Quiet Monday
Feb. 23rd, 2004 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
klsiegel320So here it is, Monday morning. Still quiet; half the team is still on the road and not yet arrived. I do have things I probably should do, but nothing that really sparks my interest, unfortunately. I seem to be running out of motivation.
That's partly tiredness. I tried last week to make a commitment to being asleep by 10, since I have to get up at 6 or so to meet the colleague with whom I'm currently carpooling. I didn't have remarkable success, although I think I did get a fraction more sleep than I might ordinarily have done. I might have gotten more yet, if I'd been smart and disabled the alarm Saturday morning...ah, well.
And of course the tiredness is pretty perpetual, because for reasons I don't entirely understand, I do not sleep well on the road. One might think I would be used to it by now; after all, I've been doing it for almost a year. One might even think things would have reversed by now, and I would sleep less well in company than alone.
Not so. At home in NJ, I sleep like a dead thing. Always. Regardless of the snores (his or mine, or even Jetsam's; yes, my cats snore).
On the road, I seem to have a terrible time getting myself to turn off whatever stupid thing I'm watching and go to bed. And then I have a terrible time getting myself to put the book down and turn off the light.
Although I confess, sometimes lately that's because I'm so engrossed in something good that I can't bear to put it down. Since we're confessing here, and since this is at least shielded behind a cut, I'll make a full confession: I've developed a certain sweet tooth for erotic romance novellas.
This is junk food, I know. I am a woman who reads Milton, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Lewis, McCaffrey, Norton, Cherryh, O'Brian. I listen to Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Brahms. I discuss serious theology and politics and sociology.
But I also watch NASCAR races. I watch reruns of Charmed most evenings, right before the reruns of West Wing. And I read romance novellas.
I can explain, I think. Partly it's sheer loneliness; the exploits and adventures of the hero and heroine - because they are truly in love and not just screwing each other senseless - warm my heart with thoughts of my own real-life romance novel. But some of the writing is really actually very good. Genuine characterizations, fully realized settings, real risk and conflict, and usually at least a wedding or a promise of one at the end.
Much of it is dreck, granted. I find myself taking target practice on some of these, mentally copyediting to try to improve what fundamentally cannot be rescued. I find myself occasionally yawning and wishing the author owned a thesaurus; sometimes I find myself realizing that while she owns a thesaurus, she needs a dictionary to go with it, accompanied by a decent sense of the English sentence.
But there's something uplifting about a story in which a genuine good guy and a genuine good girl get together and become a genuinely good couple. And I do think it's because essentially that's what happened to me in real life: I met my husband over a fortune cookie at a campground in Pennsylvania, and we never looked back. So regardless of the description of the couple, in my mind they're always us.
Which is why I will also confess that occasionally I find myself plotting one of these in my head. Even a little on paper, during an exceptionally boring meeting. (And they think I'm taking diligent notes.) I have my setting, my hero and heroine, and some of their essential conflict. I think I have the solution to their biggest difficulty. You always have to have that; remember this is romance, which is a form of comedy: everybody winds up married at the end (as opposed to tragedy, where everybody winds up dead at the end).
I even have a related fantasy of being so good at this, and selling enough work, that it pays the bills and lets me go home. Which I guess brings us all the way back to why I'm reading trashy novellas in the first place, eh?
So what else is going on?
The routine here is about to get disrupted. One of the things they're really enforcing here is one car per two people, period. It isn't a suggestion; it is being forced on us by the project management.
Since the beginning of January, I've been sharing a ride with a colleague from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who's been staying in the same apartment complex as I am. It's an early morning, because he prefers to leave at 7:30 and stop at Starbuck's on the way to the office, and prefers to get in by 8:00.
But he isn't unreasonable, really. He would pick me up after Starbuck's if I asked (and has on occasion), and usually he's ready to leave before me in the evening, if anything. So I'm not really trapped. (Except I feel trapped because I don't have my own car and therefore I'm not free to come and go as I please, even if I know for sure that most days I wouldn't do anything different than what I'm doing now. But there you are: I'm not really trapped.)
On weekends like this just past, when we're both staying in town, I ride to the airport on Friday afternoon with another colleague, drop him off and use that car for the weekend. On weekends when the Halifaxian and I both travel, he leaves me the car on Thursday night and has a car service fetch him at whatever ungodly hour he has to be picked up to get to the airport and start his interminable travel home (which typically takes three flights and twelve hours to accomplish, on a good day). I then have the drive to myself in the morning on Friday, and in the afternoon to the airport, where I park the car and pick it up again when I come back.
This is a comfortable routine, and it works well enough. Except that the Halifaxian is leaving for good this Friday. So he's turning in the mini-leased car, and on Monday the other colleague is moving into his apartment. At which point, there really will be just one car.
The first place this pinches is that I will no longer be free even on alternate Friday mornings. The colleague with whom I will now be sharing a car goes home every weekend, but lives in Washington, so he's in the office even on the days he travels. Since he does go home every weekend, I'll still have the car on the weekends I'm not traveling, and I've been assured by the project manager that if it were to happen that we were both staying, they would cover a rental car for the weekend so that I'd have a car to myself during off-time. And he isn't quite such an early bird, so I might get just a tiny bit more sleep.
And I don't really go anywhere in the evenings during the week anyway. The most I might consider doing would be a quick grocery run; and even that most weeks can be relegated to the weekend. The one sticky place we have this week is that I need the car Wednesday to get to church for Ash Wednesday. Ideally, I'd be able to go to the 7 a.m. service, but I fear that wouldn't get me back until 8 or so, which would make Mark later than he likes. So probably I'll go to the 7 p.m. service, but that will necessitate navigating heavy traffic, and I have no idea what time I need to leave in order to be there in time...
And then I just spoke with said colleague, and he's okay with being a bit later that day; up to me, he said. So.
I'm toying with the idea of mentioning this to the one colleague I have who I know is also Episcopalian, in case he might want to go with (maybe even give me a ride so I can leave the car with Mark)...just not entirely sure. We're becoming closer friends, I think, from sheer amount of contact, but he's prickly to deal with sometimes.
At least I'm beginning to know why. He sees himself as ultra-conservative; he sees me as ultra-liberal. He is fond of calling folk of my ilk "bed-wetting liberals," and uses this term in reference to various members of his family all the time. He discovered when he called me that that the kitten has teeth; he was told firmly that he may call his family anything he likes, but he will not call me names. Ever.
And I really don't think I would describe him as ultra-conservative, unless I've totally misunderstood what that means. Because - for example - he is entirely opposed to the various movements afoot to amend state and federal constitutions in order to ban gay marriages. He's perfectly fine with homosexuals being allowed to marry; he doesn't feel it's any kind of threat to marriage at all. He opposed the war in Iraq, and found the justification flimsy and unconvincing. He agrees that everybody should have basic shelter, food, health care.
Where we differ, he contends, is this: the Democrats, he says, want to take his money and give it to somebody else, to solve the problems that person has. The Republicans want that other person to solve his or her own problems. It's about personal responsibility and accountability, he says. And dismisses out of hand the suggestion that there might be people who simply can't make it without help.
And then he revealed far more than he thought, far more I think than he intended. He said he had learned, growing up as one of seven children of a workaholic, alcoholic father, that you cannot depend on anyone in this world but yourself.
In other words, nobody ever helped me, so why should I help anybody? The deeply buried fury beneath the words was a little scarily intimate, for me; I think he was entirely unaware of it. He was simply stating his case; he had no clue that he opened for me a window into his own personal hell.
Certainly there are people who manage, somehow, to survive and even thrive in tough conditions. There are people who make it in spite of the odds. There are people who come from nothing and make something of themselves.
But there are people who can't, and there are more of those now than ever. Saying "get a job" is all well and good - except when there are no jobs, or the jobs there are don't pay enough to live on. It's fine to say "get a job outside your field, take anything that pays, take three jobs if you have to" - but when the net salary of a person making minimum wage isn't enough to pay for rent and food and health care - what then? What necessity of life do you do without?
The implication, of course, is that anyone who can't do exactly as he did, and as his father did, is somehow lazy or unwilling or not trying; that somehow that person in poverty deserves his condition, that it's all his own fault and therefore his responsibility to remedy as he can. The necessary end result of his attitude is blaming the victim.
He would no doubt say that the necessary end result of my attitude is that nobody is accountable for anything. It makes me want to argue with him, makes me want to try to teach him. Makes me want to say, "But honey, it just isn't that simple."
I mean, I'm all for personal accountability and responsibility, but within reason. If we say that every person is solely responsible for and to him- or herself, then the necessary conclusion is that if someone needs help, too bad - if they be like to die, let them die and decrease the surplus population.
I'm tempted sorely to remind him that Jesus didn't chide the five thousand for not bringing enough food with them; he simply abundantly fed them, because they were hungry. He healed the sick when they needed it, not when they could pay for it. He had compassion on those who were marginalized by their society - widows, orphans, outcasts - and made it clear that in God's eyes, no one is marginal. He said, "As I have loved you, so you should love one another." When he had washed the disciples' feet and dried them with a towel, he said, "As I have washed your feet, so you should wash one another's feet."
And really, I can't say any of that. It really just isn't my place to say any of that, except as an opening occurs. I do feel very strongly called to pray for him; some little voice says he needs it more than he could ever admit even to himself.
I'm sorely tempted to ask whether not being able to depend on anyone but himself means he can't even depend on God - but I don't need to ask, because I know the answer. As I fear abandonment - and therefore at bottom abandonment even by God - so does he fear dependency, and therefore at bottom even dependence upon God. We are more alike than he knows.
That's partly tiredness. I tried last week to make a commitment to being asleep by 10, since I have to get up at 6 or so to meet the colleague with whom I'm currently carpooling. I didn't have remarkable success, although I think I did get a fraction more sleep than I might ordinarily have done. I might have gotten more yet, if I'd been smart and disabled the alarm Saturday morning...ah, well.
And of course the tiredness is pretty perpetual, because for reasons I don't entirely understand, I do not sleep well on the road. One might think I would be used to it by now; after all, I've been doing it for almost a year. One might even think things would have reversed by now, and I would sleep less well in company than alone.
Not so. At home in NJ, I sleep like a dead thing. Always. Regardless of the snores (his or mine, or even Jetsam's; yes, my cats snore).
On the road, I seem to have a terrible time getting myself to turn off whatever stupid thing I'm watching and go to bed. And then I have a terrible time getting myself to put the book down and turn off the light.
Although I confess, sometimes lately that's because I'm so engrossed in something good that I can't bear to put it down. Since we're confessing here, and since this is at least shielded behind a cut, I'll make a full confession: I've developed a certain sweet tooth for erotic romance novellas.
This is junk food, I know. I am a woman who reads Milton, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Lewis, McCaffrey, Norton, Cherryh, O'Brian. I listen to Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Brahms. I discuss serious theology and politics and sociology.
But I also watch NASCAR races. I watch reruns of Charmed most evenings, right before the reruns of West Wing. And I read romance novellas.
I can explain, I think. Partly it's sheer loneliness; the exploits and adventures of the hero and heroine - because they are truly in love and not just screwing each other senseless - warm my heart with thoughts of my own real-life romance novel. But some of the writing is really actually very good. Genuine characterizations, fully realized settings, real risk and conflict, and usually at least a wedding or a promise of one at the end.
Much of it is dreck, granted. I find myself taking target practice on some of these, mentally copyediting to try to improve what fundamentally cannot be rescued. I find myself occasionally yawning and wishing the author owned a thesaurus; sometimes I find myself realizing that while she owns a thesaurus, she needs a dictionary to go with it, accompanied by a decent sense of the English sentence.
But there's something uplifting about a story in which a genuine good guy and a genuine good girl get together and become a genuinely good couple. And I do think it's because essentially that's what happened to me in real life: I met my husband over a fortune cookie at a campground in Pennsylvania, and we never looked back. So regardless of the description of the couple, in my mind they're always us.
Which is why I will also confess that occasionally I find myself plotting one of these in my head. Even a little on paper, during an exceptionally boring meeting. (And they think I'm taking diligent notes.) I have my setting, my hero and heroine, and some of their essential conflict. I think I have the solution to their biggest difficulty. You always have to have that; remember this is romance, which is a form of comedy: everybody winds up married at the end (as opposed to tragedy, where everybody winds up dead at the end).
I even have a related fantasy of being so good at this, and selling enough work, that it pays the bills and lets me go home. Which I guess brings us all the way back to why I'm reading trashy novellas in the first place, eh?
So what else is going on?
The routine here is about to get disrupted. One of the things they're really enforcing here is one car per two people, period. It isn't a suggestion; it is being forced on us by the project management.
Since the beginning of January, I've been sharing a ride with a colleague from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who's been staying in the same apartment complex as I am. It's an early morning, because he prefers to leave at 7:30 and stop at Starbuck's on the way to the office, and prefers to get in by 8:00.
But he isn't unreasonable, really. He would pick me up after Starbuck's if I asked (and has on occasion), and usually he's ready to leave before me in the evening, if anything. So I'm not really trapped. (Except I feel trapped because I don't have my own car and therefore I'm not free to come and go as I please, even if I know for sure that most days I wouldn't do anything different than what I'm doing now. But there you are: I'm not really trapped.)
On weekends like this just past, when we're both staying in town, I ride to the airport on Friday afternoon with another colleague, drop him off and use that car for the weekend. On weekends when the Halifaxian and I both travel, he leaves me the car on Thursday night and has a car service fetch him at whatever ungodly hour he has to be picked up to get to the airport and start his interminable travel home (which typically takes three flights and twelve hours to accomplish, on a good day). I then have the drive to myself in the morning on Friday, and in the afternoon to the airport, where I park the car and pick it up again when I come back.
This is a comfortable routine, and it works well enough. Except that the Halifaxian is leaving for good this Friday. So he's turning in the mini-leased car, and on Monday the other colleague is moving into his apartment. At which point, there really will be just one car.
The first place this pinches is that I will no longer be free even on alternate Friday mornings. The colleague with whom I will now be sharing a car goes home every weekend, but lives in Washington, so he's in the office even on the days he travels. Since he does go home every weekend, I'll still have the car on the weekends I'm not traveling, and I've been assured by the project manager that if it were to happen that we were both staying, they would cover a rental car for the weekend so that I'd have a car to myself during off-time. And he isn't quite such an early bird, so I might get just a tiny bit more sleep.
And I don't really go anywhere in the evenings during the week anyway. The most I might consider doing would be a quick grocery run; and even that most weeks can be relegated to the weekend. The one sticky place we have this week is that I need the car Wednesday to get to church for Ash Wednesday. Ideally, I'd be able to go to the 7 a.m. service, but I fear that wouldn't get me back until 8 or so, which would make Mark later than he likes. So probably I'll go to the 7 p.m. service, but that will necessitate navigating heavy traffic, and I have no idea what time I need to leave in order to be there in time...
And then I just spoke with said colleague, and he's okay with being a bit later that day; up to me, he said. So.
I'm toying with the idea of mentioning this to the one colleague I have who I know is also Episcopalian, in case he might want to go with (maybe even give me a ride so I can leave the car with Mark)...just not entirely sure. We're becoming closer friends, I think, from sheer amount of contact, but he's prickly to deal with sometimes.
At least I'm beginning to know why. He sees himself as ultra-conservative; he sees me as ultra-liberal. He is fond of calling folk of my ilk "bed-wetting liberals," and uses this term in reference to various members of his family all the time. He discovered when he called me that that the kitten has teeth; he was told firmly that he may call his family anything he likes, but he will not call me names. Ever.
And I really don't think I would describe him as ultra-conservative, unless I've totally misunderstood what that means. Because - for example - he is entirely opposed to the various movements afoot to amend state and federal constitutions in order to ban gay marriages. He's perfectly fine with homosexuals being allowed to marry; he doesn't feel it's any kind of threat to marriage at all. He opposed the war in Iraq, and found the justification flimsy and unconvincing. He agrees that everybody should have basic shelter, food, health care.
Where we differ, he contends, is this: the Democrats, he says, want to take his money and give it to somebody else, to solve the problems that person has. The Republicans want that other person to solve his or her own problems. It's about personal responsibility and accountability, he says. And dismisses out of hand the suggestion that there might be people who simply can't make it without help.
And then he revealed far more than he thought, far more I think than he intended. He said he had learned, growing up as one of seven children of a workaholic, alcoholic father, that you cannot depend on anyone in this world but yourself.
In other words, nobody ever helped me, so why should I help anybody? The deeply buried fury beneath the words was a little scarily intimate, for me; I think he was entirely unaware of it. He was simply stating his case; he had no clue that he opened for me a window into his own personal hell.
Certainly there are people who manage, somehow, to survive and even thrive in tough conditions. There are people who make it in spite of the odds. There are people who come from nothing and make something of themselves.
But there are people who can't, and there are more of those now than ever. Saying "get a job" is all well and good - except when there are no jobs, or the jobs there are don't pay enough to live on. It's fine to say "get a job outside your field, take anything that pays, take three jobs if you have to" - but when the net salary of a person making minimum wage isn't enough to pay for rent and food and health care - what then? What necessity of life do you do without?
The implication, of course, is that anyone who can't do exactly as he did, and as his father did, is somehow lazy or unwilling or not trying; that somehow that person in poverty deserves his condition, that it's all his own fault and therefore his responsibility to remedy as he can. The necessary end result of his attitude is blaming the victim.
He would no doubt say that the necessary end result of my attitude is that nobody is accountable for anything. It makes me want to argue with him, makes me want to try to teach him. Makes me want to say, "But honey, it just isn't that simple."
I mean, I'm all for personal accountability and responsibility, but within reason. If we say that every person is solely responsible for and to him- or herself, then the necessary conclusion is that if someone needs help, too bad - if they be like to die, let them die and decrease the surplus population.
I'm tempted sorely to remind him that Jesus didn't chide the five thousand for not bringing enough food with them; he simply abundantly fed them, because they were hungry. He healed the sick when they needed it, not when they could pay for it. He had compassion on those who were marginalized by their society - widows, orphans, outcasts - and made it clear that in God's eyes, no one is marginal. He said, "As I have loved you, so you should love one another." When he had washed the disciples' feet and dried them with a towel, he said, "As I have washed your feet, so you should wash one another's feet."
And really, I can't say any of that. It really just isn't my place to say any of that, except as an opening occurs. I do feel very strongly called to pray for him; some little voice says he needs it more than he could ever admit even to himself.
I'm sorely tempted to ask whether not being able to depend on anyone but himself means he can't even depend on God - but I don't need to ask, because I know the answer. As I fear abandonment - and therefore at bottom abandonment even by God - so does he fear dependency, and therefore at bottom even dependence upon God. We are more alike than he knows.
