Stay of Execution

Speaking of Pop!Tech

I was just visiting James Howard Kunstler's website, first to look at his Eyesore of the Month award, and then reading his scathing commentary about American culture, suburbia, and politics. I was impressed with him at Pop!Tech, enjoyed his book about architecture and city planning, and recommend him highly to you. Conservatives, you'll probably find little to like, but I think this man can see with a penetrating eye the way Americans have numbed ourselves and uglified our living spaces, leading to further numbness and isolation and a retreat to television and away from civics. He believes pretty passionately that a land full of places that are not worth caring about [e.g. strip malls and Target parking lots and subdivisions of McMansions] will soon be a nation and a way of life not worth defending. Even if you disagree with what he says, he writes vividly and with a fervent passion, so you if you choose not to hear his political views you could read an entertaining and vivid narrative about his recent hip-replacement surgery.

Springtime

Okay, it's nowhere near springtime and I should know better. I acknowledge that I'm in for another two and a half months of cold and mud and grey and ice and thaw and heartbreak. But today was a bit of thaw and it looked and smelled and felt wonderful.

Instead of finding a pretext to take a drive in my zippy new automobile this afternoon I drove my rental car back to its home, and then walked from there around town doing errands; a mile up and intown to the bank, and then an amble through the Old Port to buy a birthday present and some miscellaneous items, and then a mile up past the Eastern Cemetery, with its locked gate and secret guardian of the key (I'm not telling) to the Eastern Promenade, and a couple of miles along the shoreline. There's a place where the walking path runs along a big concrete wall owned by the city; graffiti is encouraged there and there were six different artists at work on different sections of it as I went by. Then I walked over the bridge and past the baked bean factory and home. The sky was this great blueypinkyyellow and the wind was from the east and my cheeks were cold but the rest of me was warm. It felt so good to be outside, to be able to feel the undertone of warmth in the sunshine. On my street a nine or ten year old girl was riding her bike around. People were smiling. It smelled like water melting.

How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

1) I love your silver sleek body and your pretty shape.
2) I love your black leather seats.
3) I love that your black leather seats are HEATED.
4) I love your sunroof and the way it opens or closes or tilts, as I choose.
5) I love your turbo engine and how you are ready to go as fast as I'd like to go, quietly, with zip but without fuss.
6) I love how quietly your engine purrs along.
7) I love your wonderful sound system, and how good my music sounds, even way up loud.
8) I love the way your air vents close up tight if I don't want them.
9) I love the way your speedometer goes up to 160!
10) I love the purpley-blue lights of the instrument panel.
11) I love the range and responsiveness of the heat and cooling options.
12) I love that you belong to me.

Enough writing. I'm going for another little drive.

Shout-out to the boys at Nissan of Natick, especially Joe, Pauly, Randy, and Chris. They were terrific, friendly, funny, quick, and helpful. A grump of a boss making a fuss about having things notarized this morning caused me to wrinkle my brow, but these guys routed around him and got things done for me.

Things I Hoard In Unreasonable Quantities In My Desk Drawer

Post it pads: 19 +
Binder clips, all sizes: dozens
Sticky flags or tabs for marking a section of a document: 14 packages
Flower food: 4 full envelope packages, plus 5 half-empty packages.
Barrettes, ponytail holders, and other hair accessories: 6
Lip balm: 4 kinds
Moisturizer: 4 kinds
Pocket change: $4.67

Other items (e.g. toothbrush, sewing kit, pencil sharpener in the shape of a nose, stapler, white-out, earplugs, spare panty hose, children's toys and trinkets, rubber bands, spare light bulb) were found in reasonable amounts.

This is ridiculous. Purge time.

Independent Woman

So I've been thinking about partnership a little bit here.  (As in life partner, not as in the Uniform Partnership Act.)  It's sort of appealing right now.  I know what it feels like to feel lonely.  That felt like I had a baby bird inside me crying out because it needed to be fed.  Ugh, and as mama bird it felt like I was fluttering around powerlessly in the face of this desperate plaintive cheeping, unable to find a worm or provide for the part of me that was just crying out for something I didn't have.  Anyway, that's not what I feel like right now.  When I do a head count of my nest full of inner birds, they seem to be pretty well fed these days, and they're scuffling around the nest, trying out their wings, or else napping contentedly.  So it's not really that I have the kind of helpless longing for a partner I've felt in times past. 

I'm just getting a little bit TIRED here with the administrivia of my life.      

I spent a long time at the DMV today struggling with the process of registering my new car and getting plates etc so I can transport it home tomorrow.  Also the city excise tax people.  Also the insurance claims paperwork that needs to be returned so I can get my check.  In addition, this morning I was on the phone with the plumber (I probably didn't mention the mysterious and fascinating plumbing leak that arose in the middle of the car crash/water heater/dog injury excitement.  It seemed too small to mention by comparison with my other hassles.  Anyway, that's fixed now.) and we were talking about insulating my steam pipes and my hot water pipes and had a difference of opinion about my boiler and how it does and doesn't work (he was telling me things vastly different than what Heating Systems Awareness Buddy was telling me).  I don't know whether plumber or HSAB is right and wish I had someone to bounce this stuff off of.  I wish someone else cared about my house and what's best for it besides me. 

Anyway I finally learned what I wanted to know and then had to call the plumbing supply distributor and arrange to buy the insulating materials I need.  They're not open tomorrow so I arranged to pay by phone and wheedled Housemate into picking them up for me this afternoon so I can do the installation tomorrow afternoon.  Then I called my buddy at the car rental place and inquired about dropping off my rental in MA near the car dealership, which turns out to be an expensive hassle.  I tried my best to charm the car rental guy into waiving the fee but I don't think that's going to be effective.  Again, I could probably cajole some friend or other into ferrying me down there, but it's a lot to ask someone to do, and it would be cool if I didn't have to, and I'll probably just pay the drop-off fee.  Meanwhile I've got to figure out my financial picture for this car -- moving money around, making some choices about how far to draw down my savings, how long to tie up certain funds, etc., whether to pay off the bank loan right away with a loan from a different source.  Again, all this kind of thinking reminds me that I'm the only one who really cares about where I'll be and what my finances will look like for the next three to five years.  I sort of wish I had someone to do this with.  And next week I have to leave work for a vet appointment, and also have to go back to the DMV and pay use tax and apply for a title and get official plates for the car.  And I still need to insulate my pipes (HSAB is going to help with that) and make a decision about how to deal with my hot water heater problem.  Plus there are groceries and birthday presents and wedding shower presents and laundry and the usual parade of life's logistics to deal with, and I'm just feeling like I could use a break from attending to them all by myself. 

Wow, this is a litany of complaints about administrivia.  Not the kind of blog entry that I enjoy reading.  I apologize.  It's not that any of this is particularly hard -- in fact, my hot water heater guy and the car dealership people and the car rental guys, the vet and the plumber and my insurance agent and my loan people, my buddy Anthony who drove with me to look at the car and my Heating Systems friend, everyone but the malevolent slowpokes at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles, has been very helpful.  I've learned a lot.  I've enjoyed interacting with people, mostly.  It's just, you know, it's tiring to be all the time tending to this stuff.  I haven't been able to focus on work without distraction in weeks.  Friends who are trying to schedule time with me feel like burdens; I don't have the surplus energy to manage my own social calendar, let alone organize group things, which a lot of my friends kind of expect me to do.  And to be reminded by these endless little projects that I'm building my life alone, just for me and without anyone who has a stake in it with me -- no shared objectives, shared social connections, shared possessions -- well, it's kind of too bad.  It makes me a little sad, not in the baby bird crying for attention kind of way but just because it would be funner, and it would feel lighter, to have someone doing this alongside me.   

Oats?

Housemate is just too groovy and California for me sometimes. She volunteered to make me a smoothie this AM after our walk -- peanut butter and banana, mmmmm. And then she gave it to me and it was all lumpy. "That's the oats," she said. Who puts oats in a smoothie??

Lots to Report

Fantastic board meeting. I have lots of thoughts as a result. In my last post I forgot to highlight John Sculley as one of the smartest folks I've met but he was really great at this meeting. As were the other nine people in the room. I'm involved with this group for selfish reasons -- I learn so much watching these extremely bright, practical, sociable, articulate, creative people from across a range of fields think, and I enjoy working alongside them to bring ambitious ideas into being. It's so refreshing, and easy in a strange way -- not the right word but I'm tired here, what I mean is things just FLOWED -- working with people who are highly skilled and capable you can get into this neat groove, which it felt like we were in today. I mean, how often in a six plus hour board meeting does it not get awful for at least a couple of hours. I'm not often in a room with 10 people where ideas move easily around, disagreements are not Machiavellian ego trips, and people aren't talking to hear themselves talk or to impress somebody or other. We got things done, capably and with humor and inspiration and respect. I left really energized. I feel so lucky to be involved; I learn so much just watching the different skillsets of the folks on the board.

And I bought something after the meeting..... I pick it up on Saturday.

Board Retreat

Way back in the fall I considered how to scale back my involvement in certain organizations I volunteer with, to make more deliberate choices about to whom I give the gift of time. The conversation I had with the President of Pop!Tech about reducing my role somehow ended up with me promoted to holding two officer positions, rather than just one, on the Board of Directors. I just couldn't say no, as it turned out. Anyway we have a daylong board retreat today, and I've prepared and reviewed the budget numbers in my role as Treasurer and am hoping there was nothing I was supposed to do as Secretary. The organization has some of the smartest people I've ever met on board, and it really will be a treat to get together today and talk about the amazing conference we'll be putting on next October.

Water and Sky

I think I am now in a new club: the Hot Tub Club.  Hot Tub Club happens at my neighbor's house.  She is a lovely lady, also named Sherry (although she spells it Cheri, and in her case it's short for Cheryl), with the most beautiful house in the neighborhood, a farmhouse right on the water with a big yard and a beautiful garden.  She has a fantastic aesthetic.  I've had a friend crush on her for the last five years from afar.  She was dating a friend of my ex-boyfriend's, in fact was engaged to him, and he dumped her just after my ex dumped me.  So we had some things to talk about.  Anyway we and a couple of other women had a lovely dinner, with lots of wine and lots of candles.  And then the other women did the dishes and Cheri + Sherry jumped into the hot tub and we lay back and looked up at the stars and looked out at the water and at the line of taillights disappearing across the bridge, and watched our breath combining with the steam rising from the tub, and lifted our limbs up out of the water from time to time to feel the cold air drying the warm water off our skin, and talked about falling in love with men who sometimes turn out to have no arms and going on with life afterwards.  And it was just about as nice as can be. 

Some Instincts Die Hard

I'm drafting an employee incentive bonus plan right now. When I'm trying to think of how I want to say what I want to say I have this little internal dialogue that goes: "I wonder how lawyers phrase this particular concept? I wonder if we have any forms on the system that do what I'm trying to do right now and how they said it." And then I say, "Yo, dummy, you ARE a lawyer and you can phrase this just as well from scratch as you would if you found some old document saying something tangentially close and then modified it extensively. Just write it." And I do. But man, my habit as a young associate is to assume that there are special non-intuitive, non-straightforward lawyery ways to say everything, and that I'm not actually privy to what they are and so need to go find something someone else has written first. Because I don't trust myself to be able to discern properly, every time, which words are just blustery filler and the redundancy lawyers seem to love and which ones are really legally significant. The truth is that I do know, most of the time, how to discern them. But my habit is to assume that I'm not qualified. When do you outgrow this? I'm getting much, much better, both about having the confidence to draft my own paragraph first rather than modelling it on something someone else has written and about actually writing in language that sounds lawyerly while remaining reasonably clear.

And I've been pretty darn good at (or at least really confident about) editing language drafted by others for quite some time now, so once I've cobbled something together I can go in with my editor's hat on and tinker with it until it reads all right.