Tag: Personality

15Jun

Present Perfect

My head is full up to here. Lesson plans, present perfect study guides, proper British spellings, and would they translate it as cinema or theatre in the UK? Dust clusters, cheese baked onto forks, a weekend filling up fast. Blank pages staying blank, clock face a blur, heart applying whiteout with a heavy hand. Lists like a rolling sea and the tide coming in.

We leave to camp our way across Europe in just over a week, but the days are still picking up speed, and I’m bracing myself for the almighty impact of vacation… or rather, the night before vacation when we’re playing Trunk Tetris with the car and my eyes are only half open and I still have half the kitchen to pack. Being a detail person generally works well for me, but I do have a habit of drowning in my own practicality—especially, say, when we’re T-9 days from an epic camping trip with pretty close to nothing planned. We haven’t even figured out which country we’re going to spend the last week of it in. That would be more than enough to overwhelm my head if there were any space whatsoever left in it right now.

But seeing as there’s not, I can’t manage to work up a good panic, and truth be told, involuntary oblivion is kind of nice. I guess all that really matters is that four of us leave home together and come home together, even if I forget to pack the kitchen sink and/or we accidentally detour through remote Slovenia. (Come to think of it, that could be fun…)

I’m grateful for these spastic little glimpses into the brain clutter reminding me that yep, it’s pretty full in there, no room to worry about the future, and hey what do you know, we’re all surviving. What’s more, we’re all happy to be here right now, and I suspect that two weeks from now when the unknown is our new right now, we’ll still be glad to be living it. However, if there were room in my head for the kitchen sink, I wouldn’t complain. Just saying.

2Mar

Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho

I’ve written before about my sad history with the workplace. I have a deep aversion to authority figures—an unfortunate side-effect of being micromanaged from birth—and I have a habit of taking jobs that require far more of me than they give back. Case in [multiple] point[s]: I once spent days putting together a portfolio of carefully researched reports only to find out that the job for which I was applying was unpaid. I also spent a few years editing for a company that turned out to be a scam. My last teaching job in the States lost us money. It’s not the most impressive track record, and my experience-fueled sense of logic tells me I should avoid job offers like the Black Death.

In fact, my return to the working world this week started almost by accident. At some point last year, a friend with whom I had collaborated on an editing project (also unpaid; why do I do this to myself?) recommended I call up her former employer and ask if they needed any new English teachers or translators. However, considering that

  1. my friend hadn’t worked for the company since the ‘80s, and
  2. polite, people-pleasing American gals don’t just call up businesses hoping to be hired, and
  3. I wasn’t sure my immigration status would allow me to work,
  4. the details of which I didn’t feel like looking it up because
  5. I was hoping to write a novel with my oodles of spare time, and anyway,
  6. jobs and I don’t have the best history together, so
  7. I was very unlikely to get hired, and, even if they were to offer me a job,
  8. I didn’t particularly want one,

I chose not to call.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. A new company in town was looking for English teachers, and I started updating my CV just for kicks. As long as I was applying for a job, I figured I might as well try my friend’s suggestion too.  The new company wanted to hire me. My friend’s former employer did not. Yet my gut told me that something was off about the job offer I did receive. Maybe my instincts have grown hypersensitive over the years of poor career choices, or maybe anyone with a smidgen of common sense would know not to accept a position that came with stipulations for age and gender. (That, I believe, is a tactic generally known as illegal.) At any rate, I turned down the job. Aside from the residual people-pleaser guilt, it felt good.

What felt even better, though, was hearing again from my friend’s company—the one that hadn’t had any openings for me. Would I like to come in for an interview? Would I like to attend an informal office orientation? Would I like to meet the other employees? Would I like to start Monday? Surprisingly… yes!

The job seems perfect for this stage of my life. I am now a part-time English tutor with hours that will allow me to be home with the girls after school and even give a little TLC to that erstwhile novel. The staff is friendly, the office is five minutes from home, and I can wear jeans. (My soul rejoices in distressed denim.) After my past work experiences, I never would have thought I’d feel so honored to return to employeedom… but I guess the right job was just an accident waiting to happen.

12Jan

Sweep Me Away

Something about today whispered spring cleaning. Never mind that winter just finished unpacking its bags or that the air is the approximate temperature of a slushie; my instincts demanded I open all the windows and invite the sunshine in to dust with me. (I wanted to write “sweep with me,” but that’s a double entendre in Italian, and now I’m worried that learning a second language has guaranteed my mind a permanent spot in the gutter. Italian vocabulary tends to be very… passionate.)  My energy levels are regrettably dependent on the weather, and I tend to slog through January with all the motivation of a boiled cabbage. Thank goodness the sun came out today; otherwise, our house guest tonight would have ended up sleeping on a pile of unsorted Christmas decorations.

Despite cohabitating for a whole 11 ½ days, 2011 and I haven’t really gotten acquainted yet. I know it uses a different brand of shampoo than 2010 did and takes less sugar in its coffee, but I haven’t figured out what makes it tick, how its hobbies and personality traits intersect, whether or not it is likely to be a good housemate in the end. I’m waiting until after my trip to get back into running and to pick up where I left off on Ye Olde Novel, so I guess that’s when I’ll schedule my heart-to-heart with the new year. We’ll likely survive until then. It puts its own socks in the laundry, and I don’t pry when it stumbles in at 3 a.m.; good enough for now.

So. How are you? Have you made any great discoveries yet this year? Do you have any new projects or goals that spark your enthusiasm? Any survival tactics for less sunny days—you know, in case I don’t manage to finish spot-cleaning behind the oven today? Any double entendres worth sharing?

27Oct

Does Nike Carry Antihistamines?

Five weeks ago, my husband convinced me to start running with him. Something about extra energy, sense of wellbeing, long-term health benefits, chance to wear cute workout clothes, no more excuses now that the girls were in school, yada yada yada. He had me at “extra energy.” It was an incredibly sweet gesture on his part as it meant doing his marathon training early in the morning so he could spend half of his lunch break at the park jogging in slow motion alongside a wife who is allergic to exercise. I think I managed 300 meters the first day before I had to stop and concentrate very, very hard on not dying. (Dan kindly refrained from cracking up.)

In the five weeks since, here is what I have discovered:

  1. My body is deeply committed to opposing this silly running venture. If my right side isn’t stabbing me, my left side takes over. If my sides are playing nice, my knees ache. If my knees are on their best behavior, my head is pretty much guaranteed to start throbbing, and when it goes on coffee break, there’s always a big toe or an eardrum or a spleen willing to act up. See? Allergic.
  2. Likewise, my brain is refusing to compute any information that might make me feel positive about the whole experience.
  3. Like how I’m up from 300 meters to 4 ½ kilometers.
  4. Or how my breaks now consist of walking rather than lying on the ground gasping like a chain-smoking fish.
  5. Or how I don’t need that second coffee every day anymore.
  6. No, my brain keeps up a steady stream of complaints about how hard running is, how painful it is, how intensely unlikeable it is, how I feel like poo, how I feel like I’ve been dipped in lead, how I feel like the slug of the earth, how I feel like biggest failure in world history, how much I want to stop, how much I want to pluck out my sides and cast them from me, how much I want to collapse and sleep forever, and how much I hate everything that ever existed, most of all those athletic wear commercials featuring sexy runners smoothly and effortlessly conquering the pavement.
  7. Something about increased blood flow disables the filter between my brain and my mouth.
  8. My husband deserves to be sainted.
25Oct

In Your Face!

The Luna Park below our house resembles a wet dog, and perhaps that’s all the explanation needed about my state of motivation this morning.

We had one of those weekends that feels like seventeen in retrospect. My senses are still full of the happy clamor of house guests, the blur of wildflower lights on the girls’ favorite caterpillarcoaster, and the orchestrated clatter of fifty Perudo dice. We made new friends, including an amazing gal whose background parallels my own, and I wish we had more time together. At the same time, my batteries are so thoroughly drained that the indicator stopped blinking. As much as I don’t want to be a textbook anything, you can find an exact description of me in any psychology manual on the page about introverts. I need frequent breaks, quiet stretches of solitude, and Sunday afternoon naps in order to operate… and yesterday’s nap was trumped by a sick kiddo.

Does Murphy have a law about Monday mornings? Because I woke up this morning to rain, hormones, and an unpleasant substance tracked across the floor that was easily identified once I stepped in it, and I’m thinking Garfield was on to something. Here’s my current workup of a coping strategy: Step 1: Acknowledge that today is out to slay me and will most likely succeed. Step 2: Surrender. Step 3: Go back to bed. Step 4: Wait for someone to bring me a lasagna.

Or alternately, Step 1: Eat chocolate. Step 2: Blog. Step 3: Eat more chocolate. Step 4: Get done what I can get done today and count each accomplishment as a giant “In your face!” to Mondays everywhere.

Including mopping. Sigh.

20Sep

Sockanalysis

These last two weeks… well, I’m not easily finding the words to describe them. Finding out so suddenly that I’m neither alone nor a [complete] nut-job has flipped my perception of life on its head, and I’m still trying to sort up from down. Coming out of a culture specifically designed to make its victims its staunchest defendants, I feel a bit star-struck around other escapees; I had no idea until two weeks ago that there were others. The conversations I’ve been having and articles I’ve been reading have been a form of intense psychoanalysis for me. Oh, so that’s why I can’t decide so much as what socks to wear some days. You mean my discomfort around all things emotional is to be expected? So it’s not some glitch in my system that makes me revert back to a bitter misotheist every few months? My so-very-unwelcome perfectionism, paranoia, skepticism, criticism, defensiveness, insecurity, and proclivity for burnout are natural side effects of that lifestyle; who knew?

I can’t really express (see above re: emotional ineptitude) just what it does to me to realize I’m not alone in this. Up until now, I have literally felt like the only woman in the world suffering under a unique brand of memories. The unshakeable weight of shame was all the more stifling because I was the only one who knew how it felt. But now… to hear that I’m not alone? To discover that my many neuroses are not proof I’m defective but are rather the stamp of mistreatment? To peek ahead into other people’s journeys and see increasing happiness and healing? It’s making my soul feel practically weightless.

My fervent thanks to those of you who braved that hopeful darkness and brought your own painful stories to light, to those of you who wrote me and shared your hearts, to those of you who offered encouragement and love, and to those of you who simply read what I had to say. Almost right could never have inspired this kind of community, and I would love the chance to meet up with each of you face-to-face (let me know next time you’re coming through Italy!). I’ll be the star-struck one wearing seven pairs of socks.

30Mar

Latent Swashbuckler

As my last post made abundantly clear, courage is not something I come by easily. I assume God kept this in mind when he nudged single me toward single Dan seven years ago and then hid conspicuously behind a potted plant singing “Getting’ Jiggy Wit It” just loud enough for us to hear. At least, I fervently hope so. A girl could use a bit of divine reassurance upon realizing her husband considers mountain biking, racing through airports, and eating fist-sized octopi to be marital bonding activities.

Dan’s sense of adventure and gift for tenacity (sounds better than stubbornness, right?) have formed the perfect antidote to my sense of being a delicate flower and my gift for hanging out safely indoors for weeks on end. He brings out the latent swashbuckler in me, and I recognize this as a good thing. Usually.

A little less so two Sundays ago. It was the first full day of our settimana bianca—a week in the mountains nearly as important to Italian culture as a week at the beach in August (and involving nearly as much sunbathing). Some dear friends were chaperoning the girls’ naps, so Dan and I grabbed our snowboards and headed up the lift… straight into a cloudbank. Notably, we had forgotten a map.

“No problem,” said my undaunted husband. “We’ll just had straight across until we find an obvious trail.”

“Straight across the mountain?” squeaked his rather daunted wife. “Without a map? Inside a cloud that fancies itself opaque?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Because I am a gutless invertebrate, I didn’t say.

Twenty minutes later found me clinging to the snowy mountainside with the tips of my boots while trying to keep a grip on my board. Above and below me were sheer nothingness—emphasis on the sheer. In fact, the only things I could see were the perpendicular slope directly beneath my feet and Dan’s vague outline ahead. The rest of my vision had been smothered in whiteout. I hadn’t heard anything for a quarter of an hour besides my own footsteps and that landlocked fish flopping around inside my chest, and panic was turning my tired muscles to jelly. Granted, the circumstances didn’t really warrant panic… but I was raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, and my imagination is nothing if not skilled.

We inched along the mountainside twenty minutes more, then another twenty minutes, then yet another twenty, and I really have no idea what I’m saying because time was swallowed up in fog along with the rest of the world. All I know is that each step was an exercise in panic-squashing bravery. And we took a lot of steps.

Want to see?

Danger Mountain

Why yes, we did cross the width of an entire mountain. In steep snow. Through blinding fog. Carrying our boards. Terrified of losing civilization forevermore and/or tumbling down a precipice onto razor-sharp rocks (this one might have been just me). With no idea that at pretty much any point, we could have snowboarded down easily.

Once we finally got a feel for our surroundings and made it to the bottom, my floppety heart decided it had racked up enough [imaginary] near-death experiences for the week. I was ready to race Dan to the cable car and spend the rest of our vacation communing with our hotel room. But then he got me laughing about our ridiculous mountain trek, and then he got me on my board again, and before I knew it, we were wrapping up a fantastic week on the slopes.

Our last morning, we found ourselves at the same starting point staring into yet another cloud.

“We have to get to the opposite side one way or another,” he said.

“Mmm.”

“And it would be so much easier to just snowboard across the top than to walk with our boards at the bottom.”

“Mmm.”

“And even if it is foggy, we at least know what we’re doing this time.”

“Sort of.”

“Just as long as we don’t lose momentum.”

“Or look down.” Or think about Little House on the Prairie. Or use my memory in any capacity whatsoever.

“So, you up for it?” asked that irrepressible husband of mine.

From behind a ski lift pole drifted an unmistakable “Na na na na na na na.”

Cable car parents

“Sure,” I answered. “Why not?”

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