Daydream Believer

If wishes were horses than beggars would ride, and if I were half as responsible to myself as I am to other people, I would be self-employed doing awesome things all day. 

I like to think that I’m a free spirit, but I’ve been made to face the fact (over and over and over again, in fact) that my particular spirit is rather like a small child:  It craves boundaries, direction, structure in which to exercise its gifts in a safe and loving environment. 

I will take on an extra project at work, but fail to shop for groceries until my third day of eating nothing but unadorned grits and Bisquick pancakes with ground pepper (for real), help a friend move or paint an apartment but leave my laundry until I’m channeling Pigpen from Charlie Brown.

Ask me to do something and give me a deadline.  I’ll do it in style, with gusto. I’ll dot all the I’s with little hearts, wrap up the results in fancy paper and bows, and deliver it to your door with a curtsy and a flourish.

I’m a diligent ditz, a spazzy robot.  I’m a freight train making all its stops, leaving the mangled corpses of a million grand schemes at every crossing.

Because there are plenty of things that I do just for myself: I play my ukulele, make songs, I sing, I sew, I write stories and essays, I walk, I cook elaborate and not-elaborate meals, I bake and decorate and bake more, I draw, I build simple electronics and modify the complex, I replicate (with varying degrees of success) everything that strikes my fancy from shoes to food to furniture.  I MacGuyver the shit out of things.  Our VHS library currently resides in a six-shelf condominium fashioned from packing tape and vintage Casio boxes. I build tiny people in tiny dioramas because tiny things are just so, so satisfying. 

But there’s the rub.  There are so many things I want to do just because I want to that if you put all of the tools for all of those activities in a room, I would end up running from station to station, flailing my arms like the robot from Lost in Space and finally collapse like a birthday girl when the cake wears off.

I'm heavily motivated by guilt, and I swallow my own excuses easily enough that I don't feel guilty when I let myself down.  A friend pointed out today that my goal shouldn't be to make myself feel guilty for breaking promises to myself, but to recognize that my personal projects deserve attention as much as outside jobs do.  It's two sides of the same coin, and she's right that the latter would be preferable, but I'm hoping for either at this point.

More than hoping, I'm baby-stepping in that direction.  In the past I've looked at this glaring flaw in my operations as something huge and wild and untame-able, something to be acknowledged with a sigh and shrug, but as I cruise into my "grown up" life still holding tight to teenaged optimism, I'm increasingly aware that that's both really counterproductive and ultimately soul-crushing. 

I like my job a lot as far as working for someone else goes, but as my ten year anniversary approaches, I shudder at the thought of another decade, or even another five years. 

When I started this blog I hinted at a big project in the works, and I'm happy to say that I'm actually working on it.  This is in no small part thanks to the community of wonderful people around me, friends and family and co-workers, who nudge me when I'm flagging keep my alternately inflated and flattened ego in reality.  In the end, it would be great if I could be accountable to myself, but I consider it a good start to be accountable to the people who care about and believe in me.

In the very short term, I'm working on a web project, aggregating all of my projects into one space.  It's a relatively passive endeavor, but it's useful for taking stock.  In the next month or two my art, this blog, Giant Marshmallow Pillow (it's not dead, it's sleeping), and my first stab at a commercial baking endeavor will find a new home together.  Like most things I do, it's happening in fits and starts because the ol' squirrel in my noggin keeps running off to check out other stuff, plus I decided to go all out and learn a little bit of WordPress coding just to make things interesting.

So thanks to everyone who humors me and challenges me and keeps me on track.  I'll be sure to give you all presents tied up in fancy paper with a curtsy and a flourish.

Giant Marshmallow Pillow -- Yeah!

When I started this blog I was like, "Hey, everything's so awesome! I can't wait to see what awesome stuff's obviously just about to happen every second from now until forever!  I'm going to document all that awesome here in this space, just watch! Yay!"

Well, yeah.  I meant to, and I really do, actually, experience the majority of my life as a series of awesome events.  The things is that I'm also a little bit hermit-y and if I were to write about the things that make me the happiest and most excited on any kind of regular basis, what we'd have here would be a collection of adorable cat pictures and stories and a series of groaningly punny dialogues between me and my boyfriend and/or one or both of us talking to the cat.

Also, for all the fist shaking and righteous indignation on the page, having the energy to invest in larger social issues is a luxury that depressed-me couldn't afford (or was too miserly to budget for).  Despite appearances, it's a sign of mental health.  But, depending on your taste, maybe less fun than the rainbows and unicorns I seemed to be promising in the beginning.

And I like it.  I like my over-long and thinky entries.  I like my old smart friends who leave comments and the new friends I've acquired because they're smart and leave comments. I like that even though there aren't a ton of readers, at least some portion of my stats are actual human beings and not click-back bots.

Now you say, "Get to the point, Ramblin' Rose!"

And I say, "Right. Anyway, I'm leaving this business just the way it is, but for those of you with a taste for fly-by-night animation and the disassociative short fiction of dreams, I made a fun blog."


Go now, my pretties.

Seriously, though, how awesome is he?

Say It, Don't Spray It

First, an admission:  I am, or have been, a great big intellectual snobby snob snob.  Surely you've noticed.  I'm all running around with my big ideas and my fifty-cent words, just cracking myself up with esoteric jokes. I recently asked a clerk at Cumby's if reading the New York Times (which he was doing) for free is the coolest part of his job. I sometimes refer to said paper as "the NYT."  I consider postmodernism to be one of the greatest threats to humanity.

In my defense, though, I had an epiphany several years ago that gave me some insight into myself and made me a much less judgmental person:  I don't hate stupid people, I just hate people who love being stupid.

It's a well-known fact among my friends that I should not be allowed access to the local paper under any circumstances.  The former journalist in me bears claws and fangs like a wild beast at front-page, above-the-fold stories detailing how hot it is, how fun a festival was, or how much kids like ice cream.  The homicidal maniac in me sharpens its knives when I see Ray Routhier making every pedestrian job in the world sound like rocket science. I know, every job has it's challenges, but Ray, IT'S SO FUCKING CONDESCENDING to try to instill drama in the process of making sure there's enough pens in a hotel room drawer.  I'm sure that lady has enough actual challenges in her day that wouldn't be good PR for her employer, so please, please, either tell it like it is, or stop treating the poor woman like a two-year-old who's doing a weawy, weawy good job!

But for all that, it's the letters page that threatens to put me over the edge every time.  I actually really love opinion pieces and find it fascinating to get a glimpse inside the heads of people who don't think like me (it's also one of the reasons I'm addicted to reading blogs).  But the requirement is that these people are at least thinking like someone not like me.  In my experience, for every thoughtful, well-researched letter to the editor, there's another six that read like the verbal vomit of self-satisfied children, replete with grammar nightmares and some sort of irrelevant attack the slightly more eloquent equivalent of "...and anyone who doesn't agree smells bad and eats poop!"

I count among my very favorite people of all time a mechanic who works with me.  Let's call him Mike the Mechanic, because that will be fun.  He's old school, which means he specializes in mechanical repairs: nuts and bolts and oil and metal and wood and nails and putting things together and taking them apart.  He takes a lot of shit behind his back because he's a simple guy who's been outrun by the complexity of the machines he cares for.  It pains him to know that he doesn't always do a very good job, in part because his education ended with his training as a military mechanic in the 70s.  His boss for twenty years in his current job was a delightful but eccentric old coot who didn't have the patience to bring my friend up to date on anything.  He'd get frustrated by a shallow learning curve and opt to just do everything himself. 

Mike's son has Asperger's, a condition that went unrecognized until the boy was twelve. Mike himself shows little glimmers of it himself along with an unacknowledged case of dyslexia.  I've never met anyone who works so hard for such meager returns and it breaks my heart to hear him talk about how under-valued and ignored he feels.

What I love about Mike is that, despite deficits that he recognizes, he's a perpetual dream machine and a hungry consumer of random information. 

There was a time when he came into work in the middle of the night to fuel the boats and when I got to work at quarter of five, we'd spend a quiet hour or so chatting about this and that, the politics of our workplace, the politics of the world, a foreign movie that enchanted him. 

Our schedules don't line up like that anymore, but sometimes when things are quiet, he'll ask if I have a minute and we'll take in the maintenance shop.  We've recently covered depression and medication (he told me he'd gone down the same road as me a few months before), French first lady and chanteuse Carla Bruni and his desire for me to use my internets skills to get some of her music for him.  He's also asked me to find him an English-language international newspaper and information on schools where someone interested in mosaics might thrive, for his son.  He tells me that he feels unfulfilled doing what he does and what he thinks he'd be good at.  He asks me for advice about how to pursue those things.

I'm outrageously lucky to have a big cheering section that wants me to fulfill all the promise I toted around in my childhood, but in some ways none of it means more to me than when Mike says, "I never understood what you were doing here.  I don't want to tell you how to do anything, but it seems like you can do anything and this place will just take advantage of that, but it's not where you belong."

There's a lot of clever, talented, artistic, wordy, and science-minded people in my life by design.  Like I said, I'm an academic snob.  I like people who are challenging and crazy-making and brilliant.  But what I like about them, I also like in people like Mike who may not have the tools to do groundbreaking projects, but who love the fact that they exist.  Who's disappointed in the way the world works and isn't satisfied to accept the explanations of pundits and politicians, but wants to (painstakingly) read as much as he possibly can about everything he can trying to find some answers.  Mike isn't smart in the way we traditionally think of it, but he has the far more enlightening characteristic of curiosity.

Just for a little contrast, and to bring the conversation around to where I started, there's a fellow in Mike's department who is his dead opposite in terms of all the lovable things I've mentioned.  He's also a mechanical man, but has been shrewd enough to insert himself into tasks over his head, where Mike has waited to be invited to learn.  As a result, he's generally regarded as more proficient at his job.  I'm not sure that's true, but what interests me more (or doesn't, as the case may be) is that he has no interest in life or the world beyond the narrow scope of coming to work, coming home, and going hunting.  He's the sort of person who says in all earnestness things like, "Well, I don't know much about politics, but it seems like if they think ________ is the best way..."  He makes the kind of pointless jokes intended to demonstrate that he's just a good-natured guy that actually demonstrate that he's a misogynist, racist jackass with nothing to contribute.  Among my co-workers there's a running joke that they should hide the pencils when he's around me because he almost always manages to say or do something that fills me with the horrible desire to stab him with them.

So there it is.  Several years ago I put the brakes on my unreasonable expectations of people's knowledge base and shifted my animosity to people who just don't give a fuck.  I recognize that this is a heavy declaration, but I think that there's literally nothing more offensive to me than people who are closed to inquiry.  It's a simple thing. We live in a shrinking world and our survival depends on our ability to understand things beyond what happens to us individually. Plus, and this comes out of the depths of my own fucked up depressed-person's nihilistic worldview, but what on earth keeps you going if you have no interests outside of the six things you currently know???  Shit, that's dark, but I'm not really joking.

Anyway.  I've (mostly) learned to let spelling and grammar stuff slide.  I've (mostly) learned to be respectful in debates with people who just don't know better.  I'm trying to be a more open person, and if you want to meet me halfway, broaden your horizons.

For about ten years, my mother was a carpenter, swinging a hammer like a champ building houses in New Hampshire and Maine.  They didn't go in for anything fancy like naming the company, but some hilarious plumber or electrician christened them Honey and Dear Construction and they penciled the name on their tools for a lark.

When it was school vacation I tagged along, busying myself with such quixotic pastimes as string-and-safety pin drop line fishing, dowsing (why did I know about dowsing when I was 6??), and building eensy weensy stone walls from wayward wads of mortar and chips of slate.  If I was really lucky and no one was around, she'd let me snap the chalk line, which was inexplicably magical to me, and even let me hang a shingle or two.  I liked the construction sites and I took for granted the freedom and family time that their self-employment provided.

Memory is very a strange animal, and independent sources confirm that mine is particularly arbitrary and specific, and I have a very vivid memory of my mom's job search when she left building.  She applied haphazardly to whatever jobs seemed even marginally interesting, including a print shop.  But when the shop called her for an interview, she declined.  "One of the questions on the application was, 'What did you enjoy most about your last job?' and I realized it was being outside, being my own boss, working on my own...pretty much the opposite of the position they're hiring for," she told me.

Since I quit college, I've worked two jobs, both of them more or less by chance and both of them satisfying, unlikely, and slightly embarrassing relative to expectations (mine and others') of my potential.

I took a job as a line cook at a popular diner ("no experience preferred," ooh, that's me!) and was promoted to baker when the previous one quit in a fit of pique and I confirmed that I had, in fact baked cakes with my mom as a kid.  I had total control over the menu and worked whatever hours I deemed necessary at whatever time I felt the urge.

The next one was the one I work now at a ferry company where I made a meteoric rise from souvenir girl to ticket seller to full-time union employee, supervisor, and office mommy.  I like the work.  I schedule crews, I drive a forklift (which will never stop seeming weird), I council, coddle and occasionally chastise the peevish, petty, often rageful masses that are islanders, captains and coworkers.

Lately, though, I've developed a restlessness that I haven't felt in a long time, a deep and abiding desire to shake things up, attended as usual by its doppelganger, fear of the unknown.  In my twenties I made some big decisions on the back of this desire, always managing to whip up a perfectly reasonable rationale for moves that were bold at face value but hollow at their heart.  So this time around I've taken a quick inventory of things that I like about my job (strangers! I love talking to strangers!, variety of tasks, the combination of hands on labor and tedious administrative tasks. I love tedious administrative tasks, so zen!) and dislike (the nightmare of hierarchy, unreliable coworkers, representing backwards policies, lack of nuance) and realized that it's time to stop fiddling around betraying my ambition.

I have, over the years had about a million ideas for businesses I'd like to start, but every time I let comfort trump my modest dreams.  Today I started a fact-finding mission to see if it's feasible to actually carry one out.  On the one hand I feel inclined to tell everyone I know about it, just to put some pressure on me to follow through, but on the other, I'm feeling hopeful and slightly superstitious, so for now I'll keep the details under my hat.

For now it'll have to suffice to say that I'm ready to risk comfort for the greater reward of satisfaction.