I just knew last night’s garbled post wasn’t going to get the thing across. The thing is, Gary McKinnon has considerable charm, his story is engaging and a bit endearing, and he has compelling personal issues. But this case is bigger and meaner than all that. The treaty he is being extradited under, basically it makes ID cards – it even makes Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax -  look like a teddy bears’ picnic. Because (aside from the several legal rulings which have said it would be perfectly possible under European law for the Home Secretary to overrule it) it technically signs away the UK government’s rights to protect its own citizens.

Here is some context from the very-serious-indeed statewatch.org – “monitoring the state and civil liberties in Europe”:

This Special Report is also available in “pdf” format to download: Analysis no 18

On 31 March, David Blunkett, UK Home Secretary, signed an Extradition Treaty on behalf of the UK with his United States counterpart, Attorney General Tom Ashcroft, ostensibly bringing the US into line with procedures between European countries. The UK parliament was not consulted at all and the text was not public available until the end of May. The only justification given for the delay was “administrative reasons”, though these did not hold-up scrutiny by the US senate, which began almost immediately.

The UK-US Treaty has three main effects:

- (1) it removes the requirement on the US to provide prima facie evidence when requesting the extradition of people from the UK but maintains the requirement on the UK to satisfy the “probable cause” requirement in the US when seeking the extradition of US nationals;

- (2) it removes or restricts key protections currently open to suspects and defendants;

- (3) it implements the EU-US Treaty on extradition, signed in Washington on 25 June 2003, but far exceeds the provisions in this agreement.

An analysis of the new UK-US Treaty – which will replace the 1972 UK-US Treaty – follows below, together with a number of relevant cases and issues that raise serious concern about the new agreement (and those between the EU and US).

Ben Hayes of Statewatch comments:

“Under the new treaty, the allegations of the US government will be enough to secure the extradition of people from the UK. However, if the UK wants to extradite someone from the US, evidence to the standard of a “reasonable” demonstration of guilt will still be required.

No other EU countries would accept this US demand, either politically or constitutionally. Yet the UK government not only acquiesced, but did so taking advantage of arcane legislative powers to see the treaty signed and implemented without any parliamentary debate or scrutiny.

Guantanamo Bay, the failed extradition of Lofti Raissi and US contempt for the International Criminal Court make this decision to remove relevant UK safeguards all the more alarming”

There is more, more, much more. Download the pdf or click the link at the top.

And two more pertinent points, from Suzanne Moore:

1. that the only people who can’t be extradited under this treaty are the terrorists – because they’ll be facing the death penalty in the Us, and that is the only absolute bar to extradition.

2. that this might be a week in which the government would want to establish that they’re not at America’s beck & call!

This Thanksgiving I am not thankful to hear that the Home Secretary of the UK has denied Gary McKinnon his further right of appeal against his extradition to the US. Not thankful at all.

I wanted to blog this ages ago, and I’m not sure why I never did. So this is going to be a mishmash of a post, trying to fit too much in at once. Sorry. But listen, people – the European court can still intervene, so this is the last chance to protest. I’m not sure what the best way is, at this point – the Mail on Sunday has been running a campaign with a petition – though fat lot of good that’s done. Emailing the Home Secretary may be no use at this stage. Twitter, blogs, Facebook. You could do like Chrissie Hynde and Dave Gilmour, and make a record.

Gary McKinnon, in case you’ve missed it over the past seven years, is a vegetarian pacifist UFO theorist from north London who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems, looking for signs of a conspiracy, from 1995 to 2002. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, which if you’ve missed that, is a form of high-functioning autism characterised by high intelligence, singlemindedness, and – er – skill with things like computers. The self-described “bumbling computer nerd” became obsessed with this idea that the Pentagon was hiding evidence of UFOs, and technological things to do with free energy. “It wasn’t just an interest in little green men and flying saucers,” McKinnon said. “I believe that there are spacecraft, or there have been craft, flying around that the public doesn’t know about.”

He would sit in his girlfriend Tamsin’s auntie’s living room in Crouch End, with a beer on one side and a spliff on the other, laptop on his lap, and access the US government systems via network administrators who had no login passwords.

Yeah, you got that. Administrators who had no login passwords. He was using a perfectly legal remote access and administration software called RemotelyAnywhere, which is used by schools, etc. As he put it in an interview, basically it was like logging in.

To the Pentagon. Because administrators had not set up passwords.

“From time to time, some Nasa scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason” – wrote Jon Ronson in an interview with McKinnon in the Guardian in 2005. “On those occasions, Gary’s connection would be abruptly cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned Gary.”

2005 is the critical year, because, although Gary was caught and questioned in 2002, they never applied for extradition until 2005. They questioned him and then let him go. They even left him with his computer. Why is that? Because 2005 is when Britain, alone in the world, signed a post-9/11 anti-terrorist treaty allowing the US to extradite any UK citizen, even without evidence. The treaty, eagerly signed by Tony Blair and his lapdogs, because Donald Rumsfeld wanted them to, apparently gives the UK no say in who gets extradited to the US under this legislation. Yes, the UK has apparently signed away its right to protect its citizens. And it was done without any consultation (of course) with UK voters.

I say apparently. But all the senior judges have ruled that the Home Secretary certainly does have the right to intervene. So he is choosing not to, and using this spurious piece of legislation as an excuse.

But get this, also from the interview with Ronson:

“Once you’re on the network, you can do a command called NetStat – Network Status – and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand …”

“All on at once?” I ask. “You could see hackers from all over the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks or the military realising?”

“Every night,” he says, “for the entire five to seven years I was doing this.”

“Do you think they’re still there? Are they still at it? Or have they been arrested, too?”

Gary says he doesn’t know.

Elsewhere in the Guardian:

McKinnon’s search for UFO material on US computers turned into an obsession. As he investigated high-level computer systems in the US, his life in Britain fell apart. He lost his job and his girlfriend left him. Friends told him to stop hacking, but to no avail.

“I’d stopped washing at one point. I wasn’t looking after myself. I wasn’t eating properly. I was sitting around the house in my dressing gown, doing this all night,” he said.

His behaviour showed all the characteristics associated with Asperger’s syndrome – an obsession with certain activities and interests and a level of “social naivety” in evaluating the consequences of one’s actions.

Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, who diagnosed McKinnon with the condition, has said: “We should be thinking about this as the activity of somebody with a disability rather than a criminal activity.”

Then there’s this, from Ronson’s interview…

“I found a list of officers’ names,” he claims, “under the heading ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’.”

“Non-Terrestrial Officers?” I say.

“Yeah, I looked it up,” says Gary, “and it’s nowhere. It doesn’t mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of ‘fleet-to-fleet transfers’, and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren’t US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet.”

“The Americans have a secret spaceship?” I ask.

“That’s what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe.”

“Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?”

“I guess so,” says Gary.

“What were the ship names?”

“I can’t remember,” says Gary. “I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect.”

This was November 2000. By now, Gary was hooked. He quit his job as a systems administrator for a small business, “which hugely pissed off my girlfriend Tamsin. It was the last straw. She dumped me and started seeing this other bloke because I was such a selfish waste of space. Poor Tamsin. And she was the one paying the phone bill because I didn’t have a job. We were still living together. God, have you ever tried living with someone after you’ve split up? It’s bad.”

Clearly typical terrorist behaviour and a major international threat. Well, the interview with Ronson is funny, and I like it – because it is very human, and it shows clearly how daft this extradition is (and how very charming, and very London, Gary McKinnon is). Daft, but potentially tragic. The television interview at the top of this post gives the full flavour of the very serious elements of this case – one fear McKinnon has voiced is of being sent to Guantanamo. Being on the wrong side of gung-ho American anti-terrorism enthusiasts is no joke. And it also comes to something when a Labour government is to the right of the flipping Mail.

Other supporters of McKinnon, incidentally, include Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister’s wife.

Lord, this is getting long. I’d almost forgotten about Boris Johnson’s wonderful column in the Telegraph - which we should appreciate, as he gets £250K a year for writing them…

He may believe in little green men (writes our moptop Mayor), but he was not operating as a fifth columnist on behalf of these Venusians. He was not trying to cripple American defences in preparation for an assault from outer space. He was simply following up a weird intuition that UFOs exist, with all the compulsiveness that he has exhibited since he was a child.

In so doing, he has generously helped America to prepare against attack from a more sinister foe. If it was so ludicrously easy to penetrate these encryptions, then what could al-Qaeda have done? Just imagine if America’s defence establishment had commissioned IT consultants to probe their systems as exhaustively as Gary McKinnon. The contract would have been worth far more than £500,000.

McKinnon did it without charge, sitting up all the night, hardly eating, smoking heavily and spending so long tap-tapping in his dressing gown that his girlfriend gave up on him. The Americans shouldn’t be threatening him with jail. They should be offering him consultancy.

As if you couldn’t tell from yesterday’s post, I’m enjoying my time off mightily.  I’ve cleaned every nook and cranny of the closet in both the bedroom and the office; I’ve reorganized our office bookshelves, my craft drawers, my computer software (which was a huge wreck), our game closet (yes I said game closet – we love board games), all the bathroom cupboards, and my chest of drawers; I’ve repotted my houseplants (a feat easier said than done which dusted the entire kitchen in a layer of potting soil); I’ve dyed my hair a pretty russet color (which I used to do years ago, but haven’t done for a long time); I’ve done load after load of laundry, including pillows and blankets that, as far as I know, have never been washed.  I’ve cooked.  I’ve done crafts.  I started to organize old photos (I got through my first year and a half!) at my parents’ house.  I treated myself to an at-home mini spa day yesterday.

I still have a list as long as my arm: scrub the walls and windows, the tile in the bathroom, the kitchen; vacuum; organize the kitchen cabinets and the stuff in the laundry room and the CDs/DVDs/records in the living room; get all the crap out of the shed and go through it/organize it so we can actually USE the shed as a shed; go through my records (bills and stuff) and shred/file; get ready for a yard sale; make Christmas ornaments and Christmas cookies; go through my mp3s and finally get my Zune updated correctly (which I think will take a full reformat); plant a winter garden; decorate for the holidays;  start walking (but – yay! – I have a walking buddy now!); finish going through pictures at my parents’ house and scan hundreds of them; maybe I can finally start my wedding album (if I can get all the rest of the photos from friends!!). 

Oh yeah and find a job.

I know, it should be higher up on my list.  But when you’re given a gift of time – something I really don’t remember having for quite a while – you want to make the most of it.  I have been applying places, and actually found a job at UCSD that looks interesting.  But I am so happy to be making the most of my time off.  I only wish I had some sort of direction I could go in that would ensure my being able to stay home – like an at-home business.  Maybe my creativity will burst forth?

Speaking of creativity, I have been having a ton of fun.  First, my work with Crayola Model Magic:

A miniature version of a plate of cookies; these are cookies from both of my grandmas - from the top right, Weeta's candy cane cookies, Weeta's Reindeer Turds (yup, we're classy!), Noni's Zuccharini, and Noni's Haystacks. I kind of want to make this plate of actual cookies now.

For perspective, that's a small paper clip.

I’ve also been playing with fabric (although I just realized I can’t share that online because it’s a gift; maybe the next piece I make will be shareable?).  And cooking a lot (which is something I’ve been doing – but I feel like I’ve had the opportunity to be super-creative with it).  And something that made me super excited: I actually wrote a really excellent scene from a novel last week.  You see, this is how I’ve always written – a single scene comes to me and usually doesn’t connect with anything I’ve ever written before; I can’t tell how the story begins or ends, but the scene is pretty awesome.  I have about a dozen different “books” going, but only one or maybe two scenes from each.  Which is frustrating to say the least.  The exciting thing about this scene isn’t how funny it is but the fact that it got written.  You see, I haven’t written any scenes in years.  I wrote three kids’ books – which I should really look into getting published – but never a scene, and at one point I was writing all the time.  I feel like my creativity is just flowing back into my body.  I hadn’t realized it was gone, but I sure as heck don’t want to ever let go of it again!

Overall I miss my coworkers.  But I am feeling like a new person.  Full of energy and enthusiasm.  Like myself of old.  It’s strange really when I think of what a black cloud I was under.  Not only the obvious sleep issues, but a total lack of energy for even longer than I was having trouble getting to sleep (I’d wake up tired and drag myself through the day).  And the throttling of my creativity.  And the way every bit of my body would hurt – from my digestive system (I haven’t had any weird indigestion or anything either by the way, and a month or two ago I’d be popping Rolaids) to my joints (you guessed it – my knee and ankles are feeling great) to my skin (okay, that’s not 100% clear but it’s definitely better) to my hair (which was falling out at an alarming rate – every time I’d brush I’d get a giant fuzzball) to my weight (I haven’t been watching a single thing I’ve been eating, nor have I been walking as I’d hoped I’d start, but I can tell from the way my clothes are fitting that I’ve dropped at least five pounds this month).  I haven’t had to have a single supplement to help alleviate stress or help get to sleep.  I haven’t had to rely on coffee to keep me awake (nor have I had a single problem sleeping after drinking a cup of coffee!).  I haven’t been grumpy and bitchy and mean to my hubby for no apparent reason.  It’s like being in a Rip Van Winkle story, like I was asleep for the last four years.  And now I’m ready to start living again!

It’s Thanksgiving.  And all the craziness of the last year, culminating in what happened at the end of last month and everything that’s happened since, has me thinking.  I’m so thankful for my support system – my friends and family who have listened to me, have loved me, have supported me through everything.  I’m thankful that I was given this opportunity – this chance to gain perspective on a life that wasn’t being fully lived.  I’m thankful that I can enjoy my time off rather than stress about it (as I succinctly put it earlier this week – when you find you’re less stressed out about having no job than having the one you’ve got, you know it’s better not to have it).  I’m thankful that tomorrow is another day.

So… Zadie Smith is publishing – that is, she has written, so Hamish Hamilton is publishing – a book of essays, and thus has essayed to write an essay about it, which is in yesterday’s Guardian. Most of her essay is about the essays of one David Shields, whose book of essays on the essay (or “stupendous conterblast to all conventional literary pieties”) will be out in February, simultaneously here and in the U(essay).

Zadie, like everyone else who is anyone, has been reading Reality Hunger lo these many weeks in proof. (She was given it by a student, apparently, but to read the HH website is to feel sadly out of the loop if one has not been given a copy. Not only do they reference Smith’s piece, a month ago, but they talk excitedly about all the people who have been reading Shields in proof, as well. I for one fall well outside this beautiful circle, but I’m blogging here anyway.) So we have to go with what she says; not yet is it for us to have an actual position on things. But we can read, and think on however little. It is a subject never very far from my mind, in fact, the stuff she’s writing about here: it’s about what I write, and why.

She  says she disagrees with much of what Shields says, even when she finds him interesting: “Shields likes to say such things as ‘Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn’t'; to which I want to say, ‘Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too’.” Referring to a quote from no less than JM Coetzee, where he also laments the rise of the “well-made novel,” she says:

This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, “well-made novel” seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for “novels that don’t look like novels” is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.

According to Smith:

Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthiness” – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”. He recommends instead that artists break “ever larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary.

So naturally this is where Ms Baroque wades in! Because I have this very love-hate relationship with the novel. There is a kind of politeness in the novel, or at least in most contemporary UK novels that I’ve read (which, okay, isn’t very many in the scheme of things, as every time I do read one I regret it bitterly, thinking Why, WHY did all those reviewers and everybody think it was so flipping great??). It’s a politeness that extends even (or especially) when the auther thinks he or she is being really iconoclastic, blowing away the cobwebs of taboo, etc etc. It’s a paleness, a predictable mannerliness; I’ve battled with it for many years and find it almost impossible to articulate what it is I mean by it… sort of, as I used to put it, the thing where the novels feel they have to tell you what colour the person’s front door is. It’s so tiring. Who cares?

It’s this detail, which every writing workshop will tell you is better than just the facts (not just cereal – what kind of cereal?), which to my mind takes one further and further away from what the story is supposed to be about. The story is clearly not about the front door, or the minutiae of utilitarian life. It’s an intrusion of the kind of clutter and noise we all seem to think passes for “reality” these days. And it’s the kind of reality we all know human kind cannot bear too much of.

One exception to this is The Corrections, a masterful work about which I will brook no dissent, and another – ditto – is The Ice Storm. But in those books that is the whole point: the intrusion of the noisy external world into people’s inner imperatives, with – in both cases – pretty dark results. (And of course both Franzen and Moody are great stylists.)

I think, thinking about it, that there are two things to say about Smith’s essay. One is about her definition-confusion about the word “essay” itself:

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

(I love that cosy “of all people”: why??) The thing is, as I’ve tried to say in my title, the word has a simple, clear meaning, “to have a go at.” The archaic “assay” is related, clearly. Sure, it’s old. To use it as a synonym for “try” would be very anachronistic now, but in terms of the written thing, the written article, it is still very much in the way of an attempt upon a subject. I can barely see that the meaning has changed at all, except to develop another sense in relation to this specific usage. It’s not an “unstable history” in the slightest. It’s just that we like things literal and plain now.

Like fiction, like poetry (an alternative to fiction that barely gets a look-in in this discussion, even though the author is married to a well-known poet), essays can take many forms. When I was at school we were taught to write “compositions” which were essays. There was a form. Say what it’s about, then lay out your items for discussion in  paragraphs, with each item containing all its subsidiary points, and finish with some kind of conclusion. In practice it can be memoir, philosophy, free-association, scholarly, newsy, scientific. It can be like the long essays by John McPhee, that went all over the shop, or like Annie Dillard’s spiritual-biological musings on life and nature, or like Lamb’s amazing shaggy dog story, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, which made me weep with laughter in school at 14. It can be a book review (or “book report” as we called them), or high-falutin’ critical analysis, or polemic.

But listen. The other thing Zadie mentions, as quoted above, is this big thing we are all too much in the face of. Reality. There’s a very interesting sentence embedded in the quote above, which goes:

He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”.

This is it.

The mediated, postmodernist, commodified, photographed, regulated, politically correct, plastic world. Think about it. And I mean plastic in both senses. Firstly it is largely made of plastic these days. Look at your nearest bus, or what your apples came in, or warehouse store. Secondly, everything is endlessly plastic, malleable, conditional, attributed, relative, up for reinvention, redefinition, redesign, restructure, realignment, reassigment. Even personal relationships, even gender!

There is now, more than ever, no such thing as empirical reality. So we are lost in a cacaphony of processes, procedures, targets, objectives, appraisals, reviews, emails, brands, cultural signifiers heaping up and up and up in an endless mountain, jargon, disposable coffee cups, fan crazes, other people’s mobile phone conversations, and a complete fall in standards of behaviour – which means that, among other things, other people are just in our faces more than they used to be.

Oh yeah, baby.

I mean even Jack Kerouac didn’t used to text on his BlackBerry while Neal Cassady was trying to talk to him, and crazy as they were I bet they didn’t eat fried chicken from a (plastic) box on the bus and then leave the box under the seat.

And their girlfriends did not talk in an endless infantile highpitched nasal whine, that went up at the end of every  phrase, like the annoying actresses in Mad Men (and every other current American TV show) do?

Ranting? Maybe. But I think fiction can’t cope any more, because frankly we just don’t want to know. There’s too much of it. It’s all too irritating. Fiction either becomes just as shallow as the so-called reality TV we now watch – as if only what you can see is real – or it tries for the historical effect and as often as not wears its research naively on its sleeve. (I don’t mean Wolf Hall here. And I don’t by any means mean all contemporary fiction, either. There are a handful of novelists I would follow around the supermarket, hoping to hear them say something to an aisle attendant.)

Ranting aside, all this imageness and process and positioning, and the way fiction publishing is being run by marketing teams and brand-builders, mean we are hungry not for “reality” – not as in “reality TV,” which is another kind of mediated pre-packaged unreality – but for the real. Something real in our literature. After all, literature is our letter to ourself, that tells us where we are and how to get along there. Fiction used to do that for us.

The fiction Zadie lists in her article does do it. It engages with the inner life, the real imperatives, as reflected in the external. But it’s all old; she ducks out of her own argument a bit to give us classics instead of taking an unflinching look at the now. After all, it’s the now that David Shields is talking about.

Our external now is so managed these days that fiction can’t cope; we need a place to process it and have a think. Because everything else – even the education system itself – is set up to mitigate against thinking. Our society has grown terrified of thought, of deep reflection, in favour of “skills” and “results,” and our literature is desperately trying to regain a foothold. It comes to something when the narrative imagination, which used to be the way to pattern reality in prose and make it bearable, is no longer enough. Franzen writes brilliant essays, for example.

John Gardner saw all this coming decades ago, with his famous, churlish remark that if the New Yorker published any real fiction at all the Steuben paperweights in the side columns would explode. So did Cheever. So did Marshall McLuhan. (So did TS Eliot.) Well, it was the mid-century lament, and Mad Men (whose women speak so differently from the women of that day) charts it too. Life on Mars was a reaction to it. (In Life on Mars the John Sims character literally gets to go back to 1972 and have a think from outside his own life.)

Now, what is most needed I think is a good step back from the clutter and noise and static and trappings, of which there are just so many. And some quiet in which to reflect and think and find ourselves, away from the shopping channel. (Everything is the shopping channel.) A chance to look at it, instead of watching it, and to assimilate.

And that’s why I write poetry. And essays. And a blog.

Even my much-vaunted half a novel was half assemblage, scraps, un-permissioned quotes, pages and pages of them; it was simply not possible to do what I was trying to do as straight linear narrative. People keep telling me to have another go but I don’t know. This article is one of the first things I’ve ever read that comes close to describing why I feel so conflicted about novels. I do kind of miss them; recently I read The Thin Man and The Turn of the Screw…

Thank you Zadie and good night.

I have come to realize what is important to me in the last few months.  It is health and good friends and a supportive family.  I have two kids still living at home but I am thankful they are healthy and are pretty level headed.  I think my son will be moving out soon.  I will and will not miss him. lol  He is old enough to be on his own.  So, is my daughter.  She does not have a great job right now but planning to go to school soon. 

I am thinking about Christmas.  Not just the presents but spiritually.  I want to be a better person and I am striving to do that daily. 

I think of all the blessings I have, not the ones I don’t have.  It is said God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.  I must be pretty strong…:)  It seems I can handle more stressful things in my life better than I did before.  I am thankful for that.

I guess I am thankful for a lot of things and may say them before we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner.  I am making my list today of what I will need.   My daughter isn’t crazy about Turkey but it is a tradition that would be hard to break.  I just can’t see making a ham on Thanksgiving.  I bet the early settlers ate whatever they could find or had on hand.  I bet all didn’t have Turkey.

Oh I try to stick to the traditional food.  Corn, sweet potaoes, pumpkin pie, stuffing and a green bean recipe

Here is the list of 10 things that are important to me.  I have decided to link each one to a past blog post or a website that supports my work.

1.  My family
2.  Nature
3. Yoga
4. Education
5. Singing
6. Reading
7. Connections/working with others
8. Journaling/writing
9. organics/sustainablitily
10. Health

What is your list of 10 important things?

30 Days of Blogging

It’s sort of a strange limbo I’m in at the moment; I am still at my job for another three days, and I’m trying as hard as I can to get everything in order for my coworkers.  I want them to be able to go into my files and understand them, and, as I’m finding, that might be easier said than done.  There are a couple of things I did very recently (in my defense, they were right after “the talk” so my mind was probably elsewhere) that I had to stare at cross-eyed before I could understand them.  And I’m the one who created them!

In addition to clean-up, I’m also cleaning out my desk.  Which is also a whole lot harder than it sounds.  More than three years of “living” here have meant a build-up of equipment (I purchased my keyboard, my headset, a wireless mouse, an electric stapler, my business card holder…), plants (6 of them to be exact, not counting the lucky bamboo that withered away and died earlier this year…  hmmm, I wonder if that’s a metaphor?), and STUFF (from vitamins and pills to snacks and photos and magazines).  I’ve already taken three loads home.  I have at least a good-sized load today and tomorrow, and another one Friday.

I’m thinking a lot about the future.  I really have yet to hit on a job I know I want to do.  I will probably dabble a bit while I’m looking for full-time work, in an effort to figure it all out.  I am definitely going to make some handmade ornaments – I’ve already ordered supplies – and sell them on Etsy (I’ll put up a link to my shop once I have something in it!).  I may troll the swap meets for vintage bits and pieces as well.  I’ve always liked shopping for other people – it’s like a puzzle I have to fit into place in just the right way – so I’m considering putting myself out there as a personal “gift” shopper during the holidays.  There are a lot of busy people and a lot of old people who simply can’t make time to go searching.  I just have to figure out how to advertise myself.

I am also considering trying to get into baking, although again I’m not sure how to advertise myself.  Bread is a specialty of mine, but I also plan to make cookies and maybe even a good set of ravioli for Christmas presents.  I wonder if people would pay for that too?  I wonder how many licensing hoops I’d have to go through?

I’m also considering coordinating parties and weddings.  And finally finishing the illustrations for the children’s book I penned a couple of years ago and trying to shop that around (although I know it’s just about impossible right now to get anything published unless you’re already established).  And gardening.  And…

Basically I’m considering a lot.

I think part of my lack of focus is the fact that everything is in the abstract sense right now – it’s all about “when I finish up here…”  I know it’ll be soon, but I have yet to experience it.  And with all these plans, I still need to make time to actually persue a job.  It’s incredibly important that I look for work – I know how long it’s taking most people to find jobs right now!  I need to figure out what to do in the interim but it still is all about actually making enough money to survive – and hopefully afford a house in 2010 – so I can’t play around forever.

I am looking forward to reevaluating my path, though.  I feel blessed to have this opportunity.

If this isn’t photoshopped, then I am at a loss of words. I’ve attempted to hold back…must…end…article…before…I…blurt…most…overused…internet….based…reaction…slash…phrase…

<Gives in>

REALLY?

Come on…REALLY????

<pant pant pant>

REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLY?

Ruuuuhuuuhuuuueallllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

No…seriously…rly?

Jesus that is ****ed up. Messed up enough where I feel little to no guilt in bringing Jesus back into this. And you need to understand that I can be considered a horrible Christian AT BEST.

It’s been a strange week.  Knowing I’ll be gone by the middle of the month, my boss hasn’t given me much to do (I’m helping my coworker and trying to get things organized).  The weather is disgusting – foggy and damp – and I feel like if I stay in one place too long I’ll start gowing mold (this weather is also bringing on major sinus headaches – ew).  Saying goodbye to people is not easy – it’s compounded by the fact that this is a sort of surprising thing, so I’ve had to explain over and over the abbreviated version of this weekend’s discussions and decisions…  Like I said, strange week.

At any rate, I need to look forward.  I want to look forward.  And, in truth, I’m excited.  I’ve already started making lists of what I’ll do.  Obviously job hunting is a priority.  I plan to apply for unemployment but I’d prefer not to stay on it long.  Realistically, I might even look for a seasonal job.  But aside from that, I want to explore a bit.  I wonder if all of this went down because I’m meant to do something completely different: work from home, perhaps, or go into my own business?  One of my best friends suggested starting a production company (*waves*) and I’ve been thinking a lot about it.  Really, money-wise it’s going to be a challenge over the next several months.  But I wonder if that challenge is mitigated by opportunity?  I think it really might be.

I’ve started cutting coupons (an activity I’ve always enjoyed more than was healthy but typically not been organized enough to keep up with) and restarted planning meals (my total grocery bill this week was less than $60, and that included milk and eggs and butter and meat for two weeks, and flour for several).  I’m going to be watching the checkbook like a hawk and getting creative with the Christmas shopping (luckily some of it is already done, but several people will probably be getting homemade baked goods or pasta or something this year, instead of store-bought gifts), checking the fliers for sales and going to Henry’s on Wednesdays for double flier savings (nerd!).

One of the first things I’m going to do on the Monday after next (after my scheduled massage, for which I have a gift certificate, thankyouverymuch) is plant a winter garden.  Lettuce, spinach, carrots, parsnips, peas, beets, herbs…  I might even throw in a winter squash, although I suspect it’s too cold for it to flower properly (I might get lucky and have it mature just in time for a warm week or two).  I’m going to clean out my closet.  I’m going to clean out the shed.  I’m going to de-weed the yard.  I’m going to cook.  A lot.  I’m going to spend time secondhand shopping with my sister.  I’ll probably start an Etsy shop, for beautiful things I find and maybe even some things I make.  I’m going to go through my parents’ photos (currently in a huge cardboard box) and scan them and put them in albums.  I’m going to go and help my grandmother around the house.

I’m going to enjoy life, and revel in the holiday season.

The hubby has a very early schedule.  He’s up and out of the house by 5:30 every day.  I’ve been waking up almost as early all week; if I can get into that habit, I can tend the garden and have a good walk (a mile or two, to start, and then I’d love to get back to the five miles I was doing last year) before breakfast.  He’ll be home by 2:30 or 3 every afternoon; we can start doing things in the afternoon, like watching a movie or running errands.  He’s talked about having people over (we won’t have the excuse we’ve had lately – Elisa’s been working too darn much and is exhausted).

I can’t get too excited about everything; I have to reign myself in a little bit.  I need a job, to be able to pay for things.  For rent, we’ll be fine with just his paycheck, and my unemployment.  Utilities too.  But eventually we’ll need new clothes, car repairs, or who knows what else…  So I have to get back to work, and I have to do it as soon as possible.  And I am motivated to do so – I know I can find a place where I can succeed.  But I have to admit I’m really looking forward to a holiday season filled with happy, productive home life.

As I said in an e-mail yesterday, a single exclamation point about sums up my life at the moment.  This year has been just disgustingly crazy, starting right before last Christmas with our washing machine disaster (read: leaky washer meets idiot washing machine repairman), heading into the New Year with our new (yay!) washer and our plumbing disaster (sigh), our plumbing being fixed and our dryer dying…  It’s been one of those years where every time one area of life gets more sane another area of life explodes.

We’ve been so busy and exhausted and sick (I’ve twisted my ankle so bad I had to get X-rays to make sure it wasn’t broken, and a few weeks ago I royally screwed up my knee) that we didn’t get our thank you notes from our wedding out until the week of our first anniversary (and some people moved during that time and still haven’t received them because I still haven’t gotten their new addresses – hint!).  We’ve gone to more weddings this year than I’d been to in my entire lifetime before this, and we’ve had some other pretty awesome exciting beautiful experiences.

But this year has basically been a giant ball of stress and tension and upset-ness (I don’t care that it’s not a word, it’s MY blog!).  I’ve been having major sleep issues for a couple of months now, to the point where I purchased an herbal (non-melatonin) sleep aid that’s been assisting me when I have the worst insomnia.  I’ve started using ocean sounds to soothe myself and haven’t had a drop of caffeine past noon for quite a while (despite my insistance that caffeine really doesn’t affect me that way – I used to drink cup after cup at night with no problems at all).

Last night was my first night of sleep – good, restorative sleep, from which one wakes before one’s alarm clock and simply can’t sleep any more; and into which one goes blissfully, sans sleep aid – in a long time.

Yesterday I made the official announcement that I’m leaving my job in two weeks.

Now, lest you think that I’ve got an incredibly awesome position lined up, or that you think I’m superhumanly ballsy and would willfully quit at a time of such dramatic economic toil, this whole thing was a surprise to me.  It wasn’t how I wanted this job to go down.  I am scared witless about what is to come.  But when I was taken aside on Friday and asked to come up with a transition timeline I realized that, as much as I had been trying to squash myself into this job, to make myself work within it, it didn’t matter.  I’d lost my sparkle, my enthusiasm.  I’d forgotten what it was like to come to work energetic and ready for the day.  Oh, I’d had a little of that last month when my boss and I were discussing how to get ahead in our routine.  But for the most part, I was dragging.

My departure from my job isn’t because of a catastrophic event or any thing that I did – it’s a great big combination of personality, circumstance, and management styles, coupled with the whole darn “stress/exhaustion” thing above.  I did lose motivation and focus.  But had I realized just how tarnished I’d really become I’d probably have sought to leave far earlier.  Oh, I was keeping my eye out, sending a resume here and there, but not really pushing myself.  I was exhausted and, quite frankly, comfortable, despite it all.  I think a lot of us get this way and don’t ever get the kick in the pants we need to realize it.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t take full responsibility of the situation; just of myself.  And even though I’d have argued vigorously with you last week about it, I know now.  I lost myself.

And in spite of any head-butting scenarios over the years, I really really like my boss (and he likes me – the conflict was not with my direct boss, nor was the decision to “transition” me).  I am going to miss the hell out of him.  I’m going to miss the easy way we “argue” with each other, and how his utter nerdiness comes out at the funniest times.  And telling my coworkers I was leaving was like telling my family I planned to move across the country or something.  Achingly difficult.  Not surprisingly, they were shocked.  I almost burst into tears when one excitedly asked me where I was going, and when I said ‘nowhere’, almost bounced out of her chair to say “are you pregnant?”  (for the record, I’m not, but I thought I’d curl up and die right there instead of burst her bubble). 

It’s been an incredibly hard weekend – one I don’t ever want to repeat.  And the decision was not reached lightly for me to depart in two weeks.  The economy, frankly, sucks.  Jobs are hard to come by – and people with masters degrees are being turned down for entry-level positions.  But I’m going to figure it out somehow, and persevere.  My incredible husband is totally in favor of my being unemployed (he said last night that if it were up to him I’d only work if I wanted to – of course we don’t live in that sort of bubble, but it was nice to hear), at least for a time, and our house-hunting plans have been put on the back burner.  I’m putting myself out there – slowly – and thinking about what I can do to make myself regain my joie de vive.  I am already planning on lots of walking and lots of good cooking (this weekend I seemed to do nothing but cook – it made my head clear and nourished both body and soul), cleaning out the corners of messy closets and replanting the backyard (which, admittedly, was an enormous mess this year – between all the lovely stress and the thought that we might move at any time, we didn’t plant a garden), working on a wedding album and going through the old photos at my parents’ house.  And making fantastic homemade gifts for Christmas (since money is going to be incredibly tight around our house this year). 

Obviously with some serious job hunting.  I might even find something before my two weeks are up.  I’m confident that God always makes the right decisions, even if they seem to be completely wrong when we’re going through the situations that they put us into.  If nothing else, ’tis the season for retail jobs.  I’ve never had one before.  May as well start somewhere, right?

But for now, I am relishing in this feeling of calm.  This feeling of regaining something I thought I’d lost.  Trust me, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and yesterday were some of the most difficult days of my life.  But after all of it, I felt strangely lightened; I didn’t realize how unhappy I really truly was.  And now I feel like I could look at myself in the mirror and see me staring back.  Like I didn’t realize how much I’d missed myself.

And I’m looking forward to getting to know myself again.