Tag Archives: change

Coming around again

Egret in flight

My central career story makes no sense any more. In the early 2000s, I was essentially fired for blogging. There was a time, back in the days before the Twitter president, when writing on the internet was novel and new and unknown and confusing. I jumped into the fray.

The short version is that I had been writing quietly. Journaling. Typing out the odd piece. Tucking it in a pile in my room and wondering if I would ever share.

I took an adult ed class on standup comedy to try to get out of my head and tackle my inner shyness. Ultimately, I took two standup comedy classes, because even though I did OK after the first one, public speaking still made me sick. Sharing my own words filled me with dread (and nausea and a little bit of a thrill, or I wouldn’t have tried again and again).

I actually had a boyfriend who after going to a comedy show said to me, “you’re funny, but you’d never have the guts to do what they do.”

Years later, I did it. I did it a lot. I went on stage. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed, mostly I got better. I definitely made some lifelong friends. I did, mostly, get over my intense fear of public speaking.

Blogging was something I heard about, and comedy friends had started writing in the brave new wilderness of the worldwide internets. I joined the nascent movement and wrote comedy vignettes and what I thought were amusing observations.

I ranted and opined and wrote a couple of funny things to an audience of like 20 friends.

Meanwhile, I was also a “career gal.” I had what seemed at the time a fantastic 9 to 5 gig (actually more like 7:30 to 7:30+). I managed grants and budgets at a research center and helped manage office space at a building that was slated for destruction. I had people reporting to me. I trained people. I signed off on things. I had a salary. My director encouraged me.

Let me back up, though. Before this job, I had had another one. I was at the quintessential in-between job (which I didn’t realize was bookended by two gloriously epic firings from ostensibly great jobs).

I was managing all of the research budgets and research and grant activities for a craptastically mismanaged collaboration of teaching hospitals. I think the CFO may have been cooking the books. The lead scientist seemed unengaged, at best. The worst was one crazy scientist who wouldn’t follow any guidelines for safe handling of tissue, tumors, animals, needles, pretty much anything that required safe handling.

Ain’t nothing like a call from building maintenance asking if those were your mice in the dumpster.

I persevered, but I knew this wasn’t my permanent solution.

Enter C. We’ll call her C., because it doesn’t match her real name and no reason to implicate her with my rambling.

C. worked at one of the nearby hospitals that collaborated with the center where I worked. She told me about an opening for a grants manager at her hospital. I applied, I got it, and C. and I became co-workers.

C. is younger than me. At the time, it was a ginormous age gap, as she was in her 20s and I, like Methuselah, was in my 30s, wizened and wise. We talked a lot, and she credits me with teaching her everything she knows about grants. She also credits me with dropping work philosophy gems, like “Don’t thank your employer for paying you or giving you a raise. That’s what they are supposed to do.”

Then, one day, my blog got me a visit to HR.

As the HR rep read through printouts of my comedy writing–pages and pages of printouts–she focused on a particular story where a disgruntled office administrator “shivved” a coworker over office supplies. AKA, high comedy.

I had been reported to HR as a risk for workplace violence. The notion was that these writings were my diary, and I was a burgeoning unabomber.

Sparing all of the details, what happened next involved my passing a psych exam, an informational chat with a counselor (who wanted mostly to talk about radical comedy and Lenny Bruce), lawyers, paperwork, anguished phone calls (off the record) with the director, who said I was ruining my life, faxes, more calls and finally a mutual agreement with my now former employer.

What I left behind was a messy office and a lot of work, but also processes and documentation. My colleague, C., who helped me find the job, picked up where I left off. Ultimately, she not just took over my stuff, but she became the center manager that I would have likely been had I not imploded. (There’s a whole backstory there with a wealthy donor and planned construction, which I would have helped implement.)

The person who reported me, as it turns out, actually was gunning for me. Or, in line with the story that sunk me, had intentionally shivved me in the back. He looked for flaws in my work, and failing that found my personal, comedy life. I believe, if I understood the ironic twist correctly, he had forgotten how much I had done for him at work, and he lost his job without my input.

Ultimately, I moved west and put the chapter behind me.

I didn’t know about my backstabber or C.’s career until she also moved west. We had a coffee and chat here in California and caught up on a decade or more of seeing how the story ended. Not only did she pick up my work, her career blossomed, and she developed a deep relationship with the director who once supported me. She honestly deserved/deserves it all.

One thing we’ve both shared in our careers is a reluctance to lead. Since moving to California, I’ve mostly managed to avoid managing. I was incredibly happy to take a job in which I would not have to manage people and had less responsibility and was really a 40-hour week not a 50, 60, 70-hour week.

C. came out here and ostensibly tried to also limit her management, but she’s failed at not succeeding. Despite what she claims is her best efforts to lay low, much like the work she inherited from me long ago, she keeps getting promoted.

Now here we both are about 20 years later. We are not the young career gals we once were. I’ve mostly steadily worked and mostly steadily avoided management. C. is a director at a major Silicon Valley place that funds research.

As of today, I am back working in the world of scientific research grants. As of today, I report to C.

It’s a story of redemption. Or it’s a story of relationships. Or it’s a story of burning bridges with organizations but not people. Or it’s a story of moving west like the Joad family, weathering twists and turns and ending up somewhere in California.

It feels like a wheel. And, maybe this time I’m spinning above the motion not under it.

Changes, I guess

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In one of those crazy things that the planet drops on you so your tiny lizard prain can see magic and say “Ah ha. Meaning!” our yard is alive with multiple generations of Gulf Fritillary butterflies. They feast and live and die and transform on the passionflower plant.

Climbing a fence between our neighbors and us, the flowers have bloomed outside our bedroom since we moved here.

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Until this summer, they lived and bloomed relatively unmolested by the insect world apart from an occasional bee.

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Pow. Somewhere the word went out to a gadflying Gulf Fritillary, and she told two friends and like a hot night club, our yard was put on the map. They have been partying it up for months. If you give the lifecycle a month or so, we have grandparents, maybe great-grandparents, fathers, mothers, children, cousins and eggs for the next generation.

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It’s a cosmic hustle for someone lying back with metal and bone filling in for bone and tissue. I’ve swapped one pain for a new pain, and unremarkably it’s all a mind fuck of trying to decide if I made the right move. Does a caterpillar know when it sticks its bottom feet on a leaf, curls up and swaddles itself in silk to form a crusty brown shell what happens next?

Here’s what I know. Day by day I was ground down by pain that the medical establishment assures me was irreversible and severe osteoarthritis. Through genes or some injury I never knew or remembered or more likely some accident at birth, my left hip wore itself to a wingeing, painful state.

It was gradual enough that for a while I figured I had pulled a muscle or otherwise strained my disobedient body. Then, I figured that I was just an out of shape mess. A little weight loss and a lot of exercise and I’d at least be able to sit, stand or walk without twinging.

And then the pronounced limping started. It didn’t stop.

Exercising was brutally painful. But with the help of a stoic streak forged with the fire of a childhood where crying was weakness and shaking it off was sound medical advice, I perservered. Oh, and of course, over the counter pain and inflammation killers, mostly my favorite vitamin naproxen, flowed in my blood stream second only to natural-born cells.

The long and the short of it — it sucked. Livable, but not optimal. I think the day I just spontaneously tripped on air or a sunbeam and dropped in a heap on the floor of my boss’s office scared me the most.

The future meant only one thing. It would be complaining and lessening my sphere of travel to footsteps. It would be my mother. My whole life she had sore feet and legs and breathed sighs of resignation. The diagnosis, which may have come only through an obstetrician, the only doctor I know that she ever visited, was one word “arthritis.”

My back was X-rayed, and the arthritis word arose again. Degenerative arthritis of two discs in my, I now learned, curved spine.

Resigned I was, too, like my mother. But I exercised more. I lost some weight, I followed exercises outlined by a physical therapist. I played softball only ever making it to first base on an error and then calling in a runner to my place.

If my mother I would become… If my future was to be pain and grimacing with a simple stroll, I’d push it hard and convince myself I could muscle through anything. I had to dig deep and keep on moving.

But I was moving less and less. I managed to walk for distances when I could not allow myself to sit. The funeral parade of my mother-in-law was a slow and deliberate slog in tropical humid heat. My new family arrayed behind us, worrying my every footfall and my pale skin getting beaten down in the midday sun.

Cumulatively, even as I pushed, I could feel my world getting smaller as my achievable distances became shorter.

What had been day-to-day discomfort, became months, then years and growing pain. Doctors told me to keep losing weight and keep exercising.

I began to learn that the language of pain is a foreign tongue. I couldn’t find the right description to impress an array of MDs that there was something more.

Here’s where I’ll toss out a brief tangent on a soapbox — I am certain that the deck is stacked against women when it comes to health. Every doctor’s visit seemed to turn to conversations about snacking and fat and health risks.

Yeah, I get that. Although, I’ve been built like a fireplug for pretty much as long as I can remember. Solid, junk in the trunk, low to the ground and a 36C bra since an incredibly early puberty. Healthy and active and curvaceous.

I never really vary wildly from about the same weight, my cholesterol and sugar are fine and blood pressure normal to low. Apart from the creep of middle age, I couldn’t convince anyone that what was happening — falling more frequently, getting up, sitting down, sleeping, moving, walking with pain — was getting worse and not the least bit normal.

My conviction of pain sucking worse for women is based on not being taken seriously. Every time I described my pain I guess it didn’t sound dire enough.

I wanted to punch the very young nurse practitioner, visited ONLY to take a PAP smear, who went off on hidden calories, bad diets and how obesity makes you uncoordinated. She accused me of drinking sugared soda and eating fast food based on nothing, and certainly not based on the vagina she was hired to swab.

Another doctor, visited when I fell in a hotel shower and weeks later ached in spasm-y pain, talked only about my age and asked about signs of pre-menopause. Pain and advancing age were inextricably linked and both incurable, I gathered.

Statistically, and rather than my linking one place, just Google this fact — Women have more cases of osteoarthritis and ultimately get more hips and knees replaced. But, men, they get their hips and knees replaced YOUNGER. If you’re an 80-year-old women and having trouble tooling around the assisted living complex, boom, you can get a new hip in the time that they recharge your Rascal scooter.

Substitute in a penis and balls, and you’re rocking that new hip or knee in your 50s or 60s. You can become an upright middle-aged man ready to chase a mobile lifestyle again.

Due for a physical, I figured I’d give it another whirl to try to convince a stranger that I wasn’t just another fat, old lady whining.

I read the online bio of a Russian woman that instead of an MD was a DO, a doctor of osteopathic medicine. When I showed up in her exam room, she had me hop off the table and walk around the little room. It was a first.

Other doctors looked at my height, weight, age and asked questions as I sat on the exam table in socks and paper gown. They moved my leg for me, asked more questions, tapping answers into a computer screen.

This doctor walked alongside me and looked from the front, back and sides.

For the first time, someone mentioned my hip. Given my not ancient age, this doctor assumed hip bursitis and after years of complaints I had an order for a new X-ray. After the X-ray, she canceled the follow up appointment that would have happened with bursitis and sent me straight to a surgeon.

I wish I had a before and after set of X-rays or even just the X-rays that the surgeon and I went over together. It was a study of black and gray. My left hip looked cavernous next to my right with space between the bones joining up and no cartilage in sight. An ugly, dark space.

I didn’t deliberate long. The surgeon was so certain that I probably was born with a misshapen structure, he didn’t suggest surgery, he only asked when.

This could turn out to be my chrysalis, my future in another form. For as long as I can remember long walks have meant sore legs and feet in a way that other people tell me doesn’t happen to them.

Maybe I have a new fix. I’m learning how to walk again. I was a late walker in my baby years. I am relearning what I maybe didn’t quite get right at like 2 or 3 years old.

At 50 I might creep into a new phase.

Another year older and deeper in debt

Here’s my overdue musing on yet another birthday. I can’t believe I’m completely easing into total decrepitude, but 49 is a grown-up, fucking age anyway you slice it.

On the other hand, I ain’t dead yet.

Maybe it’s the baby boomers, of which I think I am one, tail end of a generation and all that. After all dear old dad was in Fort Lee, NJ during the big one, WW2. But, perhaps the baby boomers and their clinging to the old ways of listening to electric guitars, hot-tubbing and refusing to give up capital F Fun really are making a dent in how aging is perceived. 60 is the new 30 and all.

What I realize, as I refuse to go gentle into that good night, is that people really do have strong ideas or pictures in their heads of what middle age looks like. In the golden oldie days of my hitting comedy clubs night after night, I had a joke about being 40 and it not being a compliment if someone tags a remark with “for your age,” as in “You look great! For your age.”

In other words, I’m not sure I’m completely digging all of the times that folks say to me (and to M.) that we don’t look our age. Baby, this right here, this chubby body and all, this is what 49 looks like.

I know it’s meant well and maybe it’s true. After all I know a chick about 6 months younger than me who rocks the mom jeans and acrylic sweaters. But, if you look at her face, she’s not actually decrepit either.

For fuck’s sake, I don’t really know anyone under the age of 90 who looks like the Crypt Keeper, so why is that our image? I would totally make out with Helen Mirren.

And with all of that, my secret will be the launch of the upcoming “Forever 49,” a store for normal people. My jeans will be old school, the way jeans were meant to be, with zippers that are not so short and low they end at your clit. T-shirts will be long enough to not just cover your belly button but reach your hips. More simply, clothes will go back to fitting you well and covering your muffin top, not create a whole other roll.

Here’s to another fucking decade of living. And, when the wrinkles catch up, I’ll just wear my sunglasses indoors.