can you hear the drums ferdinando?

I met Ferdinand on my third or fourth date with AK. The plan was to meet at her house and in a move that was retroactively predictable, she was running late. A thin-hipped black cat soft-pawed toward me on the fence.

"You must be Ferdinand," I said, and we hung out there, outside the bungalow she shared with Alberto, and for the next fourteen years.

Yesterday we said goodbye to him. For months, he'd been doing that ailing-cat move where he drank water from any vessel he could find: glasses, the pots in Dash's play kitchen, a plastic souvenir Dodgers cap. But both OC and T-Mec had long, slow declines during which they mostly lived their lives, and even when he went from his usual slender build to truly bony, I thought we'd have a while.

Then all of a sudden we didn't.

Big eyes, big heart

Long ago, AK and I picked out careers for our cats, and Ferdinand's was DJ. He was always the coolest guy in the room. He came and went as he pleased; we assumed he was off to a gig. He was the reason I slowly and cautiously transitioned OC and T-Mec into becoming part-time outdoor cats. I knew the risks, but none of them was ever eaten by a coyote, and they killed more rats than songbirds. Back in his bungalow days, Ferd would escape the house mysteriously and meow to get back in. Finally we caught him on top a book shelf, nudging open a swinging window with his nose, and leaping to the ground.

When AK and I had problems, Ferdinand seemed even cooler and occasionally became my rival: the cat who could do no wrong when I could only do wrong. But meandering conversations on our cats' probable careers (OC: town crier; T-Mec: PhD student in neuroscience, doing her dissertation on Why Do Some Cats Talk So Much; Ollie is an adverb salesman) brought us together when adult life was too much.

Ferd was a nine-pound alpha, never hesitating to sink his teeth into OC's neck when he felt like it. But when it came to food, he was a delicate flower. "Oh, did you want that?" he'd say, quickly ceding the food area.

He won the hearts of human visitors. "I don't like cats, but I love Ferdinand" was a thing we heard a lot. He'd let you sling him over your shoulder. As a kitten, his hunting specialty was Palm Frond a la Nand, but he graduated to rats and once manhandled a squirrel.

The girls next door loved him and Ollie, though Ollie--ever the self-protective middle child--kept a low profile. Ferd would hang around a little longer when all three kids screeched "Gato!" and charged.

As he grew skinnier, Dash grew both gentler and bolder, frequently picking Ferd up by the middle and carrying him around. I should have stopped it more often, despite its sweetness. Ferd's skinny middle was full of cancer, and he had to have been in pain. He rarely protested.

I told Dash the news yesterday after school. I'm afraid he thinks cats just go to the vet to die. He's a privileged kid in plenty of ways, but I didn't lose a cat until college, and he's lost two. He said, "Now we have two cats in our hearts." He said, "What will Jasmine and Juanita say?" He said, "Is he in the fire?" because cremation is a fascinating and terrible concept to him, as it should be.

Ferdinand. Ferd. Mr. Nand. You're DJing the best party now, and we're missing you at this one.

tops of 2019

Hello from the tail end of what I think was a good year? I’m too superstitious to make proclamations, and hindsight usually doesn’t kick in till a few years out anyway. I’m not so into the personal decade-in-review blurbs people are offering up on Twitter. The same people who call out privilege all day long seem awfully quick to boast about their triumphs as if they’re not the result of good luck and not dying.  

Anyway.

AK, Dash, and I just got back from a three-day trip, two of which were spent in Cambria at my brother-in-law’s family vacation house, and those days were excellent ones to end on. My sister is the only person who can take care of me in the exact way I need without eliciting a parallel guilt reaction. She mimics my mom in all the right ways. And her husband, David, is a natural caretaker too, eager to share his ancestral home with newcomers, to feed them fancy cheese and cook hash browns and tell the story of the time he scratched up his grandparents’ banister by sliding down it in zippered pants. I felt myself decompress in a way I hadn’t all year, my soul unfurling from its tidy carrying case and rising like heat in their high-ceilinged living room. 

We watched the new What We Do in the Shadows and walked down to the rocky beachfront and took our traditional booze cruise around Morro Bay. We ate really good seafood at an old family-owned spot called Dockside, and I laughed more than I have in a long time.  

Today I’m back home, polishing the rough edges off my memoir while AK and Dash ring in the noon New Year at Kidspace, and hoping there aren’t major structural issues with the book. Time is a construct, and also the only thing that’s real, and I want to declare Draft 1.5 DONE today. I’m taking this interlude to bring you my annual roundup of cultural recommendations, things I took in this year that may or may not have been produced this year. Keep in mind that I didn’t see most movies or read the Hot New Books, but books, movies, TV, and podcasts still kept me going. Here goes. 

Oak Flat by Lauren Redniss: With gorgeous red-purple Southwestern skies and near-ghost towns drawn in colored pencil, this book--about Apache efforts to protect sacred land from copper mining companies in Arizona--is utterly original in form and urgent in content.

Roma: I know it came out last year, but I didn’t see it until March. (And the book above doesn’t come out until spring of 2020, but I got my hands on an ARC. CALENDARS ARE A CONSTRUCT.) This movie is sweeping and epic and personal. It centers an indigenous housekeeper and nanny, and depicts washing dishes and hugging children as the quietly heroic acts they are.

Us: I definitely don’t want to see this movie again, but I’m so glad I saw it once. It’s riveting and terrifying, a perfect allegory for the randomness of injustice and the efforts people make to deny the legacies to which we’re all still tethered.

Delicious Foods by James Hannaham: This book shares some traits with Us, actually, in that it’s weird and scary and reveals how slavery is still with us. Narrated by crack (yes, the drug), Delicious Foods is the story of how a big agricultural company leverages addiction and creates a maze of subcontractors to get away with enslaving workers. It seems too bizarre to be true, but this shit happens.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Another 2018 movie, but I can’t not mention how brilliantly this movie wed comic book illustrations with 3D animation, and what a beautiful tribute it is to the powers of both mentoring and self-actualization. I say this as someone who cannot even tell you who belongs to the Marvel Universe and who is a DC Comics character.

Operatic by Kyo Maclear, illustrated by Byron Eggenshwiler: Maclear is a master of picture-book poetry, and here she brings her talents to a middle grade graphic novel about marginalized kids finding themselves in music. Byron Eggenshwiler’s illustrations are a perfect accompaniment, equal parts high drama and subtle detail.

House of Anansi Press

Good Talk by Mira Jacob: Jacob’s funny, touching memoir about talking to her kid and her Trump-supporting in-laws in the wake of the 2016 election is one of those books that had me nodding along, feeling like I was part of the conversation. It’s the rare book that suggests we can find common ground as a country without just splitting the difference and throwing marginalized populations under the bus.

Fleabag: I’m still not sure I liked this series quite as much as everyone else did, but I liked it very, very much. Sometimes I think I struggled to watch it because it hit too close to home. Sisters struggling to get on with life after their mom dies of cancer? Check. One is very successful but high strung, one is bad with money and always says the thing she’s not supposed to? Check. For Christmas, AK gave me a key chain with one of the show’s concluding statements: Love is not something weak people do. No, it’s not.

Unbelievable: Toni Collette and Merritt Wever would be reason enough to watch just about anything, but this series also has true crime, feminism, and a satisfying ending following an expose of the “justice” system’s most infuriating elements.

Rocketman: A few scenes in, my face lit up. No one told me it was a musical musical! But it is. So well done. So moving. So singable. So, so gay. Taron Egerton as circa 1970 Elton John is precisely my type.

Getting On: If Fleabag is about someone fucking up her life in the sexiest way possible, the American version of this British show about a long-term care unit makes a tragicomic unsexy counterpart. Every character fancies themself a good person, but is horribly petty and selfish in the execution. I relate.

White Lies: A true crime podcast that is about so much more than whodunit. The Alabama-native investigative journalists at the helm examine the culture of silence that kept the 1965 murder of white civil rights activist Rev. James Reeb from being solved. I was particularly fascinated by how medical misunderstanding (namely that hematomas get worse over time) dovetailed with racism to create a conspiracy theory. And the final episode, in which the descendants of Reeb and the murderer meet, is a beautiful and hopeful example of intergenerational healing.

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones: I read this early in the year, and it stayed with me. A novel about a mistress’ daughter that reads like a memoir. Jones is razor-sharp in her dissection of domestic power dynamics.

the hardest privileges

1. hibernate

This time of year, my body wants to hibernate. Even in LA, when we're never more than a week on either side of a heat wave, the warm air filters through extra layers of atmosphere, giving everything a surreal glow. Today it's chilly but bright. There are holiday playlists and discounted pajamas for grownups. It's so tempting to curl up on the old crib mattress in Dash's old room, which recently became our office/eventually-maybe-a-baby-room. Dash has moved into the front room, which he loves, and which also prompted a week or so of extra meltdowns because change.

I want to read all the books and watch all the seasons of Madam Secretary and drink hot spiked beverages. To fall into a mood the same way I'd fall asleep, a dreamy surrender.

But those hygge vibes are hard-won. Maybe not actual Scandinavian hygge, which Wikipedia tells me translates to "everyday togetherness," implying that you don't have to do much more than stay in to achieve it. In America we'd rather make it a market and an occasion, which translates to a lot of work, perhaps especially for women and moms. The gifts and the decorating and the making of hot spiked beverages. I'm doing my best to simplify the holidays, but even the act of simplifying takes some work. In America we like to work.

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash
I love curling up with an old map and a string of Christmas lights in the same color palette as my old map.

2. create

Last week, I finally finished a full draft of the memoir I've been working on since 2013, in fits and starts and so many stops. So many times, I thought I was pivoting briefly to write a column or a blog post, and then another three months would go by. The memoir covers 2010-2015, the marriage-miscarriage-cancer-adoption years. The years when I was a really good time for everyone who knew me. I'm proud of it. It's not finished, but it's closer to something resembling a book than it's ever been.

I'm proud of myself for not (knockonwood) giving up on a story I needed to tell, a story that is not just about "some hard stuff that happened," but which is about storytelling itself as both superpower and kryptonite.

It's the most marketable thing I've written, but when I think about sending it out, I feel exhausted and glum. A wonderful agent tried to sell the last two books I wrote, with no luck. I hope she'll take a chance on me again.

Once upon a time I was a promising young writer with two books published by cool indie presses, and then I blinked (and wrote three unpublished novels) and became a middle-aged writer who hasn't published a book in a decade.

Aging is so fucking humbling. Aging is the hardest privilege.

Photo by Hello I'm Nik 🇬🇧 on Unsplash
Sneak preview of my memoir.

3. recreate

AK and I approached our holiday calendar like something between a jigsaw puzzle and a hostage negotiation. I want to write an essay--maybe after I hibernate--about how transactional behavior can actually be good for relationships. For years, I thought if I just explained to AK how very tired I was, she would be like, "Oh, you poor thing! Would you like to spend tomorrow resting and writing while I watch Dash? You deserve it."

Turns out what I was actually doing was whining, and while I have no intention of stopping my emotional weather reports entirely, it works a lot better to say, "I'll go camping for a night if you'll give me a half-day to write later in the week."

And so we are seeing family and camping and driving up to Cambria, and it will be genuinely fun. More so because I already took care of some household stuff (the room switch) and some writing stuff (the memoir) and slotted in time for a little more household stuff (putting away the Christmas presents I will be overwhelmed very grateful to receive) and a little more writing stuff (getting the memoir in shape to send to the agent who may or may not remember my name).

4. wait

The last time I blogged, almost two whole months ago, I said that we were live and waiting to adopt. This is still true--if you're reading this and have a baby you'd like us to raise, hit me up. But it's taken a frustratingly long time to get moving with our facilitator, for a handful of small, no-one's-fault reasons, and we are juuuust getting off the ground.

Our facilitator said the average wait time with their agency is about a year. Still shorter than the national average, still shorter than the time we waited for Dash, and probably NBD in the grand scheme of things, except that we just fucked around for two months following a nine-month home study, and nothing is going to happen over the holidays, and fuuuuuck where does time go?

I am reminding myself that we're already parents. I have a wonderful and preoccupying life right here in front of me. But I still feel all those old feelings bubbling up, that little Simpsons bully on my shoulder saying "Ha-ha, you don't have a baby." I keep thinking about being in my mid-forties with an infant, about getting clocked as their grandma. There are worse things in this world. Because I also think about cancer, of course. Still on brand after all these years!

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash
I feel like this judgy sand castle has never adopted a child.

Last night I dreamed I was at some kind of indoor gym/play space, doing cartwheels and shaking my ass, when I looked around and realized everyone else there was a teenager or younger. One of the coach-type people told me I looked great for 44 (I'm 42).

When AK and I were waiting to adopt the first time, I charged up my defenses. Maybe I wasn't a parent, but I was skinny and fashionable and literary, so there! In the past few months, I've climbed out of a kid-/job-/occasional-PTSD-related self-care hole, but at best I can report that I'm schlubby and I read semi-regularly. How am I supposed to be cloak myself in glamorous defenses when I can't be bothered to floss?

And that's my update. I am motivated and gunning my engines. I am world-weary and fine. Fuck, where does time go.

smithing words, making space

Homeboy Industries had a beautiful culture of storytelling, but not of reading or writing per se. People would send long emails about the staff barbecue with detailed information about the type of meat the cafe crew would be grilling, and forget to include the date. Someone would inevitably reply-all: What about veggie burgers? And someone else would reply-all: This is so important to our model of kinship and I just want to really thank Rulies for organizing this!!! It takes a village!!! And someone else would say: When is it??? And eventually we'd find out.

I wrote grants, but I also helped a former trainee rewrite a policies-and-procedures manual, and I wrote descriptions for a bunch of salsas I'd never tasted. Word got out that I could write a variety of things, and people started bringing me their stuff, saying, "I was hoping you could wordsmith this for me."

At first, I was flattered but also annoyed, because "wordsmith" sounded like a word that people who don't value or understand writing would use. Like it was some kind of glitter I just sprinkled over things. It seemed to describe a craft, not art.

Then I started working at a writing organization where people Got It, but I still got requests to "wordsmith" various chunks of text. I've been thinking a lot about that word, and I'm coming around to it.

First, because being a craftsperson is great. When I think about the art I like, it's always a combination of concept and craft. Like Ray Eames' smooth birds and planetary hang-it-all. Or my friend Rebecca Niederlander's intricate wooden sculptures. I like skill and versatility. I like imagining myself as a weaver or blacksmith in a bygone time, someone people would come to with their need for a blanket or a soup ladle. I would return something pleasing and practical.

Photo by Sergio Gonzalez on Unsplash

Second--and slightly in contradiction to Point A--writing is thinking, i.e. concept. I had my annual performance review recently, and came away with shoulders slumped because it was clear I'm not much of a manager. Or, in the language of performance reviews, it's a "growth area" for me. I felt small and dumb. And it's true, I have plenty to learn in the realm of management. But if I'm wordsmithing things for my organization, I'm also thinking through our mission and programs and strategies, and that is a kind of leadership.

I had a very satisfying text exchange with my IKEA Writers Collective friends about how frustrating it is to be a person who leads behind the scenes but doesn't command a room or give shiny presentations. There are some ways in which I'm a straight-up slacker, for sure, but I'm also a critical thinker who understands how people work, and those are useful ingredients in the leadership recipe.

When I was processing my performance review angst with my therapist, he made me pause after saying "Everyone thinks I'm a nice enough person and a good writer, but--" because, he said, "people gloss over the things that are easy for them, but they're not easy for everyone. And even being a good writer doesn't mean you can write in every context." He described a student of his who's a wonderful storyteller but struggles with academic writing (I would too). And it's true that I pride myself on being a little bit of a chameleon.

Photo by Matthew LeJune on Unsplash

To that point (this is a transition), AK and I just wrote--drum roll--the profile for our second adoption. That strange and hopeful self-marketing letter to a stranger. It's been a long time coming. First we weren't sure we wanted more than one kid. Then we decided we probably did, but definitely couldn't afford to double our daycare bill, so it made sense to wait until Dash started public school. We took our sweet time completing our home study, which is to say I didn't become a megalomaniac this time around. I can't do that to Dash. It was bad enough when I did it to AK and myself back in 2011-2014. I have to remember that whatever happens, or doesn't, we're already a family. We're not incomplete; we're creating space.

Of course when you create space for possibility, you also create space for disappointment. I worry about our health and our energy levels and our finances and my writing. Sometimes it feels like we're trying to create space where there isn't any. But scarcity thinking has never served me well. So here's to abundance and openness and woven blankets and the baby names I whisper out loud in the shower.

elementary

Friday night I met with my writing group, had a glass of wine, dug into Auzelle's poems, walked home in the humid dark, and started feeling the sparkly urge to write a poem. About the layers of being connected to and separate from another human being (are there poems about anything else?).

Saturday morning, one of the moms from Dash's new school organized a pre-first-day play date so kids and parents could get to know each other, and it was nothing short of a smashing success. Every parent was friendly and chill, and the kids started a group project of Moving All The Sand From The Sandbox Out Of The Sandbox. Dash hit it off with twin boys who were adopted by two dads, and I can't tell you how excited I am that Dash won't have to do all the queer-adoptive-family explanatory lifting himself.

So we're feeling pretty optimistic, and the blurry unknown is coming into focus. This morning I wrote the poem that took shape Friday night, even though Sunday morning is a different place (and Sunday afternoon, when I'm posting this, in a sleepy post-Dodgers haze, is another place still). But here it is anyway, that moment, a prose poem.

*

Photo by La-Rel Easter on Unsplash

Elementary

1.

I hate kindergarten.

Me too.

It’s so boring.

I know. 

We sheltered in a cinderblock cave and glared at the sun-soaked playground. The endless recess, the smug glee of other five-year-olds. Denise Moretti and I knew better, two wise old cynics in ruffled dresses. We might as well have smoked. 

Eventually I peeled away. Learned to hang like a sloth from a metal bar, turned a grounded rowboat into a prairie cabin. The adventures of Janet and Mark, successors of Dick and Jane, remained dull as sand, but when Denise said--maybe in spring, when the hillside ice plant offered thin-petaled flowers--Let’s talk again about how we hate kindergarten, I told her I didn’t. A betrayal. I left her on that splintery bench and rowed off toward first grade.

2. 

You took to daycare like the frog in the pot. We didn’t boil you, but we made you believe these hand-offs were normal. You learned to walk on indoor-outdoor carpet. You marched to the bathroom in a line. Also: the teacher whose face opened when she saw you, a daisy turning to the sun. Also: the boy you wrestle-hugged each morning, two only children merging into brotherhood. These simultaneous truths: We missed something and gained something, and it is all fine as a box of worn blocks. Smooth wood oiled by many hands.

3.

We are rugged veterans of this village life, and yet. In nine days I’ll wait with you in front of heavy doors for strangers to buzz us in. A security measure, though real estate is the gunman in our neighborhood. Children eat free lunches in the shadow of a crane. 

You: uniformed in navy and royal blue. Me: the doubting general, wondering why my metaphors bend toward war. Knowing what will form in those trenches: the fear, the friendships. Alpha, bravo, charlie. 

You curl on our bed two Saturdays before, trying to name some nameless need. You call it cake, you call it water park. Mama and I form a tent around you, hush your kicking feet. 

I want to go to the water park NOW.

I know. 

I know what is coming, and I send you off anyway. If I could hold your hard days in my calloused hands, I would. If I could save your baby skin. And yet this truth clenched like a forgotten sock: I don’t mind turning my back. Every mother is as kind and ruthless as an ER doctor. Here is your backpack, here is my long nose touching yours, here is my heart, intact.

some things old, some things new

Sometimes moms post pictures of their nine-month-olds to celebrate "nine months in, nine months out." I've never been sure whether to count Dash's gestation in our lives as two weeks or four and a half years, but here he is, four and a half years out, about to start elementary school (technically "extended transitional kindergarten," but it's part of LAUSD and there is a principal and we downloaded an app, so).

It's late summer--finally hot after months of mild weather, strangely balmy in a way that stirs my sense of possibility. New life phase? I wonder. I'm always a sucker for new starts, even though much is not new: Dash, a veteran daycare kid, will still be away from me for the same number of hours each week.

"Mommy, draw me a Southwest airplane."

My sister got married two weeks ago. Dash cried through the ceremony and acted like a crazy drunk throughout the reception. Her husband is kind and clever and has the kind of dark side that makes me trust him more. He sees her full self, which is what I always wanted for her. They've been together a few years now, and known each other for a decade, so: new and not new.

My work angst has subsided like a tide edging back, slowly returning me to land and revealing a few new shells in the process, their insides pink and pearly.

What will it be like to be an elementary school parent? I love the school we chose--a public school six blocks away with a teacher, principal, and front office person who are warm and enthusiastic. It's not technically our home school, but it has the same demographic makeup, so I think it falls under my umbrella of what's ideologically acceptable. But who knows what needs will be revealed and what decisions we'll make for subsequent years, so I know better than to be smug. I'm just grateful for Ms. Pedroza and her monarch butterfly hatchery.

We're pivoting to elementary life at the same time that we're preparing--so, so slowly--to try to adopt another baby. It'll be a while; don't run out and buy us any onesies just yet. Planning ("planning") this next phase feels like showing up to a baby shower where everyone else is wearing floral sundresses and holding pass codes to the 529 accounts they just started. I am panting and dressed in sweats, ten pounds overweight and too many dollars in debt.

When Dash was born, sometimes I looked at his smooth face and chill demeanor and worried half-jokingly that he was too cool for me, a weirdo who thought about death all the time.

The other day in the car, he said, "Mommy, I have a surprise for you because you listened."

"Oh? Thank you! What's my surprise?" Often it is a sticker.

"It's my fingernail." He handed me a tiny wet crescent he'd just chewed.

While I was giving my toast at Cathy's wedding, he ran onstage, grabbed my forearm like a chin-up bar, pulled himself up, and licked me.

I aspire to be the kind of person who will see the love in this photo before I see my flabby arms, but I also apsire to be the kind of person who has less flabby arms. How cute is my sis, though?

I think he's quite at home in our family of weirdos, and I'm sure our next kid will be too. Everyone is weird because everyone is particular, once they pass the platonic ideal/projection screen stage that is babyhood.

If I bring anything new to this next phase, I hope it's a little bit more gentleness toward myself and others. This past week, I had a slightly odd stomach bug that prompted me to think about cancer a lot. The week before that, I binge-listened to Broken Harts, a podcast about the white moms who drove the six Black kids they adopted off a cliff, leaving behind a chain of half-assed investigations into their parenting and a thread of glowing, well written Facebook posts about raising chickens and creating peace.

Social workers and expectant moms, if you're reading this: AK and I are on solid mental ground and most of my Facebook posts are about how tired I am, so I can't be overselling too much, right? But fuck, that shit shook me up. It seemed to me that Jen Hart suffered from a particular brand of hubris, where she believed that if she couldn't "save" her kids--if she was in over her head, as she and her wife Sarah almost instantly were--they were better off dead than in someone else's care. I think I know when to ask for help. I think I genuinely relish raising Dash in community, and one of my great delights is seeing his agency and personality blossom in unexpected ways (even in the middle of a wedding). But I'm also a recovering perfectionist who thinks everything is my responsibility; I use social media too much; I am prone to crafting imaginary worlds for better and worse (Jen was also a video game addict). So I imagine the tracks veering away from the highway and toward the bluff.

Last week I was on a panel at Book Show about writers with day jobs, which my friend Bronwyn put together for a cohort of summer interns, a diverse and artsy bunch with glowing skin and great clothes, whose general excitement about the world was palpable and contagious. I'm a young enough old person that getting old is still surprising to me. I like that a lot of the pieces of my life have been established, but a part of me is still that college kid who wants to sign up for every extracurricular activity.

The old things: anxiety and PTSD, iffy eating habits, imposter syndrome, envy, a wonderful family of weirdos. The new things: a certain amount of acceptance of the old things, a community that will help raise my kid(s), an appreciation for the fact that (in the half-ironic words of Daniel Ortberg/Dear Prudence) "life is a rich tapestry." Those balmy mornings when the palm trees shake their leaves against gray-pink skies--that old feeling of new possibilities.

a few words of summer

Yesterday my department had a four-hour meeting at WeWork. I arrived in a pissy mood because I'd spent the first three hours of my workday putting together a mailing list and the fourth on a series of freeways.

The Culver City building that housed WeWork was across from the Sony Pictures lot, over which a giant fabricated rainbow arced. I imagined a team of producers and diversity-committee types saying, "We have this leftover rainbow from the set of [something Sony produces]. Can we repurpose it for Pride?"

The lobby of the WeWork building was decked out with bright lounge chairs, palm trees made of balloons, and an old-timey ice cream cart. It screamed "summer selfie." It also screamed: "Haha, you're not at the beach, you're at work."

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

It's been almost a year since our department was reshuffled and I was moved from a higher-ranking position to one that seemed like a better fit for my actual strengths. Except my org likes to proceed with caution, and the transition has been gradual. Glacial, I would say. Thoughtfulness and thoroughness are attributes; my last org was much more of the "Let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, and write grant reports suggesting that everything stuck when almost nothing did" variety.

But caution has its limits. And I'm getting impatient. And we've been without administrative support for about half of the past year, and guess who's admin support in the wake?

I feel like I'm swimming upstream toward my Preferred Job Description, battling giant waves of mailing lists and database management and post office visits and data entry and reports and seating charts, and those waves keep getting bigger, and my destination is shrinking to a dot in the distance.

I tell myself that all learning is good, and I have learned a lot about a lot of fucking databases. I tell myself that all work that supports a good mission is noble. I tell myself I'm paid really well for an administrative assistant. I walk off my rage in the park next to my office and see the dozens of people who live there in tents and old vans and would probably appreciate a job as an admin assistant. Or maybe they already have one, and it doesn't pay the bills.

I also see my coworkers getting (hard-earned, well deserved) promotions. I see my writer friends and writers on Twitter pounding out #1000WordsOfSummer a day. I remember when I went to MacDowell thinking that writing for eight hours a day was impossible, but after a short ramp-up, I was writing eight hours a day. I imagine what I could do if I had the time, at work and outside of work, and I crumple.

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

Everything in life boils down to the serenity prayer: What can I control? What do I need to accept? All the work is in knowing the difference, and I panic whenever I start to feel like I've made a stupid, risky bet. Did I miss the boat by not pursuing a career as a freelance writer? There are lots of reasons why the answer is "no" (the pay is usually shittier than nonprofit work, I'm not a good reporter, I'm not a good hustler), and a few reasons why the answer is "yes" (I'm better at writing than anything else, and there would be no mailing lists).

I've been thinking about futility. And the privilege and self-delusion that made me think I had control over my life, even for a minute. I mean, I have some. I want it all. Late last night, as I bitched to AK and Alberto, I toed Dash's trucks into a perfectly straight line. Alberto laughed at me, and I laugh-sobbed, "It's the one thing I can control!"

I always wear my struggle on my sleeve, and it's no secret to anyone I work with that I'm wilting under the weight of mailing lists. At our planning meeting, I did my very, very best to be honest, firm, and leader-like. I tried to Be The Preferred Job Description I Wish To See In The World. But when someone brought up "revisiting" our the roles and workflow we've spent months finessing, I wanted to scream. And cry and whine and perform all my usual unbecoming responses. Instead I got mad--in what I hope was a professional way?--and said no, we just have to do this. The time is now.

When I came out of the meeting, the summer set-up had been wiped clean from the lobby. I'd thought it was a regular seasonal display, like a Christmas tree in December, but apparently it had been there for a specific, two-hour party. I felt strangely relieved. No more pretending. Back to work for everyone.