Sticks and Stars

I had my Day For Me yesterday and it was pretty nice. Of course, I felt intensely pressured to spend the day relaxing and taking a break, which left me in this place where my brain was screaming RELAXRELAXRELAXRELAX!!!!

So relaxing.

I started the day with a breakfast date…or, rather, a breakfast initial in-person assessment. I prefer to not call these first meetings “dates” because really they aren’t, they are just a chance to obtain an in-person context for this random internet presence that might or might not represent accurately in real life. And indeed, my breakfast companion did not represent terribly well in real life, so there will be no actual dating (despite the fact that he keeps asking). But at least I got to go out to breakfast, something I love doing but never manage to arrange…even if the food (and company) kind of sucked.

But onward and upward.

My massage got rescheduled for later in the day (or rather, they had misscheduled it for Saturday and were all pissed that I didn’t show up) so I realized that I had time to squeeze in a movie. Based on the limitations of my time frame, the only option was The Simpsons Movie but that was okay by me even if I probably would not have seen it in the theater otherwise. I used to be a big fan of The Simpsons. Back in my semi-stoner days, I’d watch it every day and enjoy it immensely but then I met my ex and he thought the show was stupid so he shamed me out of watching it and voila! I haven’t seen it in years.

Indeed, the movie was pretty funny (and very Simpsons). I found that I did laugh out loud a couple times although I was generally the only one laughing and I was usually silent when the rest of the audience roared. Which just goes to show that The Simpsons appeals to a wide variety of tastes in humor.

After my movie it was massage time and oh how I wish I could get me one of those every week. This particular massage therapist used more pressure than I might have otherwise liked (my neck and shoulders feel bruised today) but at the same time, the tension headache I’ve had for over a month is finally gone. She told me to tell her if the pressure was too much, but I felt like if I could take it, then I should do so because if that level of pressure is needed to loosen my petrified muscles, then I’ll ultimately appreciate it. I think I might need to report some “chronic back pain” to my doctor to see if I can wrangle some massages from my insurance company. They can look at it as a trade off for the mental health benefits that I never use. I’m pretty sure that a couple of massages a month will do a hell of a lot more for my mental health than one of their “therapists” whose only skills seem to be asking, “Would you like fries an anti-depressant with that?”

That pretty much ended the “me” portion of my day and while I can’t say that I’m feeling calm and at peace and as purposeful as a gently flowing stream (or whatever), I do feel a little better and have many schemes in mind for how I can continue to maintain my child-laden sanity.

The interview candidates for my job keep filing past me and none of them look at me. I’m not sure what that means. I try to make it look like I’m hard at work…and indeed I am, writing what are probably largely incomprehensible instructions for projects that the person who takes my place will likely spend as much time avoiding as I did.

I met with my new boss on Friday (and my new team on Thursday) and while I used to feel so intensely excited about this new job, I now mostly feel very, very ill. It’s always stressful starting a new job but, for me at least, that stress is always mitigated by the fact that I have no doubt that I can actually handle the work. When I started my current job I didn’t know shit about publicly funded low income housing projects, but I knew the agency and I knew the database and I knew the clients and I knew where to start to figure things out. When I worked as a technical writer I didn’t know the software about which I was writing, but I knew how to write and I knew how to play with the software to answer many of my questions and I knew who to ask if that wasn’t enough. This is the first time I’m going into an environment where I have to learn everything about the job from the barest of beginnings and what’s worse, as a woman going into a male dominated environment in a male dominated field, I feel intense pressure to do a good fucking amazing job. Even if that isn’t the expectation placed on me, it’s the expectation I can’t help but place on myself.

Part of my anxiety is, I think, that my ex always used to tell me that there were people who had programming brains and people who didn’t, you were either one or the other, there was no middle ground, and you’d know it immediately. Granted, I will not be programming (at least not yet), but I think he was really referring to writing code in general, to having a brain that can think symbolically in that way. What if I have a non-coding brain? What if I can’t do this job? What if I try and try and try to learn it but I just can’t? The very thought makes me want to cry.

“Sarah, you are blowing this out of proportion,” you are thinking to yourself as you read this. “You haven’t even started the job, it’s not quite time to quit because you can’t handle it.” And yes, I am fully aware that if there things to be blown out of proportion, I have a fully stocked cabinet of dynamite, the doors of which I’m happy to throw open. But all I can think of are times when I struggled with similar topics…like when I was in…Algebra II? in high school. It was the very beginning of the year and we were learning about…functions? (okay, the memory isn’t terribly clear). For some reason, I absolutely could not grasp it. No matter how many times it was explained to me, I just couldn’t understand what the curly little f was supposed to represent (or that it represented anything at all). I wound up dropping the class (for other reasons, although that didn’t make my decision any harder) and that’s as far as I went with algebra. And then back when I used to work for the agency I work for now, I started learning SQL on my own in order to attempt to get data from our database. It was all fine and dandy until I started learning about joins and then I got completely stuck. For some reason I just could not understand the difference between two particular types of joins (inner, outer, left, I cannot recall) and thus I stopped learning on my own and stuck with merely the simplest of select statements.

Now I will admit that when I look back on that algebra example I understand with no problems the purpose of the curly little f (or at least I think I do) and I’m not entirely sure why it was so difficult back then. And with regard to the joins, I am a hell of a lot more technically oriented than I was back then so perhaps the joins will seem blatantly obvious when I revisit them. But maybe not. Maybe I truly don’t have a code brain. Maybe I am going to go into this position and be stupid at it every single day.

I know this sounds silly. It sounds silly to me as I write it. But I truly am extremely anxious about it regardless. I am not good at facing situations where I might not be able to immediately master what I’m tackling. And I am really not good at looking or feeling stupid. The IS staff has been displaced from their cubicle pod into a small conference room, so every time I have to ask a question the entire team is going to hear it. Every time I don’t immediately grasp something and have to have it explained repeatedly, everyone will know. I can already see that I’m likely to keep my questions to myself and wait until I can study my ass off at night and hope for the best. Sigh.

This is going to be stressful. Exciting, but really stressful.

I took my boys to the farmers’ market today and bought the makings of a deeelicious dinner. My four year old has been commenting lately on how he loves real fish (as opposed to fish sticks I thought…I was to learn later that he meant raw fish with head still attached but whatever) and so I promised him that we’d get some fish for dinner this evening. At the fish stand I acquired a pound of halibut (and was also suckered into a big chunk of smoked salmon — I can never, ever resist smoked salmon) and I used the rest of my WIC coupons to purchase some “potato nuts” (which are just really tiny baby potatoes…about the diameter of a nickel).

The potatoes were awesome because they were a mixed variety of unnamed types (pink, yellow, brown, red, blue) and when cut open, their skin color held true to their flesh, so all the colors looked pretty on the plate. I sliced them in half, boiled them, and tossed them with butter, fresh dill, and salt and pepper. Damn they were good. Fresh dill and butter is a no fail combination when it comes to baby potatoes.

I cut the halibut into three fillets, broiled it, then topped it with mayo, parmesan, onions and lemon juice and broiled it again until it was brown and bubbly. I know that mayo probably seems like a weird fish topping, but the very best fish I’ve eaten in my life has been cooked that way and so that’s where I go by default. And indeed, the halibut was outstanding.

It was such a delicious dinner and even my four year old liked it (despite the fact that the fish had no actual head). My one year old spit out bites of each but that was fine with me. He settled happily with pb&j and I get a really tasty lunch tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s culinary adventure? Fettuccine alfredo with smoked salmon. I know my boys like both items, they just haven’t necessarily had them together. But no time like the present, eh?

The day is not over but I’m pretty sure my organizational/decluttering spree is. Although I took no photos to document the event, I did manage to clean out my bedroom closet as well as the cedar chest my mom gave me when I graduated from high school.

I guess the cedar chest is supposed to be my “hope” chest, although what type of quantifiable hope it’s supposed to contain I’m not sure. Is this where I store all my carefully embroidered pillow cases and dish towels in preparation for the day I leave my father’s house and start a household of my own under my husband’s watchful gaze? If so, I am sadly behind in the stockpiling of said pillow cases and dish towels. And I left my father’s house over 13 years ago so my prospects for the 19th century life of my hope chest’s dreams are not looking good.

What I have stored in my hope chest is instead all the detritus of my memories from over the years. I decided to clean it out and make sure the space wasn’t wasted with a bunch of meaningless crap but once I started digging I realized that if I removed all the meaningless crap, the entire trunk would be empty. Do I really need the video of my high school graduation that contains only about three minutes of actual graduation footage, the scenes from which I am not even a part? How about the going away cards given to me by folks from a job I hated whose faces I couldn’t recall if I was even remotely interested in expelling the effort to do so? How about the yellowed teddy bear given to me by my true love…Jason?…Jeff?…James? for my birthday in the 5th grade? Or what about the torn black mouse pad to which I can attach no memory whatsoever?

Later: In a burst of post-brownie-making energy I decided to tackle my hall closet after all, and inside I (re)discovered a dvd player that was broken (after we had it for about two weeks) when my four year old decided that the best way to close the disc tray was to kick it closed. Deciding I had absolutely nothing to lose (and feeling particularly butch), I grabbed my screwdriver, sat down on the couch, and set to seeing if I could repair it. Twenty minutes and many, many screws later, a snap coupled with my shout of joy signified the realignment of the tray on its track and the successful repair of the dvd player! It never occurs to me to attempt to repair broken things. If something breaks, you buy a new one. Tonight I feel particular kick-ass for making an attempt, and even better, actually succeeding.