Finally, Unemployed

I wanted to write something in March, just to say I had been here at least monthly.  Yesterday was my last official work day, although I already had my office, computer and phone taken away, so I didn't go anywhere, just poked around on email, forwarding some last tasks to others.  Today,  meeting new people at my treeplanting activities with Friends of Trees,  I found folks sympathetic, as everyone has been unemployed at some point.  It is like being pregnant, inspiring complete strangers to tell their similar stories.  Of course, I have to be careful not to milk it too much.

Tomorrow I plan to start a number of lists of things to do between now and whenever.  I feel I might get a job too soon, before I have used this moment to assess what I really want.  Already I feel the weight of the endless grind of the work week lifting, as I see that Sunday isn't the end of the weekend, just the beginning of a new week.  My biggest fear is the loss of companionship from not seeing my office mates each day.  I will have to find a way to have regular interaction with others.  For the first time, I realize the purpose of coffee shops.  I'm hoping there will be more words here.

Travelling Cheese

"Who Moved My Cheese" was published in 1998 and at the timewas considered a brilliant tool for coping with change.  You don't hear much about that book anymore, but I need to order it from the library, to make sure it doesn't have a secret I can use.  Ever since being told I was losing my job, I have been in a state of disbelief and controlled euphoria.  I really could use a change.  Maybe not one that takes away all my money, but if that is the one that is given to me, I should make the most of it.  Instead, people keep worrying about health insurance for me.  "What about it?" I ask grumpily, "I'm not sick, have never been sick, why must I assume the worst?"  For some reason, this aspect of unemployment really irritates me.  Should I really devote time and worry time, over whether I might get sick and be forced to pay for, or even worse not be able to pay for, feeling awful, suffering and dying?  Is physical pain and suffering less painful if you are insured? 

Regardless of the stupid health care dilemma, which I blame 100% on the Republican party, I do suffer from the retrospective of my life that is playing in all the cinemas of my mind.   When facing a big change, suddenly everything that came before this moment threatens to coalesce into a big fat evaluation of my life.  "So this is where you end up, thirty years out of law school? One lousy job, where you made lousy money,  after hundreds of poor people pass through your door, just as poor going in as coming out, and then they fire you." 

But the actual truth is that I don't feel that bad.  Sure I'll miss the swimming pool in the town where I work, and I'll miss my co-workers, with their cameraderie  as we face an impossible task each day: how to make a difference.  It must be like fighting the war in Afghanistan, only without the possibility of being blown up by a bomb.   However, after the shock of not going to work wears off, I think I will be able to adjust.  At the very least, there will be the job search to structure my days. Then there will be the entire of book of other stuff I have always wanted to do, but never gave myself the time to do.  If it turns out that that my many hobbies and interests cannot sustain me and unemployment and savings run out, then I will need to find a job, any job.  Until then, I will allow myself to just be.

The Sky is Falling

It has been more than a month since my last post.  In the meantime, my mundane world has altered.  Although the details are important to me, the fact is, only change is interesting and meaningful, stasis is about nothing.  So why do we so resist change?  Why, even when someone forces upon us the very change we seek, do we recoil against it?

These are the questions I have asked repeatedly, since I was told that my job of the last 29 years is about to be eliminated.   It happened suddenly and nonsensically, surprising and angering.  And even though my job has many positives, it has also been very frustrating and repetitive over the years.  Yet fear of the unknown has kept me here, year after year.

So now I am thrust into the next phase of my life, and yet, I cannot help but grasp at the straws of remaining the same.  There is a chance the downsize may happen some different way, so I focus on that possibility for awhile longer.  There is a chance a different position may be offered, so I hope for that.  However, the better part of me knows I should move over into the new realm of "Life After Legal Aid," and leave the what-ifs behind.  I think I had to write this to make my way over here.

So much of my job is about helping people find palatable solutions to serious problems.  Usually I assist them in getting to the next phase of their lives, and they thank me.  Why then, have I learned so little about making transitions in my own life?  I guess I will try and become my own client for the change that will come.  Here we go.

Thoughts Over A Bowl A Polenta

This post starts with nothing in mind whatsoever.  Can I make something out of nothing? 

This week has been spent alone, not counting going to work and a music rehearsal.  By which I mean, my partner, Robert, has been off to the coast pursuing his livelihood and I have been left in the house by myself.  This happens so rarely, that I am both euphoric and at loose ends.  Euphoria has been expressed through the unrestrained oddity of my diet.  Finally, I get to eat anything I want.  Which means I simply scrounge for whatever is there, no matter how various.  Tonight, I made pudding with half, half-and-half, and half, rice milk.  It was weird but I couldn't tell if it was the rice milk or the fact that I burned the bottom of the pan.  Of course, I ate some anyway.  My food goal is to prove that I can eat happily on whatever the cupboard and fridge provide.  Like most Americans, we tend to stockpile food., even though we are always going to the grocery store.  The other part of dinner was polenta, to use up the carton of chicken stock I opened for my quinoa vegetable stew two nights before, that included every vegetable in the fridge except the lettuce.  I call it practicing for poverty.

If I get nothing else out of my career of taking care of the legal problems of the poor,  at least I have a clue how to survive on the bottom rungs of society, should I ever fall down the pinnacle of success I have managed to achieve.  I also know not to fear such a fall from grace, as I have learned that only addiction or mental illness or illegality of status could send you to the streets. Despite the tales of woe that are touted as proof of our terrible economy, our country is not yet at the point of letting people starve or freeze to death.  I say this only to remember that our version of misfortune is quite a bit better than many parts of the world.

The one thing that marks my poor clients as different from my friends and acquaintances, is the raw emotion they readily express.  Although I thrill to the slogan of the "Occupy" movement that "We are the 99%,"  there is a big difference between the bottom 10%  and the 90th percentile.   The thing about this country is that we have a good idea of how the rich live, and we are damn mad we don't have some of that.  The poorer you are, the madder and sadder you are about it.  So I hear a lot of emotions and I like that part of my job.  This may be a twisted appreciation, but I admire those who are in touch with and express their feelings.  It is so straightforward.  But I'm also glad that I don't have all those strong feelings myself, at least not over the same things. 

Spending the week alone has also led to more talking to myself, which then finally, has led to this little bit of writing, which is all good.   But I'm ready for company

(Random photos from today)

Everywhere Looks Good From Here

Whenever I go out in the country I imagine how nice it would be to live there.  I stare intently at the landscape and wish I could look at the view from the window of a house right here, or over there.  This leads to  perpetual house hunting of the vaguest nature.  I am lucky to have a friend who is a realtor and  tolerates my temporary enthusiasms, because inevitably when she talks about getting pre-approved for a loan, or checking with the planning department about whether there are building restrictions, my dream house starts looking less like heaven on earth and more like a series of decisions that depend on comparing facts and figures.  Then my interest wanes until the next trip out of town.

It has been suggested that my behavior means that I don't want to live in the city and I am desperate to relocate anywhere that doesn't involve so many sidewalks, stoplights and coffee shops.  But I actually like the busy metropolis with all the possibilities for amusement.  It's just that when I see real land stripped and bare of human accoutrements, I just want to lie down and be absorbed into the scenery.   I think I sang 'This Land Is Your Land" one too many times as a child.

Luckily, we do find ways to get out where nature predominates.  Last weekend we went hiking along Siouxon Creek in Washington, about sixty miles from Portland.  The forest was covered with thick moss and popping mushrooms everywhere, and it embodied everything the northwest climate is famous for.  I looked at that moss and wanted to bed down in its softness.  What a place this earth is!

 
Here's a poem I wrote about this place, more than ten years ago.  Luckily, it hasn't changed.

Siouxon Creek

Down in hemlock, cedar, fern
everything is green, even air is algal,
the creek a punch of moss
champagne and liquor of leaf.
Mist swags treetops, a wreath of droplets
glazing needles, dripping into
effervescing waterfalls.
Tall snags carve totem poles
to gods of decay, before toppling
into bryophytic carpet.

I drive a gauntlet of clearcuts and hunters
to get here, and grumble over mountain
bike prints I tamp down on the trail,
but bathed in emerald light
discontent spills away,
within this narrow watershed of life.

Accomplishments

When I was a budding feminist, I researched and wrote a paper about female education in the old old days.  I think I read one book and summarized the major tenets; which were that in the 1800's (and possibly 1700's), girls' education needn't go further than the basics of reading and writing and a little math, as long as they also gather a few "accomplishments" to show off to suitors.   These seemed to center around music and needlework, and maybe a little riding.

This book must have been instrumental in my formation, because even though I managed to complete a fair number of years of serious education, I have also tried to keep up on a flurry of hobbies and talents to impress the judges.  Way after the competition is over, I am still practicing my music, art, and sundry athletic pursuits, as if I might audition at any time in a competition for the best all-round girl.

Thus, I have a strange combination of goal directed behavior, sabotaged by a simultaneous need to cover all bases.  The goal fixation was apparent in our recent trip to Kings Canyon National Park.  Planning from afar, we mapped a five day backpack trip that would take us into the High Sierras.  However, before we even arrived, the weather report was forecasting a serious chance of snow in the middle of the trip's timeline.  Despite this chill, I refused to accept that the weather report would turn out correct so we went ahead with our plans.  Unfortunately, the predictions came to pass and we were forced to beat a hasty retreat, hiking out sixteen miles in one day to beat the snow.  From then on we sheltered in the fancy lodge at Sequoia and contented ourselves with day hikes.  But still, I regret we didn't complete our journey as planned.  I hate to give up, even as I hedge all my bets. 

Dark Clouds

 
Although the internet gives us the ability to know virtually anything we want,  I stay away from specific areas where I don't think I can handle the information.  I am afraid that if I knew the true state of certain things, I couldn't go on making my little plans, celebrating my little successes.  Instead,  I would be paralyzed with depression or consumed by anger.  Those unknown facts are sensed to be things that I have very little chance of changing, yet are horrible.  One of those subject areas for me is "fracking."

 Fracking is not a clever way of writing the other "f-word."  It is shorthand for a terrible way we are tearing up this country in a gold rush for natural gas.  Seduced by good reviews, I watched the movie "Gasland," a documentary about this topic.  Although a well-made movie,  I am now consumed with rage over our political indifference to the plight of citizens and the land itself, against the thuggery of corporations.  But I'm not even going to get into it.  If you are interested see the movie or google fracking.  Enough said.

In another sad tale, I must report that I once again have gone around the block of dissatisfaction with the organization that employs me.  It seems like businesses are exactly like families in the way they can repeat the same argument over and over, without anything new being said.  If there were not outside forces pulling us this way and that, we wouldn't be able to change at all.  I only have myself to blame of course, for not finding either a way out or another way through the points of contention.  But like the topic above, it seems like something I have little control over, and hence the unhappiness it causes.

Perhaps it is just the weather affecting me.  Today was the first real rain in about two months.  This signals the end of summer and the beginning of our very wet winter.  You would think I would have found peace with the changing seasons, but I hate to see the warm weather go.