Awful

It is a lovely, warm night. I can hear crickets chirping and the fans are buzzing. Toddler Alien is sleeping, J is sleeping. I'm drinking a bottle of homemade mead, one in a case of bottles J found buried in a cooler. It was given to us by friends who moved West several months ago and did not want to take the mead along. The alcohol content of the mead is high, over 12%, but it is smooth with a ginger finish.

I have a full time job. With a 10% raise over my last gig, at a company with a structured development process. A company that is going to allow me to learn how to directly test databases. At the company that lowballed my first salary offer, then came up after I refused the first offer. At a company which, as it turns out, is perfectly happy to allow me to work a schedule flexible enough to get Toddler Alien when he is sick.

A good thing in the scheme of the universe, because sickness occurred on Friday, at the end of my first week as a full-time employee.

The weekend turned into listening to an 18 month old scream for hours on end, until we took him to Children's Hospital(1) and discovered that he had a massive ear infection which required antibiotics. Saturday night he cried himself almost to sleep in my arms, pointing to his crib after his tears, exhausted from being unable to sleep more than an hour for the last 36 hours. A week later he is bright eyed and happy.

All of this and I feel awful over something so stupid and insignificant that I should brush it off and move one. Right now I can't.

J and I took Toddler Alien to Lego Kidsfest this afternoon. It was a fun, overwhelming experience. Lots of people, lots of activity.

As we were leaving the convention center, J asked me to “take a picture of us” in front of one of the Lego models. In equal parts annoyed (because it was loud, I was tired and wanted to leave) and touched, I agreed.

Only to find out that the “us” J was referring to was Toddler Alien and himself, not the three of “us” as a family.

And I felt hurt. Even though J did not intend to hurt my feelings. Even though he communicated clearly and I misunderstood. I was hurt and felt awful, and lo these many hours later I still feel awful. Excluded.

And J feels terrible. Terrible enough that he gave me my card and birthday present (Legos. No really, he gave me Legos. I collect the Modular Building sets. I would collect the Harry Potter sets too, but J drew the line at that) early to cheer me up.

I've adjusted, mostly, to the concept that I am this person/role/vocation called “mom”. But I'm not the fun mom. I'm the “pick up the food you threw on the floor and put in the trash/put your toys away and brush your teeth” mom. J is the fun dad and I am the disciplinarian. Which means that while Toddler Alien does love me, throws me kisses and will not go to sleep most nights until I come in to say goodnight and tap him on the nose, I'm extraneous the moment J walks into the room.

Which is what I felt when I realized that J wanted a photograph of him and Toddler Alien without me. Extraneous.

(1) I'll have a post on them shortly, because Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh is an awesome institution. This post will include a rant about the standoff between UMPC and Highmark. A standoff that could essentially cut off access to 2/3 of the hospitals in the Pittsburgh metro area to Highmark subscribers.

Thursday of This Week

 Was the day that felt like everything had just gone to hell, which is a good topic to discuss on this, the Saturday, the supposed day of the rapture, an event that I don't believe is happening as I've seen nothing in the series of tubes of people being lifted up into the sky at 6pm.

Thursday was the day I received a phone call from the unemployment office saying, in essence, that I did not qualify for unemployment because I did not make enough money at Borders and because my separation from my former employer was voluntary. To the credit of the Mr. F (no first name) he sounded almost sympathetic as I explained that the separation from my last job was due to the stress of a probation that was indefinite and ill-defined (as I received no goals for improvement or milestones to reach).

So I'm out of personal money, a point that was driven home when I attempted to purchase two new bras at Marshall's yesterday and discovered that I did not have my check card with me. My check card was sitting in a drawer with my checkbook, placed there as an acknowledgment that I have no money.

No money for bras. Which I need, as the ones I purchased after Linus' birth are ratty and ill fitting. All my clothes are ill fitting right now. My new pants slide down my hips. One pair manages to be too large and has a zipper that refuses to stay properly up. The new t-shirts did not survive the first wash. I look and feel like a slob.

Thursday was also the day that I realized that no job offer would be forthcoming. D, the recruiter, had promised to call me last Monday. It is now Saturday and I have not received a phone call. Which means no offer.

I stood up for myself and it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Unemployed, no income, simultaneously overqualified and unqualified to work.

Bridge Building

I don't know my father's side of the family very well. After finishing his degree, my father moved from the Midwest to the east coast. There he met and married my mother, a decision that caused a great deal of tension in his family (1). Over the years there have been unpleasant incidents between my mother and members of my father's family. Between the incidents and the geographic distance, most of my knowledge of my paternal aunts, uncles and cousins comes from letters and photographs. Several years ago there was a family reunion. My brothers and I were not invited. From my point of view, it seemed the final split for any semblance of a relationship with the paternal branch of my father's family.

So I was surprised when a cousin I last met when I was too young to remember her, reached out and contact with me via Facebook. This contact was facilitated by the more reasonable of my father's two sisters. Interestingly, the cousin is the oldest daughter of the less reasonable sister. (2) She and I occasionally exchange messages.

She has a daughter (ST) who has been accepted into a prestigious program at Pitt for her junior and senior year of schooling. As she is coming from out of state, the tuition is incredibly expensive and the housing costs will almost double her final bill.

ST wrote to me recently, asking if J and I could help her out by allowing her to stay in our home during her schooling in Pittsburgh. She offered to pay a nominal amount of monthly rent ($200.00), assist in cleaning and childcare, cover her own groceries and has already made arrangements to stay somewhere else on weekends.

On one hand, it is completely fair to view the her actions as a rather nervy violation of etiquette. I know a good number of otherwise reasonable people who would be insulted by this request.

I'm not insulted. I think it takes a lot of courage to reach out to a previously unknown family member and ask for help. As an individual who has paid out-of-state tuition and is still paying off the loans, I can sympathize with her predicament. Off campus housing would be less expensive, but she is under 21, coming from out-of-state and it will not be easy for her to rent a safe, inexpensive place without an adult co-signing for her.

I'm uncertain how to help her. Our house is tiny and the only room we would be able to give her is currently my study. I have no desire to take on the financial risk of cosigning for a rental property. We can definitely give her a safe place to do laundry, get a hot meal and get a break from campus. But I wonder what we could gain by opening up our home for her for a little while.

(1) My mother is Catholic, my father Baptist. His family was not pleased.

(2) The less reasonable sister was especially critical of my mother and fond of making cutting, passive-aggressive remarks about our moral and spiritual upbringing. I recall one incident in particular when I was around ten when she told us a bible story using a book of solid colored pages. She was surprised that my brothers and I were able to interpret and explain each of the colors in the book.

Uncharted

I'm still in a holding pattern with the current job opportunity. D, the recruiter who set up the interview, called on Thursday. The news was not great. Initial reports are that the salary the CEO is willing to authorize is 2K less than my bottom line.

I can not pretend that I did not feel a little bit of relief at the news. My first impulse was to take his offer to tell the company to sock it.

Instead I asked for some time to think about it and told D I would call him back on Friday morning.

J and I sat down and talked Thursday night. It was an uncomfortable, productive conversation. J admitted that my return to work would take some pressure off us financially and felt that I should give the opportunity a shot. He also felt that some of my response was out of ego.

Which upset me, as I did not feel that he was giving enough weight to my feelings about it. To be fair to J, it is a integral part of our relationship that we give each other occasionally harsh reality checks when issues such as job offers come up, in order to ensure that we are responding to negative feedback intellectually instead of emotionally. J was only doing for me what I have done for him many times in the past – making sure his ego was not the only thinker in the room.

I can't disagree with his argument about the money. While we are doing OK on just his salary, there is very little room for mistakes. Me returning to work would mean that I could pay for daycare, bank the rest and give J enough room to increase our retirement investments.

The problem, from my point of view, is that one of us needs to work at a company that allows the flexibility necessary to raise a small child. And J's company is not that place. If this initial feeler is any indication, then this place is not appropriate either. Right now, they have not made an official offer, which means I can walk away without affecting my unemployment compensation. The initial amount does not include enough PTO for me to securely take care of Toddler Alien when he is ill or enough money for me to hire an interim nanny when he can not go to daycare.

I called D back on Friday and told him that it would not be enough money, for all the reasons I expressed to J. We discussed what I would consider reasonable (flexible time off that could be made up, additional PTO, other factors) and he put in a counter offer.

Now I wait. D feels optimistic that he will be able to work something out. I'm skeptical. My gut instinct (and downright cynicism) tells me that they would not have attempted such a lowball offer if the name on the resume had been male and they will not be all that interested in discussing my need for an appropriate work-life balance. Considering the fact that several of the people I interviewed with admitted that they had difficultly filling the position, you have to wonder.

But, at the very least, I have stood up for myself.

Decision

I'm a huge fan of XKCD. Randall Munroe has created some pointed (and poignant) comics over the years.

Today's comic like a slap-upside-the-head. Zombie Marie Curie says to aspiring girl scientist: “But you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and doing that it so hard that you become great in the process”.

When was the last time I wanted to do something so hard that I became great?

I can't remember. Literally. Maybe going to graduate school in North Carolina.

My entire life, I have fallen into things. Fallen into English because I thought I was good at it and comfortable. Fallen into QA because I followed an impulse to answer an add asking for liberal arts majors to apply.

I can recall many times when teachers and friends spoke out and said “You would be great at this”. Such as my high school math teacher, who nagged me to go to an engineering camp for girls because “you have a creative brain. You would be good at this”. J's most recent pep talk, when he talked about a children's book I wrote many years ago, but never illustrated.

But I can't remember the last time I made a conscious decision to want to do something, then followed through the tough parts to become great at it.

I have a decision to make. On the surface, the choice is simple and should be automatic. But the more time I give over to thinking about it, the harder it becomes to determine which is the correct path. The decision is this:

I am in the process of negotiating my salary for an interesting and challenging QA position. It would be a great opportunity.

Except that I don't think I want to do it.

Aimless

Last week, I sat for too many minutes staring at a Craigslist ad for a Personal Assistant for an unspecified company. I knew I could do the work with my eyes closed, yet the desire to apply for the job was not there.

I'm spending a lot of time in the past couple of weeks trying to get back to OK. OK with the increasing knowledge that my career as a quality assurance professional is essentially over. I can't compete with out of work developers with scripting skills. The jobs I am being offered are well above my abilities.

OK with the fact that my employment at major-chain-bookstore has come to an end as the location will be permanently closed at the end of the day Friday. I've been scraping pennies together to buy a bottle of something bubbly and take to the store Friday morning, so the staff for the final shift has something to share at the end. Working at the bookstore was my Plan B and it was ideal. More time to spend with Toddler Alien. More time to write. Some pocket money, so I do not feel like I am mooching off of J whenever I want to buy something for myself.

OK with asking J for money, whether it go towards buying milk for Toddler Alien or a pair of jeans for myself. This is a difficult one, as J vacillates between being easygoing and freaking out whenever we have a big expense.

Case in point: my last trip to the doctors, to get a prescription written to end a multi week sinus infection, ended up costing roughly $250.00. Ninety dollars went towards the office visit and the remaining $160.00 for the antibiotics and two inhalers the nurse practitioner prescribed to control the coughing from the infection. The reason it was so expensive can be found in J's plan – a high deductible H.S.A plan that does not cover prescriptions or anything other than a well visit to the doctor until the the deductible is reached.

Even though I attempted to explain to J that it would be expensive, he freaked out when I came home and showed him the bill, leaving me feeling useless and ashamed that I could not cover it. I need to take this medication from April to October in order to control my symptoms. I should also being taking an antihistamine with the inhaler, but I have cut that from the regime because of the expense.

So here I sit, knowing that I need to find a job, any job, that will give me halfway decent medical benefits so I can control the asthma and see a doctor to deal with ongoing, lingering aftereffects of the pregnancy. And I have zero motivation to do so.

A Quick Entry Before an Orgy of Cooking

As it is jambalaya day, in celebration of Fat Tuesday.

I went to a baby shower yesterday. The shower was held in honor of a former coworker. Unlike the last shower I attended, this one was a much less stressful affair. I still got dressed up, but instead of the pretty purple Ann Taylor number, I opted for nice jeans and a killer jacket.

I sat with two other former coworkers and four members of the guest of honor's bowling group. It was a comfortable arrangement. The food was fair, the gifts were nice and there were no games, which made the majority of guests very happy.

As I had additional baby stuff to give the GOO and her husband, I hung back at the end of the shower, waiting for the party to break up. GOO approached our table and I showed her some recent photographs of Toddler Alien, then passed the iPod to one of the other guests.

"Your first?" she asked.
"And only" I replied, laughing. "One and done!
"You don't want to give him a little brother or sister?"
"No. I hated pregnancy and I hated childbirth" I explained.
"Well some women have a hard time" she said. Her tone and body language implied that I had experienced complications.
"Oh no, the pregnancy was completely normal. I just really hated being pregnant and have no desire to do it again".

The look on her face was priceless.

The Liquidator

Note: This is a continuation of my last post. I spent the weekend trying to get a handle on what upset me so much after completing my shift on Friday. Now that I have pinpointed the source of my emotional disturbance, I wanted to distill it for posterity. Because I like to read myself talking or some such rot.

Friday morning, we had our morning staff meeting. The café shut down when the doors closed on Wednesday night, the employees charged with packing and transferring as much as possible to the two stores remaining open.

K, a service manager who has worked at the store for 20+ years, since before the build of the location was complete, struggled to remain composed as she announced the corporate office put up the store for bids by liquidators. By the end of the day all the stock and fixtures would be sold to the highest bidder, who would sell it off for whatever profit could be made.

After shelving new magazines, I offered to answer the phones, in order to give the long-term staffers a break from answering the same painful questions over and over again.

The end of day occurred at noon, when a crew of men carrying briefcases and floor plans entered the building. They stalked the floors, studying the shelves and layout, taking notes and making a concerted effort to avoid eye contact and stay out of the way of the staff.

A second man followed closely behind, in search of the store manager, D. He had heard the store was closing and upon locating D began asking information about the general layout and square footage of the space, as he was interested in renting the location.

Finding myself with a few free moments, I headed to the staff room to grab my iPod, so I could show a new coworker some photographs of Toddler Alien. D called to me in the staff room, asking if I was available for a quick task.

The liquidator was in the stockroom, surrounded by several FedEx boxes, addressed to the store, that needed opened. D introduced me, and I put my hand out in a genuine attempt to be professional.

It is now, two days later, that I realize why this man's handshake was so indistinct. He had not wanted to shake my hand.

The boxes contained the “going out of business” signage, which needed to be sorted for use in the next few weeks. Included were a set of walker boards. “These will be used outside” said the liquidator. When D asked if he would need store staff, the liquidator replied “No. Usually we go to the homeless shelter and offer some guys $20.00 to stand outside during the day”.

D continued going through the boxes while I silently stacked placards on a cart. The liquidator held up a set of stickers and said “These are seals for the service door. Every time you open the door, you need to place a new seal and log who opened the door and when, such as when you take out the trash”. When D explained that the service door could only be opened by a service manager and offered to have the staff remove trash from the front, the liquidator replied “No, because then the employees will just hid the books in the trash bags and take them out the front”.

At this point, I was finished stacking placards, all of the boxes were open and I was beginning to actively dislike the man. He had not wanted to shake my hand, he showed not an ounce of empathy for the homeless and assumed that the staff would be out to steal his stock by hiding it in the trash.

Shortly before the end of my shift, K gathered us all together again to update us on the current news. She instructed us to remove anything considered a personal item before the end of the day. When I asked about the collection of ARCs, she said to take them today, as tomorrow they would be sold.

Another service manager, G, checked me out at the end of my shift. I offered to push someone out a window for him. He said “Can you push the liquidator out the window. That man does not have an ounce of empathy in him”. I replied “I suspect there will be a line”.

Back to the Land of the Unemployed

Which is where I will be returning sometime in the next weeks. After trudging through the holiday season, selling calendars like it was something I was born to do, I was delighted to accept an offer for one of the two open part time spots at the major-chain-bookstore, thus delaying any decision about returning to full time work for several more months.

Only to discover when I came in for my second shift this past Wednesday that the major chain was filing for bankruptcy and the store that had so recently hired me was on the list of closures.

I have an emotional advantage over the rest of the staff, most who have spent years working together at this location. One manager was hired the store opened twenty years ago and remembers when the company was building it out. So today I volunteered to spend my shift manning the phones, answering the same set of questions over and over again and listening to the same set of comments.

• When are you closing? I don't know, a time line has not been set yet.
• Are all the stores in Pittsburgh closing? No, stores X and Y will remain open.
• When are you going to start discounting the inventory? No time line has been set.
• Are you still taking gift cards? Yes, online and at the stores which are remaining open will honor gift cards.
• This really sucks. Yes. Thanks.
• I'm so sorry to hear that you are closing. You are my favorite store. Thanks.
• Channel 4 said you were going out of business this weekend. To quote a coworker after I got off the phone "Channel 4 lies".
  
• This is bullshit. I understand.
• And my personal favorite "I live in Dormont. I don't want to drive across Pittsburgh and the country to use my gift cards". When I suggested he used the online store, he digressed into a rant about Amazon.com and how he still had not received an order he placed for a Christmas gift, leaving me so aggravated that I removed one of my shoes and mimed banging it against a counter while fantasizing that I was aiming it at the caller's head.

The speaker of the last quote also threatened to "call investor relations" and complain because I could not tell him when the liquidation sale would start.

The liquidator came today. He is an older man, blandly dressed in a grey suit, black shoes, white hair. His may be the most indistinct hand I have ever shaken. I relished the snarky thought of him coming down with whatever crappy illness that has been lingering in my immune system for the past two months.

In the very brief period of time I spent in his presence he struck me as a most unsympathetic of men.

To be continued... 

Back From Hiatus

I've started looking for full-time work. I'm only a couple weeks into my search and I'm already seriously considering a change in profession. Remain a part-time bookseller for the large chain with severe financial problems? Get a paralegal certificate? Go back to my self of 16 years ago and be an administrative assistant?(1) Wait tables?

There is nothing quite like a bad interview. I'm still fuming from the last interview, 50 minutes over the phone(2) with a bad connection, speaking with an individual who asked vague, broad questions and had the nerve to complain to the recruiter who set it up that my seven years of QA experience did not make me "qualified enough" as she would have to invest too much time to "train" me to use the bug tracking system and other (very expensive) testing tools. The fact that it has been a function of my profession to learn how to use such tools on my own completely escaped her. And it was not from the lack of trying on my part either.

I know what the problem is. I am totally unwilling to put up with any bullshit from any interviewer or organization at this point in my life. I would much rather be upfront about what I want and what I think I can provide then go through the rigmarole involved to land a job these days. I know that odds are stacked against me - I'm competing with laid off developers with MIS degrees and tons of experience working on $100,000 defect management systems while I have been trained/self-taught and work almost exclusively with open source tools.

Ugh.

(1) Interesting detail - the wage I am paid now, as a part-time bookseller is the same amount as the wage I was paid in 1996 as a full-time receptionist at a collection agency.
(2) Really, if you are going to waste my time with a phone interview that long and I'm in the area, just bring me into the office.

Cognitive Dissonance:

Is watching a woman in a full-length fur coat, waiting for a $5.00 latte, scream about how oppressed she is. So loudly that all conversation in the tiny mall coffee shop comes to the screeching halt, as none of the other customers are able to hear each other.

Scenes from a Mall

I'm still regrouping.

As part of the regrouping process, I have taken part-time seasonal(1) work staffing a calendar kiosk run out of a large national bookstore chain. This affords me plenty of time to watch mall life unfold and write tiny notes about what I see and think on pieces of register tape, tiny sheets of notepaper and on the back of half-sheets of invitations to a store's open house. (2)

The kiosk which I am staffing is in a small mall located in suburban Pittsburgh. The stores a mix of independent and upscale chains such as Restoration Hardware, Williams Sonoma and Anthropologie.

Most weekdays, my pacing around the kiosk is punctuated by the click-swish sound of hands washing mahjong tiles at the nearby tables. Almost daily, groups of four women take over the tables, set out the racks and shuffle tiles. Some bring a thick, felt cloth to muffle the sound of tiles on formica. They bring over trays of lunch from the nearby Panera and spend the afternoon playing. On breaks they wander over to the kiosk to look at the calendars and offer up bits of information about their lives. One woman, a thin, wiry individual with orange-red hair confesses that she comes every week, she is widowed and playing gives her something to do.

The customers offer up all kinds of information to me. They talk about their children, grandchildren and favorite pets. Some stop on the way into the movie theatre and return after the show to give me a short review and pick up a calendar as a Christmas gift.

There are crazies as well. One man asked me why anyone would purchase a calendar of Michelle Obama, as she is a “jerk” and went on a rant about how “we” paid for her Harvard education. I politely demurred that we stocked calendars for all tastes. Dissatisfied with my answer, he sat down at a table, turned the chair so it would be directly in line of sight of the cash wrap and proceeded to glower at me for the 20 minutes it took the upstairs Chinese restaurant upstairs to bring his take-out order to him. Another co-worker warned me that there she has been sexually harassed by a man, who followed her around the kiosk while telling here what he would like to “do” to her. When I asked her why she did not call mall security, she confessed that she did not know if that was okay.

(1)I worked for the same organization for 1.5 years in the early 2000's while J was under and unemployed. I was hired as a seasonal employee and the manager was happy with my work and asked me if I would continue part-time. I worked there until J and I moved to Pittsburgh.

(2)The invitations are placed on open tables by the owner of the florist/tchotchke shop located directly in front of the kiosk. She is a cranky, cranky woman who spends a lot of time complaining about the state of her business and the fact that her customers are “crowded” by the portable display pods in front of the kiosk. Many of the tchotchkes she sells are of a genre hereby dubbed “christian, inspirational”, which would not be a problem except for the fact that a significant demographic of mall customers are older Jewish women who have (I suspect) little use for tin figures of santa claus and gold-glittery tin signs that proclaim “Jesus is King!” She bought several scripture-a-day calendars, stating that she gives them as Christmas gifts to her girlfriends every year.

Law of Unemployment Number One

Unemployed + uninsured + visit to the dentist = 1 cavity and a $400.00 bill.

The upside? The bill was the most painful part of the experience.

Marshall's Greentree Road, 3:00 PM

Wednesday afternoon is the time to wander the Marshall's on Greentree Road if you are interested in observing the cross section of humanity that is the wealthy housewives of Mt. Lebanon. It is also the place to be if you want to come within inches of colliding with a former Penguin turned color announcer known in the Pittsburgh area as the “Ol' Two-Niner”.

The housewives are a scary lot. Unfriendly, dressed to the nines, they stalk the store and stake a claim at the racks of designer clothes at cut-rate prices, hovering over the large, button down w/collar white shirts with scary intensity, sending out a “I'll cut you” vibe to any individual tactless enough to attempt to reach for that size 12 Calvin Klein suit jacket and matching size 14 skirt and ramming into me with their miniature sized shopping carts, pausing to say “excuse me” after bruising my poor hip. The “excuse me” is delivered unrepentantly, a two-word verbal dressing down meant to convey how nervy I am, to be standing in the aisle, blocking her way to the size 6's.

I feel very large next to these women as I rummage through the size 12 and 14 pants, wondering when I will have enough energy to push myself back into shape and reminding myself that even if I am able to achieve some sort of “shape” my hips may be unwilling to allow me into anything smaller than a twelve.

I watch a 14 year old girl try on a short, red strapless dress for an upcoming homecoming dance. Her father comments that she looks sexy. As I enter the dressing rooms to try on a stack of pants and a couple of suits, I tell her to lean over and shake, to make sure the strapless top stays put.

He talks about how he is raising her on his own. It is an excellent ploy, as he and his daughter receive more female attention then either know what to do with. One woman suggests Spanx to wear underneath the dress, to give it a cleaner line. Another gives him options and advice about shoes. As he talks on about her, how conscious she is of her body, her voice floats out from the dressing room where she is changing back into street clothes

“Dad, you know I can hear every word you are saying, don't you?”

The suits don't fit without major alterations to both pants and jacket. No money for alterations now, no suit. The pants look terrible, cheap and ill fitting. I sigh and return everything to the attendant.

I wander a little longer, seeking pajamas for Baby Alien. At 9.5 months old, he measures 34 inches long and towers over most of his mates in the baby room at daycare. I've already looked in several thrift shops, but have not yet gathered the patience necessary to dig through the poorly organized sections of baby wear, a puzzlement as the adult clothes are neatly organized by color and size.

I've been tired a great deal this week. I sleep a lot during the day, my body's way of recovering from the months of stress it has been carrying. Next week Baby Alien drops to part time daycare and I am making plans for the days he is home.

Pushed Out

On the 22 of this month I became officially unemployed. For the first time in my life, since I started working at the age of twelve, I deliberately walked off a job.

It is cold comfort that I choose this status voluntarily.

It is cold comfort that Pennsylvania is an “at-will” state and my contract allowed me to exercise an option to leave their employ without notice.

It is cold comfort that the majority of my coworkers were upset and threw a cocktail hour in my honor on Friday evening.

It is cold comfort that my former employer framed my resignation in such a way as to imply that I was fired and made a major error in the subject line of the email he sent out (1) to the rest of the company announcing my departure. I swiftly dispatched the notion that I was fired as untrue and requested that they tell anyone who believed that I was fired the truth.

It is cold comfort that one of the most libertarian, pro-business of my friends was the first to suggest, without having listened to any analysis of the situation from myself or J, that I was pushed out deliberately because I had a baby. He also, in all seriousness, suggested that I sue them into non-existence, pointing out that “they don't make enough money to settle and you'll bankrupt them if you sue”.

J and I don't have the money to sue, but it was interesting how to witness how quickly an individual's professed values change when it concerns people he or she knows in real life.

I can't prove that my former employer pushed me out. Instructions were always given verbally, never in writing. Negative feedback, on the other hand, was given in writing and usually involved some element of, for lack of better phrasing, “making shit up.”

It has been five days and I'm still emotionally and physically exhausted. The teeth grinding has stopped and the migraines are gone, but I feel achy and sore and bruised all over.

And I have no idea what I'm going to do next.

(1) He referenced an employee fired in January instead of myself.

F(***) You, Go to (****)

Note: In case the title isn't enough of a warning, this post will be a rant. Possibly a profanity-laced rant. I would like to think that the profanity used in this post will be judiciously chosen, well placed and not suffer from overuse, but I make no promises.

I've reached the saturation point of bullshit that I can handle. So much so that the driver who honked at me this morning under the misperception I was taking up too much of his lane (never mind the parked cars that kept me from pulling over or the fact he was going approximately 15 miles over the speed limit) reduced me to tears. Because of the stress of the last several weeks, I’m tearing through my extremely limited supply of migraine medication at an unprecedented rate. As my last checkup included a demoralizing lecture from the nurse practitioner on my BMI being too high and a grilling on why I needed to take sumatriptan instead of Excedrin Migraine (1), I was not eager to call and ask for more medication. Fortunately, I received the answering service and left my request in the form of a message.

In addition to being placed on indefinite probation, my supervisor oh-so-casually mentioned to me on Thursday that they were relieving me of my responsibility to facilitate an annual client meeting as they had decided to “go in a different direction with the group”. This was followed up with an email from the unofficial leader of the group (2), who thanked me for my service.

And promptly assigned responsibility for the meeting to an individual who, slated to present at the last client gathering, bailed two hours before it was scheduled to take place without submitting any of his materials and without telling me (the person who was supposed to get the materials for incorporation into the meeting) directly.

An individual who has created for himself quite a reputation for pawning his work off on his all female team who he endearingly refers to as “my girls”. If I'm still employed when the next meeting comes around, I am going to get a great deal of pleasure out of saying “NO” to organizing slides and taking notes.

I was bluntly honest with my supervisor. I admitted that I was not terribly upset that I was being relieved of this particular duty, as the leader of the group is especially difficult to work with (2) and preparations for the meeting take an inordinate amount of time. But the timing of this decision goes a long way to confirm my suspicions that they are building a case for my dismissal. Removal from the group also disqualifies me from any year-end bonuses that may be distributed.

As an example of my mindset, this exchange between J and myself from a few days ago:

but does it really matter? They are just saying the same shit your family says. I'm just tired of being the bigger person. Really tired of it. Where has it gotten me, really? I'm being pushed out of my job, my mom wavers between passive aggressive and abusive, your family acts like I'M the crazy one when I do defend myself and the people that I count amongst my closest friends feel free to demonize my values and totally disregard my feelings.

The furor over Park51 (formerly known and Cordoba House) has made a specific subset (aka libertarian/conservative) of my friends go insane. I violated my steadfast rule of not engaging with friends or family members over controversial targets and put myself squarely in the line for a series of ad hominem attacks that summed me up to be a lazy hypocritical communist liar only interested in taking away other people's property from two of my friends. This should, on the surface be laughable.

I'm not laughing in the least. I've spent the last several days crying and trying to pinpoint when it was that I learned that it was not OK to defend myself and I should not bother trying. I think sometime during my adolescence, between teachers who told me I should just suck it up, stop being childish and that I deserved the bullying and my mother, who proclaimed that my expectations of behavior from other people were “too high” (3).

I'm “hypocritical”. The agency for this accusation is based on the claim that (as a liberal) I do not criticize the way they treat Muslim women. When I pointed out that conservative Christians are more than happy to give just about every other religious creed (including Christianity) a pass on their treatment of women and that it was inconsistent to demonize an entire faith while simultaneously claiming that they were the only parties who cared enough to speak out against the terrible treatment of Muslim women, I was told that listing the negative practices of other religious faiths was “excusing” the mistreatment. What?

Here is a short list of known liberals who actively campaign against the mistreatment of women (including Muslims) : Nicolas Kristof, William Jefferson Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Greg Mortenson, Oprah Winfrey, William Gates, Jimmy Carter. Granted some on this list are not directly speaking out against the mistreatment of Muslim women. Instead they are building schools, funding vaccinations, supporting micropayment programs and training programs, all work that gets on with the job of helping women help themselves. The argument that liberals don’t care about the rights of Muslim women is disingenuous, as it assumes that liberals deliberately exclude Muslim women whenever they discuss the practice of FGM, forced marriage, stonings, rapes and other atrocities committed upon women everywhere.

I'm a “Communist liar.” I don't even know what to say this one, except to check the calendar and make sure it is 2010, not 1955. Ditto for “taking away people's property”. I don't have any idea what to do with that statement, it doesn't make sense.

And the worse accusation, that I'm “lazy”. I’m “lazy” because I support welfare, social security and programs such as WIC, even though I’ve only asked for a handout once in my life and paid the money back as soon as I had it available. Aside from that one example, I have never asked any individual, organization or governmental entity for money. The time that my parents covered the gas bill and paid my federal taxes while I was in graduate school? They offered when they saw how little I made on my previous year's tax return.(4) When I wanted to move back to PA after my stint in South Carolina went awry? They offered to me a room in their home until I got married, so I could save money towards a place to live. When J was underemployed and making only enough money to pay the mortgage and nothing else, I got a second job. When we got behind on the gas bill because I was not making enough money from two jobs I arranged a payment plan.

I put 10% of my paycheck towards retirement savings every month because I don't have any expectation of relying on social security. Until Baby Alien arrived I was saving an additional 1K a month as rainy day money. I used that money to fund my maternity leave and did not ask for a cent from my employer. I don’t carry a balance on my credit card for longer than two months and I pay all my bills on time.

I’m “lazy”, even though the original statement, “Would you support the building of a shrine at Pearl Harbor” is a bad analogy that could have been confirmed as such with a 10 second web search using the terms “shrine” and “Pearl Harbor”. I’m “lazy”,  even though I’m not the one that proceeded to argue that there shouldn’t be a Shinto shrine there either, because the Japanese attacked the United States. What the fuck does the practice of Shinto have to do with one sovereign nation attacking another? Japan doesn’t have a national religion.

Want lazy, you who could not bother to spend five minutes to determine the source of "the shrine at Pearl Harbor = cultural center at Ground Zero" analogy or the groups currently using it. One of those groups? The same subset of people who attempted to argue that even “if” Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, he wasn’t a US citizen because Hawaii was not a state when he was born. Granted that group backpedaled (eventually) from that assertion, but using an intellectually lazy group of crazies as source material for your arguments is being intellectually lazy squared.(5)

Want lazy? You did not bother to pull up a map and actually look at the location of Ground Zero or the proposed location of the cultural center. You argued that because the wheel of a plane went through the roof of the building at the site of the cultural center, it is part of Ground Zero. When it was pointed out to you that using where parts of a plane fell is poor criteria, as it includes an enormous chunk of Manhattan, you declared all of Manhattan to be sacred and went off on a rant about how the area should be zoned Mosque free. When it was pointed out to you that zoning the area to not allow the building of a Mosque or Muslim community center violates the first amendment, you conveniently ignored that oh-so-inconvenient establishment clause by arguing that if an HOA can dictate what color a property own can paint his or her home, then the city of New York can zone Manhattan as Mosque/Muslim community center free.

In arguing as such, you conflated “freedom of expression” and “freedom from religion”. Freedom of expression means that the government can not prevent you from saying what you want. It does not protect an individual from the private consequences of public speech. Home Owner Associations are not public government entities, they are private organizations.

Freedom from religion means that a public government entity can not permit a city to zone an area as free from one specific religious faith. It is either all or nothing. You want a Islam free zone in all of Manhattan? Fine. Kiss goodbye to every single church, synagogue and religiously affiliated community center in Manhattan as well. You are aware that under that criteria, that list would possibly include the YMCA?

So for calling me a lazy hypocritical communist liar, fuck you. Go to hell.

(1) Excedrin Migraine gives me the shakes, a side effect so bad that I would prefer the pain and nausea instead.
(2) See posts from April 2009.
(3) Blaming my mother is so passe, yet here I am.
(4) I would have done my own taxes, but my father enjoys that sort of thing and it became a ritual for him to do it every year, just as I would wrap my mother's Christmas presents from him every year.
(5) Try to follow the logic of the organization who is offering such sparkling arguments, gentlemen. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, located on Hawaiian island of Oahu (a U.S. Territory since 1898) in 1941, they were attacking the United States  so Shinto shrine near Pearl Harbor = BAD. But when Barack Obama was born in 1961 on the Hawaiian island of Oahu (the same exact island attacked by the Japanese 20 years earlier), he was not born in the United States, thus can’t be a citizen. Which one is it?

Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1893 and became a U.S. Territory in 1898. In 1900, citizens born on the Hawaiian islands were granted United States citizenship. So even if Hawaii had not been an actual state in 1961, Obama would still be considered a U.S. citizen because he was born on a U.S. Territory to a U.S. citizen. Which I learned in 20 minutes of research.

Evaluation

I don't like changing jobs. I am proud that my employment history indicates a personality that is happy to stay around long term. I try very hard to work out differences. When I changed jobs two years ago, I agonized for several months over leaving, even though I knew intellectually that I was not challenged enough and could earn a considerable amount more somewhere else. But it was not until six months into my new position, when I learned that my former employer had fired everyone and closed the office that I breathed a sigh of relief over moving on to something new.

I've been trying for the past two weeks to wrap my brain around the fact that I will need to start looking again. It is becoming painfully apparent that I am not a good fit at this job and that I must find a new position before I find myself unemployed.

An implementation with a new client went terribly wrong and I am on probation, indefinitely. All the work I do must be reviewed by my supervisor on a weekly basis and by the VP on a monthly basis. If I fail to complete any task by the end of the week, I must give my supervisor a detailed explanation as to why it was not completed.

There is a long story behind this, but any explanation I have tried to come up with ends with me sounding as if I am incapable of taking responsibility for my failures. The VP is not interested in my perspective on what went wrong – if he was, he would have asked me about my perspective before announcing that I as going to have the hell micromanaged out of me. There is also a strong element of scapegoating behind the VP's decision. Conversations with the other actors in this project have revealed that I was the only individual disciplined.

So I'm looking. And considering my options.

Heartache

Last Saturday was the Fourth of July. As is our custom, we drove out to Washington County to celebrate with close friends, a married couple (C & D) with a large home and lots of property. Plenty of grilled food, cold salads, chips, desserts and beers of both the home brewed (by J and C) and mass produced variety. J and the party's host set off fireworks after dark.

It was especially joyful this year. Baby Alien, at seven months, is a stubborn bundle of laughter so interested in the world around him that bedtime is considered a personal affront. He might miss something. The house was overrun with children, including a little girl several months older than Baby Alien. D, eighteen weeks pregnant with twins, was passing around the latest set of ultrasound images. A boy and a girl.

Monday afternoon, D miscarried. Both babies lost. There were no warning signs. D was in perfect health, the pregnancy was progressing well, all her tests were normal.

Just one of those things that happens sometimes.

When words fail, make food. Express love and concern via a dish that takes some time and a bit of effort. Effort to hunt down the correct chili varietals to season the dish. Spend some more time carefully removing seeds and veins from the dried peppers, washing hands thoroughly to avoid getting oil in the eyes. Hack apart 4.5 pounds of pork shoulder while the chilies reconstitute, simmering in a mixture of water, tomatoes, cumin, onion and garlic. Throw together, cook overnight. Skim the fat, add grits.

 Try not to think about how colossally unfair are the machinations of the universe. Try not to think about the last fifteen months, how miserable you were to be pregnant, while your friend would give anything to still be in that state. Hope that she doesn't hate you now. Think of clichés instead, because the words are easy.

Today J and I drove out to their home, Baby Alien in the backseat, a container of pozole on ice in the trunk. J stayed in the car with Baby Alien while I headed towards the front door. I handed them the food, gave them hugs. Told them how sorry I was. D cried. I cried. C asked us to wait a moment, he had something for J.

A case of the latest home brew. An apology for being so sad, but “we picked up the ashes today”.

Drive away. Hope that they know the food was a gesture from the heart and that exhortations that they call us if they need anything are more then just empty words.

Baby Alien sleeps now. He has a lingering cough that he can not shake, a remnant of his first illness (the croup). Intellectually I know that is nothing, as I caught the virus from Baby Alien and have not been able to shake the cough either. Still, tomorrow we will call his doctor.

The Unbearable Frustration and Anxiety of Being

I am not OK, some days. Some days the normal vagaries of life wear me down to pointlessness. Some days this is more than just the normal weariness that accompanies caring for an infant.

It is the little things. The attempts to reach out that seem to backfire. The moments that I step out of my comfort zone that go awry. Some days I feel that no matter how much I try, I will always remained isolated. That Baby Alien will grow up to deal with a weird, sad, socially maladjusted mama whom he is embarrassed to call his mother.

My interpretive skills have gone to total shit. I seem to have lost any ability to navigate social settings with anything resembling grace, and I was never all that good at reading people to begin with.

I went to a bridal shower a few weeks ago. Part of stepping out (I hate showers) of my comfort zone. I bought a dress from Ann Taylor. I dug out the pretty silver shoes I wore to my brother's wedding. I put on the pretty Baccarat crystal necklace J purchased for me as a gift on our trip to Paris. I ruined two pairs of pantyhose before leaving the house. I tucked a bottle of wine into the gift bag, to go along with the corkscrew set off the bride and groom's registry. How bad could it be? I knew the groom - he was the brother of a close childhood friend. I knew the groom's mother (like a second mother to me), his sister, his two sisters-in-law, his aunts, his cousins. I knew some of his friends and the bride - J and I had socialized with him, her and their friends enough to be excited over their upcoming wedding.

It was awful. Not the kind of awful that you walk into right away, but the type of clusterfuck that starts out innocuously and slowly builds momentum until you hit a point where you wonder why you bothered to buy the pretty Ann Taylor dress and dig out the silver sandals that really don't fit your feet properly. The wild desire that you entertained days earlier to get out of the house and do anything gives way to frantic plots to escape.

The groom's mother greeted me warmly and made another place at the already crowded table for me to sit, with the rest of her family. Demanded to see baby pictures of Baby Alien. Passed around the iPod containing cute photos of baby. With the exception of one aunt (1), all cooed over photos and caught me up to speed on small town gossip while the aunt changed the subject to her children whenever anyone at the table asked me a question about Baby Alien.

The three, KN, KB and H, sat in a fog of tension so thick it was visible. Cut out of the shower planning by the bride's sister and multitude of friends while still expected to front the money to pay for the party, they plotted ways to avenge themselves on the other bridesmaids and spent the bulk of the shower tracking gifts and cleaning up wrapping paper with politely bitter smiles. In a classic demonstration of social ineptness, I missed the cues that the wanted my assistance in exacting said revenge by declining to put the tickets in the baskets. (2)

And so the shower progressed, with angry bridesmaids on one side, a politely hostile aunt on another and a disinterested waitstaff on the third, as I was unable to get a drink or refill of water. The guests grew restless and hungry (but not thirsty, as I appeared to be the only person in the room forced to ration her beverage), with nary a roll or leaf of lettuce to nibble on an hour into the party. Many guests, desperately downed the elaborate wedding cake cookie placed at each table as a party favor. One table managed to score several six packs of Miller Lite and were merrily drinking their way through bottle after bottle.

Desperate for some distraction from the lack of food, the angry sisters took it upon themselves to begin drawing tickets for the baskets. Service of the meal was rushed as the bride needed to begin opening gifts in short order if the party was going to end at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, as originally planned.

The gifts included the traditional mix of tacky lingerie and other "martial aids" that are so de rigor at bridal showers in these parts. It ended with the groom appearing with a large bouquet of flowers and the groom's mother asking me if I had eaten the fish, as one of the guests had become ill shortly after finishing her meal.

While on my way out, I stopped in the restroom to change my clothes and heard the aforementioned sick guest in the next stall. It was not the fish that had bought her low. It was the several bottles of Miller Lite.

Weeks later, this should just be a funny story. But it is not. Instead all the subtext from that day has been tinged ugly. This past weekend my brother told us that S and H are hosting a bonfire, to which J and I were not invited. He did not invite us because his wife, H, did not want me there.

Rationally, I understand that the bridal shower had nothing to do with the bonfire. H has never warmed to me and this is not the first time we have been excluded from plans that include my brother and his wife.

But it stung. It stung me, who has tried so hard over the years to get along with H, a person who I genuinely like. It hurts to see J, who counts S as one of his closest friends and chose S to be the best man at our wedding, who socialized with S and my brother before he met me, excluded and to know that I am the reason.

Now the comment that one of the sisters made before I left the shower, about how dressed up I was, seems catty rather than a humorous observation. And my efforts to get out in the world seem foolish, useless and pointless.

And worse of all, I am afraid I am turning into someone J is ashamed of.

(1) I was unsurprised. Several years ago I took a beautiful candid photograph (really, it was a great photo) of her youngest daughter playing during a family party and offered up a copy for her album. She complained that I made her daughter look too old and has apparently entertained an active dislike of me from that day forward.

(2) I am routinely astounded by how quickly moments like the above can propel me back to high school, when I was painted as scolding, moralistic tattle-telling goody-two-shoes merely because I was disinterested in participating in any of the dumb juvenile delinquency of my classmates. And I never told on anyone, ever. I got that, much undeserved reputation when I inadvertently revealed to a male upperclassman that the girl he was dating had lied about her age. I shall never forget the upbraiding I received from one of the cheerleaders, nor the threat that she would "make my life hell" if he broke up with the girl. As my high school life was sheer misery, I'm not sure what she could have done to it any worse because it was that bad. As for the sisters - if they had spelled out for me what they wanted I would have happily volunteered.

Things I Don't Like

I don't like being held up as an example of how pregnant women are supposed to act.

However one of my (male) coworkers has deemed it fit to use me as an example whenever his pregnant wife complains that she is tired or feels limited in what she can do on a day-to-day basis.

As his wife is not working, my coworker feels that it is necessary to remind her that I got up and went to work every day until the end of my pregnancy. Literally. When I pointed to out to coworker that I did very, very little but go to work, forcing J into multiple roles of cook, dishwasher, cleaner-of-kitty-litter boxes and scrubber of toilets, he shrugged off my gentle objections with a "but, still..."

I am not amused. I am offended. And I would not be at all surprised if this poor woman, who is now late in her third trimester, hates me.