Tag Archives: California

Coincidence, convergence, luck o’ the Irish and what would Pat think

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This story is the kind of random that is so random it creates its own pattern. This story just makes me wonder if life it orderly or purely chaotic.

Today is also Captain’s Log, 2022, the Ides of March. Had Pat the Champion hung onto the terrestrial plane, she’d have been a ripe or seasoned or well-aged 93. But, she’s been gone for 20 years instead.

Today I got my first pay check from my new job that’s doing new philanthropy in the new millennium with new money from one of the younger of the world’s billionaires.

I wrote about what happened that got me to this point last May. The career next, if next means 20 years later.

The TL;dr – I got knocked off the career ladder of blazers and blouses and budgets, writing memos back in 2004, coincidentally around Independence Day. A bit shy of two decades later, I get hired as a temp by a friend who was a front row viewer of the 2004 flameout.

I always wonder whether Pat’s dying was a catalyst, a lever that proved the center could not hold. My status quo for so long included her, so change was a-gonna come, when she died. And it did.

When I moved to California, I didn’t just avoid a career ladder, I worked 14 years at a place that brags about having a “flat” structure. No where to go and certainly not up.

I switched it up in 2019 and tried a stint in the local industry of tech. It was fun while it lasted, decked out in all the cliches. I wore a branded hoodie, drank cold brew and kombucha on tap and sat in an SF open office. And, I eventually got waylaid like the rest of the world in the fallout from COVID19.

I’m pretty sure Pat and I would have bonded on the international mandate to stay the fuck home.

About a year into the global pandemic, I lived through an epic employment drama that lasted a perfect 7 days. On the 7th day, February 22, 2021, I quit.

I onboarded to my new, new job, no longer a temp on contract, on 2/22/2022, a year to the day from my last, non-temp job.

So this month it all converges. I get to use a lot from my bag of job tricks from a pretty big bag. Who knew I’d find something where having worked in grants management for science research, at a philanthropy, and for a CTO at a tech company would all come together. In one day, I defined PR in software development to a lawyer, explained charitable purposes to an engineer and processed a grant award to support an International research center.

Today, to remember Pat, my mother, perhaps the strongest influencer in my life, I celebrate all of the coincidences and wrinkles that got me here. My coworker from the beginning of the century who is my boss now. The date 2/2/22, when I marked a funny anniversary, and I created a new milestone, And a very nice paycheck on Pat’s birthday.

Coming around again

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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.

Pat’s Day 2018, keep your mouth shut edition

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I’m a day or three late. Maybe more. Blame Comcast their lack of faith that our internet truly shit the bed. After begging and weeping and prayer, the tech came and left a new modem and cables behind.

Late I may be, but it was worth being late, or at least I tell myself that my lateness is good lateness. It’s better than telling myself I’m tardy.

The Ides of March have come and gone. The day I think of my mother, since she would have been 89 on March 15, had she not decided to not be. I think of her all the time really, not just on her birthday, and she left about 17 years now. Maybe 17. Time flies, and she’s remembered.

Every year since she died, though, I like to remember how they broke the Pat mold and haven’t built another one like it. I remember to not let the bastards grind me down (which I wish was illegitimi non carborundum).

Because of Pat, I remember that non-creative small minded people kind of suck. I remember that there’s both honor and wobbly steps (I edited that from treacherous steps) in not conforming, following, acquiescing, going gently into that good night. Most of all, I remember that like Pat, I am a square peg in a world of round holes, and so it is.

But, that’s not today’s adventure.

Today’s adventure is about work, the thing I have to do. We sell our skills and brains on the open market to live.

I have the shoulder to the wheel thing down, but sometimes I outstay my welcome, or that’s what the authorities at past workplaces have told me. I outstayed my welcome, when a director was boning two women in the office and they all hated me for my non-office-boning knowledge, and they told me I just had to go. Or the time when after about 5 reorgs, the jackass above me was minutes away from being unmasked as a doer of nothing who couldn’t balance a bake sale, and I was shown the door to go.

I’ve always thought of my working as having a shelf life, and my expiration date would come soon enough.

Through all of the trials of the workaday world, Pat’s voice in my head says, “Just keep your mouth shut.” She knew I ultimately wouldn’t keep my mouth shut. And, she’d worry as I lost another job. Albeit lost a job and gained a great story.

I also suspect she was a bit proud of my inability to keep my mouth shut and dodge a fight. Sure, I need to work, and she always needed to work, but she respected that I have some fight in me.

Friday, despite her having been gone so long, her voice was loud and clear in my head, “Just keep your mouth shut.” Here in California, the strange land where I work, in a company that is more earnest than ironic, I’m doing alright with a big mouth and ingrained, East Coast bred sarcasm.

Pat’s head would be blown.

She would say “keep your mouth shut,” but she’d be confused by the work company I’m keeping. I’m working among lawyers, the kind that read and talk about the law not hang out in courts. Until now, the only mix of work and lawyering was when I hired a labor lawyer to help me out of my last employment jam.

On Friday, I was parrying wits with someone who used to be the head of one of the top schools in the country and clerked for a justice from the SCOTUS, while in the company of a double Ivy grad from Yale Law. Magically for Pat’s daughter, they asked me to speak up and no one’s getting fired.

So, I marvel at what a fucking crazy world it is. That I’m me, that she was she, and of all of the things she taught me to worry about or be cautious of and the kind of authority she feared. I’ve ignored her lessons of fear and aversion, and I live on to tell the story.

Here’s the Hemingway version of the story:

People who give away money for a living and run an organization for the purpose of giving away money are asking my opinion on how to make that workplace work better. They are paying me to not keep my mouth shut.

And for two hours, the day after Pat’s day, I got to share openly with the authority figures I was taught to avoid, and I’ve only just begun.

She would have been suspicious and recommended cautious. But, still and all, I think she’d be proud that I have a voice. For her, speak up, speak out and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Cooking time

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Here’s something I’m disproportionately proud of to start the week: I made some seriously kickass chicken soup.

M., the man with whom I cohabit, did something he ain’t never done before since I’ve known him. He packed a lunch for work with said kickass soup. Then he shared with his co-workers, who are now seeking a recipe, so I’ll do the best I can to write it all out.

It’s recipe time boys and girls!

First, days before you make the soup, whip up this recipe from Farm Fresh to You.

Butternut Squash & Swiss Chard Hash
Ingredients
• olive oil
• 1/2 large onion, thinly sliced
• 1 jalapeno, finely chopped
• 1 small, yellow bell pepper, chopped in 1/2-inch pieces
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 cup butternut squash, cut into 1-inch cubes and roasted
• 1 cup shredded swiss chard, kale or spinach
• salt & pepper
• 2 eggs poached, fried or soft-boiled. Runny yolk recommended.

Instructions
1. To roast butternut squash: Heat oven to 400 degrees F and place cubes on an oiled baking tray. Bake for 20-30 minutes until tender and slightly golden.

2. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over a medium high heat. Add onion and cook, stirring for about 5 minutes until soft. Add jalapeño, yellow pepper, cumin and paprika and cook for another 2 minutes. Stir in Swiss chard and cook for 2 minutes until wilted. Add roasted squash and cook for another minute. Remove from heat.

3. Season with salt and pepper and serve warm with a poached egg on top.
Serves 2
http://voraciousvander.com
Serves: 2

Oh, but don’t do the egg bit. Just use the veggies as a side dish, sans eggy-wegg. Have leftovers.

Cook up a seriously tasty chicken dinner the next night. Maybe use one of Trader Joe’s pretty tasty “Organic brined chickens.” I roasted that puppy up on a bed of leeks with a few slices of red pepper also thrown into the pan.

Eat the chicken. Save the ravaged corpse.

When the weekend comes along, time to boil up your bones and make a broth.

Here’s the tricky part — First, juice a whole bunch of tangerines, while your loved one watches. Let him leave the house to go for a run.

While he’s out, switch out the tangerines from the juicer, clean up the citrus and switch on over to carrots. When you make carrot juice, you end up with a bucket full of ground up carrot bits. All of the juicing guides tell you, you can make stuff with a bucket full of ground up carrot bits. For example, you can make broth.

So, there you are, a chicken carcass, a bucket full of ground up carrot bits, water and a big pot. Boil that shit. Boil it some more. Let hours pass. Throw in some laundry. Not in the soup, in the washer machine. Do your core exercises, while the pot simmers. Maybe a little knitting, while the pot simmers. Update your craptacular blog, and you guessed, the pot simmers.

You’ll end up hours later with a murky orange goop of soupy base goodness. Time to let it cool, strain it into a bowl and recover any meat that ended up at the bottom of the pot. Throw that into the bowl with the lovely, strained chicken broth.

Slap it in the fridge and go out to eat. Drink wine. Carpe the old diem.

The next day, throw the broth back in a big pot. Put the pan, and a bit more water on the fire getting it back up to a toasty simmer.

Rummage around the refrigerator, and pull out the leftover squash and chard hash from the recipe above. Dump the leftovers into the pot.

Wash and chop up some carrots (the other ones in the pack that you didn’t get around to juicing), and throw the carrot slices into the pot.

Check the crisper in the refrigerator, and discover a bunch of neglected spinach. Clean that up, throw out the leaves of no return, chop or rip it up, and throw that into the pot.

Throw out the beets behind the spinach. They’re wilted and soft anyway, and only in Moscow do you want beets in your soup. This is California, not the Soviet Union. Bad beets. Bye bye beets.

Sit on the couch and let that stuff chill on simmer. OK, not chill exactly. Relax on simmer.

When you finish your core exercises, go back to the pot and grind in a serious helping of fresh pepper. Look around for what other soupy type spices you might have. Hmmm, just in case, throw in a chicken bouillon cube and a bit more water.

Discover the unopened spice mix you got as a Christmas present and check the label. If it says something like “celery salt, garlic salt, pepper and sea salt mixed,” throw some of that junk in. Toss in a little dried rosemary. The old parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Although, probably not the sage.

Back to the fridge — take out the giant jar of minced garlic in oil, and throw a metric shit ton into the pot. Or at least two heaping tablespoon’s worth.

Let that boil a long while longer. Throw in more water if it starts getting low, and check the carrots. If eyes are the windows on the soul, carrots are the windows on your soup’s doneness. Soft carrots equal done soup.

While this all is boiling, fight off the local critics and naysayers who question your simmer. Simmer is good.

Finally, when you’re hungry, declare the soup is done and force all in the house to eat. Or else.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to throw in some breast meat from a brand new chicken just to give it some more meat.

Enjoy.

Maybe it’s because another birthday is a-coming

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I thought I had a thought about something to write about here. The jump was a Facebook status I saw with a quote that boiled down to whether you could call yourself an artist.

I usually don’t. Sometimes I do. It’s usually when I am melodramatically claiming insights and wisdom and sensitivities I don’t actually possess. Recently, I did gesticulate and gesture broadly while declaring “Fuck them all, I’m an artist,” to a work friend (he is beleaguered as I am by those people who cannot discern wit and sarcasm from assholic behavior).

Generally, I’m more unsure. Although, as M. will shout at me, ridiculously so. If I don’t trust my words or my way with words, why the fuck should anyone else?

It’s a baby step that I now tell people that I’m a “writer” (yup, note the quotes and do the little airy double-fingered gesture) or admit to blogging or working on a book, now with M.’s sage advice an admitted collection of essays. Essays I can manage; a book creates a dry heave kind of thing in my brain. Hmm, not a great visual that – a retching head.

It’s important, I think, that you have to at some point say “fuck it, I’m in the club.” I’m tired of waiting for permission to decide what I am.

I never or rarely call myself a stand up comedian. I say (admit) I’ve done stand up comedy (and suppose I might again).

At night in dim clubs and bars, there was a mostly unspoken hierarchy, and there was a definitely bitched about gripe of who got to call themselves a comic. I think I took the atmosphere too much to heart, too personally, and I couldn’t bring myself to compare my meager offerings to people who made money and gigged madly and got auditions.

In retrospect, I wish I had brassier balls to front myself as belonging, even if I didn’t feel it inside. After all, I drank beers (and retro-shamefacedly even slept) with clowns who cashed checks built literally on fart jokes. Fart, fucking, jokes.

(Cue the smoke and vaselined lens with swirling colors, I feel a nostalgic memory coming on….

Back in old Boston, there’s a dingy room in a basement of what was once a bank. The tiny tables behind the stage, where comedians impatiently wait there turn, is adjacent to the black, iron wall of the bank’s vault.

I chatted and fiddled with my list of jokes in front of me and nursed a beer. A guy who at the time got paying gigs and took a shine to me, leaned over me to whisper sweet nothings of advice, and no doubt peer from above my head at the fun bags in my blouse.

He explained that I was too smart, and audiences don’t like that. My success, it would seem, would best be served by following his lead. He suggested I stand up from where I was sitting and watch his carefully calibrated performance unfurl.

Woman that I am, because I do sadly believe woman are a bazillion times more likely to politely follow these kind of orders, I got up to watch.

No lie, it was painful. Scampering and dancing on stage and a solid gold bit that if my dim mind remembers culminated in the comic gold of not being able to tell if the farts were coming from his dog or his grandmother sleeping on the couch. GOLD!

People do laugh at that shit, I’ll give him that. Although, sometimes it’s the uneasy laugh of watching someone fall spectacularly or the cruel laugh at the handicapped or maybe the giggle from watch monkeys flinging poo at the zoo. So, indeed the room had laughter in it.

A couple of people later, it was my turn. He returned the favor to study my set and give me notes.

It was one of those nights I only sort of remember. My best moments on stage are the ones where like a trained athlete it’s all muscle memory, mechanics and flow. Everything rolls out instinctively, not held up by my conscious (and self-concious) thought of what’s next.

I ripped it. The audience was listening and laughing exactly where I planned. They were silent on my words that would lead to revelation and release. But, in my game, in that ultimate zone, I don’t remember the details.

Admittedly, those nights were rare for me. I could measure my success by the astonished smiles and back pats from my friends and acquaintances back stage.

In a comedy club, a cold handshake with no eye contact tells you your fellow comics are embarrassed for you. In contrast, there’s a warm spread of people reaching out to touch you, pat you, congratulate you, smile when you’ve just nailed it in the end zone.

My would be suitor, smiled and offered the perfunctory hand shake and “good set.” He didn’t try to sleep with me again after that night.)

Those moments are the ones that make me want to sell myself harder. I only wish it didn’t take negative stimuli for me to feel the need to conquer.

There’s a bit more in my head. Stuff about what happens into the next decade, now that I’m about 10 years deep in M.’s and my relationship, just shy of that many years into my California dream, and looking down the barrel to 49, knowing it was 38/39 when it all last shifted seismically. And, as they say on Madison Ave. and Cupertino, wait there’s more.

But, for now, I’ll have to consider a part 2.

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

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Ah the holidays. It doesn’t matter the decade, the age or the location, but I get that bluesy feeling that’s best summed up by The Animals or Nina Simone.

But oh, I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Of course, it’s all self-inflicted anxiety. One year maybe I’ll just not give two shits about whether the gifts I get are well-matched and well-received. Maybe I’ll just receive all gifts at face value and not morn the lack of connection.

(Truth be told, that’s one minor complaint at the end. There’s only one thing I received that I thought, “Really?” since it seemed so cookie cutter and impersonal.)

This year, though, was a new chapter. M. and I celebrated at home and hosted. California menu, no snow, fresh produce, avoiding travel all pluses all around.

I have to admit, I have more fun with M.’s family and Chinese New Year. Although, he points out that could be because many don’t speak English, the only language I do. I guess being misunderstood ain’t so bad, if it’s done in Chinese.

In this week’s episode

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There’s a line in the movie “Auntie Mame” that always resonated with me. If I remember correctly, it’s “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

I was obsessing about that line for the better part of the week after my Spanish lesson.

First, probably makes sense to explain the Spanish lesson part. I work in a place that among its benefits is some dough to pay for edumacation. Like many a place, on account of the IRS not minding, I’m offered for them to pay for me to get me get my learn on. Only thing is, you can’t just learn anything, so I opted away from belly dancing (IRS no likes) and into language (everybody likes lingual ed, right?).

Besides, they say that old people learning shite like languages helps to ward off the old dementia. We’ll see.

So I take one-on-one conversational Spanish. Miguel comes by and for an hour and a half listens to me butcher his native tongue while awkwardly trying to utter something akin to a coherent sentence. Mostly I fumble around for adjectives, destroy verb tenses and using what feeble few words I know to describe something kind of like, but not really, communicating.

Miguel. Él es muy paciente. Soy un tonto, pero lo intento.

Believe it or not, I actually learned the word “tonto” on Wednesday. It’s not “friendly Indian guide,” like the Lone Ranger might think. It’s idiot or fool.

I was trying to explain to Miguel, again with my infinitesimal Spanish vocabulary, what it meant to be kooky or quirky. We whipped out our phones and language apps and tried to figure out the equivalent expression. We failed. But, I did learn that the Three Stooges are the “Los Tres Chiflados.”

In this week’s episode of my Spanish class, I tried to tell Miguel about our fiesta de el psíquico, where Felix the psychic medium came to our house and gave readings to our friends for a modest fee.

We chatted about talking with the spirit world and psychics. I learned that Miguel believes los muertos no hablan. I gotta agree. I don’t really know whether the dearly departed are up for chats while we drink red wine and/or tea. Wouldn’t once you are dead you would kind of figure, hey, no more mundane chit chat for me?

I learned that Miguel believes in demons, and it could be they, the bad’uns that Felix is actually chatting up. It’s a mysterious thing this existence and life and death and all.

But, I also learned that Miguel kind of thinks I’m nuts. Or maybe he admires me. Nah, probably thinks I’m nuts, which brings me back to Auntie Mame, and the banquet and starving.

In the movie, and in the musicals too — by the way, it’s a toss up between Angela Lansbury and Rosalind Russell as better Mames, sorry Lucy, I love you, but not the same league — Mame is an eccentric “free spirit.” It ain’t always pretty, there are bankruptcies and pregnancies and pissing off people, but she has fun.

I think Miguel thinks I’m like Mame, only I’m almost certain it probably wasn’t a big cultural touchstone in his native Ecuador. So, he doesn’t know that he thinks I’m like Mame.

Maybe I am.

We chatted some more in a mix of Spanish and a little bit of English to get a point across, and he tells me that every lesson he is surprised what I’ve been doing. In his words (and gestures), most people do kind of the same thing all of the time or maybe stick to a few things. For me, and for M., though, the cluster of activities seems to be a bit wider than most.

His example: this week I told him about la fiesta de el psíquico and awhile back it was how both M. and I became ministers in order to marry our friends. And, there is my renewed vigor, as a new season is upon us, for crabbing. And, writing. And, comedy. And, then there is the actual real job.

I gather my list is eclectic.

Of course, old Miguel is one to hablar. He’s a Spanish tutor. But, he’s really a math teacher. His math students are reformed parolees. He also spends some free time writing short stories. Incredibly short, I think he keeps them to 100 words. He read me one and made me try to sort out the meaning as a Spanish lesson. It was about a crab (see above interests).

But, I wonder, why not spend weekends on adventures? Why not try everything? Why shuffle alone in the expected course?

In my head, life’s a reality TV show, and I want to see what’s going coming up in next week’s episode. I want to make sure the team of writers that live in M.’s and my heads comes up with interesting new adventures. I want to order a la carte so I can try a little of this and a little of that and then get seconds on what I like.

How else will I ever find anything I like, if I don’t try everything else?

On a side, definitely tangential but possibly relevant, note, I think this philosophy drives a constant source of amusement in my life, and in M.’s. Apparently, we don’t act our age. To a lot of people that’s admirable, to quite a few it’s puzzling, and to still more it’s evidence we are childish or some how naughty. Near as I can tell, pushing 50 is meant to be a rather serious affair, somewhere between an IRS audit and a trip to the morgue.

I very much risk dying a dilettante. But, by all that is holy, I’d rather have grabbed a plate for the banquet then gone hungry.

Dawn of the kind of dead

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I have never been what you would call a morning person. In fact, I'm definitely more of a night crawler.

Most of the dawns I have seen in my life, I have seen on account of not making it to beddy by the night before. I've seen a few dawn's early light by virtue of not sleeping at all.

But, here I am today having snapped this photo after waking in the dark. Complacent, middle-aged me is trying a new thing. It's a new thing that circumstance has foisted on me, and goddamn it I am tired right now. I saw dawn by waking up and greeting it, not meeting it from the other side.

If things play out, I'll be experimenting with the old circadian rhythms. I'll be all up in the early to bed early to rise lifestyle. I'll undoubtedly fall asleep on the couch by 8 p.m., if not face down in my plate at the dinner table. Although, I've been known to fall asleep on the couch on a normal day.

If you see me writing more, it's because we are down to one car at the moment. Whilst saving the environment and carpooling, I am spending a bit of time thumb twiddling, as it were. M. has to get into work early. My place of employment is on his path south to that work. So, I get dropped off early and picked up late.

They say the elderly sometimes need less sleep. Maybe this month is the week I cross over and become one of the early rising elderly. Damn-it, I want my AARP card and movie discounts now.

A funny life

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Ain’t much to complain about so I’m keeping it light.

Good old M. has a halo of protection in this relationship. Mostly it’s protection from me.

An incredible blue-skied day yesterday–our town reputed for fog above all else delivers sun in October–found us walking along the beach. Apropos nothing I remember, I tapped him on the ass as we strolled along.

“Hey, that’s sexist. Whacking a man in the hiney like that. Your sexist.”

I heard it, but since the voice was behind us on the walkway, I assumed it was two people talking. Though, I was intrigued and slowed a bit. I had to see the voice’s face.

“You’re sexist. I saw that slapping a man like that.”

We caught each other’s eyes. I smiled in recognition. He meant me.

Once again, the cosmos and fellow humans had saved M. From me.

Over my shoulder, I replied, “it’s not the first time, and probably won’t be the last.”

Grace, as though I know anything

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There are several meanings of the word “grace,” and I'm not good with any of them.

There's the conceptual grace of religion and god and all of that, but I think job one would be, I dunno, totally believing in god. I think the all mighty fireball of power ain't shedding much of the old grace on me.

There's physical grace. I don't even walk so good. If grace is a swan, I am an ostrich.

I had an aunt Grace. I liked her. She seemed tough but fair and kind to me as a kid. You didn't mess with Grace, but she seemed cool.

Then there's what got me thinking about the word and the thing and the concept. Maybe what I really mean is graciousness, but grace-type stuff for sure.

Here's the thing. This summer M. and I have been inundating ourselves with visitors and parties and meeting people. M. even changed jobs, introducing more new people. It's been a melting pot, as the kids say, of old and new friends.

Comparisons are natural, if not always kind or useful. We're trying to figure out if the East Coasters just complain more than the Westerners or if it's simply the people we know.

We're mighty comfortable here. Fat, dumb and happy without a lot of angst or worry about what the other guy is doing or has. For sure, many of the people we know here don't spend a lot of time shitting on other people. Maybe we did a good job of vetting our Cali friends.

Some days I attribute it to the sunshine. If the sun is out, the waves are stroking the beach, and my belly is full of the kind of good food that makes locavores salivate, what do I have to bitch about?

Then there's begrudgery, which I've written about before, and I first heard from my uncle Jerry. Everywhere you go in Boston, you pretty much can find a character complaining about someone or something. OK, full honesty, you can find that everywhere. But Boston is really good at it.

There can be a humor to it all, and I love bitching and wallow in it. My brother walking down the street in my California neighborhood declaring every dude with a goatee or skateboard way too old for whatever he was doing is the grumbly part of Boston I occasionally miss.

(Apropos nothing, best part of my brother's visit: woman with parrot on her head, calling me a bitch in front of her kids for my pulling into the crosswalk too far.)

M. declaring that kids today are soft, because when he was the age of one of our friend's kids he was climbing coconut trees not whining, is the equatorial version of Boston's walking to school in the snow uphill both ways.

We still have some East Coast sensibilities. So maybe it's just the people we know who seem to complain a lot. Maybe we're just being bigots when we stereotype Massholes?

Afterall, as I mentioned to M., there are people like Dot, which brings me back around to grace. Dot is Massachusetts through and through, and I'm happy to report blogging again. She's from AHHlington on the Red Line and everything.

But that one, she ain't no complainer. I think for Dot to waste time trashtalking, you'd really have to rile her up good and proper. I'm pretty sure she even complimented the musical chops of one of those ex-boyfriends everyone has who ends up treating you lousy.

And, that woman, she writes thank you notes, and she's not nearly 80. A dying art the thank you note, but much appreciated. I've wanted to write a note back to thank her for the thank you note, but that could go on into an M.C. Escher meta loop forever.

Maybe she's just one of the good ones.

Probably the reality is we are all getting old. I'm starting to notice here from the vantage point of what I guess is young-ish middle age that choices have to be made.

A couple or several years ago, Norah Ephron gave an interview in which she was recognizing that life changes when you get older. She espoused the notion that basically you just don't know if you're going to get hit by a bus, so maybe you should go ahead with the doughnut today knowing full well it's not health food. She pretty much called it correctly for herself, enjoying meals today before her unexpected bus accident of dying from leukemia.

I'm not going nuts on doughnuts, and I like keep my treats slightly infrequent so they still feel like treats. (A year of working at Brigham's Ice Cream in the olden days taught me one thing — ice cream every day just makes ice cream, that wonderful elixir, ambrosia of the gods, nauseating.) But holy fuck, I want to waste less and less time with that which sucks and spend more time with the good.

In desserts and in meals and in friends, I want deliciousness. Good conversations, laughter, pleasure. For the inevitable nastiness and dark moments of our meager little human existences, I'd rather spend time with someone exploring a new cookie recipe or pretty much doing anything, as long as they are doing.

Anecdotally and tangentially, it seems to me that the folks who complain the most and criticize the most and can spend hours running down what's wrong in the world in their corner or globally, have little or no solutions. Don't tell me all of the stories about what is wrong without telling me what you are going to fucking do to fix it, make change, get the hell out or otherwise act.

Yeah we all long for people, jobs, adventures that are interesting. If you tell me someone is not interesting, though, you better be damn entertaining.

Victims and critics are fucking boring. And, who has time left to be miserable?