing gigs, which is wonderful experience.

Speaking of yoga subbing gigs - can we talk about the general public for a minute? My first subbing class someone walked out after 20 minutes, but that's fine - you can't be everyone's teacher. My second subbing gig someone came to class with a shoulder injury that prevented her from lifting her arm over her head or putting any weight on it. Of course, I had prepared an elaborate shoulder-based class, sigh. So she probably had a sub-par experience, but my feeling is kind of that she should have stayed home. Would you go to typing class with a broken hand? Probably not. Boy, I can't wait to see more of the general yoga-going public. It's completely different from teaching friends. I'm ready though, to repel who I repel and attract who I attract. We'll see!

Life Plans

I think I mentioned before that having a full-time job, even one that I like a lot, really highlighted for me that I’d rather be teaching yoga, and that I want to subsist teaching yoga. If anything is going to be demanding on my time in an exciting and challenging way, I want it to be yoga.

My friend is opening a store front in the town we live in to sell t-shirts and local music. Not exactly a big money-making enterprise. This was sort of amazing to me. How much money could it possibly cost to get a little space set aside to get going on a business if my crazy friend is doing it? I don’t know the answer to that question yet. But I’m hoping that it’s less than $600 a month. Then I think I could do it.
I would want a space that is geared toward yoga practice as well as yoga discussion and meditation. I feel like the overhead is pretty minimal – space rental, heat and electricity (no AC for me unless it’s pretty desperate), a major initial purchase of mats and straps and blocks and blankets, a little stereo, maybe some candles and pretty curtains. Bathroom and cleaning supplies. Insurance. I don’t know, seems manageable at the moment, especially since my friend is doing it.

There’s a neighborhood business improvement group that gives business-starting classes. There are a huge number of steps to be taken, which is pretty annoying, because since this occurred to me, I feel like I have to do this Right Now. I’ve checked out three yoga places in the area, and I think that I have something different to offer that could gather its own steam. And I want to make community. It’s certainly one thing to find and participate in community that appeals to me – but how about making one’s own? There might be a megalomaniacal, “my way or the highway” downside to this kind of thinking, but I hope my motives are pure. I don’t want permission or approval or acceptance from anyone to start sharing my yoga experience with my community. I guess I also don’t want to wait – and that’s something to think about in terms of purity of intention. Patience. “Deserving.” Mostly I’m nervous that someone else is going to open a yoga studio in my ‘hood that has a similar approach, and I’ll have missed the boat.

Oh lordy.

So anyway here’s a version of the plan: get a space and rent it, and take it easy for the first year. I’d teach two classes a week, and get a few other people interested in teaching one or two classes a week, and we’d start off with evenings. Hopefully it breaks even with rent, but even if it comes up a little bit short that’s fine. Then maybe eventually quit the job and teach a bunch of days a week. Sweet plan!

Oh Man Stress AGAIN

I’ve had this feeling lately of a sliding downhill. At first I thought it was connected to the drinking. I thought I’d been having some moderate success with having *a* drink from time to time, like two drinks a week, but it seemed that I was noticing it in a physical/emotional way. So I stopped that, and got back to my real hangover problem: stress. Now that I am settled more into my job, actual stress and responsibilities are also settling in, and I’m spending a little more time in my head worrying about stuff or hoping to remember to do things. So it’s getting harder lately to maintain the equanimity that I spent 7 months working on. Yep, it’s much simpler to stay calm when you have no stressful data coming in.

I went home from work on Thursday this week at about 10:30am. I felt horrible; I hadn’t felt 100% this week anyway – I had a teeny tiny cold and took some cold meds for two nights. But Thursday was a little special - I had woken up at about 5:40 in the morning with that familiar pounding feeling in my head, and a cold shiver, and nausea – zero alcohol involved, mind you. But I did my tried and true hangover prayer anyway, which is to sit under the hot water in the shower for as long as the hot water lasts, and beg the sky that the vascular constriction or whatever would cure me or at least make me comfortable enough to go back to sleep. Neither of these happened, as they never have, and I ended up waiting it out over a pot of tea and probably some ibuprofen, I can’t really remember. I was still pretty shaky by the time I got to work, and feeling like an emotional time-bomb, and the moment I started lifting boxes all my veins started throbbing blood up to my eyes and temples. It felt like my pulse was trying to knock me out. I tried a short cup of coffee, since caffeine can provide some relief for this feeling by dilating, you know, everything, but it just made me jumpy. And then the nausea came back. So I lined up my ducks at work and said see you later, came straight home in the car somehow (barely remember that either), took off my grubby work stuff and fell asleep until about 1pm. I think I probably had a tiny fever – the chills and nausea and fatigue were pretty in line with that feeling. But anyway this go-home-and-skip-a-day was sort of unusual for me. I think of myself as a pretty tough work-horse. I love the all-over fatigue of physical work. I would do it all the time (and I do, now). So I felt a little defeated by having to go home.

My friend SoapyKittens diagnosed me over the phone with allergies. I sort of thought this was off, since I haven’t been sneezy, and I felt feverish, and my eyes aren’t itchy or anything. But the pollen has been flying around quite a bit and it surely clogs the sinuses and screws up one’s head and sleep in ways besides sneezing and itchiness. I thought about the apples at work, of which I eat many a discarded and bruised reject, and since my cootie-meter has totally lowered its standards I only wash about half my fruit these days – so I’m thinking some kind of pesticide or bacteria thing lodged itself in me and that’s what I get for feeling invincible.

So while there is certainly a lesson to be learned in my bruised-apple-laxity, I don’t think that was it, either. I think it was stress. I think I am really kind of a baby about stress, and that I reached a little bit of a maxed-out point, and had to go home and sleep and lay in the bed for a day.

So now that I have a somewhat manageable life, and don’t work 80 million hours a week, I have a little bit of room to contemplate how to cope with stress. I already do a bunch of yoga, and I think I do enough focused breathing to be getting some stress relief out of it, but maybe not enough? I could stand to meditate more than I do, for sure, that would probably help. I really practiced a bunch of stress-relieving habits on my 7 month vacation from life, like rubbing my feet and sleeping 9 hours a night, so I could draw upon that to up my self-care regimen a bit. And I think I should absolutely knock it off with the caffeine, which will also help (except today, since I already drank a pot of tea, which was delicious and wonderful). And as always, contemplate diet changes. Goddammit I get sick of contemplating diet changes. Life is always better with brown rice and green tea, blah blah blah, but seriously, how insanely do I have to tweak my environmental input to feel physically steady? Feels unfair. It’s like 80 year olds who can only handle plain toast and a gently poached banana because everything else is too upsetting. Is this my new super-sensitive-bunny reality? Sigh. But when I do add a little extra mindfulness to stuff it’s always much simpler than I think, and more rewarding than I anticipate. Bleh. Anyway stress is, like, really serious you guys. So I’m gonna eat some brown rice about it, basically.

Inoculation vs. Antibiotics

This weekend I had to work for a few hours at a big, popular, flower event that the city has every year, usually the same weekend as Mother’s Day. It’s right near the law school I went to, and I realized that professors and people I know from that time might swing through and see me, and I’d end up having some conversations about what I’m doing with myself these days etc. And that’s fine, I’m completely happy with my life choices and don’t feel accountable to anyone for any of my decisions anyway (I’m a grown-up, yes? Yes.). But it did get me thinking about what I usually say about what I'm doing and why, and it made me think about "where" I like to put myself in the stream of human experience. I have concluded that I prefer to be more on the inoculation side of things and less on the antibiotics end of things.

So I think I’ve mentioned before the pro bono thing, providing free legal services to people who can’t afford them. And that I hated it and found it ridiculously stressful and horrible. And yet, the tug at myself to “help” people and use my supposed powers for good created a lot of conflict in me. It’s like forcing yourself to eat something really bitter because it’s good for you. There are really other ways to keep yourself positively occupied or full of nutrients than by doing things that you hate.

Anyway. When providing legal services to anyone, you’re usually on the We’re F***ed end of an event. There’s certainly very little opportunity for working in a preventive roll for an attorney unless you have an ongoing relationship with a client who consults you as they move through their personal decisions. Nope, for most people, calling a lawyer is like getting antibiotics - you're f*****, but we can through some expert-seeming crap on it, and you'll be fine. And I think I prefer working on the inoculation end of life, in that it involves the point in time before everything goes to hell, when everyone can do some yoga and go for a walk and eat some vegetables. That’s what I can handle; that’s what I like.

I used to feel really mystified by people who spent their lives seemingly dedicated to “how” one lives their life. Seemed really boring to me. Diet gurus, exercise lifestyle people, whatever – it seemed like such a limited life to consume oneself with these kinds of things and want to talk to people about how to act all day. Weird. I think it seemed to me that we all sort of figure out how to act anyway, and we should be aiming for higher things like art and music or whatever; that our personal potential is primary, and that the tiny facts of sustenance and connectedness and fitness and peace were secondary pursuits that should be balanced in accordance to their ability to support or detract from one’s primary purpose. But I feel a little more interested in versions of life that have a lot to do with how to live life, as opposed to leaving that as an afterthought or as the natural consequence of one’s other choices/primary pursuits. It’s endlessly fascinating, this examination-breakdown of our tiny choices, and the measuring of our feelings and reactions against these choices, and the adjusting of ourselves depending on the impact we sense. Finding satisfaction in this requires some letting go, perhaps. You might have to let go of ideas of importance or fame or success or whatever else you might think is “more important” than the tiny decisions that come up every day about how to live. Really it all kind of felt small to me, but now I’m starting to feel like it’s everything. Nowadays we have a lot of forces pressing on us that do make small (mostly consumption-based) decisions really big – oil consumption, free range animals, whatever, but even without all the social/ethical baggage that we assign to our decisions, attentiveness to the mundane is pretty much where it’s at. There is a dark side to this attentiveness, which is that stuff like going to a coffee shop can become an event of emotional impact completely disproportionate to its import, i.e., “did the barista hate me with that snarling snarkiness,” “this table is too sticky,” “those people are talking too loud,” “is someone looking at my laptop information,” “I have to pee but I don’t want to leave my stuff here but I also don’t want to lose my seat.”

The roller-coaster of our everyday experience can be pretty intense if you absorb yourself too fully in its minutiae. Maybe I’m trying to say something else about being happy just trying to live. That the range of interactions and emotions we have going to a coffee shop are the higher purpose in life? Something like that?

BUT ANYWAY. Suffice it to say that I empathize with people who are a bit obsessed with the hard work of making their daily decisions have a positive impact on themselves, because it doesn’t seem small-minded or less lofty to me, it seems real and powerful. And I am much happier trying to part of the prospective, as opposed to responsive, aspect of sentient happiness here on the planet, which is to say that I prefer inoculations (or the lifestyle equivalent) to antibiotics. Prevention is way less toxic a game than cure, and I am okay with a life that has less to do with accomplishing “important” things and more to do with living well.

Positive Job Anxiety! Negative Coping Mechanisms

Another nutty week of existence. Have I mentioned that I love my job? I really do. I wish that I could love my job for about 30 hours a week instead of 40-45, but still, it’s really fun. I love riding around in a big truck with other people who also love riding around in the big truck, and bullsh*tting with the customers, and learning about produce prices and markets, and saying I won’t take the collard greens because they aren’t up to snuff today, look at ‘em, they’re slimey!

So on the list of “personal growth” items this week was: having to confront an employee about behavior, which was pretty intense for me. I lost a little sleep, and it was really interesting to observe my mind in this situation. I couldn’t stop my mind from turning the problem around and around in my head, but I did feel pretty effective about watching the thinker, if you know what I mean (which you do), and I felt pretty yoga-tastic about it, even though I wasn’t successful at keeping the anxiety at bay. And I did have a chance to have the conversation with this person that I needed to have, and it went awesomely, and I feel great about it, even though I had some rough time in my head about it.

So clearly, even though I am pretty happy, I still have anxiety about job performance, for sure – there are a lot of important things that have to get done for our jobs to exist, mainly being: buy produce, put it on the truck, drive the truck to places people will be expecting the truck to be full of produce, and be extremely cheery and rad to people to create a feeling of fun and ease around eating healthy. I will say that in terms of potential work consequences, i.e., how far down you have to fall and how hard you hit, this job feels both more important to do right and less terrifying if I blunder as compared to my legal (CLA) job. More important because I think I am starting to care that the truck be great, not just pressured that people view me as a billable resource like the CLA job; and less terrifying for blunders because every single day is another opportunity to make the truck great, and the cumulative impact of my personal screw ups washes out in the bigger pool of the job. At the CLA job, it felt a little more severe – although screw ups happened and at the CLA job people were really understanding about that stuff, the head trip about making something screw up was pretty rough, way rougher than this job (and might have created expensive consequences). But I feel like the anxiety and challenges at my job are enjoyable; I feel ready for them and like I can handle them and like everyone is a teacher and it’s going to help me grow as a person and eventually as a parent. I finally feel like I’m in the right place at the right time in so far as challenges I need to meet goes. Was I just so freaking over-my-head at the CLA job that I shouldn’t even have been there? Probably. I can’t believe people adapt to that stress.

So on to the next fun bit of information – we got in a car accident on the highway in the truck! Good god if you’ve ever felt an 8 ton vehicle rock from side to side and fishtail on the highway, well, I have too (I was not driving). And it’s pretty scary. We could have tipped over – well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I felt for a split second the possibility of that. A convertible, driven by a 19 year old male (if you can see where I’m going with this), came up super fast behind us and clipped our back end trying to pass us. The convertible spun out and stopped across two lanes. No one was hurt, but key-rice-st it was scary. I called 911 which is a weird thing to do, if you’ve ever had to that, well, I also had to do that, too. The other car needed a tow, but our big truck drove away with a mutilated back bumper thing but fine otherwise.

Again, we were fine and all that, but the emotional impact was surprising. It’s like when you get into a fight with someone and you spend the rest of the day pacing and anxious and reeling in your head. Except after the car accident I wasn’t thinking up good things to say to anyone that would have really zinged them, so it’s actually kind of better than that. To decompress a little, I took the crew out for burgers and beer, on me. And I had half a xanax, so that smoothed things out like you wouldn’t believe (if you've heard my "the day I quit my CLA job" story this might ring a bell, but don't worry about me, it's fine). And after making an appointment with our vehicle service people and trying to go to the DMV to get the accident report, I rode my bike home on the bike trail with no cars around, had some spaghetti (more comfort medication), two more beers, watched Brigitte Bardot movies (which are horrible/excellent), and fell asleep at 9:30pm.

So for coping with this experience – the tingling and boiling in the stomach, the out-of-body feeling, the bowel-loosening - I went straight for the old stress standbys – drinks, tv, and starch. This might have been an amazing opportunity to roll with it yoga-style, but I did not do that. I had beer instead. Man, what an amazing shortcut to mental relief that is. The spinning just stops as your mind gets so deflated. But I am absolutely letting myself off the hook for that. It was An Occasion. I’d be less inclined to treat my best friend’s wedding as a reason to drink than a car accident – after the car accident, I wanted to feel shutdown and tired and wake up the next day with everything over. Happy occasions and everyday life, not so much. I had one good stress-coping event at work (had to talk to employee) and one pretty rough stress-coping event (car accident). So that’s a note about my progress on vice and coping mechanisms.

That’s what happened at work this week, and that’s how I’m doing with stress and life. Forward, back, you know how it is.

Personality Problems

So one of my personality problems (flaws) is that I talk a little loud and bulldozer-ish and kind of know-it-all-ish in a class clown kind of way that is hilarious to me but not always hilarious to the listener. I like to start sentences with the phrase “here’s what you should do” and follow it up with something preposterous. I also like to roll my eyes about things and identify the problems in arguments or points of view. Nobody likes this. I also enjoy cutting off your sentences to say something funny to me. Nobody likes this either. But anyway.

I noticed a couple of incidents at my job this week that reminded me of how annoying I can be to people and it got me thinking about what aspects of myself I should want to change, and what aspects I should accept as being part of “myself.” Sometimes I don’t care if people don’t think I’m funny, in what my dear pal calls the “joke ‘em if they can’t take a f***” approach to things. Under this perspective, I am in charge of my half of the interaction, which is My Personal Intention, and everybody else can worry about themselves and it’s not my problem. MPI is not (usually) to be hurtful or mean or dismissive, but rather, to be funny and interested and interesting and bat around ideas and critiques of things for fun and banter (and to get laughs, which is a vanity/insecurity thing). The listener’s experience my boisterousness might be different from MPI, of course. The listener could be offended or feel misunderstood or get the impression that I think s/he is foolish or whatever, so it’s not always effective.

The examples at work were as follows: two gals in the workplace were discussing Eat, Pray, Love, and one had seen the movie but not read the book, and the other had the book and brought it in to share. I saw the book on the table and immediately launched into some version of “oh lordy who’s reading THIS,” fully believing that I was effectively opening up the channels of communication for fun discussion of the book and its problematic and successful qualities. This belief of mine that saying how much I hate stuff is actually a great ice breaker is funny in itself, and of course, "channel-opening" is not what happened. Instead I prompted the gal who brought it in to say “yeah I guess only people with terrible taste, like me, like this book.” It took me a minute to catch on that this was the hurt-feelings kind of sarcasm and not funny self-deprecating humor, so I said “yeah only dumb-dumbs like this crap.” And then I realized that I had provoked hurt feelings, and I had to let the crankiness settle for a minute and then explain that I didn’t want to be mean or superior about it, I was trying to be funny and that I was sorry.

So that’s one incident. Another one was a different set of gals chit chatting about stuff, and one of them starts saying how she got an iris reading the other day – yes, someone looks into your eyeball and tells you all about yourself. I guess the premise is that there is information in the iris of the eye that says stuff about you and your choices and your life – and the first two things that the iris reader told this gal were that her deodorant was clogging her breast tissue lymph drainage and that she eats too much dairy. Yawn! These are totally generic and I said so, again, thinking that I am funny. Instead the gal’s face fell a bit and I have probably effectively inhibited her from ever wanting to share anything about her life with me ever again for the rest of time. Here’s how that conversation could have gone in my ideal world with a friend who “gets” me:

“Hey Marth I got my iris read last week, and it was so rad! This chick looked into my eyes and told me my lymph stuff wasn’t draining because of my deodorant and that I eat too much dairy!”

“Dude, she also tell you that you had a hard time high school, and detect stress and confusion in your life? That stuff is way generic!”

“Ha ha whatever lame-o, no way, you had to be there, it was different than that – it was really right on, for reals!”

“Whoa, that’s nutty! Are you going to go back? Tell me what else she said!”

See, was that so hard? Fun! Shows my attention and critical thinking and delight in life, no? I mean, I recognize how snarky and combative and potentially offensive it is, so yeah, maybe not.

So now here’s the real problem: I don’t want to alienate people, but I also want to be myself. I don’t want to maintain relationships with people who willfully misunderstand me or who are too sensitive or serious about themselves, but I want to be relate to lots of different kind of people in my life and not use my personality as some kind of filter or friend deterrent. I want to do my half of whatever it is that happens between people to make sure everyone knows that everyone is cool with everyone else being exactly how they are. And I want to be around people who can do their half of not taking things the wrong way, or being too attached to their decisions or preferences or anything else such that disagreement on books or iris readings is really offensive to them.

But I also don’t want to become so settled in my personality or defensive about my characteristics such that I deny the possibility or necessity of improving myself when it comes to my personality problems. I mean, it’s maddening to be around people who are really protective of their bad personality traits (lots of old people do this, and I think it can be pretty lazy sometimes). But how do I know which things to work on changing and which things are okay to keep? My friend suggested that I can get comfortable with this idea by thinking about being myself, but just adjusting my behaviors to what is "appropriate" for the situation. This is a nicer way of thinking about it than just saying I need to change myself or censor my nature. Even if it’s just semantic that’s fine with me, I can work with it. So that’s what I’ll be trying to think about for a while.

College is Dumb

I have ranted about this before, but it deserves revisiting. I was talking with my friend the other day about what college means. I think a lot of people my age have parents who treated the college degree as some kind of success-measurement-threshold in launching their kids into the world ("well, at least they're educated, I did my job"). I think by now most people understand this as a socialization and class status exercise, because the bachelor's degree draws a line between the lower classes and the slightly less lower classes. Having a bachelor's degree, my friend said, is a just handy vetting qualification to weed out the people who didn't have judgment enough to figure out they should smoke someplace besides the boys' bathroom in high school. Having a college degree indicates all kinds of things to employers that we can't really say are the actual qualifications for a job: college degree = probably has enough sense to lay low and do his/her misbehavior out of sight, and participate in a scheme of expectations involving respect for hierarchy and maybe a little independent decision making. "Values"-wise it also probably indicates that someone comes from a non-threatening, bourgeois, SAT-prep-course-attending kind of household that most bosses (the ultimate bourgeois) can relate to. It's just a class indicator. I mean, my job requires a college degree. I load and unload a truck. Bachelor's degree required.

Yoga instruction, however, requires no college degree. You can teach yoga after a month of training for anywhere from three to seven thousand dollars. So there's that. There's a class thing involved in yoga-doing, but that's another story. Maybe later.

Not Yet the Boss

I am sort of supposed to be in charge of some stuff and a few people at work, but the transition is a little slow going. I've spent the first month being told what to do by the people I am "in charge of," because they definitely know how to do the job way better than I do, which makes it a little tough to start telling them what to do and overriding their judgment calls from time to time. And plus the old boss is still definitely in the mix, and still definitely in charge-charge, so that is still happening.

But most of all I have been missing my chance to assert my authority, which is really hard to think about today. Today especially, since something happened at work that I didn't stomp down on immediately - it took me a little while to process what was going on and figure out how I felt about it and how to articulate it, and only now am I recognizing the exact moment that I missed to make an important point about expectations and behavior and stuff like that. It was pretty minor event-wise, but still, I'm going to have to adopt a little bit sharper of a "persona" about stuff. I don't like the idea of having to be armed and ready to shut stuff down all the time, but it's pretty interesting to see myself in this position of letting things slide by and then thinking I shouldn't have, or I should have reacted differently. Blerg, whatever.

What it really makes me think about is parenting. There are a lot of decisions that need to be made right on the spot, or the moment slips by. There is some kind of stop-gap solution sometimes, like saying, "hey, hold up a minute, this is not cool," and then just sort of using that as a place holder to pause for a bit and figure out WHY it isn't cool and what you mean to say about it. It was so different at my old job - being in charge of stuff just meant rational delegating and sensible deadlines, clear instructions and cheerful demeanors. The cooperation was pretty easy in that sense. This job is like waitressing - team effort, team dynamic, team drama. Anyway back to the parenting thing: my friend CheetahDress told me a story once about working at a day care, and having to reprimand two little girls for not including a third child in their fun. When they were instructed with the disappointing directive of including the third, one girl said to the other, "that's okay, we weren't having that much fun anyway," so that the third kid could hear it. When I heard this, it was pretty shocking to me - this comment shows a pretty sophisticated kind of malice. What the hell do you say to a kid who says something like this? Something is way wrong with that comment, but what is it exactly? And what to do about it? There's no way it would be okay to let that go without consequence. (It's like parenting or working at a day care just becomes one huge exercise in doing that thing where you think of a great comeback two days later!) So when I heard this I instantly imagined myself in that situation and tried to think about a quick way to snuff that behavior, and I couldn't think of anything to say at all. Some lame adult thing probably would have occurred to me, like "hey, play nice." Lame-o! My pal CheetahDress, on the other hand, said, "whoa now, that's a pretty sneaky way of being mean," to the little girl. This was perfect - it's fast, and identifies the problem happening, and isn't so complicated that has to be the exact thing (describing passive aggression or the whole complexity of the girl's cruelty would have been pointless), it calls the little girl out specifically on her bullshit . . . I mean, this was an A+ thing to say in the moment, in my opinion. How to stay this present and direct and crap-cutting in life? How?

So anyway not that my job is a preschool, but really life is a preschool, and I'm going to have to call people out on their sneaky ways of punishing each other or blaming each other or whatever, and I'm using this preschool example as my template.

New Job Side Effects

One of the blessing/curses of my new job is that I get to take home produce that we can't sell. This has been coming in the form of scarred zucchini, avocados on the edge of browning, bruised MacIntosh apples, sad looking beets, etc. My rescue and conserve impulses are being stretched to their ends with all the waste that goes on with produce. I made two huge loaves of zucchini bread, put zucchini and leeks in my pasta thing, I have borscht on the stove right now, had two avocados for dinner last night, and spent about a half hour last night just peeling red peppers that I had roasted to save them from becoming garbage. So this definitely isn't sustainable. I can't be a one-woman garbage-to-food conversion operation indefinitely. But the waste! If my tiny organization is making this much waste, I can't even contemplate the chain grocery stores and their garbage. And it's amazing what people won't buy even though it's perfectly fine. And admittedly, I won't buy a zucchini with scars all over it, I'm usually pretty suspicious of it. But the way we get our produce doesn't even resemble what food actually looks like when it comes out of the ground. Someone made a joke about organic oranges at work yesterday, and apparently it was funny because they're so hard to get/make/find. Organic bananas might be an oxymoron, too. We'll see. There's a whole world of produce industry crapola I have to learn about.

But anyway I definitely attach a certain level of morality to waste, ie, it isn't just a shame to throw away stuff, it's wrong. And don't get me started on refrigerators, either - nobody needs a refrigerator as big as we have them. Personally I'm starting to feel that no one needs a freezer, either. So many adaptations we've made to convenience just to become crap-buying garbage-makers who are too good for scarred zucchini, oh lordy I'm getting fired up about this now, better chill out. Anyway it's 6:30 in the morning and I'm going to work to buy produce, that I hope we will sell all out of to people who will eat it and not end up throwing it away. Cheers!

So What Was Law School About?

I was recently talking with a pal, well, a few pals really, about what law school was all about for me. A few things to get out of the way here - I definitely went to law school because by age 27 I felt that still having no idea what the hell to do with myself was a big problem that needed some kind of answer. It's funny to think about in retrospect because right around the same time I was thinking about doing yoga teacher training, but it ended in the fall and law school would start in the fall and it wasn't going to work out in time to do both. Hm. Second, I hated the bureaucracy of the world and felt pretty powerless and broke a lot of the time, and was tired of that; getting one blood test and a prescription for antibiotics from the hospital cost more than my rent and caused a serious panic about How Am I Going to Live at one point. Um, I also got a preposterous scholarship and my vanity was so ridiculously flattered that I was definitely going to get this bargain education even if I didn't really know what the hell I was doing it for. And of course, being a lawyer is sooooo versatile, yes? You do aaaaaanything with a law degree, right? Ha ha, that's funny. Anyway, being a lawyer certainly sounds like something indisputably worthwhile, skill-set wise. "Marketable" is the term we hear tossed around.

Okay so there's that. What did law school do for me? The way I found myself putting it over the phone to one friend is that, well, "I basically have the exact same life I had before I became a lawyer, except now, I really like my life." This sort of sounds like some version of "I punched myself in the face for while, and once I stopped, it was awesome." It's a little different than that, more like, I was filled with doubt about my choices, and having challenged them to the extreme with this five-year adventure, I can feel more confident about my choices. One thing I got out of law school is that I love to learn. I love it. Even though I'm not going to be a lawyer, getting my J.D. was super fun for me. I would go back to school for any number of things if money were no object. Philosophy, Spanish, Botany, Music, you name it, I would love to learn about it. I truly treasure my law school education for the new way of viewing the world that it provided me - I had no idea how the FCC is allowed to exist, I had never considered my "rights" under the Constitution, I had never had to bend my mind around the kind of reasoning that the law uses. It was pretty neat for all those reasons. Another thing I got out of it was finally getting over my own insecurities about my intelligence. Being smart is VERY highly prized by my family and I was always worried about being only sort of smart and how that doomed me to a meaningless life. Grandpa went to Yale, Uncle got a free ride to college because he's so super smart, cousins have perfect SAT scores . . . but I was always hovering well under the exceptional threshold as it's measured by the world - wasn't going to get into a great school, etc. At last, at last, I do not give a crap about that. Education pedigree is a shameful and exclusive and hierarchical measure of human worth that no one should subscribe to. I went to a low/medium crappy college, and I would have had a way better time at a state school meeting actually interesting and diverse students. But anyway. As for my own level of intelligence, I am totally fine with not being a genius. I did great in law school (yes it was not a well regarded school but whatever I'll take it), and I certainly keep that in my pocket as evidence that I am reasonably smart, but it's not just that - it's more like I have enough education and enough of a sprinkle of wisdom now to feel like I can trust my own analysis and intuition, and enough skepticism to be ready to change my mind when something better, clearer, or more persuasive comes along, and I know I will keep trying to learn new things. That's plenty, and I feel great about that.

And here's one more important thing about law school that really broadened my perspective, and it's pretty basic, so if this kind of thing has been obvious to you since birth then pardon this silly revelation. So, a lady adult in my life has been repeating the following anecdote for years to me: this lady adult goes to a job interview, and the interviewer immediately notes her haircut, and says something to the effect of, "I really appreciate a simple, no fuss haircut on a woman, it shows that your sense of practicality is sound." This haircut apparently was highly influential in getting a job. I walked around for a long time with this, and many other similar ideas, in my head - certain decisions we make have very clear messages to people, and one of those is that having a practical haircut means you are practical person. I think I still judge people with elaborate hairdos as having suspicious priorities. So anyway, I think it took me until I was in law school to understand that sets of facts are susceptible to multiple conclusions. This is basically the premise of arguing the law - with any given set of facts, which conclusion is best for you, and can you persuade someone of it? With respect to the haircut thing - why didn't the interviewer conclude that the haircut meant this lady had no concern for attention to detail? Or placed no value on self-care and beautifying herself and was therefore indifferent to pleasing others in a workplace setting? Or gets up really late and is super disorganized and can't handle anything beyond a wash and go haircut? (Most of all, why didn't this lady adult conclude, in spite of the observation coming in the form of a compliment, that the interviewer was inappropriate and superficial?! Seriously, the haircut?!) Feeling liberated from narrow conclusions was huge for me. I didn't know how to see beyond a certain way of thinking until I was forced to squeeze my brain out a lot. Now I feel like I can see unlimited kinds of conclusions in all things, every day, and it makes life so much more interesting, and much less severe, if you see what I mean.

And of course, participating in the corporate world was fascinating, and I could finally decide, based on my own experience, not just my own leftist prejudices, that it wasn't the right place for me. And that does go a long way in terms of my own contentment. So, onward and upward, further in and further up.

Oh My God Working is Like Pretty Annoying Y'all

Dude how do people live their lives AND go to work? I started my new job this week and I only did three days, but I feel like that should be enough for the month. Srsly. Everything I've been working on went out the window for the week, and I'm picking up the pieces of my brain right now to feel like I can keep going with everything. I have to find a place to live, first of all, which is like double varsity annoying to the exxxtreme, but once that's done it'll be great to have a place to live that I can pay for out of my working-girl salary. Kind of reassuring.

But I have to say that starting this job has really underscored the fantasy of yoga teaching as a life - I look forward to my little buddy-brunch yoga trip on Sundays like I don't look forward to anything work related. And of course the full-blown fantasy version is a little on hold right now since I have this job. And just to make the timing all the more frustrating, a three month apprentice-teaching program is happening with one of my favorite teachers right now, and I can't try to get into it because now I have a job. But I'm staying calm about it, the dream isn't disintegrating, it's just that another dream is taking shape right now and I need to turn my attention to this for a while, and I can maintain the thread of my yoga life after business hours, in my future apartment where I eventually will live and have all my books and junk all how I like them around my desk and I can work on my feminist manifesto autobiography.

Speaking of books and autobiographies: I am reading for fun right now Spalding Gray's book Sex and Death to the Age of Fourteen, and it's pretty interesting. He's that monologist whose life consisted of running around doing things and then telling audiences about what he did. This also sounds like an amazing life to me, and the stories are good mostly because he's incredibly neurotic. His story telling is pretty compelling, I admit, and it is definitely the result of his long relationship with improvisational and experimental theater, none of which I have ever done, but still, I think monologuing is an interesting undertaking. Blogging, just out loud, right? That's a thing I would like to try to do, write one monologue about something.

Anyway no one wants to read a blog that never posts, so we'll see how it goes trying to blog regularly and have a job. My entire NYC fan base was alarmed by my wrapping it up, and the fans are the most important thing.