The Urbane Homestead

Changes

Here's the nutshell: by September, my job at the Depression Center had become almost unbearably frustrating.  I was unable to accomplish anything, due to a total lack of organizational strategy, their refusal to give me a budget (I mean $0), and my own downward spiral of depression. Ironic, yes, I know. In October, my mother had heart valve surgery and my supervisor was reluctant to let me take vacation time to be at the hospital. The surgery was a success—when the surgeon came into the consultation room afterward, he said: "I did a great job!"—and the soaring relief I felt made me realize something. There are very stressful things I can't control, like the outcome of major surgery on a loved one, or the culture of an organization I work for. And there are stressful things I have some control over, like whether or not I get another job. And then there are stressful things I have total control over, like myself and my own behavior. So I quit.

Of course, if it were that simple, I would have quit a long time ago. I'm lucky, though—very lucky—because I'm married to someone who has also had many, many rotten jobs, and has now, for the first time, a job he likes everything about. And I'm also close enough to the end of this MBA program that I have the skills to create my own job, if I want, and make it pay. I could, of course, have created my own job in the past, but there isn't a lot of demand for Hittite translation services.

I love being on my own. I like the flexibility, and the variety, and the challenge. I like being at home when I want to and being the art class parent at Joe's school and I like going to networking events and talking to people. I like thinking about all the different things I can make happen and then choosing which one to do. And I like sitting here at our old dining room table in the basement next to the washer and dryer and the bicycles about a million times more than sitting in an Aeron chair in front of a Steelcase executive office configuration and being miserable. For one thing, it's a lot easier to keep up with the laundry.

Meetings

Every once in a while you have a meeting that serves as little window, through which you can watch, twig by twig, the construction of the handbasket you and your colleagues are going to hell in.

Tempum virumque cano

My friend Steve at Deep Background has posted on the sad fact that careful and thoughtful reading is on a downhill slide. He's right, people don't read much, but a lot of the reason for that is that reading takes time, and no one thinks they have any. (That's one thing I've noticed absolutely everyone thinks: they're busy, busy, busy. The other thing is that no one can believe how old they have suddenly gotten to be. "I can't believe I'm 75/50/30/18/7 already! It seems like just yesterday that I retired/didn't need reading glasses/ got old enough to drink in a bar/was in junior high/thought that the Teletubbies were fabulous.")

And reading, when you're doing it to engage rather than disengage your brain, also takes focus. I often think about all the much more interesting things I could be doing if I didn't have to work, and one of them is reading, specifically, reading when I'm not totally exhausted and eye-strained from staring at a computer all day. I'm now at a stage in life where I bet I spend more time watching tv than reading because of the limits of my ocular physiology. And isn't that a pathetic comment on modern life.

Career paths

One evening, as we were sharing our stories of the day, Joe asked me, "Who did you undepress today?"

We've been having a lot of conversations about what I do during the day, and how depression is different from feeling sad, and how people who work at the Depression Center help other people who are sick with depression. Joe's question led me to believe that I've actually managed to explain some part of this adequately, and that on his six-year-old level he has an understanding of my work. His question also made me think about how I derive satisfaction from working. When my job was editing the only annual analytical bibliography of Mycenaean studies, I knew I was contributing something unique to our understanding of the ancient world. It was fascinating and it was challenging, and I was good at it. If I had stayed in linguistics, I think ultimately I would have had something interesting to say about how we express our perception of time and space through language. By contrast, working in marketing seems shallow and unoriginal. I am an intermediary, a pass-through; I take the work of others who do serious research, dumb it down, and serve it up to the public.

And yet, by doing so, I can do something real. If one person reads a brochure I write, understands the illness better, gets treatment, and as a result does not die of suicide, and as a result that person's children grow up with a healthy parent, and that person's partner doesn't spend the rest of their life wondering—or knowing—what they could have done differently, and that person's parents don't see their hopes for the future die with their child, then I don't mind spending my days cranking away.

Irreplaceable shoes

In switching jobs, I had to turn in "my" laptop to my previous place of employment, since it belonged to them. It was a sad and difficult moment. Luckily, Henry has an almost identical laptop, and being both a thoughtful husband and a skilful system administrator, he set me up as a user there, and transferred every last little thing to it, so that I could sit on the sofa and do all the computing I usually do without ever noticing a change. And yet, it was not the same. I could not make the leap and feel at home on that laptop.

It was the phenomenon of the irreplaceable shoes. You have a pair of shoes that you love; they are cute, they are comfortable, they go with everything. You polish them, you carefully keep them salt-free in the winter. The heel (which is just the right height) wears down; you have it repaired. The sole starts to get thin; you have it replaced at some expense with a fancy rubbery sole. Eventually you have to admit to yourself that these perfect shoes have lived a long and useful life, and it may be time to set them lovingly and tearfully adrift on an ice floe to meet their fate. But fate is kind, and to your delight, soon after, you find an identical pair, recently discontinued, at TJ Maxx! Your heart full, you hold them close, pay for them, and run home. The next day, you get dressed and finish with the shoes. But somehow, you aren't quite ready to wear them out, so you put them back in the closet. Day after day, the same scenario unfolds. Finally you realized that although these shoes seem to be identical, they lack that certain something that made your old shoes so very, um, sole-matey. You will never bond with them in quite that way, and sooner or later they will go to Kiwanis and be a wonderful bargain for someone else. The only way to move forward is to find an all-new pair of irreplaceable shoes that have their own delights and their own way of perfection.

So you can imagine my joy when, at the end of last week, my new work laptop was delivered. I had a desktop machine, but it was indeed a machine, and not personal. Now that I have this lovely, lovely new MacBook, I feel like I can think again. I have decided that the computer is how my brain connects to the outside world, and my notebooks (paper ones) are how my brain connects back to myself. That explains why I've been stuck in a loop for all these weeks, and now, here I am, outside in the fresh air.

Okay, I admit that's a few blocks past eccentric and into the neighborhood of the downright weird.

A place for me

The new job is good. After the requisite day or two of wondering why on earth I claimed I could do any of this stuff, I realized that I actually can do this stuff, and in fact, I can do it pretty well, and I'm not a big fake, and it should all work out just fine. Also, it turns out that one of the reasons why they wanted to hire me for the job is that I have, um, intellectual interests, so within the first few days I felt comfortable coming out of the closet and admitting that I've raised a 6-year-old who likes opera, and nobody batted an eye.

On to the next thing

I survived my last day at work. It was the usual mix of "No one can ever replace you" and "Thank heaven she's finally leaving." Of course there were many jokes about my new place of employment, the Depression Center, but I pointed out that at least there, when I had to work with crazy people, I would know that they had access to good mental health care.

I was fine until the end, when I had to say goodbye to my very dear friend Marianne. I know we'll talk often and see each other regularly, but nothing helps you get through a day like having someone you can share all your nutty thoughts with sitting only twelve feet away. I had brought Joe's red wagon this morning to carry my stuff home in, figuring that it would actually be easier than using the car. I must have looked like quite a sight,in my smart grey trousers and tailored black blazer, tears running down my face, pulling a little red wagon piled high with a plant, a lamp, a lot of file folders, an extra umbrella, and my forgotten winter boots.

My email address will remain the same, by the way.