Twenty years ago today, at about 8:00 in the morning, I walked into Shoney’s in Petersburg, Virginia having no idea what to expect. Three weeks earlier, I had celebrated Christmas by walking away from my still poppin’ fresh teaching career in the middle of the school year. Between getting my old condo ready to rent, the U-Haul expense, and setting up housekeeping in a new apartment, I was lucky to scrape together enough spare change to be flush enough to order breakfast somewhere so fancy. It was a starving time – the flattest of flat broke I’ve been as an adult before or since.
With that career turning 20 today, it’s been hard not to linger on where it’s taken me – from Petersburg and Richmond, to the Columbia River gorge and The Dalles, Honolulu, DC, Memphis, and finally back home to Maryland and the shores of the Chesapeake. I’ve met some absolutely brilliant minds and more than a few complete and utter shits. A few of the former, I’m lucky to consider dear friends. The latter are unavoidable no matter how hard you try.
No matter where the geography took me, it’s always been a job – the thing I do to pay the bills and afford to do all the other stuff. That’s ruffled the feathers of the true believers whose paths I’ve crossed. It cost me a few points here and there and maybe made me more than one low key enemy… but I have very few regrets. I’ll bitch about Uncle’s batshit crazy, incredibly frustrating, and outmoded way of doing things until the day I die, but it’s been a good living and it’s given me the opportunity to build a good life with not too many compromises. That ain’t nothing.
I’m just a bit shy of 2/3 of the way through this unexpected career of mine. With 20 down and 12 to go, I do find my thoughts turning a lot more frequently to its end than I do to its beginning. It’s nice, though, this one time a year, to sit down and think about the truly bizarre series of events and decisions that led me from there to here.
Category Archives: Life
It’s important to be just cynical enough…
As we rolled headlong into 2023, it was refreshing not to see a myriad of posts about how this was going to be “my year” or “the best one yet.” The plague years of 2020-21 and financial fuckery of 2022 have, it seems, beaten people into submission and given everyone a bit of a more realistic perspective on the world and their place in it.
The date on a calendar, you see, doesn’t mystically change anything. Absent unusual circumstances, things plug along much as they did before. There’s no secret sauce, no matter how badly some want to believe that in a new year, all things are possible.
I know for some of you that’s going to sound too pessimistic, or defeatist, but that’s not in any way how I see it. I didn’t think last year was so bad. Hell, we all know I was absolutely built for life in 2020. If there was ever a moment of living my best life, that was it.
Sure, my take could have some cognitive bias at work, but so far 2023 doesn’t feel all that much different than its immediate predecessors. If I’m wrong, we’ll all find out soon enough – and if everything does slide off the rails, I’ll be the first to admit that I called a bad shot. Still, my plan is to keep doing what I’m doing, on the assumption that nothing we’re seeing at the moment is the herald of the collapse of civilization. If I’ve misread the signs, well, none of what I’m thinking about or doing will make a lick of difference anyway.
If you’re just cynical enough, it’s actually kind of comforting.
The dread…
The dread I’m feeling about tomorrow being the end of my 17-day Christmas weekend is palpable. Without any scientific evaluation, it’s precisely why I think most heart attacks happen at the beginning of the work week.
Despite none of the plans of the last two weeks playing out as expected, the time has been an absolute delight – seemingly endless hours stretching out surrounded by books, and animals, and range time, and generally doing whatever caught my fancy on any given day or hour. I imagine it’s a sample of how I’d spend my days if it wasn’t necessary to work in order to afford those things.
I’m jealous of those people who, it seems, find fulfillment in their jobs. More power to them. I don’t know that I’ll ever find it more than a rude, 8-10 hour interruption, keeping me from doing the things that are actually of interest. For good or bad, I’ve told every boss I’ve ever had that it’s just a job, not some kind of sacred calling – usually in response to their misguided questioning about my desire to move upwards through positions of “increasing responsibility.”
If I were going to embark on some uplifting holy quest, I promise you it wouldn’t be planning the best gosh darn conference ever, or writing the OPORD with the fewest spelling mistakes, or sending out the most taskers in a single day.
It’s job, not in any way to be confused with actual life. If you’re expecting me to be passionate about it, you’re looking in the wrong place and at the wrong guy. I’ll do it well because that’s why I’m getting paid. The minute I’m finished, though, it won’t even be a passing thought during the rest of my day.
I’ll schlep into the office tomorrow because it’s what keeps the lights on and the animals fed. I might even crack some jokes or make a few snarky comments while I’m there. I’ll create the necessary illusion of being interested and engaged. Uncle will get his money’s worth… but it’s never, ever going to be a place or activity I’ll run to with a smile on my face and song in my heart.
I won’t be home for Christmas…
For 42 uninterrupted years, I woke up on Christmas morning on the western fringes of Allegany County. The arrival of the Great Plague in 2020 changed that. As it stands now, I’ll have only been home for Christmas one out of the last three years.
It’s a combination of factors this year. There’s been non-Covid respiratory sickness for the last two weeks at the old homeplace. Maybe it’s reached the stage of not being contagious, but then maybe it hasn’t. I came back from Christmas last year carrying a bug that unloaded on me on about December 28th… and see no good reason to ask for a repeat performance. Better, I think, to just push the visit out into January or February once everyone involved is healthy.
The second precipitating factor is the appalling weather. At 9:00 this morning, the temperature here was 46 degrees. By 10:00 it had started plummeting towards it’s anticipated low of 9 degrees. It’s not forecast to creep back above freezing for the next four days. Being away from the house for days on end while nature threw some of her worst possible conditions at us, felt like tempting fate unnecessarily. Add in problematic travel conditions enroute and staying put feels like even more of a no brainer.
Finally, and perhaps the most compelling factor, is that a certain feline member of the household came back from the vet earlier this week being diagnosed with a double ear infection. We’re treating it with drops twice a day. He’s just barely tolerating my administration of the drops. I know his normal sitter would have given it the old college try, be she only comes in once a day and there’s no guarantee he’d have been cooperative. Sitting tight ensures he’s getting the full course of meds as scheduled. Even surrounded by the comforts of my childhood home, I’d have inevitably spent the entire visit fretting that I should be doing something more for him.
It’s a disappointment, of course, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not catastrophic. I’ve got a ham to bake and made a trip out yesterday to pick up a few missing ingredients to whip up the appropriate side dishes for a proper Christmas dinner. It’s decidedly “less than” the normal traditions of Christmas, but it still won’t suck.
The other spooky season…
I know everyone leads hard on October as the spooky season, but I’m going to need to give at least partial credit to mid-December as well. Oh, sure, it’s not spooky in the conventional sense, but the middle to end of December is the one time of year my personal email clears out. As of last night, there’s not one single receipt, shipping confirmation, or any information at all about items purchased, in transit, or being returned. If you happened to be familiar with my online buying habits, you’d know just how unusual that is.
It’s the time of year when my online orders dry up. It’s less because of not needing anything than due to the logistics of this time of year. Delayed orders, out of stocks, items lost in transit, abnormally long shipping times, and then the ever-present weirdness of having UPS, FedEx, or Amazon drivers stumbling around the yard in the dark well after I’ve gone to bed on those occasions when a package happens to get through.
Unless it’s something urgent, my proclivity for online buying is momentarily paused. Whatever I need for the time being should be easy enough to lay my hands on locally. Even so, it’s a sure bet that my Amazon cart will be full to the electronic brim by the time I get around to getting back to normal operations sometime around the first of the year. For now, I’m willing to wait out the worst of the Christmas rush. I’m sure it’s just a weird personality quirk, but I’d rather hold off on ordering completely than spend any bit of the next week or two raging about shipping and logistics.
So yeah, whatever else it may be, the back half of December feels like its own unique flavor of spooky season.
Tossing the schedule…
As the end of the year bears down on us like an onrushing bus, I’m strongly leaning towards temporarily abandoning the normal schedule.
I give it the good old college try to get a post up here every weekday of the year. With the exception of federal holidays that I sometimes forget are weekdays, I mostly hit the mark. You’ve probably noticed that at least a fair amount of what ends up on these pages is at least tangentially related to work. Given that we’re about to hit a two week stretch when work will be the very last thing on my mind, there’s likely to be a dearth of quality source material from that front. If I happen to also mostly ignore the news, well, there’s no telling what, if any, ideas might percolate.
I don’t think I’ll be taking a two-week break – the chances of me shutting up for 17 days in a row is absolutely nil – but I do expect the final two weeks of the year will be a time when I toss the schedule completely out the window and let posts fall when and where the motivation strikes.
With all that said, don’t be surprised come December 19th if you don’t see a spanking new post hitting every night promptly at 6:00. I promise you’ll still get a healthy dose of angst and hostility over the ultra-long Christmas/New Year’s weekend, but I don’t want to commit myself to any kind of a schedule. It’s my longest break of the year, after all, and I fully intend most of it to be a true break from any kind of expected performance.
Taking full advantage…
It’s finally Friday night after what felt like an exceptionally long week. I’m feeling tired, but mercifully not sick. So, I’ve got that going for me, anyway.
I’m sure there are those of you out there with grand and glorious plans for the weekend. Good on you. Me? Well, all I really want to do is sink down into a nice comfy chair with a good book and a decent gin drink and lose myself for a little while. Mercifully, I can do exactly that for just about as long as I can stand it over the weekend. Aside from laying in the weekly groceries, there’s nothing on my “must do” list.
I intend to take full advantage of the situation… So, if anyone needs me, please don’t.
Give a little bit…
Since it’s Giving Tuesday, every non-profit on the planet is out there scrambling for your charitable dollars today. I present the following list of those I choose to support today, for Giving Tuesday, and throughout the year. As always, it’s a list that focuses on helping animals, because people are awful and it’s so often the animals, both wild and domestic, that pay the price for that. I’d ask that you consider them when putting together your giving plan for today and the future.
Clean Futures Fund – The CCF facilitates The Dogs of Chernobyl program. These dogs are the descendants of those left behind during the evacuation of Pripyat in April 1986. Despite an initial attempt by Soviet authorities to kill the abandoned dogs, breeding was out of control. Since their involvement beginning in 2017, no cats or dogs in the exclusion zone have been culled. They conduct sterilization clinics to reduce the population, provide vaccinations and medical care to strays, and provide food to the Dogs of Chernobyl.
Delaware SPCA – The mission of the Delaware SPCA is to prevent cruelty to animals. We bring our mission to life through programs that provide shelter and adoption for unwanted and homeless pets, reduce pet overpopulation through affordable spay/neuter, and enable pet retention by providing low-cost veterinary services.
Cecil County Animal Services – CCAS serves as the County’s Animal Control Authority and provides quality care to animals in the community through the management of an open-admission shelter. Additional programs and services provided through this Division include the Pet Pantry Program, Adoption and Foster Services, Behavioral Helpline, Pet Loss Support, Humane Education, Project Safe Haven, “Seniors for Seniors,” Pet Visitation Program, Volunteer Initiatives, and Pet Re-homing Intervention.
Ducks Unlimited – Ducks Unlimited is now the world’s largest and most effective private waterfowl and wetlands conservation organization. DU is able to multilaterally deliver its work through a series of partnerships with private individuals, landowners, agencies, scientific communities and other entities.
Chesapeake Bay Foundation – Serving as a watchdog, we fight for effective, science-based solutions to the pollution degrading the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers and streams. Our motto, “Save the Bay,” is a regional rallying cry for pollution reduction throughout the Chesapeake’s six-state, 64,000-square-mile watershed, which is home to more than 18 million people and 3,000 species of plants and animals.
World Wildlife Fund – WWF works to help local communities conserve the natural resources they depend upon; transform markets and policies toward sustainability; and protect and restore species and their habitats. Our efforts ensure that the value of nature is reflected in decision-making from a local to a global scale.
International Fund for Animal Welfare – The International Fund for Animal Welfare is a global non-profit helping animals and people thrive together. We are experts and everyday people, working across seas, oceans, and in more than 40 countries around the world. We rescue, rehabilitate, and release animals, and we restore and protect their natural habitats.
Grinning like the village idiot…
OK, so here I am back after a delightful, if short, four-day weekend. I mostly tuned out any form of news, avoided Twitter, and landed on Facebook only sporadically – air dropping in to post occasional memes, but not doing much scrolling. In short, it was really kind of delightful. I’m quite sure there’s a lesson there, if I’m willing to take heed of it. Steering mostly clear of news and social media is good for your mental health. Who knew, right?
I’ve often wondered why people who are obviously stupid wander through life so often grinning like the village idiot. I can only speculate based on my limited evidence, that perhaps ignorance really is bliss and that’s not just something people say. Going about without a thought in your head or a worry in your heart is undeniably freeing. It’s not so much that I didn’t care what was happening in the world as it was that I just didn’t know. I’m feeling surprisingly ok with that.
The first thing I did when I trundled to my desk this morning was tee up Drudge. Finding it plastered with reports of China’s rising protests, Donald Trump in general, the Republican Party continuing to form a circular firing squad, Elon continuing to be Elon, and Russia, as always, doing Russian shit. If that’s what I missed out on across the four days of Thanksgiving, I have to ask if I really missed anything at all.
I still don’t expect I’ll ever be able to tune everything out indefinitely. It’s an unhappy side effect of being, at least in some ways, curious about the world. I hope that I can at least be a bit more selective in the future – heading down rabbit holes that are of interest rather than just because they’re there. If the world is determined to burn itself to the ground, I can’t see any good reason I shouldn’t just increasingly allocate my attention to books and animals and smile while everything else does its thing.
Four days…
The two weeks surrounding Christmas and New Years are usually the only time during the year I burn off a really big chunk of vacation time all in one sitting. Planning around the other various federal holidays, I’ll manage to sneak in a few week-long blocks, too, but Christmas is always the big one.
Some of my favorite bits of time off, though, are the stretched long weekends. Either extend a 3-day weekend or slip a day of leave in between a Tuesday or Thursday holiday and its corresponding weekend and hey presto you have yourself a nice mini vacation on the books with very little loss of leave involved. Spread enough of those around through the year and you can almost maintain what few scraps of sanity you’ve got.
The Thanksgiving 4-day is probably the king of the bunch as far as I’m concerned. Unlike Christmas and its multi-day road stand and immense logistics tail, Thanksgiving politely contains itself to a single day for visiting, enjoying an oversized meal, and getting back home at a reasonable hour to sleep in my own bed. It’s a holiday distilled to its essence.
The three following days of no specified activities are just the sauce on top and I’m 100% here for it.
Long live the 4-day weekend.
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