July 2007 Archives

Well hello again, dear Internet. For some reason the urge to blog was strong tonight. Probably because I've finally gotten both kids to bed and I'm avoiding the pile of house chores left to do tonight in the brief hour or two between now and my own bedtime (dishes and laundry and lunch-making and blablabla). Josh is away on a biz trip so I've been solo parenting and since it's also the end of the month at work everything is barely being held together by chewing gum and dental floss right now, if you get my meaning. But I'm hanging in there.

What I really want to do right now though (in addition to blogging) is just blow off the myriad of "TTD" (Things To Do) and flop down on the couch and read. Mmmmmm reading. I have this huge pile of books hanging out on my nightstand right now, and as I was putting a fresh couple on there that just arrived from Amazon I realized that I really ought to record at least some of the titles for posterity, because it certainly does give me a great snapshot of where my life (and both sides of my brain) are at right now.

So here's a generous sample of the top layer (the "I truly intend to get to this shortly" pile as opposed to the "eventually when I get to it" pile), in no specific order:

Think and Grow Rich (a wealth-building classic, apparently)
Lower Your Taxes--Big Time! (recommended by someone at the Chicago seminar)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (because, well, duh)
The E-Myth Revisited (an entrepreneurial classic)
The Price of the Stars: Book 1 of Mageworlds (for VP)
Blood and Iron: A Novel of the Promethean Age (for VP)
In A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (because Suz gave it to me and it looks fun and is in nice small bits)
Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought For Free Speech and Became a Feminist Rebel (a memoir by my favorite college professor/thesis adviser)
Sex Wars: A Novel of Guilded Age New York (newest book by one of my favorite authors on a really interesting topic)
The Assault on Reason (because dammit, I still haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth and I really want to read this one)
Real Estate Investment For Dummies (back to the wealth-building education now)
Growing A Business (given to me by my Dad from his biz book library)
The Entrepreneur's Manual (also from Dad)
Up Your OWN Organization: A Handbook on How to Start and Finance a New Business (also from Dad)
Eat, Pray, Love (next month's book group book)

And that doesn't even count the 3 or 4 other books I have on order from Amazon, all novels from VP instructors. How can I blog when I have so much to read? How can I keep going to work or feeding kids or anything else with this many books demanding my attention? I clearly need a nice long beach vacation (with optional hammock, frosty drinks and cabana boy with fan). What are my chances? Don't answer that, it'll only depress me.

And people look shocked when I tell them I don't watch TV or movies. Hah. Who has the time?

I am just too consistently tired and overwhelmed to blog these days, let alone to properly describe the mental/emotional subtleties of what the last few weeks have been like. All I can do is use metaphor (I know, you're shocked), and I'm too stretched out to think of something clever or original, so please just bear with me. (My wordsmithing fu is weak, dear Internet, and your humble servant begs for forgiveness. Please have mercy and do not slay me. I will recover my strength soon.)

This is what it feels like: I am sitting on a smooth, water-shaped and sun-warmed rock here in the middle of a wide green river. I was lying down on the rock not long ago, taking a nice nap all cozy in the sun, but a few minutes ago I was jarred out of my sleep by a big splash of cold water. After the initial shock passes, I realize that I was getting mighty hot just lying there in the sun and the cool water feels pretty good. In fact, I feel a lot more awake and clear now. Sleeping was certainly a pleasure, and it's pretty here in this spot, but I know that this river goes a long way and there's a lot more to see and do. So now I'm sitting on the rock and dangling my legs in the water as the river rushes by, feeling the pull and the power of its movement and trying to decide if I should just jump in and start floating downstream or whether it would be more fun if I went and grabbed an inner tube or blow up boat. I remember how much fun river rafting was years ago, even though it was something that I didn't control or direct.

Then Josh, who's been sitting next to me on the rock all along, takes my hand with a twinkly look and says "hey, this looks fun, doesn't it? Let's wade over to the shore and grab that inner tube--no wait, maybe the boat--no, that would take too long, how about the inner tube--and go float downriver?" And we look at each other and realize that we're not totally sure where that river goes or whether there are serious rapids nearby but the sun is warm and the water is cool and everything seems like a thrilling combination of scary and fun and we do what we always do: say "yes." And we jump off the rock and start splashing towards that tube, laughing.

All right, all right, I know that gives a kind of emotional flavor to what's been going on, but you want to know, hey, what's actually been happening over there, Ms. Floating-Down-The-River? Well, I will tell you, at least in brief (because that's all I can stand right now). There are actually two major things going on right now:

1) My new job, as I think I've mentioned before, is for a company that provides financial education and coaching with the goal of supporting people to take concrete, step-by-step action towards achieving financial freedom (whatever that might mean to each individual in terms of actual $$). Josh and I have been really inspired by the entrepreneurial and DIY philosophy and approach of this company, and the community that has built up around it. We just last night got back from one of the educational seminars that my company puts on around the country (this one was in Chicago), and we have a whole new set of goals we are going to be working towards (I have to be a little vague here but hope to be clearer soon). We are going to be starting a business (actually, several), and we are newly committed to educating ourselves about and taking action on the ways our money flows and works for us. We are committed to more self-direction and less letting other people do things for us. It's a huge, huge learning curve to be doing all these things, and it's simultaneously exciting to be stretching and learning new things, and hard on the ego in the way that being a newbie always is (just like I've been experiencing with my new job, for example). We are going to be working our butts off for the next few years.

2) In the middle of all this left-brain excitement comes a totally different kind of opportunity for movement and growth: last weekend, after returning home from another long weekend camping (which I will just have to write about separately at some point), I found an email in my inbox congratulating me on being accepted to Viable Paradise. VP is a week-long writer's workshop in Martha's Vineyard for fantasy and science-fiction writers, taught by some people whom I greatly respect and admire. I've been wanting to go to this for years (ever since I started the novel, pretty much) but with Isaac so little it was just never the right time. But with the encouragement of my writer's group I applied last January, and holy Moses, through some sort of amazing alignment of all the stars and planets, I got accepted. (There are only 20-something students accepted each year out of who knows how many applications, so it's pretty amazing.) I was already talking myself out of the disappointment, rationalizing that this would be a difficult time in my life to focus on the writing anyway with so much else going on, and then I got the email. So even though I'm overwhelmed with all the other changes going on, I know there's a message of "balance" here for me. And you bet I'm going! I can hardly focus on anything else, I'm so excited about VP. So I guess another lesson I'm learning right now is "compartmentalization". Whee!

These are watershed times right now, I am certain. It will probably all seem much clearer and b'shert ("meant to be") in the future when we are looking back on these days, but for now--woah! Everything seems to be moving very fast. I'll write more when I can.

But where has my life gone? And by "life" I'm talking not about merely the state of being alive, with all that entails (with the breathing and eating and sleeping), but about the whole wide and messy spiderweb of events loosely centered around one person, only in my case it's less like a web and more like a sandstorm. I'm 3-D in my chaos, people. I'm not keeping up with the life admin, to say the least. I mean , laundry still gets done, and groceries find their way into the house, but I'm letting email go unanswered, birthdays go unacknowledged, and friends go un-checked on. And that is just frustrating, but I'm so tired all the time that I occasionally fear my face might just melt off.

Anyway, that was just a poetic way of saying damn, I'm still feeling incredibly busy and overwhelmed, especially in the evenings which are really all the free time I have right now (ah, for the golden olden days in which I could email, or shop, or even blog--occasionally--from work!) The mere thought of trying to tie together everything going on into a coherent blog post has stopped me from blogging on many an evening--so screw that, I'm just going to post some random bits, a la the smorgasblog on the general theory that something is better than nothing. Those of you who have become overly dependent on segues between your paragraphs might just want to avert your eyes or leave now. You have been warned.

Job update: still employed. Still barreling through each day managing to mine a few small shiny success nuggets from the swift raging river of newbieness. Holy moses that didn't make much sense…what I'm trying to say is that the days are full of work and go by quickly and that a lot of what I do every day is not terribly easy or fulfilling, but it is becoming more so week by week. I'm getting at least a little bit of rhythm and groove now, and that is a blessed relief. Of course, now that I'm juuuuust feeling like I've gotten a tiny bit of equilibrium, last week we had a big change in the way we get compensated--but I think it will ultimately be to my benefit. I'm going to be working my ass off in July, that's for sure.

Josh and I went to my 20th high school reunion in SF last weekend. It was quite a head trip to look around a room of several hundred people, many of whom I had not seen since graduation, and see the physical differences a couple of decades make on familiar faces. I'm glad we went, and I made a few good reconnections, but overall it was noisy and unsettling (in a variety of subtle and unsubtle ways) and we wound up leaving on the early side.

Which wasn't so bad, really, because we were staying overnight in the city at the funktastic Hotel Triton in honor of our anniversary (thanks for the babysitting, Grammy!). So we went back to the room full of funky furniture and hit the mini bar and spent some sweet time together that night and all the next day. We slept in, went out to breakfast, poked around Chinatown, saw a bit of the Pride Parade going on nearby, and wandered around Union Square. We talked a lot about all the entrepreneurial plans we're considering and made ourselves anxious enough that we decided to pass on the idea of an elaborate fancy dinner. Instead, we picked up Indian take out on the way home and got to see the kids before they went to bed, which made everything better.

So much else has been going on…but it's late now and I'm tired and rushing to finish. Quickly then, a few recent events.

Last Tuesday was the first writer's group meeting in about a month, and ohhhh I am just still so blocked on new writing. Getting closer to being unblocked, but still--the stuck and fallow feeling is not comfortable, and not okay. But I'm just too tired and distracted and overwhelmed by everything else to be able to, ahem, focus. (Yes, that's an in-joke reference to my novel.)

Friday was all about the iPhone (and much other tech fiddling) for Josh, but we had a fun Shabbat dinner with new friends on Friday night. Eli and his buddy broke (!) the hinge off the bathroom door, but other than that it was a lovely evening.

Saturday after interminable errand running and house cleaning we left the kids with a babysitter and went out to the woods to celebrate our dear Burly Fighter with much of our Tribe. We stayed until around 2, which although far too late for my aging cranky physical body was barely enough time.

Despite severe sleep deprivation and a full measure of overcomplicated familial logistics, yesterday we met up with DKJZ and my parents and went to the Marin County Fair, and overall had a great time. We didn't get to see the art exhibit or the animals, but we did get to go on the Tilt-a-Whirl and bumper cars, and see Stormtroopers at the Creatures & Models exhibit (Isaac was hilarious giving high fives to the Stormtroopers--but what does he know from the Dark Side?) DKJZ left after dinner time and Josh had to leave for another engagement not long after that but the kids and my parents and I stayed for fireworks and funnel cakes, and watching my kids' faces throughout that experience alone was worth any hassle or tiredness.

Falling asleep now. That'll have to do.