Letting Go: Part 1

 For some time now, a year maybe, I’ve had trouble sleeping. It’s the variety where I fall asleep easily enough, but I wake up a few hours later, anywhere between 2am and 4am, and a thought flickers across my brain – and snap! I’m awake. There is no returning to sleep for at least two hours after this has happens.

The thought-culprit is generally work. I’m the records manager for an environmental division, and we’re migrating our records management system to another platform. It’s exhausting and tedious in a way that library school didn’t really prepare me for; this is IT work, essentially, but that’s what Records has become. Information Management. The minutiae of keywords and field lengths and naming conventions and compatible filetypes has consumed me for years now, but never so much as with this migration, which has been challenging, to say the least. Finding ways to fit our square pegs into these round holes has been the work of multiple teams and we’re all very tired.

The pandemic has made it easier to focus on this project, actually; I’m pulling lots of ten and twelve hour days, something I didn’t do when I had to drive downtown to the office. The state definitely gets more work out of me when the commute is taken out of the equation. But it’s also upset the balance of my life, and that’s what is giving me insomnia.

I think. Could also be my obsessive personality that takes everything I do as a personal reflection of my worth as a human. Can’t search for a Spanish-accent é character in this database? This is unacceptable, Kay! How could you allow us to use such a product?!

I don’t know if this is an American thing, taking work so personally. But it’s typically the first question you get when you meet someone: “What do you do?” It’s another way of asking who are you?

This is the third time this week I woke up between 2 and 3am. I’m plagued with panicked second-guessing of every decision I’ve made. I am responsible for the accurate ingestion, search, and retrieval of these documents. If the public can’t find a record, if staff doesn’t have a category in which to file a document, I am to blame.

It’s just records, I hear you say. Give me a break. This is not life or death.

And I know that. But it’s my job. And my job is my identity. It is who I am.

Is that valid, though?

I’m in physical pain. All the time lately, it seems. I have a knot in my right shoulder that I have massaged away once a month; it’s back by noon the next Monday. The headache I used to get daily has expanded downward along my brain stem to include my entire neck.

In May, I tripped on a box in my garage, banged up my left leg, and opened a Pandora’s box of klutziness. Since then I have taken a wrong step and rolled my right ankle three times.

 The first time hurt like hell, and it swelled up for several, several weeks; but other than that I was fine.

The second time, I fell on the concrete walkway to my backyard garden and skinned my shin in a lovely Fifth Element water-stone pattern. Also managed to break a big hole in the bottom of my watering can.

At this point I stopped wearing flip flops.

The third time was about two weeks ago. I stepped out my front door to take a walk and – down goes Frazier. It was so agonizing I cried, which was super alarming because usually only emotions can make me cry. I had to talk myself out of having my roommate drive me to urgent care, because this is America and I didn’t want to pay a hundred dollars to be sent home with an Ace bandage and an order to stay off it for a while. The nice doctor in my Kaiser chat agreed that wrapping it was “reasonable” and to go in if it didn’t improve.

So now I wear an ankle brace most days. I’m guessing I damaged it more than I thought that first time. It’s been a couple weeks, the bruising is gone, and the swelling is down. I am systematically replacing all my cute sandals with orthopedic old lady shoes with sturdy rubber soles. I am the owner of six pairs of compression socks.

I thought I’d have to get older before the fear of falling would set in, but here we are. I’m not even fifty, and I’m falling apart.

Can I blame all this on the insomnia? Hard to say, but I imagine it’s all related. The exhaustion has permeated to the soul level.

Tuesday night I woke up at 2am, lay awake for about an hour, then got up to make a cup of tea and think about my life.

I’ve always been an early bird. When my normal pattern is functioning, I’m in bed by 10 and up by 5; dawn is my favorite time of day. The insomnia has given me a new appreciation of the middle of the night. It’s so quiet. Even if I lived alone, it would feel wrong to turn on a bunch of lights and disturb the dark too much; it is a time to think, to just be.  

Who am I?

I am not a records manager. That’s what I do. It’s not who I am.

This is such an obvious statement that it should hardly count as a revelation, but it was.

I spent an hour sipping my tea and writing down what I wanted more of in my life, and none of it was work.

I recently took a vacation to visit friends in New York, a trip I make every year. We sat at the dining room table and ate cheesecake and laughed and laughed about inconsequential nonsense. We sat on the deck and watched the sun set over what used to be a corn field but now is a bank of new houses, and then we piled in the car and drove to Cape Cod for five days.

I’ve never been to Cape Cod. It was very much what I expected, only with a lot more pine trees. We rented a little beach house in Yarmouth and had adventures. Walked in the rain, collected seashells on the beach, visited lighthouses, went on a whale-watching tour and saw humpbacks and porpoises, perused the shops of Hyannis and Nantucket. It was relaxed and absolutely glorious. I did not think about work for several days, until we were waiting for dinner one night and I checked my email and responded to the question of how many characters were required for the EPA# field.

Knock it off, Kay. You’re on vacation, came the response from my colleague in the Water division.

Still. Mary was covering for me, but she didn’t know the answer to that question! They needed me! Me!

Sigh.

The list of things I want more of in my life looks like this:

Friends – connections with people I love

Family – a friendly relationship with my brothers

Order – lack of clutter, fewer things

Animals – my pets give and receive my love

Adventure – new experiences and places

 You may notice none of these things are work.

My work is interesting, challenging, and important. What I do matters now and will matter years down the road. People don’t think much about records until the town floods and suddenly nobody’s sure where their property boundaries are, or a developer wants to put a building up and needs to know what was buried there in 1989. They come to us in what is invariably a desperate hurry, they’re grateful we can provide their records or answer their question, and then they go back to forgetting that we exist.

That’s fine. It’s foolish to allow others to define your worth. I enjoy helping people. I love finding the needle in the haystack. Others might use words like tedious and boring, but I call it rewarding.

Nevertheless, it’s just a job. It’s not a falsehood to say if you died tomorrow they’d have your job posted before your obituary. Loyalty and dedication are great, but at the end of the day this is not who I am.

Which comes back to the insomnia.

I don’t think I’ve been snapped awake by a non-work-related thought in years. When I was a little girl I’d wake up on my birthday or Christmas and jump out of bed because I was excited and full of anticipation. Now the thing that jumps me out of bed is anxiety.

Anxiety is the adult version of excitement.

Even jumping out of bed to get ready to catch the plane for vacation isn’t excitement. It’s anxiety: finish packing, feed the animals, tidy up, leave a note for the house sitter, when should I call the Uber, triple check I have the tickets, is two hours before the flight enough time?

Anxiety starts with the job and bleeds into all of life. And it’s time to let go.

Let go of allowing work to dominate my thoughts, my routines, my plans. Let go of all that is not who I am and put it back to what I do.

Who I am is a woman who is enjoying a cup of coffee on a chilly fall morning, planning what I’ll need for my brother’s birthday dinner tomorrow, and anticipating – dare I say with excitement – the running of the Preakness later on today. Today is all we have; it’s fruitless to worry and fret and waste energy on thoughts of what may come.

I don’t know if anyone else needed to hear that, but I needed to write it down.

Cheers,

Kay

 P.S. David, seriously, every one of these recipes calls for cream of mushroom soup. I’ve found one that doesn’t. Let’s hope it’s the one Mom was using. 

Spring Wind

The first day of spring was four days ago, and so far it's been gorgeous. Sunny and mild and incredibly windy, which I actually kind of hate. Wind can ruin a perfectly nice day.

I've always resented wind for ruining my hair and making it hard to breathe. Then a friend told me she gets energy from the wind, and I started thinking about it differently. The other day, when it was gusting really strongly during my lunch walk, I put my face into it and closed my eyes and tried to breathe in that power.

It really is awesome.

Today is another such day, sunny and beautiful all morning, darkening clouds and chill winds tearing through the house now. Opening all the windows is such a freeing feeling after the winter. The grass is greening, the tulips are showing, the crocus has already come and gone thanks to the snow last week. I spent the morning pulling weeds.

"You can't do all that, you'll die!" said my roommate. 

It's funny how we're a nanosecond into spring and already there's a jungle of dandelions and milkweed that want to take over the bottom half of my yard. 

I didn't die. But I didn't finish, either. Made it to the second step before hanging up the gloves for the day. I sat in the newly painted Adirondack chair for a while and watched the birds at the feeder, the squirrel running up and down the tree, the rabbit come back from feeding and duck back into the gap under the house. 

Spring is volatile. Tonight it's just cloudy, but there's rain and snow on the way in a couple of days. It's the season where colors return and the Earth is bursting with the scent of new life. The scent of beginning. I can't wait until the purple salvia and the yellow forsythia burst into their colors. 

Snowflakes

Saw this tonight, and got philosophical. 

I do dislike the ‘I think like men’ thing.

I used to say it myself, though. I have four brothers. I grew up around men, I liked to think I understood how they operate and think, and that I was similar. I’m a blunt speaker. I like sports. I loathe duplicity and “catty” behavior in others.

I’ll use the word catty because its meaning is a specific one about a specific kind of behavior that most are familiar with, but it’s a terrible word. I have four cats. They can be asses, but they’re asses right to your face. There’s nothing sneaky about it.

I don’t count the pissing in the closet because I’m pretty sure that was Gordon and it’s because he’s a thousand twenty years old.

Anyway.

I used to say I was like a guy, my best friends were guys, etc. in exactly the way this meme describes. Men are easy. They say what they mean. They don’t smile to your face and talk shit behind your back.

Only, they totally do. At least as much as women do.

Because people are people, and whether or not one is honest or a liar, easygoing or uptight, moody or easygoing, is a matter of character and personality, and has nothing to do with sex or gender. It’s the innate thing that makes you who you are. How you respond in a crisis, how you behave when nobody’s watching – that’s what makes you special.  

Humans, at least in Western culture, don’t generally like to be lumped into a group, because it’s imperative that the individual be considered apart from his group. “Just because some people, doesn’t mean I…” Every comments section includes somebody’s personal anecdote about how they are the exception to whatever assertion was made in the article.

We are all generally quick to distance ourselves from what everybody is doing.  It’s our quest for immortality in being unique individuals, damn it.

Snowflakes, if you will.

It’s odd that this term has been bandied about as an insult, when it is in fact the sum total of all that humans want to be. One of a kind. One in a million. A real gem. We glorify and crave being held in the highest esteem among our humans. “May his name live forever.”  The worst curse of all is to be ordinary.

At the same time, the worst crime of all is not to be ordinary, and the most “heartwarming” stories are the ones that celebrate the ordinary. Those whose names are not remembered beyond their grandchildren. Those are the vast bulk of the human species, and their heroism lies in not embracing the outwardly heroic role. The farmer and his high school sweetheart who raise their family on the small plot in Iowa.

Even then, we have to give their stories some twist to make them interesting. I think of “The Bridges of Madison County – “ her story is that of any farmer’s wife, at first glance. Except she’s more than that. She’s unique in some way – an immigrant, ah, a refugee of the war, a veteran’s wife. Immediately she is different – and that is what makes her interesting. Because she’s not exactly like the other unnamed farmer’s wives.

Only they all have equally unique stories, if only we were to find their memoirs in their chest of drawers.

We are all unique. Nobody else has lived in our skin, felt our joys, suffered our pains. Billions of us, experiencing the world in a unique and unrepeatable way. No two experiences will ever be exactly alike. 

We are snowflakes.

Wishes in a Jar

Last year, I gave my friends' 8 year old daughter a birthday gift of dandelion wishes. That is, a jar full of dandelion seeds, to be pulled out when a wish was needed.

I have no idea what she really thought of it, and I have a feeling the poem I wrote to accompany it got tossed in the garbage, but I'm proud of it. I've never been much good at poetry but I liked this one. Just found it while cleaning up my documents folders and I will share it here!

So remember: every time you see a field full of dandelions gone to seed, you can look at them as weeds, or you can look at them as wishes.

Wishes in a Jar

When so ever you have a need,

Take a head of dandelion seeds,

And blow your wish

Into the Air;

Then say these words,

“Let my wish be heard!”

And when the seeds

Are all used up

Just gather more

To fill your cup!

For know, sweet girl,

In this great world

There’s a place for every

Wish to be heard. 

More Holiday Treats

I saw The Nutcracker yesterday. For a story that's sort of just an elaborate fever dream, it certainly makes for some beautiful music and dancing. It was spectacular.

The atmosphere of the holiday season is so fun. As it gets dark earlier and earlier, it's such a welcome sight when the trees are lit and evergreen branches and colorful bows, ribbons and lights are strung everywhere. The ballet had all that: folks dressed in all their most glittery, sparkly, fancy best, dazzling sets and costumes, stirring and triumphant music. Highly recommend.

This weekend's cookie extravaganza:

Almond Butter Balls 
my mom's recipe, one I make every year, stupidly easy, delicious, not too sweet.


1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp almond extract, or 2 tsp vanilla extract
1-2 cups almonds, or your nut of choice - I often make this with walnuts
sugar for rolling, optional. I use a cinnamon-sugar mixture with a dash of nutmeg. You could also use powdered sugar. 

Cream the butter and sugar together with a mixer until very light and fluffy. add salt, flour, and extract. Stir together until well mixed. Fold in nuts. Refrigerate for 20 minutes or so until it's easy to handle.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Roll dough into 1" balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake about 10 minutes (ovens will vary). When still warm, roll in sugar, then place on parchment paper.

Makes about 3 dozen cookies, depending on how big you make them.


4-ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies 
So easy, you'll never make them with flour again.

1 cup smooth peanut butter (Jif/Skippy/Peter Pan, not the natural stuff)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla

Cream the peanut butter and sugar together until well mixed. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Roll dough into 1" balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Using a fork, press ball down gently one direction, then again perpendicular to create a grid pattern.

Bake 10-12 minutes. Leave on the cookie sheet about 5 minutes after baking, then remove to cooling rack.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies.

I'm too lazy to go take a picture of the ones I made, but they look just like this. https://homemadehooplah.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/4-ingredient-peanut-butter-cookies-2-800x1198.jpg

Holiday Cooking

I'm undertaking a wellness regimen, starting two days ago. I must be totally mad to attempt such a thing at this time of year. It's the season of Break Room Cookies.

Ah well. The best thing about being an optimist is that you never stop thinking you can try again. And there's nothing like getting a new picture at the DMV - and actually owning up to your current weight - to make an aging gal want to make some changes.

So there's that. As the song says, every new day life's just begun.

I have a few boxes to send out to friends that are really family. Framily? Hey, I made up a word. Anyway, what do you add to round out a care package for a young man? A few things come to mind, but ultimately "food" is always a good idea. And so! Cranberry-orange cookies. These are awesome and a little unusual with the tart-sweet combination. These will be even less sweet than my usual batches, since I inexplicably never realized I was out of powdered sugar and will have to forego the orange-flavored icing. I did do some research to see if you can make it with regular sugar, and you can... if you turn regular sugar into powdered sugar first. Not gonna happen. Ah laziness, thy name is Farnsworth.

Cranberry Orange Cookies 

The Rabbit Hole

Discipline remains the enemy of my ambition. How long since I wrote anything? Counting it in months, that's scary.

Ah, well. The trick is to not let the guilt over not being productive, prevent me from being productive. So I haven't been writing, but I have been busily researching. So. Much. Research. It's my true love, really; I love to write, but even more than that I love to read. I like that my mind is still a sponge for those things that intrigue me, and I can still get drawn into the rabbit-hole of Wikipedia just as I did with World Books thirty years ago. 

Anyway, when you're trying to understand an ancient culture it's important to really understand those things their lives revolved around. In looking to the life of aristocratic women in ancient Greece, the first impression is that by modern standards, they lived sheltered, reclusive, oppressed lives, having little contact with anyone outside their immediate family.

This is true to an extent, but it ignores the sphere where women held tremendous power and influence: the state religion. There was no specifically priestly class, but the aristocratic families all held the most important roles and led the rituals around which the civic calendar revolved. The role of women was key in these festivals, and in some cases, men were not permitted to attend or even view their ceremonies. 

This line of thought led me to the Thesmophoria, a ritual devoted to Demeter during the threshing period. Threshing is a word I associate with processing wheat, but that's all I know about it, and here we go down the rabbit hole of how wheat is harvested. I'm familiar with the scythe, the sickle, the term "separate the wheat from the chaff," but how all of this was actually accomplished, I never knew. Turns out a tremendous amount of labor goes into it - reaping, threshing, winnowing, all done by hand. Villages worked together to get it all done before the rains came and ruined the crop, and it could take weeks or months. 

We just celebrated Thanksgiving here in the US, where around 2% of the labor force engages in farming. That number is just...telling, I think. In 1920, it was 30%. In 1850, it was 64%. 

It seems as a nation we're almost entirely removed from the harvest. Every year there's the debate about ending summer vacation for the kids since so few of them are needed on the farm anymore (a myth we all grew up believing).  Pretty much any food you want is available at a supermarket at any time of the year. Sure, we go to farmer's markets, we eat local food at farm-to-table restaurants, we have little vegetable gardens, but the number of us who really do anything significant to produce food is just minuscule. We're removed from the cycle of the seasons, of planting and growing and harvesting, on all but the most superficial levels. Carving pumpkins, making apple pies, visiting a corn maze. There aren't a lot of us who actually know how to drive a combine and get the massive grain harvest stored so we don't all starve this winter. 

Two percent of the nation feeds all of us and more. That number just floors me. 

They sell these at Michael's. 

Still, when I look around my neighborhood and talk to my friends, most of us who have a little bit of land will try to grow a vegetable garden and/or flower beds. The instinct to have little bits of nature around us is still pretty strong. We all gleefully take part in the harvest ritual of buying enough food to purposefully gorge ourselves and our families, and I think it's generally a time we remember to stop and take a moment to feel gratitude for those things we usually take for granted. 

We're a long way from the days of our ancestors, though. We're seldom most thankful for the food, if my Facebook feed is any indication. We're thankful for our families, our friends, our circumstances if they are good. But the notion of being thankful for this food as the old prayer says, is somewhat remote. The dangers of a poor harvest are less likely to result in famine as in those small tribal city-states. People still go hungry in our nation, of course, but on the whole I think we are very much removed from the real danger of starvation that was faced by our ancestors. 

The funny thing about history is that people haven't changed much. We're all still driven by emotions, for the most part. Love and anger and fear and jealousy and grief and hope and compassion. 

It seems to me that what we fear has always been a prime mover, and this is a thing that does change. I think about those ancient Greeks who fought against Persian invaders because they literally had foreigners landing on the beach with swords. Sure, the invaders expected to be able to say "give us earth and water" (i.e., tribute money) and the Athenians would choose to capitulate instead of all getting killed, but they were perfectly prepared to slaughter all the soldiers, then move through Attica enslaving and killing the remaining men, women, and children, burning their farms along the way before laying waste to Athens. 

Side note: Incidentally, the Athenians started it. They joined up with their allies from Miletos to attack the Persian empire, and they set fire to their city of Sardis. How much history would be altered if they had not done this? Maybe the Persians would never have bothered trying to take revenge on the Greeks, and nobody would know the name of Marathon, and a bunch of people who inexplicably enjoy running wouldn't have any reason to do a 26 mile race every year.

But I digress, because that is the nature of the rabbit hole. Where was I? Fear. It's hard, as an American, to imagine having to physically fend off invaders at our shores. Having to pull our weapons off the walls and go defend our homesteads, lest we be killed or sold into slavery by hostile invaders. Yet we are our ancestors: we still feel the same emotions, and emotions still drive us. We're still afraid of invasions. We're still afraid of The Other. 

But that wasn't where I started either. Where was I originally? Oh yes, the religious festivals of the Greeks and the role of women in the rituals that shaped their year. The perception that women were disrespected, ignored, and abused, but I think this is wrong. Women were the guardians of the home and the family, managers of the household, and played key roles in most of the city-wide religious festivals. Goddesses, too, were the patron of many cities - Athena to Athens, of course, but Artemis was the primary deity worshiped in Sparta, and so devoted to her were the Spartans that they refused to join the Athenians against the Persian invasion until their holy festival, the Carneia, was completed. 

And we're back at Marathon again. 

This is the rabbit hole. Now I am off to read about the Thesmophoria, a pretty odd ritual for Demeter, the grain goddess. Involved in this was the sacrifice of a pig, whose remains would be cast into a pit to be retrieved at a later festival, planting I think. I'll have to read that again. Women were the only participants at these rituals, and they were secret - regrettably, the ancient sources were pretty closemouthed about things that were supposed to be secret rituals, so we really don't know much about the mystery religions. They remain a mystery. 

I'll see myself out. Oooh, is there still pie?