Three Years: Are we home yet?

Z and I just celebrated our third anniversary. Three years ago August we gathered almost all of our favorite people and made them stand around in 101 degree temperatures while we committed this and committed that. Then two months later, Zach and I packed my 101 pounds of craft materials into boxes and moved them up north to Portland.

And every time we drive down to the mid-valley I feel a twinge of homesickness. And every time we drive back over that Marquam I ask myself, "Does this feel like home yet?"

This is one of the questions I ask people who aren't from the area. How long did it take to feel like home?

During childhood, Albany was home. No questions. It's where everyone I knew lived. And when I was an exchange student, Albany was home because I knew Nitra was a temporary exchange student town. (And in some ways Albany became a heightened sense of home because in Nitra I was so terribly homesick.) And when I was in college, Albany was home because Eugene was the temporary college town. Even when I lived in Portland the first time, Albany still seemed like home because I kept thinking Portland would be a stop before LA or NY. Aaaand then I moved back to Albany.

So my experience for the first 28 years of my life has been consciously making the current location temporary because it isn't and can't be, the completely permanent idea of home.

How do we relocate the idea of home from the mythical place of our upbringing to the place we've planted our new IKEA bookshelves?

I'm not sure. And today we will drive back through those Albany fields and tomorrow we will cross back over that Marquam bridge and I will look at the skyline and wonder yet again.

Side noe:
I've realized recently that when I get homesick now it's the feeling I had for place but really it's for person. My homesick feeling often means I'm away from Zach. Which is sort of lovely I think.

The Big News

Those of you who read this blog probably already know this information, but here it goes: I'm quitting my job.

Oh wait, that's a lie. I tried to quit, honestly I did. There was sitting down with managers and there was writing of transition plans and there was even tear shedding...but then they offered me a really great job with fewer hours. I couldn't say no. 

But still. If I let the 10 hours I'll be working for them be an excuse for not creating then I'm not cut out for creating. That said, this week I don't feel very cut out for creating. Every time I paint I find it frustrating instead of refreshing. I wonder if my creativity is running dry. I worry that I don't feel like telling stories anymore. What if my art never says anything very meaningful? What if I stop caring to say anything meaningful? What if I never get any better?

I know that right now isn't the time to be worrying about such things. After a ten hour work day where I sat down twice. After hauling garbage and cleaning up coffee sludge and keeping my shit together.  Now is most definitely not the right time to look over the abyss and see anything but the deep dark of uncertainty.

So I'll go to bed. And then wake up for another 10 hours. And work a crazy schedule this week and then begin to wind down as my final two week approaches. Maybe after 4 weeks of solid painting mornings I'll be a better judge of whether or not I see a flicker down there in that there hole.

What were you saying? No wait, what was I saying.*

I went to the park during the last serious sun break a few days ago to take in some quiet and some light. Armed with a journal and a book, I bought coffee and found a spot at a wooden table amid bark dust and grass.

Within 5 minutes of my being there I could sense out of the corner of my eye an old man approach. I did not look up or make eye contact. His opening line, "I'm the park pervert." It was suppose to be a joke. And I said, not laughing and not looking up from my task, "Grrrreat." I was not hiding my disdain. "I try to be funny," he said. I did not answer.

But my rudeness didn't matter, and he asked me if I was in school or if I had gone to college. He didn't really care what my answer was. It was a set up so that he could tell this joke about being just a few credits away from a math degree. He asked me what I studied, and again, it didn't matter, it was just a segue so that he could sing a fight song he'd made up with clever lyrics. He asked me a few more questions and again, none of them really mattered, they were all just vehicles for him to say the next thing in his stand up routine.

Bad Opening Lines

Back in November during the one weekend I had off for at least six weeks on either side of it, I got on a plane and flew 600 miles south of us. My brother kept telling me that my 95 year-old grandfather was fading fast and that if I wanted to see him, I should do it. I kept getting this message from various members of my family until finally Z and I decided to go. So down we went. Since we were already heading south, we decided we should visit my maternal grandmother who also lives nearbye-ish. It'd been awhile since I'd seen her, and she was always saying that we never visited. So we went. And we stayed for one night. We jumped up and did the dishes on queue. We cleaned up the $50 of steak her dog threw up. We stripped the sheets from our bed and started the wash machine before we left. We did or duty, and because we both had to work on Monday, we couldn't stay long. But we did it.

32 Days In

 There are only 52 weeks in a year and so for some reason saying I only have 40-some weeks left is terrifying. Yet if I tell myself I am only 32 days in, it feels like there is more time to catch up. 

A few giant work things are now over, and life has calmed down enough to still be a frustrating schedule but manageable. I'm sleeping more. Actually I'm rearranging habits so that sleep is a priority. I still eat like a crazy person but the sleeping is making waking up and exercising a reality in a way that it just wasn't before. 

I like it. 

Goals:

356 Days Left

First off, I love the internet. I could could type, "How many days left until Feb 19, 2014," and I got an answer in a website. http://daycalc.appspot.com/02/19/2014

Bookmarked!

This is why it's good for me to visit this list each and every week. It's easy to get sucked up into life and forget the goals. I'm doing some fun stuff this week that wasn't on the list like finishing my sister's baby invites. I'm adding an "other" section at the bottom to keep track of creative pursuits that aren't part of the goals. 

Goals last week and goals this week:

Thirteen for Thirty-Two

This coming year, it's a numbers game.  Many of the goals will be quantity not quality. The truth is, quantity leads to quality especially when one is trying to learn a subject or a discipline.

Some have specific numbers attached to them:

1. Photoshop
Watch a Lynda.com class on Photoshop.

2. Illustrator
Watch a Lynda.com class on Illustrator.

3. After Effects
Watch a Lynda.com class on After Effects. 

4. PaintingPaint 365 portraits (at most basic sense). I want to be good at painting faces. I don't even know what that means yet but what I do know is that I need to put in a lot of time with drawing and painting. This feels like the loftiest of the goals.

Turning Over the 31st Page

I started this blog when I turned 28. It perhaps was a bit before but the birthday as a marker isn't a bad marker.

Today I turn 32. Thirty-two is a nice round number a lot like 28. It's arbitrary, but I feel better about 32 than say 31. Thirty-two has purpose where 31 is just a number waiting to change.

I was feeling bad about life a few days ago and I stopped to try and clear my head. "Think about something positive, God damn it," I said out loud to no one but myself.

During year 31 I did a few things well:

Conversations No One Had

I got an angry(lite) emal from one of the artists we're working with on creating a DVD saying that she was sorry nothing had come of her DVD, that it had been almost a year since filming, and I guess she would have her lawyer contact us about who owns the rights to the footage.

Yes we told her it would take four months, and it's taken almost a year. Yes we've done a bad job communicating this with her. Yes the DVD is almost finished being edited, and we don't have a good communication structure set up for this. (All of those thing btw Z and I have been trying to fix for years and every time we were close we were totally fucked by my parents. End side note.)

There's this really interesting thing in human behavior...and I see it more so in female human behavior... is the strategy to say nothing until the negative emotions build into a super offensive explosion. And it often is the direct result of time dredged down by purely defensive behavior.

It's hard to say what we need. It's hard because first we have to understand ourselves well enough to know what we need. Then we have to look out into the world and define how the current situation isn't giving us what we need. Then we have to do the very hard task of figuring out if we can change it for the better and how to go about taking those steps.  

August 2012 Goals

I love arbitrary dates, and this means that each and every month on the first, I feel like life is opening up to me as much as it does on a January 1st.  So here we go. I'm allowing myself 10, which statistically is 9 too many to really stick with something, but alas. Goals.

Look. Listen. Learn.

This weekend I ran face to face with my past. Not that I'm running from anything in particular, and I've never been one of those people who holds high school up to some pillar of greatness. But I do have to say it's strange to suddenly discover that you are selling $1 candy to your favorite childhood English teacher.

We feel the gentle tug of the daily ups and the daily downs and how smooth that all seems when held side by side to the face plant of your 18 year old self. I walked away from the experience completely torn. It was really lovely to see a man I so admired. He said some really nice things to me. I got to meet his family. But on the other hand, I was selling him candy. He asked me what I was doing with myself and there was no good way to answer. I didn't want to disparage the theater when I really do enjoy my job. I didn't want to talk about my bigger goals because they won't happen in that particular place no matter how great it is.

It's too easy to hold yourself up against what you thought you could be, but it's a false act. Life is harder in ways we never imagined. Childhood is easy. Childhood is easy and no child knows it. And it's from only that place of comfort and naiveté can you hold these ideals up and say, "I want to be great." To a child, greatness is a thin thin line. And that line is cartoonish to an adult.

Carving Out Our Own Space

When you grow up with one family you think all families for the good and for the not good, are like yours. Then you step out into the real world and discover it is not so.

It's the same for your place of work.

I worked for a company for seven years. It had its ups and it had its downs. I could chart both but only within the context of what I knew. As I've made small steps out into the world beyond our family business, I've started to see the bigger reasons why those good and bad things existed as they did.

I volunteer at an arts organization and I work part time at another. Let's call them Arts Org and Theater Org respectfully. The longer I've volunteered at the Arts Org the more I've come to understand just how dysfunctional it is. The organization works really hard and does amazing work but the people within the organization are overworked and hate their office life. There is a pettiness and passive aggressiveness and a defensiveness that reflects a bit of what I felt at my old job.

The Theater Org on the other hand doesn't have that. Or at least not enough to become aware of in the first few months. Sure, it's still a group of overworked, underpaid, passive people, but the way they talk isn't passive aggressive. There isn't a culture of blame and defensiveness. I find it startling but I think I've also begun to figure out how the two evolved.

Well, This is Embarassing

We're in Play Month so I have been dead to the world and those in it for May weekends.

As part of my job, sometimes I get House Assistants from the Intern Program at the organization. Interns are a mixed bag. Most of them are kind of amazing. So tonight, I had a great intern. His name was C. And C like some of the teens I've met is really agreeable. He spends a lot of energy trying to make sure people feel included and welcomed and more importantly agreed with. (The latter being a teenager trait I'm beginning to see.)

C is talking with one of the staff (who I don't know very well at all). I'll call the staff guy T. T makes a joke that C seems to be really getting the hang of his House Assistant duties. (This is all going on while I'm setting up some last minute concessions and sort of laughing at what they're saying. You know when you're a part of a conversation even though you're not necessarily one of the speakers.)

C says, "I guess I am."

T says, "In no time you'll be up for the head job." (Referring to, well, my job.)

C laughs a bit uncomfortably and says, "I think that would be awhile. Also it seems to be in pretty good hands." (Or something trying to be nice to me..who is just continuing to work at the stand where they are.)

To which T says laughing and saying sarcastically, "Yeah, like your big dream is to grow up and be a house manager for a living. That's your big dream."

At this point C had no idea what to say. *I* had no idea what to say. And I don't know how long it took T to realize that he basically just 100% insulted a person who is standing RIGHT THERE. He may not have. And at this point I realized that this wasn't my problem and I turned around and left their conversation.

I'm rarely in situations that are so awkward that they actually become funny. It could have felt really damaging to me and the big self worth questions. But because it was a situation I'd never actually found myself in before, it felt oddly hilarious.

Reflections and Lessons from My First Weeks

Yesterday, as in all days when I finish a house job, I come home giddy and exhausted. My fingernails are so destroyed that I have trouble popping gum out of its case. My feet arches groan under the pressure of one more step. But my brain is on fire. I want to share every single little interaction and undertaking. I can tell Z braces for impact when the apt door swings open wide.

But the last 2.5 weeks has taught me a lot of things. I think I'm fortunate that I'm incredibly different than my predecessor. I'm not a bad version of her. I'm no version of her at all.

Nine Things This Week

This week at my new job:
1. Cleaned up vomit in TWO places in a theater. (Note: Coffee grounds are amaaaazing.) My co-workers think of this as my deflowering as a House Manager. I'm official.

2. I unclogged a toilet. (Seriously double flush!)

3. A 4-year old named Stella has learned my name and shouts it as I come in to give my House Speech.

4. I've sung happy birthday in front of a packed house to a little boy named Brett. The house sang with me and Ruth, the audio guru, made good on her promise to cut my mic half way in.

5. I've worked 37 hours in 4 days. (30 in three.)

6. I've learned about 40 names.

7. Met 3 people who get my sense of humor. (Two are teenagers.)

8. Learned I like young kids. (Although I still don't want any.)

9. Met two parents I totally adore. (And they are hosting a slumber party tonight with the females from the cast.)

Tomorrow at 5:30 is the end of my 6 days of work preceded by 4 days of work (with one day off). I am giddy at the prospect of sleeping in and cooking and pulling pants from the attic that fit my I've-been-running-up-and-down-stairs-and-had-no-time-to-eat butt.(Although tonight I ate so much so quickly I actually had to stop eating a cookie b/c I thought I'd puke. Oh! I know a trick for that!)

Wait, what?! So excited for sleep.

True Story

When I was giving my house speech tonight, someone from the audience recognized me as my father's daughter BECAUSE OF MY CHEEKS. This person knew my paternal grandparents from when they lived in Oregon. She knew my Dad and had met me as a child. MY CHEEKS!

And that, kids, is the power of genetics.

First Days

Most of you read this know that I've just started a new job. I'm just going to call it my Theater Job. It's part time. And half of it will consist of working as the House Manager, which means interacting with volunteers and probably refilling a lot of toilet paper. (Seriously, the keys for toilet paper and paper towels are a hilarious non traditional takes on keys.) It's an extroverted job. Not to say that you have to be an extrovert to do it, (for I am not) but it's a job that consists mainly of interacting with the public. I have learned so many names in the past 48 hours that my brain feels like that full bowl of water you're trying to walk across the room, and you think if you just go slowly enough it it won't spill. And that's always about the point it spills.

What We Owe

I hung out with an old high school classmate last week. I see him about once a year. Before I go in, I find myself playing out possible confrontational conversations I'll have with him. I'll draw lines in my mind as to what point I'll give myself permission to leave or feel offended. And the fact that I do this at all probably means we shouldn't hang out. Sounds totally healthy right?

But we've known each other for a long time. And history has to count for something.

The answer is no it doesn't. History counts for nothing if the person is abusive or a bully. And sometimes it may take you 8 years to realize what your husband can point out in 8 seconds. But never mind how long it takes or who says the clarifying statements. The truth is history holds very little water when the present is being (always has been) a complete ass.

Goals: Unemployment 2012

Today is my last day of full time employment. A culmination of 7 years. What does tomorrow bring? Well, tomorrow I'm volunteering all day. But what about the day after? Good question. Here's hoping.

Not in order of any sort of importance: 

1. Get better at grammar and build vocabulary
I love doing social media, and a large aspect of anything related to social media is language. Time to brush up on those language components. I'll defeat you yet comma placement.

2. Cook
Z and I eat out all the time. We love doing it, but I suggest it less out of love and more out of laziness. We'll be unveiling a budget at some point in the near future, and I'm pretty sure laziness eating shouldn't (and won't) be a part of it.

3. Volunteer + Do Informational Interviews
I have a set of skills I need to learn to be viable in this job market for my particular industry. I need to find volunteer opportunities that let me learn those skills. I also need to work hard to talk wtih as many people in the industry as I can. The few informational interviews I've done have taught me things I could have never learned with out their willingness to give an hour of their time.

4. Exercise
My cholesterol is high. My moral is low. I am unhealthy. Unemployment Season has no room for excuses about exercise. 

5. Freelance like a Mother F*cker
There are aspects of my job that I could never attend to because my leash was being held by (good-intentioned) crazy. Now that I set my own hours I can explore those possibilities.

6. Read and Learn about the Tools of My Craft
SEO, adwords, Wordpress, website building. We have a Lynda.com account and that magic piece of paper known as the library card. Time to use both for all they're worth. 

7. Blog
I manage (and write some) content for the work blog, and I will continue to do that. Our readership is growing, and it's something I love doing. Time to put what I'm learning there into my other blog projects, mainly CraftAmor.

8. Sleep 
I love sleep. And even things we love take discipline.

9. Create Art
The only way one gets better at art is to do art. Time to start living within facts.

10. Work on Happiness
I have a bad attitude about myself, and when life is chaotic it's easy to fall into habits that are hard to discard later. Now is that later. I have the quiet and the time for self reflection. I want to study my triggers and my reactions and see if I can trim some at the source. Time is my biggest stressor and unemployment means time is the one commodity I have in abundance. 

11. Live Lightly + Discard the Trash
I am a clean freak pack rat. I have too much stuff, and I long for clean surfaces. I no longer have the excuse to ignore the bulging closets and drawers. Time to fit the home we have. This includes both the physical space and the digital space.

Final 5 Days

In five working days, I am finished with seven years of working. Seven years. My first job. My only job. Amazing.

I have mixed feelings. There are the obvious feelings of worry. Will I be able to find work? How long should I try to find work that involves my desired career? I'll be doing freelance, we'll have unemployment, and we've saved quite a bit this past year so if we're smart, we'll be OK from a money standpoint, but still. I don't think I've yet realized how much identity is involved in any job of seven years. Who are you when a large part of what you've done disappears?

On the other hand I feel a bit like a kid poised at the edge of summer break. I never planned for lazy days (although I often took them.) Summer always meant a season of exercise and writing and classes at the community college. It meant early mornings and long nights. For me the coming season of unemployment means goals and the self discipline of learning, well, self discipline. I'm curious to see if my levels of guilt will go down now that I don't have to be anywhere 9 to 5. I'm curious if my weird issues with time strengthen or weaken.

It's a mystery, but one I'll soon have the mixed pleasure of meeting face to face.