Travels in Booland

Random Somethings of Midsummer

2009-07-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

*Hello hello! Happy Bastille Day! I mean, happy, I guess happy, I always think of Bastille Day as more violent than happy, what with the extreme bloodiness of the French Revolution and all, though I guess the 5 or 6 guys who tottered out of the Bastille (did anyone else ever hear that? That there were actually only a few prisoners in there by 1789?) were pretty happy.

*Okay. Happy Tuesday, anyway.

*Tuesday is my short day at work: only 4 hours. Since Monday is 5 hours and also crazy busy lately, I always feel like a Lady of Leisure on Tuesdays.

*Especially since MG has started walking home from camp on her own.

*Camp--at least this week-- is at her school, with her last year's teacher, and runs from 9 AM to 3 PM. So basically, from a parent's perspective, it's JUST LIKE school.

*Except, no homework! Woo-hoo!

*And also, according to MG, it is actually TOTALLY DIFFERENT from school, because basically all they do is art and P.E.

*On the Growing Up front, MG is now taking showers instead of baths.

*Yesterday she finished her shower, turned off the water, and asked me to hand her a towel. I reached out and touched her hair, which made the fuzzy, bubbly sound of a head with a fair bit of shampoo on it.

*I guess taking showers is a skill not acquired all at once.

*Yesterday, when I was feeling crappy, MG made me a plate of cinnamon-sugar toast, and even cut it in half for me. I was very touched.

*Then she said, as she says after every action evidencing a modicum of self-sufficiency, "Is this getting me closer to earrings?"

* I was a little less touched after that.

*More news: MG now has a trampoline!

*It was an early birthday present, a joint effort between some grandparents (who provided the cash), RW and I (providing the legwork), and our neighbor, who came over and helped us put the thing together last week.

*I have been nonplussed at how many people, on reading/hearing this news, react by warning me or RW about the dangers of backyard trampolines

*So I have become kind of defensive about explaining that we know the dangers, there is a net enclosure, MG has learned trampoline safety for years in circus class, we have a number of rules in place, etc. etc.

*The Vancouver Folk Music Festival is this weekend!

*This will be the third year in a row that we're going as Vancouver-area residents, not tourists up from the States.

*It's wild to think how different our lives are than they were about two years ago at this time.

*Kind of puts my recent job complaints in perspective, doesn't it?

Free-Range Kid

2009-06-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

I picked the Mermaid Girl up from her first day of camp a couple of hours ago. She was chowing down on mango and complaining about how HUNGRY she was and how I didn't pack enough lunch and can I please pack more tomorrow because she was STARVING, when the phone rang.

"Hi," said a kid's voice. "This is Trillium. Does MG have plans for today?"

MG took the phone. "Sure." She said. "Okay. How about in fifteen minutes?"

I said I'd walk her, but before I even had my shoes on, she'd finished her mango and thrown a skirt over her leotard.

"I'm going now!" she called, and was out the door. By the time I had my keys, she was down our half-block hill and across the street.

I followed, far enough behind to see her, but too far to call out comfortably and be heard. She knows the way to Trillium's house; it's less than four blocks away, most of which is the same as her route to school. So I didn't try too hard to catch up, just kept an eye on her as she walked down the street, past the school, and through the schoolyard.

She passed out of sight as she rounded the corner to the next side street, but as I passed through the schoolyard gate I could see her standing on the corner of the semi-busy street that separates the school and Trillium's house.

That street makes me nervous, even more so than the Main Street a block away. Especially in the late-afternoon rush. There are no street lights on Semi-Busy Street, only four-way stops at every corner; commuters use it all the time as an alternative to Main Street, and they don't always stop.

MG stood on the corner for long enough that I had a chance to observe her observing the cars. She danced in impatience as one car zoomed past heedless of the stop sign; then I saw her take a step, and wave at something, and hesitate while looking purposefully to her right--and now I was close enough to see that she was looking at the next car to make sure it was definitively stopping for her. Then she run-skipped across the street and dashed the few short yards to Trillium's house.

She walked up the stairs to the front door, then turned around and walked back down--nobody had answered her knock, I figured--and went around to the back.

She was in the house and out of sight by the time I caught up. Trillium's mom was waiting in the doorway and waved at me. I waved back, said a few words of greeting, and turned around to walk back home.

Last week I read Leonore Skenazy's "Free-Range Kids", and was intrigued. I especially liked the card at the back, meant to be clipped out and carried around and shown to worried adults. "I am a free-range kid," it reads, and goes on to explain that the bearer knows how to cross the street safely, knows not to go anywhere with strangers, that the adults in his/her life know s/he is out and about and that this is okay with them, but if the reader is concerned, here are the parents' contact phone numbers, which they should feel free to call.

When I finished the book, I'd shown the card to MG, and asked what she thought about it. I wasn't sure she would approve; she has an ambivalent relationship with autonomy and independence, and often asks us to to do things for her that I think an almost-nine-year-old should be able to do for herself. She even likes us to pick out her clothes for her.

She read the card, and gave a wordless, eloquent thumbs-up.

I think she's just given it another one.

Facebook angst

2009-06-26T00:01:00.001-07:00

Until we moved two years ago, I worked at a private K-through-8th-grade school, as the librarian. I've written about it a fair bit so you probably know this. Anyway, I was there for nine years, so by the time I left I'd known virtually all the kids since they were in kindergarten.

I loved some things about being in a close-knit community, I really did. I loved getting to know all the kids over the years, I loved the village that was the staff room, where I learned almost everything I ever needed to know about being a spouse and a parent and a grownup. And I really enjoyed the company of many of the parents.

There were some things I didn't like, too: the close-knit community sometimes felt too boundary-less to me. The kids sometimes acted infuriatingly entitled. I didn't like all the parents, especially the ones who were also infuriatingly entitled, and didn't like how the structure and nature of the school sometimes left me unprotected from their (I'm pseudonymous here, and don't work there any more, so I'll just say it) craziness. When there was a solid and supportive administrator in charge, that craziness was generally buffered. But there were several years, including my last few, when such was not the case.

Anyway, then I left. Left that school, that metropolitan area, that country. I missed the kids, and many of my colleagues, and some of the parents, but, hey, whee! Clean break! I never have to see the ones I don't like again!

Except, not so much.

Because now we have Facebook. All of us. And our exes and elementary-school friends and high-school teachers and everyone else we thought was faded out of our lives forever, adrift in the world somewhere, well, they can all find us. And we can find them. And we can all be Facebook friends in the great big cafeteria/mall/staff room in the ether, forever.

I am Facebook friends with some of my old co-workers (a few of whom read this blog-- Hi! hi there!!), and that is swell and it makes me much less lonely to be in touch with them and hear how things are going. So that is really nice.

Then, a few months ago, one of my old students sent me a Facebook friend request, and I haven't replied yet. I like her a lot, but I know this student isn't fourteen, and I don't think she's even thirteen, and even though she's not my student any more I wasn't really comfortable with letting her into my grownup facebook life. Just tonight, I got another friend request from another former student. This one is a year older, and again, I like her a lot and would be happy to be in touch with her but just don't want her to see all my stuff. I figure there will be other friend requests from other former students--I wasn't a hugely popular figure, but some kids, the bookish, thoughtful ones, liked me and I liked them, and some more will probably friend me when they think about it or see me commenting on one of their teachers' Facebook pages. I need to figure out what to do about this.

Then there are the parents. I thought I had decided for myself, in my new, happily non-boundary-challenged life, that I would not friend parents from my old school (unless they were also former co-workers). But then I got a friend request from one of my very, very, very favorite parents ever, the mom of one of my very, very, very favorite students ever, and a woman I'd always liked and thought would be a good person to be friends with, but felt somewhat constrained by my professional role. So I accepted her friend request.

And now I see that of course she's friends with other parents, including a few I'd rather not have much to do with, and they will see my comments if I write on her page, and then they and I will no longer be forever out of each other's lives. They might friend me, and I don't want to friend them, but now that I've friended this parent will they be all upset if I don't friend them too?

I have to remind myself that it doesn't really matter, that they are no longer my employer or anything like it (some of them thought they were, which drove me nuts and made me very jumpy), they can't complain to the principal because I won't Facebook-friend them or because they don't like something I wrote on my page. I can friend who I want and not friend who I don't want. That I am a grownup and that--on Facebook and in real, non-Internet life--I don't have to like all my friends' friends.

I'm curious about other people, and would love to know if you want to write in comments: What do you do? If you work at a school or a church or some other similar institution, or are a parent, or just for one reason or another need to set boundaries about who you let into your Facebook-- how do you decide?

Sweet Tooth

2009-06-18T01:14:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is true that no one cares what I had for lunch. But! I care! And I will tell you why.

I like many, many things about our life here in Vancouver better than back in Seattle. You know the drill: health care gay marriage skytrain ethnic neighborhoods spelling colour with a "u" blah de blah de blah. And I think I've even mentioned in braggish passing the wealth of ethnic and just generally wonderful food available just a hop skip and jump down the road here in our un-groovy Nearby Suburban neighborhood: Chinese, Italian, sushi sushi sushi, barbecue Vietnamese, Greek, middle Eastern, even Ethiopian. Yummy. Never more need I bemoan the dearth of cannoli in my life, for I can pick up a box of the stuff any time I like.

BUT. There has been one notable lack here in Vancouver. A flaw, a lacuna, a fly in the rainy ointment.

We have not been able to find any decent, cheap, convenient Thai food.

Now, Thai food in Seattle is like Chinese takeout in New York or sushi in Vancouver: ubiquitous. If there are two restaurants on a Seattle street, chances are that at least one of them is Thai. In our old neighborhood there were, at one point, six--SIX!--Thai restaurants within a five-block radius of our house. The owner of our favorite restaurant knew us and always gave MG special treats when we came in. There were times when we ate Thai food every week, and we always got Tom Kha Gai, the miraculous Thai chicken soup, when we were sick. Even the Mermaid Girl, notorious in our family for her food pickiness and not generally fond of anything without orange cheese or nitrates in it, had two or three Thai dishes that she reliably liked.

Not only that, but at almost every Thai restaurant I ever ate in in Seattle (and I ate in many over the years), the service was quick and unobtrusive, the menu was cheap, and the food was reliably at least decent and often transcendent. Thai food was a staple of my routine. It was hard to imagine life without it.

Then we moved to Vancouver, for a better life. But can a life really be considered better if it doesn't include regular doses of satay and rard nah? We stepped gingerly around that question.

Oh, sure, there were Thai restaurants. In our new neighborhood, even. We tried them. They were...underwhelming. And the service was uneven. And they were expensive. It was hard to get used to Thai meals not being among the cheapest restaurant food going.

So, in the manner of immigrants everywhere, we adapted. We learned to eat the local cuisine (which, luckily for us, encompassed a dozen or more other local cuisines.) We tried to forget about Thai food. And, aside from a few wistful sighs over the bathing rama of yesteryear, we almost succeeded.

Then, today, I stopped at the Sweet Tooth Cafe for lunch.

I've passed by the big blue Sweet Tooth awning dozens of times in the past couple of years. It's right on Hastings, a couple blocks East of Commercial, right on my way from Nearby Suburb to almost everything I need to get to in Vancouver proper. I always wondered about it, and thought I should really go in sometime to see what kind of cookies or pastries they had in store. With a name like the Sweet Tooth, that would be what they had, right? Desserts?

But I was always too busy. Until today.

Today I had a half-hour to spare between one errand in Vancouver and another in the Northern suburbs, and the Sweet Tooth was exactly on the way. So I pulled up the van and approached.

I thought they'd serve, maybe, some sandwiches or something to accompany all the sugary things that must surely lurk within. Imagine my shock to see, prominently listed in the window, "Soups, Salads, Desserts, Sandwiches, THAI FOOD."

Inside, it looked like a bare-bones cafe, not a Thai restaurant. No travel posters, no purple wallpaper, no bronze statues. No ambiance whatsoever, in fact. I demanded of the middle-aged woman behind the counter: "Do you really have Thai food?"

"Oh, sure, we have Thai food," she said, bemused. She pointed to the menu on the wall, where four or five Thai dishes were listed along with some soups and sandwiches. "What do you want? Do you want Pad Thai? I make the best Pad Thai in the city."

Pad Thai is the basic, signature Thai dish, the roast chicken or macaroni and cheese of Thai food, but it is easy to mess up. Even in Seattle, there were places that made amazing fancy Thai food but flubbed the Pad Thai. Here in Vancouver, we'd ordered it at every Thai restaurant we tried, and I'd been disappointed every time.

I ordered the Pad Thai. And a lemonade.

The food cost $7.95, which is about what a Seattle Thai joint would charge for Pad Thai.

She brought it over about five minutes later.

It was...it was...it was fucking fantastic. Not too sweet, not vinegary, not gluey or mushy. The noodles were distinct and the vegetables were crisp and there was a liberal dusting of chopped peanuts and it had a hint of that limey, fishy taste that makes it special. And there was plenty of it. If it hadn't been so incredibly good that I couldn't stop eating, there would've been enough to save a nice bit for leftovers.

I took the empty plate back to the counter. "You're right," I said. "That was amazing Pad Thai."

She nodded, pleased but not surprised. "I learned how to make it from my mom's friend. She'd been making Pad Thai for thirty years, and hers was the best in town. She sold it at a stall, in the market, and then she stopped and only cooked at her house, and people followed her there and came to her house for her Pad Thai.

"Even in Thailand, you know, you can't always find Pad Thai. It's street food. You can't get it at a fancy restaurant. And everyone makes it differently. But her Pad Thai was the best, and I learned from her."

I thanked her again, and promised to be back. And I will be.

This isn't normally a food blog, or a review blog. And I don't usually name specific businesses here, at least not with their real names. But I will today: The Sweet Tooth Cafe. 2404 Hastings East, on the corner of Nanaimo. For Pad Thai like they make it in Seattle, and maybe even better.

Oh, and the lemonade was pretty amazing, too.

Random asterisks of time keeps on ticking ticking ticking

2009-06-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

*MG cut her hair. Well, unlike when she was 3, she went to a haircutting place and someone else cut her hair. I'd made a reservation for her at the cutesy little kids' salon at the mall, but when she and RW got there, they realized she was way too old to squeeze into the little cars and watch a Dora video, so they cancelled the appointment and went upstairs to the grownup hair salon, which was so much cheaper that RW bought her a Webkinz with the difference.

*Now my daughter's hair is only about down to her shoulder blades and she looks around two years older than she did.

*She is on a campaign to get her ears pierced for her ninth birthday. We told her we'd consider it if she demonstrates some self-sufficiency in other areas of personal hygiene, since care for newly-pierced ears is no joke. So now she is a fiend for tooth-brushing and face-washing and even did her own bath and shampoo by herself the other day. This might not seem notable for most kids, but it is for her.

*Every time she brushes her teeth or hair or washes her face or performs some other evidence of competence in the taking-care-of-her-own-needs area, she says, "Am I getting closer to being ready for pierced ears? Am I?"

*Did I mention: NINTH BIRTHDAY!?

*Oy.

*RW got her a CD-ROM keyboarding tutorial out of the library, and now she is learning to type. Which is good because handwriting is an agony for her.

*We are trying to figure out how to rig up an old computer so that she can type at will, but doesn't have Internet access.

*The laptop on which I am writing this very post is a prime candidate.

*The other day we were driving around, and she was pretending to talk on her pretend cell phone (which is really an eraser). She informed me that the ringtone was "Money Money Money" and then proceeded to sing it in an undertone for a few seconds before pretending to pick up each call. It went like this: "Money money money, always funny, in a rich man's world...Hello? Oh, hi! Yes, a party, can you come? We're going to have sushi, and pizza, and ice cream...yes, on the beach! Okay, bye! [beat] Money money money, always funny, in a rich man's-- Hello?"

*Etc.

*I asked how she knew about ringtones, since RW and I both have cheap cell phones with just regular old rings. "I just do," she said.

*Then she asked if she can have a cell phone when she's a little older. "Maybe in a few years," I said. "When you're old enough to go places by yourself. But we might get you a cheap one with no ringtone too."

*"Don't worry," she said loftily. "When I'm older I'll get my own cell phone. And it will have a cool ringtone."

Find a Window

2009-06-03T09:46:00.001-07:00

There is, as usual, a bunch of stuff that I need to do that I've been avoiding. Some of it is at the point where further avoidance will have actual notable consequences, and yet, of course, the longer I've put it off the more I don't want to do it.

I was talking about all this at breakfast this morning, mostly to the Renaissance Woman but the Mermaid Girl was there too, picking at her cereal in her usual morning fog.

"It's like all my fear and resistance is this great big WALL," I said miserably. "And I have to BLAST THROUGH that wall to get anything done."

RW, sensibly, suggested that rather than think about blasting through the wall, I just let the wall stay there and sort of do a few things around it.

And then MG looked up from her cereal and said, "Find a window."

I blinked at her. Sometimes she says things that don't seem to make sense, because she's following her own train of thought and not whatever the grownup conversation is, and I was thinking maybe this was one of those times. We'd been talking a lot about windows lately, what with all this heat.

"You don't need to break down the wall," she explained patiently. "Just find a window. Or make a window."

"Oh!" I said, and "Thank you!" and "That's just exactly it! Wow! Thank you!" It was like the Buddha had airlifted down to our breakfast table in the guise of an eight-and-three-quarters-year-old girl whose hair was dipping into her cereal milk at that very moment.

She was still late to school. Probably to throw us off the track so we don't figure out that the Enlightened One lives among us.

Off to find a window, now.

Employment Drama, Part II

2009-05-28T23:28:00.000-07:00

Part I is here.

So, there I was, in my temporary decent hours although feeling somewhat underemployed at my perfectly nice although job-posting-challenged Suburban Library System, and buckling down for at least the medium haul there since the coveted Big City Library System had announced a hiring freeze this January, when...

Big City Library System posted a job.

And not just any job. A cool, interesting, challenging, unusual job, working not at a reference desk but out and about with members of marginalized communities, especially those who might not ordinarily be inclined to come to the library. That kind of job could be really bad news if if's not well-thought-out, and/or if the Powers that Be aren't supportive and expect the moon and let librarians burn themselves out. But I didn't get that sense in this case. Just before the job was posted, in fact, I'd been to a workshop presented by members of the team doing this job, in which they'd talked candidly about the difficulties and frustrations as well as the rewards. I came out of it excited and energized and inspired and wishing like hell my job was more like that.

Then, the next week, the posting went up, an exception to the hiring freeze because this area is a high priority for the city.

I pulled out all my notes from my last debriefing and applied them: added more items to my resume; went over the posting and highlighted the important buzzwords; pounded out the most impassioned cover letter I've ever written, without even bullshitting.

The next week I got an email asking to schedule an interview for barely a week later.

I went into a flurry of preparation. I'd started a temporary once-a-week gig at BCLS for a month or so, filling in for another librarian who hadn't started yet. So the week before I had the interview, I spent some time at the end of the shift talking with the person in charge of the program, who confirmed my sense that it was well-administered, that the supervisors had a clear idea of the potential toll and issues and worries people might have about it. I left her office feeling even more sure that not only did I want this position, but I could do a good job at it.

The weekend before the interview, I spent a day putting together and practicing my assigned presentation, running questions with RW, and henna-ing my hair.

And the interview was great. I knew and liked the interviewers, and I felt prepared to answer the questions. They kept nodding and scribbling things down, and they were engaged during my presentation. The written question was on a totally unexpected topic, but once I took a few minutes to absorb it, I wrote like crazy and pulled up ideas I hadn't even known I had. I didn't come out of it feeling like I'd nailed it, but I felt like I'd done pretty well and even sort of had fun.

I didn't think I would necessarily get the job, though. Since seniority goes by hours worked at that library system and not by months worked, or by years of overall professional experience, even a new graduate who'd worked at BCLS as a student could leap right over me with the 10% seniority boost.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happened.

It was close enough that just a day before the "you were not the successful candidate" call, Human Resources phoned me to get information about more references, and close enough that both my interviewers went out of their way in the following week, both during the debriefing and at other times, to tell me how well I'd done and what a good addition I'd be to the library staff, and to urge me to hang in there and wait for the end of the hiring freeze, probably in the next year. HR even offered me an eight-month full-time position , which I turned down after agonizing about it for a few days, since the end of that temporary term could leave me without steady employment at all if the freeze didn't lift.

All of which was reassuring, and lovely for my ego, , but somehow I've taken this whole process harder than any of the others. Maybe because the job was so unusual and exciting, or maybe because the interview-preparation process was so particularly demanding that I got even more invested than usual. The fact that I've been working regularly at the library during the whole process, and getting to work with some of the players in a regular day-to-day way, might have something to do with it, too. Or maybe it was just that it was so very very close.

Anyway, it's not such an exciting story to anyone else: I applied for a job, I didn't get the job. But I feel almost like I did at the end of summer camp or the high school play or even a crush. It was an intimate experience. Even though I didn't talk at all about my personal life during the application process, what I said during the interview and wrote on my cover letter and in the interview written portion tapped into some of my deepest passions. I barely know them, but the people who read my application and saw my interview got to hear and know me in ways that not a lot of people do, and that was fulfilling all on its own; who doesn't want to be heard, known, appreciated?

And now, you know, that's over. The show closes, and you go back to barely saying hi to people in the halls. Camp ends, and maybe you write to a couple bunkmates every once in a while. And now that someone has been chosen for the posting, the job of the administration at BCLS is no longer, for the time being, to hear and know and appreciate me; they have lots of other work to do.

So, things go on. Eventually, the hiring freeze will lift. Eventually, I'll accumulate enough on-call hours at BCLS to have some chance of having seniority on my side, though at the rate I'm going, it will take a long time. Or maybe eventually the other finalists will blow their interviews enough that if I do really well I can beat the seniority advantage. Or someone at Suburban Library System will retire, or move, or maybe even another job will be created there, and I'll have a good chance at it. Whichever system finally does offer me a permanent job in my specialty, that's probably where I'll be for a good long while.

Today was the last of my weekly fill-in sessions at BCLS, though I'm still on their on-call list. The person who got the job started this week, so she was there, and I congratulated her, because it's the grownup thing to do, to pull it together to be warm and gracious to someone who beat you out for a job, because, you know, the professional world is small, and what else can you do? She seemed nice and smart and enthusiastic and I'm sure will do a great job. Really.

But still, I found myself unusually tired today.

Employment Drama, Part I

2009-05-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

So. It's been an emotional couple of weeks, employment-wise. Facebook friends have already heard most of this, but just so it's all in one place, and for my own narrative satisfaction, here it is:

I have a part-time job at a Suburban Library System. It's not exactly what I want. For one thing, the hours suck. For another, it's not in the area (children's/teen svcs) that I love and am best at. And sometimes it's a bit quiet for my tastes.

But other than that, it's pretty good. The people are friendly and supportive and smart. The work is pleasant and not too hard. And, you know, it's a job. These days, a good job is nothing at which to turn up one's nose. It has benefits, and vacation, and they pay me and all. And until January, because I have a temporary appointment filling in for someone who's filling in for someone who's on maternity leave, I actually have a decent schedule rather than the crappy-shifts-no-one-else-wants hours that I will probably return to when the maternity leave posting ends.

So. That's the job I have.

Suburban Library System is pretty small, and because it's a nice place to work, people don't leave there much. There is a small number of youth lib. jobs in the system, and the librarians working in them seem quite happy and disinclined to go anywhere. Chances are, unless the Powers that Be create a brand-new position, it will be a matter of some years before I get a shot at a job I really want in Suburban Library System. I could be working my crappy-hours job there for quite a while.

So I've been applying for anything else that comes open, especially a children's or teen job. In the last year or so, I think I've applied for a dozen jobs, interviewed for most of them, and gotten two of them. Well, two-and-a-half: first the crappy-hours permanent job at SLS; then the better temporary posting I have now at SLS; and along the way I picked up an on-call substitute librarian position at Big City Library System.

Big City Library System is where, all things being equal, I would most like to work. And, until recently, it seemed like the place where I was most likely to get a job in my specialty. It has a lot of branches, a lot of staff movement, and a lot of funding for various initiatives.

As in Suburban Library System, almost all the postings at Big City Library are internal-- you have to work there already in some capacity to qualify. I applied a little over a year ago for a rare externally-posted position. I didn't get the job, but they hired me on as an on-call then, and I've been working there sporadically ever since.

In that time, I've applied for four other BCLS positions, interviewed for all of them, and gotten none of them. The rules at BCLS tilt the playing field heavily in favor of the applicant with the most seniority. Everything--resume, each interview question, the written portion (and there is always a written part of the interview, administered after the oral section)--has a certain point value, and the most senior finalist is given a 10% point advantage--a hard one to beat, considering that all the finalists are generally pretty good or they wouldn't be finalists.

Preparing for an interview for this library system is no small thing: the applicant is expected to hunt down their future supervisor and learn more about the position (unlike in most library systems, where applicants are discouraged from talking to anyone or trying to get an edge before the interview); there's always a "practical" or presentation component, which involves preparing part of a story time or other presentation, performing a portion it at the interview, and handing in an outline of the whole thing; and the questions are varied, unpredictable, and often seem to have little directly to do with the job in question. Between the unusual criteria--which screen for workplace-politics savvy and for knowledge of the system and its quirks as much as for more standard librarian skills--and the seniority advantage, it's not uncommon for librarians to interview three or four times at BCLS before landing a permanent job there, so my experience hasn't been totally out of line.

After my first failed internal application, and every subsequent one, I was offered a debriefing of the interview. This is as scary a prospect as you'd expect, but every time the debriefers have been practical, kind, and strategic in their advice, down to advising me of what buzzwords are important to refer to next time--and it's generally assumed that there will be a next time.

Back in January, I had an interview that was particlarly close, and my debriefer was very encouraging. I should definitely try again, she said, but might have to dig in and wait, as--due to the economy and the costs of preparing for an International Athletic Event in our region--the city had just imposed a hiring freeze.

So, oh, well. Such are the vagaries of public employment. I resigned myself to working Saturdays and weeding nonfiction at Suburban for the forseeable future, and trying again at Big City when the freeze lifted, probably sometime next year.

To be continued.

MG Speaks: Three Stories

2009-05-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

1.
The Mermaid Girl has been talking fluently for almost seven of her almost nine years now, and for that entire time it has been like pulling the proverbial teeth to get her to spill more than a monosyllable or two about what happens during the day while she is away from us. Back when she was in preschool, sometimes her teachers would give us some good dirt, but these days we have to resort to sidling up to her friends, on playdates, and asking them what they did today, hoping they come up with a couple good nuggets of info before MG shuts them up.

Well. Today, I finally figured out how to get her to sing like a canary: Two Truths and a Lie About Your Day. We went around the table at dinner. When it was her turn, she put on her best poker face and said, "I watched TV at Rosita's, I got two new pencils at the book fair, and we had a substitute teacher." The watching TV was the lie. It was a very good one, since she knows we know that TV is the thing she usually loves most at her babysitter's.

She turns out to be extraordinarily talented at coming up with lies that sounded ordinary and likely, and weird truthful occurrences that sounded made up. And I now know more about what she did today than I know about any school day of hers in the past four years, at least. Like: She and her friend found an old rusty penny and worked on the "poison" they're developing to kill dandelions (we agreed that since it is made out of flowers and bark and dirt it is probably exempt from our town's new ban on pesticides); they had gym indoors and had to ride on weird scooters and play badminton, which she hates; her class did a reprise performance of one of their Reader's Theater plays from the Open House last night. There's even more, but I can't remember it; in fact, she insisted that we go on playing Two Truths and a Lie until RW and I begged off, insisting that we simply couldn't come up with one more thing that had happened to us today, never mind concocting more lies.

MG is just the way she is: she hates, hates, hates being coaxed or interrogated or pressed for information; but she loves the chance to trick us and make things up. I wish I'd thought of this years ago.

2. [swiped from Facebook update of a few days ago]

Me: "You just don't care about the dishwasher getting fixed because you aren't the one who washes the dishes."

MG: "I care as much about the dishwasher getting fixed as a potato cares about an onion getting sliced."

Right then. That would be a D for household responsibility, and an A for similes. I'm not sure if this says more about MG's own proclivities or the values we've transmitted to her.

3.
Last night we rolled MG into bed early, after an eventful and meltdown-laden School Open House (two out of the three members of our family had meltdowns, in fact, so it was even more exciting than such events usually are.) Then in the middle of the night I was resting and reading and getting over myself when I heard her cry out loudly "Mama! Mama!" the Renaissance Woman, a/k/a Mama, was sound asleep, so I ran in to MG. Her eyes were closed, and she was lying down in bed, but her face was mobile and she was talking. "Mommy," she said, sounding frustrated, "I can't, I can't get the white to...it won't...would you please just..."

"Sure," I said. "Sure I can. Don't you worry about it." I kissed her on her creased little forehead and she seemed to relax a bit. "Is it okay now?"

"Mmm-hmm." She nodded in her sleep.

"Okay. Goodnight, bun."

If only everything were so easy to fix. I wonder what she was talking about. She had no idea today, when I asked her.

More Village: First Communion Edition

2009-05-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

This afternoon the Mermaid Girl went out to the back yard to lean over the fence and heckle the little boys next door, as is her wont. (They have a thing going: she heckles them, they adore her, especially the older one. When I go outside without her, he's always asking me: "Where's MG? Is she coming home soon? Will she be home tomorrow? She can come over, if she wants..." it is somewhat inexplicable as she is quite bossy to them, but maybe they like that.)

Anyway, I went out to look for her so we could go out to dinner, and saw both boys outside in their yard, both looking quite spiffy in button-down shirts and ties. I complimented them on their outfits, and the older one said, "Thanks. It was my first communion today. The guests are coming over soon. This is a golf set. Want to see? Playing golf is really fun!" I congratulated him and he did a line drive onto his dad's shoes.

I rounded MG up and we left, with Chasmyn and her lovely family. "Where are you all going?" Older Next Door Kid called after us.

"To the Main Street!" I answered.

"Why?" he persisted.

"For food," I said.

"We have food!" he cajoled, but I said his guests would probably want the food, and off we went, first dropping MG off at the library to meet the Renaissance Woman, and then on to the restaurant.

After dinner, we walked back up the Main Street, and there in front of the fancy Italian restaurant up the hill was Ofelia, one of MG's school friends. I almost didn't recognize her; she looked like a flower girl, or even a bridesmaid, in a gorgeous, classy white dress and her hair all done up in ringlets. She was surrounded by friends and relatives.

The penny dropped. "Hi, Ofelia," I said. "You look so nice! Was it your first communion today?" She nodded happily, and I congratulated her, and we headed the few blocks back to my house to divide up the leftover Ethiopian food.

A village. It takes one.

2009-04-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

So, two stories:

1.
The Renaissance Woman was on her lunch break the other day and walking out on the Big Main Street. (She works a few blocks from our house and from MG's school.) She was stopped at a street light and happened to see a bunch of kids with their teacher, out on a walk or outing from the local high school, the one that mysteriously has a terrible reputation as the place for Bad Kids even though it is in this relatively ritzy corner of Nearby Suburb.

Anyway, she knew these kids were from the Bad Kid High School because she recognized one of them from last year, when he had been in the oldest grade at MG's elementary school (which goes up to Grade 7), and had starred in the Christmas Play. He's very memorable: charismatic, a good actor. Also he looks a little like Barack Obama.

So while she's watching, and while the teacher is focused on a few of the kids in her charge, a loud car playing loud music pulls up with a bunch of guys in it, and Tall Charismatic Kid, assuming that no one's watching him, saunters over and gets right into the loud car, which zooms off into the distance.

The teacher emerges from her discussion and, perhaps feeling a bit defensive on account of Bad Kid High School's reputation, catches RW's eye, nods after the disappeared loud car, and says, "Those aren't our kids."

"Well," says RW, "one of them was."

"What?!?" says the teacher.

RW explains how she'd seen this kid get into the car, and how she'd known who he was from last year's Christmas play at Neighborhood Elementary, and describes him: "Tall, looks kind of like Barack Obama?"

"Oh! Robert*?" The teacher says, and RW, recognizing the name from the play program, confirms it.

"Thank you!!" the teacher says fervently. And off she goes, with what's left of her class, preparing no doubt to make a report to whoever needs reporting to. RW was pretty amused to think about how surprised ObamaBoy would be, to be busted by someone he didn't even know but who remembered him from last December when he played The Santa Show's MC.

2.
I was sitting in on a volunteer training for some teens this afternoon at the suburban library where I work (a different one from the one where RW works), and on the short break, one of them--a very charming kid who showed up on a scooter--whipped out her cell phone and then said, "Oh! Rats!" and then explained: "I couldn't find my key this morning, so I borrowed my brother's key, but then I remembered I had to go to this training and he wasn't home yet, so I left the key in the mailbox with a note with his name on it, PETER* in big letters in bright orange highlighter, to make sure he'd be able to find it, but just now I got a text message that he's coming over here to get his key so he won't be late for his violin lesson!"

Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later, a kid shows up in the computer area, an amiable-looking boy, about ten years old; he hones in on the volunteer in question, and starts right in with, "and you took my scooter, too?!?"

"Hi, Peter," said the library student doing the training.

"And where's my key?!?" Peter demanded of his sister.

"I left it right in the mailbox!" she said. "With your name on it!"

"In orange highlighter," I added.

"Great," he said. "Okay, fine," and he turned for the stairs.

"Better get going," said the other librarian observing the training. "You don't want to be late for your violin lesson."

Peter turned around and gave his sister one last glare and said, "so did you just tell everyone about my WHOLE LIFE?"

Yep. Life in the village. It has its points.

Iolanthe, with Various Digressions

2009-04-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

There is no good word for a cousin by marriage--that is, one's cousin's spouse or spouse's cousin--and there really should be. If my brother's wife is my sister-in-law, I guess my cousin's wife is my cousin-in-law, but that doesn't sound right somehow. Well, I'm declaring it a word anyway. So there.

Which is not what this post meant to be about. Here, let me start again:

My cousin-in-law, Delia, has been posting on her livejournal personal reviews of various performances she's seen, and they're wonderful reading, not least because Delia lives in Manhattan and has an array of exciting and buzz-generating shows from which to choose. (Also she is a fantastic writer.) It was on the strength of one of these reviews--and the enthusiastic comments it prompted--that I went to see Next to Normal when I was in New York a couple weeks ago, and was blown away, and look! so was the New York Times, when it opened a few days ago!

But that's not what I started out wanting to write about either, exactly. What I wanted to say was that, inspired by Delia, I thought I'd write about a performance I saw last night, Iolanthe, put on by the North Shore Light Opera Society. Not a review, exactly, or not a formal one; just some stuff about it.

I like Gilbert and Sullivan well enough, but I'm not an obsessive fan, so I'd never seen Iolanthe or even heard most of the songs. I went with RW and MG and RW's mom, and all of us enjoyed ourselves mightily. The fairies were a kick, Iolanthe was suitably dippy, there was lots of very funny mugging and very game dancing, and the story! So excellent! So silly! What's not to like about a show about fairies and politics? It was hard to wrap my mind around the indisputible fact that this show was written over 120 years ago. It seemed so contemporary.

This could have been partly because this production is set in the present, with female Peers as well as males (filched from the cast of fairies, with different costumes) all dressed in suits and looking suitably stuffy. When the young hero, Strephon, becomes a Member of Parliament, he is symbolically awarded a jacket, a tie, and a BlackBerry, and he and his girlfriend (who is all pissed off at him because she saw him hugging and kissing his mother, Iolanthe, who looks like a 17-year-old on account of her being a fairy) immediately commence to frantic texting as the rest of the cast sings the first-act finale.

Another update: Private Willis, a Guard/soldier in the original is, in this production, Brock Willis, a journalist for BBC-TV, and there's some very nice business with a live video feed and a burly bald cameraman. When the Lord High Chancellor sings his patter song about lying awake with a dismal headache (a song I knew already. How did I know it?? No idea), he's standing in front of the plain wooden backdrop that serves as the screen, and the camera, filming him, projects his image and then the projected image and then the image of the projected image, etc. and it's very appropriately surreal and nightmarish.

It was community theater, and RW says the musicians were having some problems with pitch and timing, and even I noticed that sometimes the singers got ahead of the instruments. But all the cast members were charming and funny and excellent singers, and the staging was very clever, and overall, it was swell. Also, we had great seats, right up front. And MG was totally starstruck by the fairies in particular and waited around in the lobby afterward to get a few autographs, which they were happy to provide.

I've been turning it over in my mind, and thinking about the advantages of seeing something Big and new and buzzy like Next to Normal, and something small and charming and local and off the map like this performance. RW used to do sound design for theater companies in Seattle, and I saw a lot of mediocre and even bad performances of local theater there. But I also saw some that knocked my socks off, one or two in particular by a playwright/songwriter named
Chris Jeffries who is a real, true genius, and who I can only imagine decided for reasons of his own to express himself through small local venues rather than taking his brilliance Eastward. Because really, he is that good.

And on the one hand, it's kind of cool and exciting and club-like that his shows "The Glory Booty Club" and "I See London, I See France," will never be reviewed in the New York Times, and most people will never hear of them, and I got to see them; but then, it's also sad. Because they were freaking incredible shows, and live performance lives in the moment. (We actually do have VHS tapes of those two, but it's not the same.) Selfishly, I'd like to see them sometime in revival, when they've been reviewed and produced to death and RW has read the scripts in her drama class in college, and some director who's now in elementary school has the challenge of making them fresh again. But of course that's not going to happen.

Hmm. How did I get here? All I wanted to write about was Iolanthe from last night, and how cute the title character looked in the big dorky glasses she wore to "disguise" herself, and the ingenious use of rubber duckies on the set, and how MG, clever child, figured out even before the second act who Strephon's father was. And just how excellent it is to see live theater, wherever it is, when it's done well and passionately.

There Followed a Dark and Gloomy Time

2009-04-17T20:53:00.001-07:00

No, well, first there followed the rest of the trip. Which was really, truly, excellent beyond excellent, aside from a cold which sidelined me for a day or two. And the need to keep harping about MG about math homework.

But really! We racked up three seders, many subway and taxi rides, much yummy street food, a circus show (not Barnum & Bailey but a lovely gentle European family circus which was just the right speed for someone recovering from a cold), a stop at Central Park, and visits of varying lengths with three different sets of relatives besides my dad & stepmom. The sun didn't shine every day, but it shone enough. I had some wonderful, sustaining conversations about books and life, and MG enjoyed herself mightily.

But beyond that, every time I got off the subway and came up onto Broadway and Somewhere Above 86th Street, I was happy like a kid holding their baby blanket: that's the neighborhood I was born into and lived in for my first five years, and it feels like home the way no place else in the world does. Every time the #7 train rose up from underground and took that swerve around the corner to reveal a shining view of the skyline across the East River, I felt like I could reach across the past few decades and wave to 17-year-old me, riding home of an evening from her summer job before college, and all the versions of me between then and now who have ridden that train and watched for that view. Heck, every time I visited the basement toilet at my dad's house, I got a hit off all the accumulated family history that old row house holds, right down to the Doonesbury and Sylvia and Kliban cartoon books that have been sitting in that exact spot ever since someone--maybe me--left them there sometime back in the '80's.

So the dark time was after I came back. For a few days. It's better now, though, and I remember again why I like it here too.

Remind me to tell you about the Amerikan Grrl store. It was a story in itself.

Dinner and a Show

2009-04-08T05:21:00.000-07:00

Two days back in New York (and it will always be BACK in New York, to me), and I've done six iconic things. I guess I really am a tourist in the city now. Tourism is exhausting! I am wiped & ready for a home day, which is what today will be.

Last night I went to a Broadway show. But not a feel-good, oh-I'll-take-something-in-while-I'm-in-the-city show. I saw Next to Normal, which is still in previews, but based on last night I'd say they're ready for opening. My theatregoing companion, a friend from college, called it "a smart-choice sandwich"--smart choices on top of smart choices. It was also disturbing and sad and emotionally rocking, and resistant of easy pat resolution. But not depressing, partly because it was thrilling to see something SO GOOD. Wow. Week after week I read theatre reviews in the New Yorker and think, oh, well, maybe it'll go on tour. But this one I got to see.

I want to write about it, but Delia covered much of what I'd say, and the rest is spoilers. But if you can see it, I'd recommend this (for grownups, not kids) over a big snazzy revival any day.

And for me it was all the more vivid because I got to go with this particular college friend, who was one of my two or three friends in the city the year I lived in Brooklyn after graduation. (Two or three friends wasn't nearly enough for me back then, which is one reason I left. But she was a good one to have.) We walked to the subway together after the show, talking and talking about what we'd just seen. We spent so many evenings walking back to the subway after seeing things. I don't want to say it was like the last nineteen years never happened--part of what we talked about, and some of what the show was about, was this strange phenomenon of being middle-aged. We hadn't seen each other for some years, and it was nice to be grownups together, to compare the somewhat-parallel tracks our lives have taken. So no, not like the years never happened, but familiar, a touchstone to my past self, and to that alternate ghost self who stayed in the city instead of lighting out for the west coast almost twenty years ago. Chances are, that self would also be meeting up with this friend every once in a while to go see some show or other, and walking through the dark to the subway together, talking and talking, and then swiping our MetroCards and going to wait on our separate platforms.

I meant to write about all six things: that show, plus the Chinese sesame noodles and the Empire State Building and Katz's and the central library and the Amerikan Grrl store. Oh, and the hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut, which makes seven. But this seems like enough for now, I think.

In Which I Reappear, Briefly

2009-04-05T12:05:00.001-07:00

I didn't mean to be gone so long. I NEVER mean to be gone so long. But jeez, March was nuts. I figure if you average out November and March it combines to make a decent average rate of posts, but for those two or three people out there clicking forlornly (or am I the only person who hasn't gone to a feed-reader?) that doesn't really help, does it.

In any case: Back now! With the birds and the sunshine! My job today is to pack, get the Mermaid Girl packed, do some work (yes! on a Sunday, right before I get on a red-eye! see above re: March, nuts), find several mysterious tax documents so RW can work on taxes while we are away (just the thing for those relaxing evenings alone), and then get on a plane.

Has anyone else besides me become more plane-claustrophobic with age? No? Maybe? Maybe it's just those teeny tiny seats we get now.

Also, MG has to do homework. Either today, or on the trip, or both. She is not thrilled at the prospect and I don't blame her. On the other hand, she's missing a week of school in order to do command performances of the Four Questions and eat street-vendor hot dogs, so I'd say she's coming out ahead.

Mainly, she has to do some math and build a simple machine. I know nothing about simple machines but apparently it is standard Grade 3 curriculum all over Canada. So chances are the average Canadian 9-year-old is much more knowledgeable about the ways of levers, pulleys, and springs than I am. Maybe I should find one and ask her over for the afternoon to help MG with her project.

Here are some haiku, generated by this application from previous blog entries:

when people of our
age and class were living and
studying in a few

x tulchinsky book
for example the one who
looked over at

want my maaaamaaaa me
yeah i know but i'm the one
who's here so there we

career paths i could
sing the songs by heart even
the sevens even

one that's very
different from what i've been
doing they'd have charts

productive in the
last two days last week at a
gas station tried to

we know what to say
that the car guys that and they
said it was moisture

from india to
canada where she continues
to feel baffled by

and would be so much
they asked her to change the
songs by heart even

But this one is my very favorite:

so what do you need
to eat something and maybe
even a bonus

Yes, indeed.
More from Old Country. I'll eat a knish for you.

Flashback

2009-02-28T08:25:00.000-08:00

I spent two days last week at a professional training, becoming officially certified to lead a special, intensive song-and-story based program for infants and parents. Yesterday, the trainer talked about how this program was originally designed for parents who were at risk, who'd been referred by Child Protective Services, but that eventually it was decided that all new parents needed and could benefit from this kind of support.

At the lunch break, I was talking with a few other librarians, all childless and younger than me.

"When I have a baby and I'm on mat leave, I'm going to go to all the baby storytimes all over town!" one of them said.

"Yeah! Yeah! Me too! That'll be so great!" the others echoed.

"Yeah, I thought we'd go out and do lots of stuff too," I said. "But what happens is, first the baby needs a diaper change. Then you need to gather up all your stuff to go out, and that takes a while. Then she's hungry and you need to feed her. Then she falls asleep. Then you need to eat something and maybe go to the bathroom. Then she wakes up and her diaper needs changing again. And by then she's hungry again, and then it's dinner time, and then...time for bed!"

They stared at me as if I'd just recited a dirty poem in fluent ancient Greek. Because I am psychic, or maybe because I used to not have a child, I know what these extremely nice, smart, energetic young women were thinking: they were thinking that I was insane, or at the very least that as a baby-parent I had been criminally disorganized. They would not be like that, slaves to routine, housebound and scattered! They would sling those babies on their hips and get out into the world!

Well. Maybe they will. Truth is, eight years later, I can't exactly remember why I didn't, just that I, too, had thought I would be out and about all the time with the baby, but that when it came down to it, it all seemed incredibly, weepingly, Sysiphianically hard.

And I wasn't even (mostly) the at-home parent, except for the first three weeks and then Tuesday afternoons for a few months after that. (And Jewish holidays.) It was at least as hard for the Renaissance Woman, though if I remember right, she did a spectacular job of getting the two of them out of the house on a regular basis.

This training brought it all back for me, though in a hazy, faraway kind of way, like the memory of a fire alarm in the middle of the night. Which was what a lot of it was like, come to think of it: staggering around sleepily, aware that something urgently important was happening, but unable to wake up enough to grasp its exact significance.

I have to remind myself of this when MG is having one of her full-on earthshattering meltdowns (as has happened twice this evening): it's easier now. And God knows, I was one of those nodding fervently and knowingly at that training last week, when the trainer said that in her opinion all new parents are in need of extra support, and that in this culture having a baby increases a family's isolation profoundly, and that just getting to a library program can be incredibly difficult.

Yep. Yep. Yep. I may not remember it well, but I remember it, all right.

Katie wrote back!

2009-02-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

I was right-- it was her.

Now I'm totally stumped for what to write back in return. She asked how I am, so there's the whole Vancouver thing. Plus the previous 35 years.

Also: As of mid-April, I will be off Saturdays! So I can take a protesting MG to shul and kids club a few times a month! Hmm. Maybe not such a good deal after all.

Lost and Found

2009-02-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

For one year of preschool and my first few months of kindergarten, I went to a small private school on the Upper West Side. It wasn't one of the fancy famous ones--in fact, it doesn't even exist any more--but it was fancy enough that I remember a formal lesson in how to hold a fork.

My best friend there--my very first real best friend, period--was a girl I'll call Katie. We met during naptime: we were supposed to be sleeping, but we each looked sideways and discovered each other, and were racked by fits of giggles. The teacher scolded us, but I didn't care: for the first time, I'd found something at school that I cared about more than I cared about Being Good.

The Mermaid Girl used to love to hear stories about me and Katie: how I went over to Katie's house and bounced on her bed and we listened to the "Cinderella" soundtrack and screeched "bippety bobbety boo!" over and over; how we were supposed to hold hands and walk across the street to the park for our daily playtime, but Katie ran, and I ran with her, and we both had to spend playtime sitting on the picnic bench, and Katie said loudly that she didn't care, she didn't want to play anyway, and I marveled at that because I did care and desperately hated being in trouble; how once I went over to Katie's house, all excited to spend the afternoon with her, and her mother came over and gently explained that Katie wouldn't be able to play after all, because her father had come to see her, and how I was so confused about that, because I'd thought I knew her father, the man who lived with her and her mother and her little brother in their exciting long-staircased brownstone, but he was her stepfather, as it turned out.

I didn't tell MG about how once there was another girl I was friendly with, until Katie said that she guessed if I wanted to be friends with that girl then I didn't want to be friends with her. So I started avoiding the other girl, and everything was okay after that. Even at the time, I knew there was something wrong with that kind of threat, but I shrugged it aside because Katie was so magical, so exciting, so special; it seemed worth everything, to go on getting to be her friend; even better, her *best* friend.

In the middle of my kindergarten year, my family moved to the suburbs. My parents and Katie's parents weren't friends, particularly, and long distance phone calls (even from New York to New Jersey) were expensive, and Katie and I were only just barely literate and certainly couldn't send letters independently, and so after a short while we lost touch. She did come to visit, once--maybe for my sixth birthday party--and I remember being excited but also feeling like it was strange somehow, off somehow, for my old preschool city friend to be appearing here, on my suburban street. And I remember talking on the phone with her once, in first or second grade, but it was strange and we didn't know what to say to each other.

After that, I never saw or heard from Katie again.

I've wondered about her, off and on, ever since then. In college, I thought about her a lot, maybe because I was spending a lot of time in exalted, obsessive love/crushed-out-ness, and my friendship with Katie was the first time I remember feeling something like that, or its preschool version, for someone my age. College would have been a good time to look for her--most people of my age and class were living and studying in a few dozen well-defined institutions, and even if she hadn't been at one of them she certainly would have had a close friend or relative who was--but somehow, I didn't. I think I was a little scared; Katie had always been a force of nature, and I was such a nerd--and, then, a newly-out lesbian to boot--that I was afraid she'd snub me, her old best friend, as not worthy of her time and reunion. I'd have rather not found her than that.

About ten or fifteen years ago, when the Internet made it easier, I started looking again, but without much hope: the name I knew her by isn't uncommon, and she'd had a different last name from her mother and might have changed it to match her mother rather than her mostly-absent father, and then we were getting to the age when people of our age and class were getting married, and many women do still take their husbands' names. Over the years, I found people with her name several times, but none of them seemed to be her, and after a while I gave it up as one of life's mysteries.

Last night, in one search that took all of ten seconds, I found her on Facebook.

At least I'm, say, 95% sure it's her. There were half a dozen women with the same name, and I sent messages to all of them, just in case. Most of them have written back by now and said sorry, it's not me, but good luck finding your friend.

The one who hasn't written back? I think that one is her.

She did indeed change her last name when she got married, but included her maiden name as part of her middle name on her Facebook profile. Her sampling of friends, which includes a few celebrities, was impressive enough to send me Google-stalking around to find out more.

Here is most of what I found out, which is general enough so that anyone who doesn't know her name won't be able to identify her: she's married to a lawyer a few years older than us, and they have two children and live on the Upper East Side. She donates to and volunteers for various worthy and vaguely-progressive causes. She has a law degree herself, but seems to have retired to stay home and take care of the kids. She goes to charity fundraisers.

Those facts are the bare outline of a certain kind of life, a life I know about from friends of friends, from books and movies, one that's very different from mine; though, except for the geography, it's not so very different from the lives of my students' parents, at my old workplace. I can guess some things about her, just from that outline: that she went to private school through high school, and then to a good college; that somewhere in there she travelled, probably in Europe; that she met her husband in law school or at work; that her kids go to private school, too; that they have household help; that their building has an elevator and a shiny lobby; that they have a summer home in driving distance of the city.

In other ways, I know nothing at all. I don't know anything about her that I know about my old high school and college friends, or even my invisible blogging friends. I don't know where she went to college, what she majored in, whether she passionately wanted to be a lawyer or just kind of fell into it. I don't know whether she ever lived outside New York. I don't know what her favorite books are (though I know that one of her favorite TV series is one that I like, too). I don't know if she kept on holding her friends so tightly, whether she had a lot of friends, whether she was wild in high school. I don't know if it was hard for her to give up work, and if she plans to go back to it when the kids are older. I don't know if she gets along with her mom, or her dad, or her stepfather. I don't know what happened to her little brother, who we used to tease. I don't know what about her kids worries her, if their births were hard, what she's proud of in them. I don't know anything about her grownup self, really.

But I knew her right away, when I saw her Facebook picture, even though I haven't seen her for thirty-five years. She has the same dark hair, the same piercing, forthright eyes. She still looks like a force of nature.

From that, and from the causes she supports and the things she's listed as doing, I know she's the same girl who ran across the street to the playground, and then said she didn't care. The same one who did care, passionately, enough to get people--me--to do what she wanted; the same one who looked over at naptime, giggling and transgressive. She doesn't live a transgressive life now, for sure. The outline of her life is different from when we were four, but the core is the same.

I have a feeling she's not going to write back; it could be that she doesn't even remember us being friends. But it almost doesn't matter: I think I'm finally old enough to not care if she thinks I'm a dork, to not measure us against each other, to not worry, after all these decades, if she thinks I'm worth being friends with. I'm just happy to know what happened to her.

And we're only about halfway through our lives; if she wants to get in touch, she knows how to find me.

Some Perspective

2009-02-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

It is Multiple Deadline Time again at That Job, and so I am sitting here freaking out. Every once in a while I slink over to my email and send something job-related, which relieves my anxiety just enough that I can return to surfing the whitehouse.gov website and reading the press briefings.

Yes, it's come to that. I can't tell if that's because I'm that desperate to procrastinate or the workings of the Obama Administration are that fascinating, or both.

It does, however, make me exceedingly grateful that of all the career paths I could have chosen, I did not pick the one(s) that might have led to me becoming the White House Press Secretary. Just the job I would least like in the world: to stand up every afternoon at 2:00 and have a mob of people yell and harangue me for information that I either don't know or am not supposed to give out.

Yup. It makes That Job seem not so bad.

Two Short Stories About the Mermaid Girl

2009-01-30T00:06:00.000-08:00

1. She had this "All About Me" project for school, in which she had to collect a bunch of things that "symbolized" her as a person and explain her connection to them in detail on index cards. This took days and days and occasioned much drama, of the "I don't knooooow what to doooooo, it's too haaaard" variety. And she only wrote like one brief sentence on each card. Some of them were pretty...enigmatic. So I was going over it with her and trying VERY VERY HARD (and with only moderate success) not to be a helicopter parent and tell her what to write.

One item she included was a beloved sparkly sequinny too-small shirt, along with a card that read, in its entirety, "I chose this shirt because it reminds me of my old school and of my Uncle Skaterboy."

Me: So...the shirt reminds you of your old school?

MG: Yes. Because one time I was wearing it and I bit one of the sequins right off. And that was at my old school. So every time I look at it, I think of my old school.

Me: That's a great story! I bet the kids in your class would love to hear that story!

MG: And you know why it reminds me of Uncle Skaterboy. [He gave it to her.]

Me: Sure. But your classmates won't.

*pause*

Me: Don't you want to write on your card that...

MG: NO.

2. MG was having her bath, and I was rinsing off her hair, and she was not happy.

MG: *whining like a kid much younger than 8* I want my maaaamaaaa!

Me: Yeah, I know. But I'm the one who's here, so there we are.

*pause*

Me: So...what do you say when you're with Mama, and she does something you don't like?

MG: *with matter-of-fact equanimity* I say, I want my mommy!

Me: Huh. So, what do you say when we're both there and do something that makes you mad?

MG: *quite cheerful now* I say, I wish I didn't have any parents!

Me: And what about when you're with someone else, and we're not around?

MG: *positively chipper* Then I say, I want my moms! I want my Mommy, or I want my Mama. Whichever I think of first.

Equation for a New Day

2009-01-25T14:02:00.000-08:00

What do you get when you combine

The Mermaid Girl's newfound obsession with the movie Mad Hot Ballroom and all related dances, especially swing, merengue, and rhumba

+

The adorable orange ukelele that the Renaissance Woman gave me for Jul, after I saw another librarian singing and playing one to excellent effect at a storytime workshop and became convinced that I Must Have one

+

A happy sunny relaxed Sunday morning when none of us had to go to school or work

+

This priceless typo-d headline, and the inspired comments below the post?

Well, I'll tell you what you get. You get RW and MG dancing a ~~box step~~ rhumba around the living room, while I strum along to accompany them (F chord, G chord, C chord, F chord) and we all sing, to the tune of "Guantanamera":

"GUAN-tan-na-mo Bay,
I'm closing GUAN-tan-na-mo Bay,
GUAN-tan-na-mo-o-o-o Bay,
I'm closing GUAN-tan-na-mo-o-o-o Bay!"

[pause for giddy peals of laughter, and repeat]

Not dead!

2009-01-21T00:46:00.000-08:00

You know it's been too long since you've posted when you start getting concerned e-mails from friends asking if you're dead.

I'm not dead! Not yet! I feel happy! Think I'll go for a walk! [<--Geek alert: note gratuitous Monty Python reference.]

Nope, nope, not dead this past month, just crazy what with the snow and the holidays and the running off to Florida to visit my brother, barely getting to the airport in what was I swear the very last taxi in town the morning of January 5th, and there was a REASON it was the last taxi, the driver was busily day-trading on his handheld computer as we slid through the snowy clogged streets until RW and I put on our I-Mean-It voices and made him stop. Still harrowing, though, and traffic was so nasty it took over an hour to get there and we barely made it onto our plane...

Well, anyway, we did make it to the plane, and got to Florida, and came back, and have been catching up ever since. It's almost like those lovely ten days were just a beautiful faraway dream, now it's all homework and laundry and dishes and frantic hunching over the computer on That Job. And the fog rolls in every night and sometimes during the day, so that we can't see the street corner, even, and I start to have near panic-attacks about being surrounded by haze forever.

But the snow is slowly, slowly melting, even though there are big dirty gray chunks of it still hanging around on the edges of the streets.

And this morning we gathered 'round the computer and watched as the 44th President of our home country was sworn in. For eloquence about that, I'll just point you here and here and...well...just about everywhere, today. If I try to do justice to how it feels, I might just give up altogether and then someone will have to send out a searching party to verify my continued existence. So I'll just say...it was good to see it, even on jerky live-streaming in a tiny window on the screen. It was really, really good.

Sumas, Ho!

2008-12-22T18:10:00.001-08:00

OK I think the Dudes on the Crane have had more than enough time above the fold. The memory of that waving leg still freaks me out, though as far as I could tell they were fine. (Really. Really. They were fine.)

I was going to tell the story of My Harrowing Second Annual Holiday-Mailing Trip Down to Sumas In teh Snow last Thursday, in four-part harmony, with feeling, but now it's been a few days and I'm afraid much of the narrative juice has leached out of it. Suffice it to say that the car started lurching and slowing down alarmingly a few miles down the highway, I pulled off at the first exit and drove around frantically (and ever more slowly) looking for a place to pull over, finally found a parking lot that belonged--joy of joys-- to an auto-supply shop! just as the car seemed to be getting over its ailment and speeding up again, pulled over, the guys inside spent a good amount of time brainstorming about my problem (and intermittently dissing VWs), they said it was probably not a crisis situation and gave me the name of a good VW mechanic.

On my way back out to the car I called RW, who said oh, yeah, she knew that mechanic, and also she knew that car problem, it had happened with her last year and the mechanic said it was moisture in the gas tank and put something in it to dry it up. I turned around & went back in & told the car guys that, and they said, Oh, We Know what he put in there, here, we'll sell you a bottle of it, pour half the bottle in the gas tank and then fill up with premium when you get down to the States (it's cheaper there), and sold me a bottle of something for $3.99.

So then all was well until I thought I missed my exit and got off at the next exit and then had to figure out where I was while also not getting stuck on a snowy side road (by the time you get that far East, all the cars have snow tires if they're driving off the highway. Except not me), somehow managed to find a gas station with only a little skidding around, got directions, got back on the highway, and then the car started lurching & slowing down just as I got off at the right exit.

So I lurched the few miles down to the border, whereupon I was hassled by the requisite A**hole Border Guy--they appear at random intervals and never when you expect them--who chided me for sealing the packages so he couldn't easily get a good look at them, but fortunately (for time's sake, not for what was in them, which was exactly what I said was in them) didn't insist on opening them then and there.

The post office itself was pretty straightforward, and everything got mailed, and then I stopped at a gas station & tried to fill up with premium, only the premium gas pump was frozen shut. So I drove home without even stopping for cheap cheese, or actually back to work because by then I was late for my 1:00 shift. It should've only taken two or three hours but it took four and a half. And I was very very cold.

Well. It felt heroic at the time. But it's hard to capture the magnitude of it. Because when you come down to it, I drove an hour on the highway, mailed some letters, and drove back.

In other news, today I feel like Norma Frickin Rae, in a similar spirit of exaggeration to that of the heroic epic above. If you ask me I will tell you about it.

And two people at work spontaneously wished me Happy Chanukah, which was pretty nice.

It's all lighter from here on out!

The Dudes on the Crane

2008-12-17T23:41:00.000-08:00

This morning I went to a meeting for That Job. I had to wait in the snow and take the bus downtown, but I didn't mind. These meetings are generally pretty fun; I don't get to do much creative stuff myself, but I get to work with creative people and artists, and we spend a lot of time brainstorming and tossing around ideas and folding up pieces of paper and scribbling on them and such.

The meeting took place in a conference room in a big building. The room has one of those panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows, and across the street was a squared-out, sort of hollow construction crane at the same level as our floor-- that is, 9 stories up--and angled straight at us. At one point we were deep in discussion about some item we were trying to figure out how to make, when I looked out the window and saw that there was a leg sticking out of the bottom of the crane, sort of waving around, like maybe the guy crawling around in the crane had lost his footing on the snowy metal.

I must've gasped, because everyone else looked out the window too. The mood, which had been in turns raucous and purposeful, became charged--here we were, all together, a bunch of people who really didn't know each other that well, witnessing something that was either horrific--if the guy was in danger--or funny--if he wasn't--and it was obvious that in either case there was nothing we could do about it.

I covered my eyes. "I can't look, I can't look!" I cried. "I'm scared of heights! I can't even look!"

I looked again anyway. The leg was gone, pulled back into the boxy part of the crane, and then there it was waving out the bottom again. Then we saw another guy, crawling around inside the crane.

"There are two of them!" another administrator gasped.

"I'm pretty sure they wear harnesses," one guy said.

"They're fine," said someone. By then it seemed pretty clear that they were actually fine, or at least we decided that they must be, and we were overtaken by a wave of giddiness and black humor.

"And we wouldn't be able to see them hit if they fell, anyway," said someone else.

"I'm sure there's a trampoline down there," an artist reassured me. "They'd just bounce right back up."

"Maybe we should put up a sign in the window," the graphic artist suggested. "Like, DO YOU NEED HELP?"

Things went on in this vein for a few minutes, along with some discussions of equations regarding terminal velocity that seemed perfectly appropriate and hysterically funny at the time and now seem callous and horrifying. And then we went back to planning.

Tonight, one of the administrators emailed me some meeting notes that she's sending to our boss. I wrote back with a few of my own notes, and added that it was probably just as well that she hadn't included the part about the guys on the crane.

She wrote back to me: "I didn't include the part about the dudes on the crane because I never ever want to think about that again. :)"

And I know just what she means.

Checklist

2008-12-15T20:02:00.000-08:00

Cards: Almost all done, except for a couple people whose addresses I have to get (and if you want one, and didn't get one last year, let me know-- we have lots!) Still need to be mailed, mostly in one big batch South of the border later this week.

Shopping: Done, mostly online. Except for RW. She is the toughest.

Packages: A couple of small ones still to go out. Need cardboard for mailing photos.

MG's photos: Wallet-sizes cut up, bigger photos allocated. Not all sent yet (see "Packages", above).

Menorahs and Hanukkah candles: unearthed.

Party this weekend, preparation for: Oh, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, right.

However, the art is all hanged! Hung? Hanged? Well, it's up, anyway.