NYCweboy

In My Weakened State

Just when I think I have experienced most any kind of flu or similar illness, I get hit with something else. Or so it seemed this week when I came down with an intestinal bug, one that has, apparently, been making the rounds.

I have discovered that is actually frightening to be unable to keep any solid food in your system for more than an hour. Also, lack of nutrition makes you lightheaded and occasionally incoherent.

I have also discovered that "I am just one stomach flu away from my goal weight" is really only funny when you don't have said stomach flu.

Since much of this week it has been difficult to form coherent sentences, I thought writing was pretty much out of the question.

I went to the doctor on Thursday. And, let it be said that at least I seem to have found a really good set of medical professionals for my primary care practice, at a clinic designed for people of modest incomes. It is literally amazing every time I go there. This time, the caring older lady doctor diagnosed me right quick, and handed me an easy to fill scrip of affordable medication within 20 minutes of my arrival.

A day and a half later, I am attempting to reintroduce solid foods and get back to work. It may be too soon for both (Thursday morning, when I thought I could handle both, was a disaster, but that was before the pills), but I'm big on trying to get back on the horse as soon as possible. The worst that can happen is... I fall off the horse. Or I wind up in my store's back room, sobbing (somthing I was pretty close to on Thursday morning).

Like food poisoning, there's nothing quite like a stomach or intestinal virus to make clear both the basic necessity of food and the fragile state of one's health when normal food intake is interrupted. Trying to remember to treat myself gently and handle with some care is not the worst lesson to be reminded of... although I could have done without the multiple trips to the bathroom and the feeling that the life was being sucked right out of me.

Anyway, let's see how the next few days go, and hopefully, I can get back to more fully writing my thoughts. 

The Swing Of Things

The suitcase officially went back into the basement today, so I guess the vacation excuse is officially over. We got back home late Tuesday night (memo to self: Miami remains the worst reentry point into the US of anywhere), and Wednesday was mostly about resting up and feeling settled back home. Yesterday was my first morning back at work, which was fine, but as usual, the early rising and energy reqired at work makes the afternoon and evening after a bit of a wash.

That, and I'm finding it hard to get back into the swing of things, especially writing. Blogging lately, for me, has been an off and on enterprise at best, and, admittedly, more off than on. Writing about politics isn't simply frustrating at this point; mostly it feels simply pointless. Watching TV news and discussion programs - which I do a whole lot less lately - is frustrating and, I hate to admit, depressing. The waste of time and energy spent on useless topics ("our first story tonight: something not very controversial that happened on the Republican primary trail, amongst candidates you don't care about, pretty much all of whom will never be President.") really just floors me.

I'm left trying to fashion a blog out of movie reviews, the occasional pithy observation, and some witty asides about television programs I've seen, and no, I don't think that's much of a life, either. At the same time, I have no interest in simply stopping. As much as I like the idea that someone reads what I write, enojys it, gets something out of it... I write mostly because it fulfills something for me. And still, as I do it, literally as I type this, I feel more purposeful than I have... well, since I scribbled a few words about my vacation from a hotel room in St. Kitts.

There are two other obvious complications: I just got an iPhone for my birthday - mostly because my iPod died and I've come to the conclusion that the BlackBerry Curve, while nice, is technically flawed - and I have to admit, the remarkable number of things it can do (listening to online radio of disco remixes whilst reading the AP newswire, for example) means not even having to use my laptop for most anything. Second, on the job front, I am up for a fairly significant promotion and, when I am realistic, getting that promotion changes my priorities. I'm actually ambivalent, on a quiet personal level, about moving up, because I don't really know if I can sustain writing, even at this reduced level, over the long term while in management. On the better days, I resolve to try. On the worse dys, I just curl into a ball and avoid everyone and most everything.

(None of the last few sentences belong in a blog post that could potentially be read by your boss... but oh well.)

I suppose my point is that "real life" - off of the interwebs - has become the life I'm actually spending more time leading. Interesting things are happening; interacting with real people in real time is emotionally fulfilling; pounding the keys about personal and political frustrations isn't much fun (and frankly, has never entirely been my style). There's no real conclusion here, no absolute "that's it, I'm done", no resolution that I'll try harder to blog more. It might happen... and probably, however well intentioned, it won't anytime soon. Life goes on, I'm back in the swing of things, the journey continues... and that, really, is what matters, isn't it?

Island Time

Long ago - before I started working for Starbucks and my income dropped to 25% of what it had been - I liked to take my Spring vacations in the Caribbean. Back then I had a plan (a life's goal, if you will) of seeing every Caribbean island at least once. And I was doing pretty well with it, too. In the months before I quit my old job, I had even made plans to make my next vacation a trip to Nevis, which seemed somewhat remote and less accessible.

But then I quit my job (and just to be fair, I'm not trying to blame Starbucks for my financial predicament; I made the leap out of corporate life knowing that it would be less money and challenging. Not quite that challenging, but still), and vacation plans became, literally, a luxury I couldn't aford. For several years I took almost no vaccations involving considerable travel (Maine, Canada, that sort of thing), and indeed, almost no vacations at all. 

Then I moved back home, and between her financial support (I can't pretend it's not there) and my own mildly improved fortunes, vacations to further off places resumed. There was our lovely trip to Tucson and Sedona in Arizona. We took several cruises (qhich is a quick way to up one's island total, I found).

And this year, I managed to convince her to join my island hopping quest directly.

And oddly enough, here we are, on St. Kitts.

St. Kitts and Nevis are one nation, St. Kitts lying slightly north and east of Nevis, the islands separated by a two mile strait (a moment where the Atalntic meets the Caribbean). Yesterday, spur of the moment, we took a ferry from Bassaterre, the capital, over to Charlestown, the capital of Nevis. Two islands, one vacation.

We have shopped and explored and eaten wonderful food and laid in the sun. Well, technically I have laid in the sun while mom sits in the shade or under an umbrella, rrading a book (the latest Sara Paretsky, on her way to capturing my newest Elizabeth George). My face is red and a little sore, but otherwise, it is a typical tanning adventure. Already in just a few hours over a couple of days, I am several shades darker.

St. Kitts is marvelous, less developed than some of the islands (Nassau, Aruba), not too expensive, with some nice opportunities to eat well, pick up a few duty free items (a watch, some perfume, and my boss's cigarettes), and generally relax. Nevis, as I suspected, is somewhat less developed, but even more pleasantly low key and easy going. And we even managed to shoehorn in some history, seeing the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton (which, for this graduate of Hamilton College, was a treat).

It's the change of pace that I notice the most, not surprising for your average impatient New Yorker... but somehow the cheerfulness and friendliness of most Kittians makes the slow pace tolerable. Our dinner the first night (at a local legendary beachside "shack") took 45 minutes to arrive, what with the crowds on hand for the bonfire and the fire eater (he was quite remarkable). Somehow the wait was just fine. And the food was worth the wait.

Being here, on island time, made getting to writing this post an effort; I have had it in my head for tow days, but life, and wandering, intervened. We only have a couple more days to enjoy, but this trip is already one of the standout vacation choices I've ever had.  Now it's off to my morning run and another great cup of coffee at the local coffee place, a cup every bit as satisfying as the ones I get at work.

I promise to poat pictures too.

Oh, and, Happy Easter. :)

Just Another Dream

Apparently I decided - again - to take a week off. Mostly I was very harried at work... and kind of depressed. But both have passed, and rather like waking up from a weeklong dream, I am prepared to write as if I never left.  How one day off turns into seven (or more), I don't know - I wish my regulr job had moments like this.

In any case, a few thoughts to come shortly. 

And So This Is Christmas... And What Have You Done?

Christmas has been, like much this year, a little weird, but also somehow just right. I've felt quite "spirited", full of Chistmas cheer and joy, pretty much since Thanksgiving (and even a little before that, once we decorated the store). And yet, here we are, two days out... and we don't have a tree, and a lot of other work has yet to be done.

I'm pretty sure, without looking, that I mention my love of Christmas each year; it's a family tradition, it's my Swedish heritage, and it's the optimistic kid inside of me, all rolled up. Working in retail - which has been a pretty consistent thread of my adult working life - can really grind the Christmas spirit right out of you. Us salesgirls are a hardened lot. Yet somehow, as if on cue, I hear carols and see decorations, a little switch inside me gets switched on.

And it helps to remember what's really important about Christmas and the season. In our way, the people I know who are serious about a life in retail, kind of share this notion: Christmas is so not about the things and the shopping and the decorations in October. If you can't get beyond that, if Christmas doesn't live somewhere besides the mall... I think one is bound to be disappointed, at some point in life.

One of my customers has been on pins and needles, waiting to see if her County government job would be saved from massive budget cuts, and that her county subsidized living arrangement wouldn't also go away. Yesterday, we got the final good news: her job is secure, at least for now, and she took the big step of finding a new home and is now just settling in. It is, as they say, a Christmas miracle.

I'm afraid I'm something of a traditionalist when it comes to the calendar year; I see the year ending and the new year coming and somehow, this time of year is all endings and beginnings, sum-ups and fresh starts. It's kind of obvious, kind of cliche... yet that's the pattern I see, over and over. I get to December, and my mind just starts to take stock. And plan for the next start.

As I've said, in some ways this has been a very weird, very hard year - emotionally and economically tough, full of strange endings and fresh uncertainties. This year has also been a real test of just how thoroughly I can keep up with my self-assigned task of writing continually and consistently. But here I am, at the end of the year, and I find myself focused on what remains: the good that exists, the joys that highlght my daily routines, the love I have and can freely share. As much as I don't love Lennon's Christmas carol (and this year, I realized, for the first time... it's not Yoko's fault), I find myself, for once, appreciating his song and it's simple opening. So this is Christmas... I hope you had fun.

I did, and I will.

Here In The Real World

So... the last few days were spent mostly offline, out in the "real world." I'm more conscious, these days, of making the choice to step away from the onine sorld in favor of life lived in real time in real space. Working, doing things with friends and family, sleeping (a lot of sleeping)... these are my days.

It's not that I want to write less - I'm behind on movie reviews, for one thing - but the challenge of finding a balance doesn't get easier, and the sense that writing, at times, makes me put the rest of life, the real life, on hold hasn't had its usual appeal. Add to that the dismal state of blogs, especially politically motivated blogs, and the even more depressing state of politics in general... and the appeal of spending time with two very nice nephews just grows and grows.

The thing about life lived in real time, I find, is the way things are more immediate, more practical, more... well, real. Raking leaves, doing laundry, making a pie, serving coffee and cleaning my store... these things keep me grounded, my head focused on things that, in the end, probably matter most. The things we can actually do, the ways our lives can actual touch others, the problems that seem most immediate, most manageable, most solvable. 

So, here I sit while the plumbers install a new faucet in our kitchen - life is full of practical problems, these days - trying to get a little caught up. It's too cold, winter is upon us, I hate the early dying of the light, day after day. This has been, in so many ways, a strange year, full of unexpected twists and turns... only to wind up, here, with more of a sense that I am, in fact, doing okay, right where I need to be, focused (at least some of the time) on things that matter. If things keep eing this interesting, I could even learn to like this real world. At least some of the time.

Hard Times

My instinctive sense for how bad the economy is has been telling me, for some time, that things are getting worse. I don't really have numbers to back it up - there I go again, asserting things without facts - it's just a hunch, a feeling, a sense of the winds blowing and the times changing. I was saying this, just yesterday, to my friend Jennifer, about how I thought the economy could get much worse, and she said "oh God, don't even say it." Because, really, we both kind of sense it to be true.

These are hard times. And it's not surprising, I suppose, that the hardness of these times is driving a fresh wedge into our society, our politics, our personal connections. The things that bind people together - friendships, social connections, shared experiences - are falling away. If you're not facing enormous personal hardship, if you're not sure that the weekly paycheck will even pay to feed you, if you have even the smallest of luxuries to fall back on... how can we expect others to understand the things we're going through?

Reading through even a few of the postings of the "We Are the 99%" Tumblr, I think it's impossible not to be moved. The group blogging experience has yielded up, I suspect, it's ultimate moment: a true sense of just how much pain and suffering is out there, how little we can do to fix it, and how hard it will be to get out of this. Emotionally, it's incredibly wrenching. Politically, I think it's a problem we may never figure out, entirely, how to solve.

It's hard to accept hardship we cannot fix or change. I have a friend at work whose mother recently suffered terrible injuries in a fall, and a few days later her father suffered a series of strokes. It's hardship that I think must be almost unbearable. I can't fix it, I can't take away her pain... all I can do is try and be supportive, and sympathetic. And what I can do feels, naturally, like very little. There's a more distant, objectifying piece I could write about the struggles we are having to see rehab as part of healthcare, when rehab and longer term care are two of the biggest issues in health reform; there's a comment to be made on how my friend, with a coffee shop salary and modest health insurance, can hope to cover what will likely be enormous bills... and on some level, all of that is entirely beside the point.

These are hard times. All of us, really, are bound to be tested, pushed to our limits. Anger and frustration will separate us, make strangers of friends, enemies where shared goals once stood. Not everyone will understand what others see, or share an emotional connection, a sense of passion and purpose for the same goals. These are difficult, upsetting times. And on some level, I'd love to share the anger, the frustration, the sense of upset. It's just not who I am. It's just not how I see. It's just not what I feel.

As hard as these times are, I feel compelled to do what I've always done: love the people I care about most, hope the best for them, do what I can as best I know how, and try my best to take care of myself, so I can be there for others. I'm not angry, or frustrated, or sad, even by the passions that have played out across my life and this blog in the past week. I can't hang onto the negatives, and I can't let anger and fear and the rest rule me. I get it. These are hard times. And they will take people on journeys to new experiences, different places. They will separate and divide us from the familiar and allow us to find something else we may have been meant to be. 

Godspeed, my friends. May we all survive these hardest of times.

Sad Mac

My first exposure to an Apple Computer was the 2E that they got for my high school's math department. I was a junior, and I'd had a computer at home for probably like two years, a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 4K memory. Yes, 4K. 8K was very expensive. The 2E at school had, as I recall 16. Maybe 32.

In college, our computer center was an early adopter of Apples, putting Macintoshes (I called them Macintie at the time) into all three of its computer centers, and selling them through the school store. I didn't get one; the cost of school was high enough before a several thousand dollar toy. I used those computers to write pretty much all my term papers, and more abitiously, used them to tabulate the votes of hundreds of students to select the films for the Student Film Society.

These days, I'd put the whole vote process online.

I wouldn't write about the passing of Steve Jobs except that, more than most any public figure, he probably most literally changed the life I'd known, and yours, too. Apple changed how we thought about computing, what computers could do, how we advertise computers, and how "computer geek" came to take over and define so much of our pop culture.

I think he may be the business leader I'd most admired in my lifetime. The idea of "Silicon Valley", of a magical, mythical place where really smart, creative people got to work in sleek employment utopias... Apple was the first (Google, now, has probably eclipsed that). I was fascinated, when I finally went to Sn Francisco and Oakland to visit my sister (she was doing grad work at Berkeley), to see Palo Alto up close. They make Apples there!

Outside of a brief foray into a Wintel tower, my computers have been Apples. My preference is for Apple. I have worked on two MacBooks for the life of this blog. I have carried my music on two iPods. I used to love the Creative Departments of the ad agencies where I worked, because that was the Apple playground. And it just reinforced how cool it was to be "a creative."

To me, that's the heart of Apple, the legacy of Steve Jobs - not the technology, but the faith that technology, put to good use, can help us, inspire us, make us more creative, better. These latter years, when Jobs became a better CEO, putting himself out there for his company's dynamic product presentations... the passion and the joy he exuded, doing what he loved to do... was hard not to find inspiring.

At my table, as I write this, loving my aging Mac Book, I have to acknowledge that much of what is good in my life, right now, is because of Steve Jobs. I don't think I can say that about another public figure, not in the same way, not sending out from the laptop he helped create... for me. That strikes me as awesome... and sad. So very sad. May he rest in peace.

Who Cares?

A friend at work asked me about reading my blog - since I try to be anonymous, I don't do a lot of personal promotion of this place - and I realized I wasn't so much worried whether he'd like the content or not... as much as I was a little depressed that lately there hasn't been any.

As always, I have a million reasons not to write: I've been busy, there's not much to write about, politics is depressing, who's really reading this anyway... and on and on. These are, in the end, excuses. The who-what=when=where-how issues of writing are details. The real question is why. Why write? Why have anything to say at all?

The passion I have for writing, the passion to write... ebbs and flows. In these economically hard times, writing for no pay is, in many ways a luxury, a luxury I can't always afford. But the choice not to write isn't about circumstance, so much as its about choices. Lately, I've chosen not to write. Because the passion to express myself has waned.

It's hard to explain how these ebbs and flows are, at either end, temporary. I can't not write for too long; it makes me crazy, I start to feel stuck. But writing round the clock - especially when I really have nothing to say - strikes me as pointless. I don't do one sentence posts. I don't do "here's a funny video" most of the time. Or tell you how someone else has written everything I wanted to say. I'm arrogant enough about my writing to believe that no one, really, says it quite like, or even as well as, I do.

Restarting this time has been harder than usual, though not utterly impossible. The sense of slight defeat - why bother - hangs around more lately, the wall is higher, harder to climb. I have to find a reason for writing that suits me, ultimately; it's nice that people want to read what I write (but then, in my head, I'm going, "of course you will"), but that's not why I have to want to write it. I don't write for the validation... not anymore, anyway; if I ever did, I suppose, it was in high school, less in college, much less out in the world. I worked really hard to get this writing thing down. Mission accomplished.

So, yeah, I'm sorry for the general silences, the way life intervenes, the ebbs and flows of my passions and the stuff I have to work out in my head, by myself. I don't expect people care about that, or my excuses. Who cares? I do. And that's the reason I have to keep doing this.

Gone Again

I really should have said I was taking some time off... and I also should have avoided a very silly identity crisis. Literally - I had back to back losses of my main bank account debit card, first over an unauthorized theft, then because I stupidly left the card in an ATM (where it wasn't stolen, thank G-d, but the bank destroyed it).

That, plus my silence, plus an effort by Typepad to "crack down on Spam" according to their very apologetic note, led to my disappearance as a blogger. All of which I discovered about three hours ago, and, to their credit, which TypePad resolved in less than 2.

So, in any case, I've been away - a lot - and now I am back. And we shall see where that takes us.

 

PS I missed you.