“Children make you want to start life over.” ~Muhammad Ali
While on vacation I had dinner with my friend KG one evening. For the record ‘KG’ isn’t some pseudonym or something for her, it’s just that I have pet names for all of my friends. Usually I keep them in my head or they are in my phone as the way I refer to them in my mind. Like my friend Sarah is in my phone with her entire name and that is how I refer to her. Again. IN MY HEAD. So KG is KG at all times whether she knows is and/or likes it. The very first time I met KG, Alice introduced me to her and Alice kept talking to me and I was too busy all up in KG’s grill harassing her and she accepted it and likes me despite myself. She also looks like she belongs in a J.Crew catalog which adds to her general precious self.
And wow, I just hit my ass kissing quota of the day. But seriously, if you met her you’d be all “I love you. Be my friend?” too.
It’s kind of hard to come up with really! great! stories from Martha’s Vineyard because it is so the opposite of hyperbole and extremes. Martha’s Vineyard is sitting on your butt all day in your bathing suit only moving if – and only if – the sun happens to scald your shoulders. Crossing the Nantucket sound is like an hour of Vinyasa yoga. You feel all zen and chill and all your cares are whisked away.
Upon returning our friend Danny wanted to know how our meeting went. To which I replied that it went swell and all but dude, she can’t chug a beer. And that concerns me because my #7 quality for a friend is “Must excel at flip cup”. It’s just above “Must accept overuse of ‘fuck’” and right under “Trustworthy”. So color me appalled when we were getting ready to leave and I finish my beer in one gulp and there’s KG, delicately sipping away. I swear she even had her pinky up.
But what I really wanted to tell Danny was this story:
We’re sitting at dinner and KG’s husband wants to know all the spectacular details of my life. Normally I sit there and look mildly confused but since I had the gift of Sam Adams summer ale inside of me I gave him the quick and dirty rundown. Her eight year old son was sitting across from me engrossed in Harry Potter and stopped reading to listen to my very exciting life which did not involve Tom Riddle. Instead of being disappointed in my abilities to scare off Deatheaters, he then exclaimed, “Wow! You’ve had a big life”.
“Wait, how old are you?” he said after a brief pause.
“25…” And as I waited for him to ask me to whip out my AARP card he suddenly said, “AND YOU’RE ONLY 25!” Like genuine shock that at 25 I’ve actually done stuff. And God willing I’ll do more, like, stuff.
But because I was writing Danny back from my phone while lying in the fetal position, I didn’t tell him this story. I also didn’t mention the part where The Eight Year Old asked for a pony and I gave him one and then I offered up 50 bucks if he’d come live with me and be my personal self-esteem booster.
The Eight Year Old spent the rest of the evening quizzing me on Harry Potter knowledge and then we saw some fireworks that made me feel vomitous, deaf and blind. And then we had beers and then KG drank her pale ale with her pinky up.
And that, kids, pretty much sums up my vacation.
KG thinks I should write like a book or something. I’m assuming that at some point she’ll read this post and my attempt at ‘story-telling’, her eyes will bulge out of their sockets and she’ll say out loud, “Holy hell. Stick to your day job, honey”. I mean, I’m totally guessing here but my God, that was not my best work.
Single Ladies – Beyonce
The Unemployment Thing (See also; That Thing That Gives Me Agita)
“[O]f all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.” ~Jane Addams
Early last week or perhaps the week before I was in a mood. A no good, very bad mood over a variety of things all of which were money oriented. All of which stemming from irresponsibility and/or a month of cross country travel that left me feeling destitute. I walked into my coworker’s office, plopped down in a chair and made a HRMPH type noise. Like “Dear God, life is so hard. With the living and the having to choose between having money and a trip to Martha’s Vineyard”. COME ON everyone needs R&R and I was on that cusp of needing to get to get out. To go somewhere. To breathe something other than badly circulated air conditioning. I needed to smell salt water and eat fresh clams.
And I walked into my coworker’s office and told her just that.
“All I want to do is vacay and I can’t vacay because I have to work and let’s face it, I cannot afford to vacay. Fuck my life”
She cocked her head to the side.
“I want five minutes of peace and quiet. There’s also a dress I’ve been eying but more importantly THE BEACH and I haven’t been to the Vineyard all year. WHY IS MY LIFE SO HARD?”
Her head moved a little more to the left and she smirked. And with that I knew what she was thinking.
My head stayed straight ahead as I closed my eyes and repeated everything that had just spewed from my mouth in my head. The complaints about vacation and Martha’s Vineyard and why I had to spend a week in Seattle eating raw oysters and drinking French 75. Feel free to slap the shit out of me and my agony.
I rolled my eyes at myself and was ready to shut up and returned to my own office. The office where I sat among piles of papers with layoff and attrition projections. Dollars lost were staring me in the face. In the background played a debate on the Senate floor on the extension of Unemployment Insurance. I vaguely heard Mitch McConnell mention something about the unemployed needing to pick themselves up by the boot straps and find a damn job already (I’m paraphrasing here). For clearly that was the reason for trillions in deficit; all of those people who were sitting on their ass watching the Real Housewives instead of working. Of course.
Then more eye rolling and general head between my knees-ness over email upon email as to why it had become such a Herculean effort to keep teachers employed. There was a discussion of offsets so as not to contribute to the deficit and where the offsets should come from so as not to piss off that group or this one. But even if it was paid for someone had to have a problem because again, WHY CAN’T THESE PEOPLE JUST FIND A JOB?! Never mind that pesky recession. People just aren’t trying hard enough. People didn’t want it enough. Parents didn’t want to take care of their children. Dad’s didn’t get those bags under their eyes from sleepless nights after realizing that no bacon would be brought home. Moms didn’t fret about giving their children enough to eat. They just didn’t care and that’s why they didn’t get jobs and another “bailout” wouldn’t get them off their Bon Bon eating asses.
No one should have to go through that. No one should have to worry about how to care for their children or themselves. It’s so very liberal of me, I am aware but it is also the human side of me that doesn’t like to see people in excrutiating pain and awaiting foreclosure because of jobs lost. I cannot imagine being that terrified day to day and having the fate of my job in the hands of people who have never and could never be there. How can you help when you don’t know what it’s like to spend each day surrounded by worry. Will there be a job or won’t there? I don’t like What If and that’s on things that don’t matter like what if I can’t buy wine tomorrow or what if I can’t buy that new MacBook Pro?
I know that things are relative and we look at our circumstances and pain as individuals and not in relation to the world around us. It’s hard to see past our own problems – however small – to realize that there are those who are spend each day in a state of perpetual fear. That’s what made me feel like That Asshole; the one who couldn’t afford that trip to a beach house and didn’t want to work or just wanted a nap dammit! I turned into that person but what makes me less of an asshole – and probably you as well – is realizing that things are good. Relatively speaking. As long as I keep trying and I did keep trying and tomorrow there is a vote in the House to prove that I worked my ass off and that the gray hairs of stress were worth it.
I’m not a complete jerk. And what makes me less of an asshole is that I made myself aware. And I hope that for five seconds you can realize as well. Realize that as I type, others are in the absolute worst of situations and that vacation or no, we are some of the lucky ones.