Many Atlanta homes and businesses don't have properly insulated pipes in exterior walls or under houses. As a result, water/ice/slush coated many streets after the hard freeze, and repairs are slowly starting. Don't expect every business or government office to be open this week, even if that was the plan.
I had a small water event in the basement bathroom of our rented townhouse - luckily I was home to catch it.
We had a large water event in the vacant unsellable house in Lake Claire. Neighbors let us know water was pouring off a deck. Insurance was contacted, but I'm not going to touch the place. There's nothing I can really do by myself (the husband and kids are out of town for the holiday). I was lucky enough to be with friends when the news of the problem got to me, so I could have a good hard cry in someone else's bathroom for once. It was a nice change of scenery in which to sob.
The realtor was actually the one who managed to get the water shut off at disaster house. I had called the city emergency line, but with pipes popping all over the city in Christmas Day, we were just put on a list. City of Atlanta water meters are the special fancy locking kind, not the old curb key kind, or I would have killed the water supply before the cold reached us. Instead I had just turned on the heat, set the taps to drip, and hoped for the best like everyone else.
It's just busted pipes. No one I know died. Things will get better. My friend's house is big enough that I could take 15 minutes in a back bathroom to collect myself before going back out to snack and play boardgames with friends. I didn't talk about the problem, and everyone there was considerate enough to not ask how selling the Lake Claire house is going.
This all reminded me of when I was pregnant and would have to leave group settings and vomit. Everyone knew I was leaving the party or work meeting to go be sick, and it wasn't remarked on except in a supportive way. As we continue to go through the journey of losing the house, sometimes I have to leave whatever I'm doing to go emotionally vomit in the back bathroom. I try to go out and have fun or be productive, but at this point I never know when the nausea of the bigger thing happening to me is going to sieze control. I was supposed to have four days off for the holiday. I spent at least a few hours of each of my days off dealing with problems caused by the weather.
Luckily, I got a text the next day from work management letting me know we have tomorrow off as well. A pipe popped at work, too. No telling what the damage at the office will be, and maybe they'll allow me to work from home later in the week.
One of my best friends gave me supportive hugs at the holiday party while I sobbed. I had tried to go to the party to forget for a few hours all the weather problems, and the call about the water cascading off a deck in the vacant house came in right as I arrived. Actually, the call came in to my friend's phone, because of course mine had been destroyed in the water event at the rental house the previous day.
As my friend gave me a ride home later, I emotionally vomited all over his car during the trip, because I'm sick. I'm sick with the consequences of the last two years. My friend understood, and we caught up a little. I hadn't seen him in months, because I've been busy with all the things that are making me sick.
It's difficult to go anywhere or do anything with friends while you're experiencing a disaster. I never know when my own pipes will burst, sending gross, unwanted water everywhere. I imagine losing a house must be like going through a divorce that way. Maybe losing the house is less like vomiting from morning sickness, and more like being divorced by the place where you used to live. I don't want to live with that house anymore, but the actual divorce proceedings are dragging on, and putting me through the wringer. The house keeps calling me with problems that have to be fixed. Lawyers are involved, but think we're both boring, and by the end, neither the house or I will have any money.
Which is a long way of saying that there's ice in the streets, and Atlanta has so much water damage we might as well have had a flood. Repairmen will be busy. They'll get to the rental, and the vacant house, and my work eventually. Don't expect a lot from those of us down here for a week or so.
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Another lie I wish I hadn't told
Earlier this year I lied to a dying woman. I didn’t mean to lie to her, when I said that I would attend her funeral at the Jewish cemetery in Nashville’s West End when she passed. Sharon had been dying for the last eighteen months, and was looking to me like she’d make it to January at least. Instead she passed away in November, right after the house sale failed and the car started having problems. I had used up any credit card emergency reserves on that stupid work trip to Jekyll. I didn’t make it to Nashville to see her burial.
Sharon Doochin was one of our neighbors while we lived in Lake Claire. She was older, she had a terrifying dog, and we were friends. Before she got sick - before COVID came for her in the summer of 2021 - she would park herself at the top of the lawn of doom we had in Lake Claire, and talk to me while I was gardening or landscaping. Sharon wasn’t an easy person to get along with, and in that regard she reminded me of older members of my own family. I helped her a little around the edges of her life, because at some point someone will have to help my parents, who are both just as difficult as some people found Sharon to be. I haven’t talked to my father since 2004, and I cut ties with my mom after her father died. I hope both my parents have good neighbors in the end. Just because I can’t be around them doesn’t mean other people can’t find value in relationships with them. Sometimes people and places just build up so many negative memories that it’s best to stay away.
I don’t go to Nashville for the holidays anymore, not since a therapist told me in 2020 I don’t ever have to go back to Nashville again. I kept revisiting the place on holidays because the husband’s parents are there. Every year the city became less and less recognizable, and in 2019 I found myself just driving to the parking lot of the UU church in Green Hills and just sitting in the parking lot alone. It was one of the few places that still existed in the city that I once knew, even though I was never a member. Later, my friend Jeff - the last really close friend I had in Nashville in 2019 - told me I should have gone to his house off Granny White Pike to try and chill out. It was good advice and I should have gone to hang out with Jeff that year. He moved to Chattanooga during the pandemic, and so using his house as a safe place in Nashville is no longer an option. I still know people in the area, but not in a “can I hide at your house from the goddamn holidays” kind of way.
When I told Sharon I would go to Nashville for her funeral, I saw my husband’s eyebrows go up. He knows how much I avoid the place now, and that I hate lying. I really did mean it when I told our Lake Claire neighbor I would attend her burial, but then she passed quicker than we could unload the house that made her our friend. Her family was from Nashville, and we never discussed our reasons for disliking the town in any depth. She arrived in Atlanta thirty years before I did, and neither of us ever planned on returning, and that was enough on that subject.
The house we still own in Lake Claire sits empty, and has to be winterized today. A new appraiser was engaged (again) last week and came back (again) and said the place was worth 200k more than anyone is actually willing to pay for it (again). This means that our current hopes are pinned on something called a deed-in-lieu, and that we won’t be rid of the three story disaster until 2023. The pain just keeps coming from that place, and the only neighbor I really got close to is now dead. I still have friends on the street, but not in a “let’s sit on the porch and talk shit” kind of way.
Besides, anyone in the Lake Claire neighborhood would just want to talk about what’s going on with the empty house, and the topic now makes me physically nauseous. When you tell people “We bought the place as a fixer-upper nine months before the pandemic hit, and then we couldn’t afford both repairs and the mortgage”, no one really believes you. I know they think they could have done better, that we must have fucked up royally to be in the position we’re in now.
Sharon caught COVID from a repairman who came to her house coughing just a month after she had completed the first vaccines. He gave her a variant she never really recovered from, and during her treatments the doctors found the cancer that finished her. Maybe Sharon was always going to die from the cancer she inherited from a lifetime of cigarettes. Maybe we were always going to lose money on the Lake Claire house. COVID just sped up the inevitability of Sharon’s passing and our fiscal losses, I suppose. Maybe without COVID Sharon could have lived to see us try to sell that house when the kids graduated High School, like we planned. Or maybe she was always going to die before we could sell the house that made us neighbors.
I’ll be celebrating the days off this week by going to a party with my chosen family, while the kids and the husband go to Nashville. As the only business I have in the town four hours north would be visiting Sharon’s grave, I’m happier to be in Atlanta. I will go to the Jewish cemetery in West End, the next time I go up there. But right now, I feel like Sharon would understand I want to spend the holidays in the town I made my home with my own decisions, not somebody else’s decisions for me. Sharon fought to the end to live her life her way, and succeeded. We should all be so lucky.
Sharon Doochin was one of our neighbors while we lived in Lake Claire. She was older, she had a terrifying dog, and we were friends. Before she got sick - before COVID came for her in the summer of 2021 - she would park herself at the top of the lawn of doom we had in Lake Claire, and talk to me while I was gardening or landscaping. Sharon wasn’t an easy person to get along with, and in that regard she reminded me of older members of my own family. I helped her a little around the edges of her life, because at some point someone will have to help my parents, who are both just as difficult as some people found Sharon to be. I haven’t talked to my father since 2004, and I cut ties with my mom after her father died. I hope both my parents have good neighbors in the end. Just because I can’t be around them doesn’t mean other people can’t find value in relationships with them. Sometimes people and places just build up so many negative memories that it’s best to stay away.
I don’t go to Nashville for the holidays anymore, not since a therapist told me in 2020 I don’t ever have to go back to Nashville again. I kept revisiting the place on holidays because the husband’s parents are there. Every year the city became less and less recognizable, and in 2019 I found myself just driving to the parking lot of the UU church in Green Hills and just sitting in the parking lot alone. It was one of the few places that still existed in the city that I once knew, even though I was never a member. Later, my friend Jeff - the last really close friend I had in Nashville in 2019 - told me I should have gone to his house off Granny White Pike to try and chill out. It was good advice and I should have gone to hang out with Jeff that year. He moved to Chattanooga during the pandemic, and so using his house as a safe place in Nashville is no longer an option. I still know people in the area, but not in a “can I hide at your house from the goddamn holidays” kind of way.
When I told Sharon I would go to Nashville for her funeral, I saw my husband’s eyebrows go up. He knows how much I avoid the place now, and that I hate lying. I really did mean it when I told our Lake Claire neighbor I would attend her burial, but then she passed quicker than we could unload the house that made her our friend. Her family was from Nashville, and we never discussed our reasons for disliking the town in any depth. She arrived in Atlanta thirty years before I did, and neither of us ever planned on returning, and that was enough on that subject.
The house we still own in Lake Claire sits empty, and has to be winterized today. A new appraiser was engaged (again) last week and came back (again) and said the place was worth 200k more than anyone is actually willing to pay for it (again). This means that our current hopes are pinned on something called a deed-in-lieu, and that we won’t be rid of the three story disaster until 2023. The pain just keeps coming from that place, and the only neighbor I really got close to is now dead. I still have friends on the street, but not in a “let’s sit on the porch and talk shit” kind of way.
Besides, anyone in the Lake Claire neighborhood would just want to talk about what’s going on with the empty house, and the topic now makes me physically nauseous. When you tell people “We bought the place as a fixer-upper nine months before the pandemic hit, and then we couldn’t afford both repairs and the mortgage”, no one really believes you. I know they think they could have done better, that we must have fucked up royally to be in the position we’re in now.
Sharon caught COVID from a repairman who came to her house coughing just a month after she had completed the first vaccines. He gave her a variant she never really recovered from, and during her treatments the doctors found the cancer that finished her. Maybe Sharon was always going to die from the cancer she inherited from a lifetime of cigarettes. Maybe we were always going to lose money on the Lake Claire house. COVID just sped up the inevitability of Sharon’s passing and our fiscal losses, I suppose. Maybe without COVID Sharon could have lived to see us try to sell that house when the kids graduated High School, like we planned. Or maybe she was always going to die before we could sell the house that made us neighbors.
I’ll be celebrating the days off this week by going to a party with my chosen family, while the kids and the husband go to Nashville. As the only business I have in the town four hours north would be visiting Sharon’s grave, I’m happier to be in Atlanta. I will go to the Jewish cemetery in West End, the next time I go up there. But right now, I feel like Sharon would understand I want to spend the holidays in the town I made my home with my own decisions, not somebody else’s decisions for me. Sharon fought to the end to live her life her way, and succeeded. We should all be so lucky.
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
My Pants Were Not Alight, So That's Something
Monday morning I was chased by a woman with no pants out of the Circle K where Monroe turns into Boulevard on Ponce. This was, as my teen daughters pointed out to me later, entirely my own fault.
I always forget something on the way to work on Mondays, and this week it was my frozen waffles left in the toaster. After dropping the girls off at school, I asked the husband to pull into the Circle K so I could grab some mini donuts and other horrible to eat things that could get me through the day.
The woman with no pants was huddled on the concrete outside the Circle K and asked me for a donation. We just made last month’s rent, and the car needed repairs, and we’re in foreclosure on the house that won’t sell, so I did one of those white lies and told the beggar I had no cash.
Then she evidently saw me pay for the junk food breakfast through the window with a twenty.
Full on, in the store, “MA’AM AS YOU SEE I HAVE NO PANTS, CAN I PLEASE HAVE A DOLLAR FOR BREAKFAST.”
I panicked. She chased me to the car, where the husband was waiting, oblivious to the entire conflict. We got out of the situation without harm to anything but my sense of self. It was a hell of a Monday though, starting raw with conflict. I admit I lost my temper a few hours later when an accountant at work demanded to see my credit card statements PROVING the receipts, the ones I had provided for the Jekyll island trip (the one with chemical plant explosions, a hurricane, and goddamn studies on domestic terrorism) came from my own funds. Of course, the receipts came from my own funds and if my employer had paid me back in a timely fashion, I wouldn’t be short on rent, but I couldn’t say that.
I did calm down and hopefully didn’t damage my rep at work too much. I then had to download credit card statements, redact all the personal info, and reload them into a computer system, all so I could get paid back for a rental car, gasoline, and two trips to Arby’s. I need the money spent on the work trip paid back to me. I’d hate to end up outside a Circle K with no pants.
“You shouldn’t have lied to her, mom.” Said one of the teens when I explained my hard day over dinner. “That whole thing was on you.”
“Yeah mom,” said the other. “If you hadn’t lied, she wouldn’t have chased you.”
Fuck me, I’ve raised them with my bizarre attachment to truth, and the teens are right. I shouldn’t lie to anyone, regardless of their personal dress code. It was my fault for telling the pantless woman I had no cash. It was my fault for taking on debt for the work trip I couldn’t really afford. If I had been honest and admitted up front that I was struggling to make rent to both the beggar and my employer, both these situations could have been avoided. I had too much pride though and lied to both.
This was my weekly reminder that nice white lies – the kind some still insist I should use to just “get along” don’t really ever actually help me get along. By telling the truth to my employer before the Jekyll trip, I could have avoided that strange conference all together, and an awful lot of stress. By telling the truth to the beggar, I could have avoided being chased out of the circle K clutching nasty snack food. The last I saw of the pantless woman, she was stumbling across the crosswalk to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Ponce. I hope someone there gave her a better breakfast than the one I crammed down in the car.
One baldface lie (I have no cash) and one lie by omission (not speaking up about my personal financial situation) hurt me Monday. I’m writing this as a reminder to myself about being more truthful in the month of December, the month when white lies and omissions are expected. Some people live their whole lives lying through the holidays, but it’s never worked for me. So if you wonder why I might not be at your holiday party, or why I stayed home from the gathering you invited me to, know it’s because I didn’t want to lie to you, or risk a lie of omission. The parties I attend and the people I visit are the ones I know who can tolerate honesty. It’s not a big group.
I always forget something on the way to work on Mondays, and this week it was my frozen waffles left in the toaster. After dropping the girls off at school, I asked the husband to pull into the Circle K so I could grab some mini donuts and other horrible to eat things that could get me through the day.
The woman with no pants was huddled on the concrete outside the Circle K and asked me for a donation. We just made last month’s rent, and the car needed repairs, and we’re in foreclosure on the house that won’t sell, so I did one of those white lies and told the beggar I had no cash.
Then she evidently saw me pay for the junk food breakfast through the window with a twenty.
Full on, in the store, “MA’AM AS YOU SEE I HAVE NO PANTS, CAN I PLEASE HAVE A DOLLAR FOR BREAKFAST.”
I panicked. She chased me to the car, where the husband was waiting, oblivious to the entire conflict. We got out of the situation without harm to anything but my sense of self. It was a hell of a Monday though, starting raw with conflict. I admit I lost my temper a few hours later when an accountant at work demanded to see my credit card statements PROVING the receipts, the ones I had provided for the Jekyll island trip (the one with chemical plant explosions, a hurricane, and goddamn studies on domestic terrorism) came from my own funds. Of course, the receipts came from my own funds and if my employer had paid me back in a timely fashion, I wouldn’t be short on rent, but I couldn’t say that.
I did calm down and hopefully didn’t damage my rep at work too much. I then had to download credit card statements, redact all the personal info, and reload them into a computer system, all so I could get paid back for a rental car, gasoline, and two trips to Arby’s. I need the money spent on the work trip paid back to me. I’d hate to end up outside a Circle K with no pants.
“You shouldn’t have lied to her, mom.” Said one of the teens when I explained my hard day over dinner. “That whole thing was on you.”
“Yeah mom,” said the other. “If you hadn’t lied, she wouldn’t have chased you.”
Fuck me, I’ve raised them with my bizarre attachment to truth, and the teens are right. I shouldn’t lie to anyone, regardless of their personal dress code. It was my fault for telling the pantless woman I had no cash. It was my fault for taking on debt for the work trip I couldn’t really afford. If I had been honest and admitted up front that I was struggling to make rent to both the beggar and my employer, both these situations could have been avoided. I had too much pride though and lied to both.
This was my weekly reminder that nice white lies – the kind some still insist I should use to just “get along” don’t really ever actually help me get along. By telling the truth to my employer before the Jekyll trip, I could have avoided that strange conference all together, and an awful lot of stress. By telling the truth to the beggar, I could have avoided being chased out of the circle K clutching nasty snack food. The last I saw of the pantless woman, she was stumbling across the crosswalk to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Ponce. I hope someone there gave her a better breakfast than the one I crammed down in the car.
One baldface lie (I have no cash) and one lie by omission (not speaking up about my personal financial situation) hurt me Monday. I’m writing this as a reminder to myself about being more truthful in the month of December, the month when white lies and omissions are expected. Some people live their whole lives lying through the holidays, but it’s never worked for me. So if you wonder why I might not be at your holiday party, or why I stayed home from the gathering you invited me to, know it’s because I didn’t want to lie to you, or risk a lie of omission. The parties I attend and the people I visit are the ones I know who can tolerate honesty. It’s not a big group.
Thursday, December 08, 2022
Wednesday is for Working Drafts
Monday a cold rain moved into Atlanta so suddenly that my oldest texted me after school, not feeling safe to finish the walk home by herself. Worried about both the kids – the youngest was in an after-school activity and unable to use her phone until it was done – I spent money we didn’t really have to catch a ride share to a restaurant across from the High School. There the oldest and I shared an appetizer and passed the time working on a college scholarship entry while we waited to hear from the youngest.
I worried. It was dark, and in this time of constant communication, being unable to contact a kid for even a couple of hours was nerve-wracking. Kids get hit by cars on the edge of their High School campus at least once a year. But of course, she was fine, just late. The youngest hustled into the restaurant, and because it was pouring again, I paid for another cab to drive us the mile home. Money flows away from me constantly, and I feel powerless to stop the losses. I did gain some unexpected precious time with the teens, so that was something.
The fog rolled in on Tuesday, covering all of us in Atlanta in a blanket to dampen the anxiety around the run-off election for senate. I tried not to hold my breath all day, waiting for word of a line shooter or other violence, but Georgia made it through with no big incidents. An awful lot of people worked hard to make sure we can still vote without stabbings or gun violence at the polls, but that’s never felt like so near a thing in my lifetime as it did this week. I expect the violence now will come this weekend, or over the holidays. The idea that there will be no political violence over a contest so close is laughable. There’s too many guns, and too much rhetoric in the air.
I told the girls via text Wednesday to make sure that if they must stay after school to leave campus by 4:30 or call for a ride. It’s the darkest part of the year, and I’m preparing them to move around the city as grown-ups do, but they aren’t grown-up yet. The oldest has probably reached her adult height, but still has that lean look of a person not yet fished in her maturity. The youngest is growing very tall like me, taller than her sister already, but has the movement style of her age, easily identifiable as a very young person from a distance. They don’t behave like targets but could be mistaken as vulnerable if alone in the dark. Their walk from school is along a path with lots of traffic and potential help, but I have to worry when there’s not so much light.
When I post this, it will be the second Thursday in the month, and rent still isn’t paid in full. A friend recently offered me a spot in a great burn camp in February, and I know I should tell him I can’t go. I want to go, but even if everything else about the trip was free, I couldn’t afford the transportation. The burn is in Miami, besides. I’ve tried to have fun on Miami before – it never works out, probably because I don’t do the kind of drugs that seem popular there. I could use a week near a beach without the chemical fires, hurricane threats, and homeland security lectures I had on Jekyll, but it’s not in the cards right now.
We’re eighteen months out from the oldest child going off to university, and thirty-six months out from having both the babies be legal adults. I’m not ready for a trip to a burn in Miami, but I might be in a few years. It’s strange to be in this holding pattern, still circling the nest even while the kids get ready to fly, aware that at any minute a careless driver or domestic terrorist could set all our futures back and away after so much work. It happens every day, in this neighborhood – a hit and run, a rapist, gun violence. I have to make an effort not to think about what could happen and focus on the good things. It isn’t easy. It’s 2022, and the world is on fire. We’re all just doing our best.
I worried. It was dark, and in this time of constant communication, being unable to contact a kid for even a couple of hours was nerve-wracking. Kids get hit by cars on the edge of their High School campus at least once a year. But of course, she was fine, just late. The youngest hustled into the restaurant, and because it was pouring again, I paid for another cab to drive us the mile home. Money flows away from me constantly, and I feel powerless to stop the losses. I did gain some unexpected precious time with the teens, so that was something.
The fog rolled in on Tuesday, covering all of us in Atlanta in a blanket to dampen the anxiety around the run-off election for senate. I tried not to hold my breath all day, waiting for word of a line shooter or other violence, but Georgia made it through with no big incidents. An awful lot of people worked hard to make sure we can still vote without stabbings or gun violence at the polls, but that’s never felt like so near a thing in my lifetime as it did this week. I expect the violence now will come this weekend, or over the holidays. The idea that there will be no political violence over a contest so close is laughable. There’s too many guns, and too much rhetoric in the air.
I told the girls via text Wednesday to make sure that if they must stay after school to leave campus by 4:30 or call for a ride. It’s the darkest part of the year, and I’m preparing them to move around the city as grown-ups do, but they aren’t grown-up yet. The oldest has probably reached her adult height, but still has that lean look of a person not yet fished in her maturity. The youngest is growing very tall like me, taller than her sister already, but has the movement style of her age, easily identifiable as a very young person from a distance. They don’t behave like targets but could be mistaken as vulnerable if alone in the dark. Their walk from school is along a path with lots of traffic and potential help, but I have to worry when there’s not so much light.
When I post this, it will be the second Thursday in the month, and rent still isn’t paid in full. A friend recently offered me a spot in a great burn camp in February, and I know I should tell him I can’t go. I want to go, but even if everything else about the trip was free, I couldn’t afford the transportation. The burn is in Miami, besides. I’ve tried to have fun on Miami before – it never works out, probably because I don’t do the kind of drugs that seem popular there. I could use a week near a beach without the chemical fires, hurricane threats, and homeland security lectures I had on Jekyll, but it’s not in the cards right now.
We’re eighteen months out from the oldest child going off to university, and thirty-six months out from having both the babies be legal adults. I’m not ready for a trip to a burn in Miami, but I might be in a few years. It’s strange to be in this holding pattern, still circling the nest even while the kids get ready to fly, aware that at any minute a careless driver or domestic terrorist could set all our futures back and away after so much work. It happens every day, in this neighborhood – a hit and run, a rapist, gun violence. I have to make an effort not to think about what could happen and focus on the good things. It isn’t easy. It’s 2022, and the world is on fire. We’re all just doing our best.
Thursday, December 01, 2022
The Final Title of My Old LJ Was "I Need To See Your Sources"
After I gathered twenty-two years of Thanksgiving links for the post last week, I had a think. Everything in each of those blog posts was true, but there was just so much missing. The stuff that was missing from the decades of blog posts would make for deeply compelling reading, but I won’t publish it here.
I blog – I have blogged – I will blog – in large part because I still have a childhood fear of my own truth being yanked away from me. I am an inveterate saver of calendars so I can look back at how I spent my days and check my own memories. When your father is an alcoholic and your mother a pathological narcissist, you tend to develop real trust issues. I need documented proof of my own lived life. That’s why the parts that were missing from the last twenty-two years of blogging made me sad. I remember the people I didn’t name for their own privacy. I’ve had intense friendships and more than friendships during that time. My relationships with my sisters and cousins are deeply important to me, and largely undocumented. But I don’t write about those things out of a lot of socially justified fear.
Mostly, I suppose, I worry about losing my current job. I love what I do right now more than I can express, and I have near constant anxiety that I will lose the position out of social awkwardness or other failure on my part. The bigger concern, of course, should be that I could lose the job just because sometimes jobs end for people - that’s happened to me plenty in the past as well. Half of the CNN cataloging staff lost their jobs this week. Much of Cartoon Network, Tru TV, and other workplaces deeply associated with Atlanta have collapsed over the last year. The career prospects in Atlanta right now are terrifying.
I can’t lose my current job. I’m really, really good at what I do, but none of that would matter if the wrong person in my workplace found my blogs and didn’t like them. Georgia remains an at-will employment state; I could be engineered into any of a dozen firable offenses with minimal effort. As I mentioned before, I have deeply rooted trust issues.
Then there’s the consideration of the feelings of those around me. It occurs to me as I type that my best friends would stick by me if I went for radical honesty in my writing. But I actually do worry about the feelings of others who aren’t my best friends but could be hurt if I wrote about, for instance, what the COVID years in the Lake Claire house were really like for me. It wasn’t an easy time for anyone, and I have two teenage daughters.
My options for really writing the full truth – or at least the truth as I live it – are to either lean on a pseudonym or thinly veiled fiction. That feels odd, as to me the whole point of fiction that I enjoy is escapism. I want to read about living in outer space, or riding dragons, or having usual powers. If a book is about how people struggle to make rent in a crumbling anocracy, I’m unlikely to read that story unless aliens, dragons, or superheroes show up. Ridiculous humor can work to keep me engaged in a story, as can scandal. I think the best roman-a-clef ever written was Another City, Not My Own. Dominic Dunne wrote that when he was at least twenty years older than I am now, and he still didn’t really tell his truth throughout. Dunne's omissions - his visits to bath houses and with younger men - don't matter to the reader though when he has solid stories to deliver like accidentally introducing Nancy Reagan to Heidi Fleiss.
My own truth, even when I’m near historical events, isn’t as interesting as Dominic Dunne’s, and so could not yet hold up reader interest the way he did. Maybe in another twenty years I’ll be ready to publish some thinly veiled scandal, but not right now. Right now, I have to figure out why we’re $300 short on rent. Right now, I have to come up with funds to help the kids have the best High School experience possible. Right now, it’s 2022, and the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. Right now, we’re all just doing our best.
I blog – I have blogged – I will blog – in large part because I still have a childhood fear of my own truth being yanked away from me. I am an inveterate saver of calendars so I can look back at how I spent my days and check my own memories. When your father is an alcoholic and your mother a pathological narcissist, you tend to develop real trust issues. I need documented proof of my own lived life. That’s why the parts that were missing from the last twenty-two years of blogging made me sad. I remember the people I didn’t name for their own privacy. I’ve had intense friendships and more than friendships during that time. My relationships with my sisters and cousins are deeply important to me, and largely undocumented. But I don’t write about those things out of a lot of socially justified fear.
Mostly, I suppose, I worry about losing my current job. I love what I do right now more than I can express, and I have near constant anxiety that I will lose the position out of social awkwardness or other failure on my part. The bigger concern, of course, should be that I could lose the job just because sometimes jobs end for people - that’s happened to me plenty in the past as well. Half of the CNN cataloging staff lost their jobs this week. Much of Cartoon Network, Tru TV, and other workplaces deeply associated with Atlanta have collapsed over the last year. The career prospects in Atlanta right now are terrifying.
I can’t lose my current job. I’m really, really good at what I do, but none of that would matter if the wrong person in my workplace found my blogs and didn’t like them. Georgia remains an at-will employment state; I could be engineered into any of a dozen firable offenses with minimal effort. As I mentioned before, I have deeply rooted trust issues.
Then there’s the consideration of the feelings of those around me. It occurs to me as I type that my best friends would stick by me if I went for radical honesty in my writing. But I actually do worry about the feelings of others who aren’t my best friends but could be hurt if I wrote about, for instance, what the COVID years in the Lake Claire house were really like for me. It wasn’t an easy time for anyone, and I have two teenage daughters.
My options for really writing the full truth – or at least the truth as I live it – are to either lean on a pseudonym or thinly veiled fiction. That feels odd, as to me the whole point of fiction that I enjoy is escapism. I want to read about living in outer space, or riding dragons, or having usual powers. If a book is about how people struggle to make rent in a crumbling anocracy, I’m unlikely to read that story unless aliens, dragons, or superheroes show up. Ridiculous humor can work to keep me engaged in a story, as can scandal. I think the best roman-a-clef ever written was Another City, Not My Own. Dominic Dunne wrote that when he was at least twenty years older than I am now, and he still didn’t really tell his truth throughout. Dunne's omissions - his visits to bath houses and with younger men - don't matter to the reader though when he has solid stories to deliver like accidentally introducing Nancy Reagan to Heidi Fleiss.
My own truth, even when I’m near historical events, isn’t as interesting as Dominic Dunne’s, and so could not yet hold up reader interest the way he did. Maybe in another twenty years I’ll be ready to publish some thinly veiled scandal, but not right now. Right now, I have to figure out why we’re $300 short on rent. Right now, I have to come up with funds to help the kids have the best High School experience possible. Right now, it’s 2022, and the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. Right now, we’re all just doing our best.
Thursday, November 24, 2022
Twenty-Two Years of Blogging Thanksgiving
This year we had most of our meal from Boston Market. The husband and the oldest daughter went to pick up the meal. The market accidentally gave us a full pre-cooked bird instead of just the breast to carve, and the husband asked the market worker if he was sure, and the worker just shrugged and said *he* didn't put the meals together. So we've got enough turkey to feed a small army, and just us four. Well, two teens count as four adults with their appetites, so enough food for a week, anyway. I was going to make cranberries and sweet potatoes, but after seeing all the food cut it just back to cranberries. The oldest child likes the family recipe, boiled berries in sugar and orange zest, like me. The youngest likes the canned jelly, which I had been careful to buy a month ago to make sure it was on hand. I did get up and make drop biscuits early. All the four of us have done today is lay around and eat and watch TV and play video games.
Which is a pretty nice holiday, when you think on it. There's been pie. Truthfully though, we eat pumkin pie all year round; it's one of my key comfort foods. It's the bird that makes it all special.
I have below rounded up links to previous Thanksgving posts, as many of the posts from Boston are only available on the wayback machine. I also spent some time looking through LiveJournal. My memory of posting on Livejournal is flawed - I thought I had written quite a bit more on that platform, but it turns out my activity there between 2003 and 2009 was mostly just talking to friends. So here's the line-up. Links should open in a new window.
Thanksgiving 2000 (scroll down to where it says Thanksgiving)
Thanksgiving 2001
Thanksgiving 2002
Thanksgiving 2003 and https://einatlanta.livejournal.com/2003/11/19/
Thanksgiving 2004
Thanksgiving 2005
Thanksgiving 2006 - no specific Thanksgiving post was made over on LJ.
Thanksgiving 2007 on LJ
By Thanksgiving 2008 I was just posting about keeping two babies healthy on LJ, and nothing about how we spent the holiday.
And then I just had to stop for a while, as having two kids was quite a lot. I kept up on FB, but have never really loved that platform. I did search my post history there, and here is what I found:
No posts mentioning Thanksgiving in 2009. I think 2009 was the year my Grandma Alice came up for Thanksgiving and two of my best friends moved to Atlanta. The youngest ran around the table eating everyone's scraps after the meal and we all laughed. My mother's family always loved watching my youngest as a baby, because she looked so much like babies on that side. The older child the husband and I made always looked like his side of the family, and similar delight was had by his few family members in the same way.
I was sick November 2010. No posts about anything but work and being sick. I'm sure we went to Nashville.
In 2011, we ordered the fried turkey from Popeyes. I think friends from in town joined us for the meal.
In 2012, two of our best friends joined us at the husband's parents in Nashville, and the children got their first digital cameras in the form of LeapPads. They started taking their own pictures that year.
2013 we were back in Atlanta, and toasting marshmellows in the fireplace for the first time with the girls, having decided they were old enough.
In November of 2014 I went to Berlin, then helped my Grandfather move out of his coastal home, broke a tooth, and celebrated Thanksgiving on Sea Island, in a set of rooms bigger than many apartments I had lived in. I can't think of any month that summed up 2014 more than the month that included Thanksgiving in luxury (paid for by someone else), while I delt with a crippling dental issue I couldn't afford to fix. That was also the month I finalized a government contract with the CDC. 2014 was insane, and six years later I still can't believe all the crazy shit I did that year.
In November of 2015 we had Thanksgiving in Atlanta again, but this time the husband's parents came to visit, and set us up with dinner at the Intercontinental in Buckhead.
In November of 2016, I was sick again. I think we went to Nashville.
In November of 2017-2019, we were invited by second cousins of the husband's family to Thanksgiving about an hour north of the city.
November 2020 was the COVID quarantine Thanksgiving. We had it at the Lake Claire house with some of my cousins that lived locally. Afterwards I took plates to other family members a few blocks away who had been distancing. I think we ordered from Sweet Auburn BBQ.
Thanksgiving 2021 was the second and last Thanksgiving at the Lake Claire house.
This Thanksgiving, twenty-two years after I started blogging, eighteen years after I was married, sixteen years after my first child, I realize I largely have everything I hoped for twenty years ago, when I was, I thought, burying my white collar dreams by going back to retail work after grad school. I've had a lot of crazy ups and downs since then, but ultimately I am still living in Atlanta, I have two kids, and I pay the bills when I can. It's 2022 and the world is on fire. I suppose, on reflection, I'm thankful that I continue to just try and do my best.
Thursday, November 17, 2022
You're Going To Have To Slow Down, and It's Going To Cost You
As the storms from last week hit the coast, cold weather arrived in Atlanta. I had the experience (not for the first time) of chasing teens with sweaters and jackets and trying, for the love of god, to get them to dress sensibly. The dance between parent and child over sweaters is performative; they know they need a jacket, but they want to tell their parents no. After a day or two of being cold, there’s no more discussion, the jackets will happen anyway. I haven’t decided yet if this is the last year I’ll bother to argue. Maybe they want me to fuss, but I don’t like being in the role of enforcer. They’re old enough to know what they need to keep warm.
Even though I’m the mom, I’m the one who got really caught in the cold on Monday. I’ve written here before about how much I have enjoyed my twice a week eBike rides home from work. After work Monday I walked to a fully charged Lime bike and started my ride home. I had forgotten gloves, but it wasn’t yet so cold that my hands would go numb or anything during the ride. The first third of the way home went as usual, but as I turned from Irwin street on to the Beltline, the bike suddenly went heavy and slow.
The company that I rent eBikes from had decided to put a speed governor on the bike for Beltline travel. Maybe it was just the particular bike I was on, but suddenly it was like I was on the heaviest bike pedaling up hill. I panicked, cold and trying to get home, and pedaled harder, only to encounter more resistance. It’s worth mentioning here that the Beltline is built on an old railroad path, and so is perfectly graded. On an eBike, I’m used to some light pedaling and mostly coasting the mile and a half I ride the thing home, before really pedaling uphill to the house the last few blocks. With the speed governor on the bike engaged, I couldn’t coast on the perfectly level path, but instead was suddenly challenged to lift the weight of the heavy machine for a mile without warning.
I pushed and puffed. I was determined to build up speed to get ahead, but the bike wouldn’t let me. The rules on getting home had changed, and it took me a few minutes longer than usual, resulting in a higher price of rental. As I ended the ride, cold and angry, a couple more dollars fell out of my bank account, and I considered screaming. Instead, I limped inside, texted the family that I was in pain from the bike ride, and curled up under the covers for the next 24 hours. I was the one who had caught a cold during the weather shift, and hurt the muscles in my legs to boot.
So I have to figure out now how to get home after work. Likely I’ll switch to renting the city’s regular old pedal powered bikes, as hopefully they won’t have speed governors on them. I can’t afford to buy my own eBike, or any kind of bike right now. Things just keep getting more difficult and more expensive. It’s 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything. We’re all just trying our best.
Even though I’m the mom, I’m the one who got really caught in the cold on Monday. I’ve written here before about how much I have enjoyed my twice a week eBike rides home from work. After work Monday I walked to a fully charged Lime bike and started my ride home. I had forgotten gloves, but it wasn’t yet so cold that my hands would go numb or anything during the ride. The first third of the way home went as usual, but as I turned from Irwin street on to the Beltline, the bike suddenly went heavy and slow.
The company that I rent eBikes from had decided to put a speed governor on the bike for Beltline travel. Maybe it was just the particular bike I was on, but suddenly it was like I was on the heaviest bike pedaling up hill. I panicked, cold and trying to get home, and pedaled harder, only to encounter more resistance. It’s worth mentioning here that the Beltline is built on an old railroad path, and so is perfectly graded. On an eBike, I’m used to some light pedaling and mostly coasting the mile and a half I ride the thing home, before really pedaling uphill to the house the last few blocks. With the speed governor on the bike engaged, I couldn’t coast on the perfectly level path, but instead was suddenly challenged to lift the weight of the heavy machine for a mile without warning.
I pushed and puffed. I was determined to build up speed to get ahead, but the bike wouldn’t let me. The rules on getting home had changed, and it took me a few minutes longer than usual, resulting in a higher price of rental. As I ended the ride, cold and angry, a couple more dollars fell out of my bank account, and I considered screaming. Instead, I limped inside, texted the family that I was in pain from the bike ride, and curled up under the covers for the next 24 hours. I was the one who had caught a cold during the weather shift, and hurt the muscles in my legs to boot.
So I have to figure out now how to get home after work. Likely I’ll switch to renting the city’s regular old pedal powered bikes, as hopefully they won’t have speed governors on them. I can’t afford to buy my own eBike, or any kind of bike right now. Things just keep getting more difficult and more expensive. It’s 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything. We’re all just trying our best.
Thursday, November 10, 2022
While Fleeing the Apocolypse, Be Sure to Visit the Gift Shop
I was sitting in a hotel conference room on Jekyll Island Monday. Behind me on the mainland, the port of Brunswick was on fire due to a problem at one of the chemical plants. In front of me, the Atlantic was pushing a storm surge as a hurricane built up a few days off coast. Everyone’s phones at the conference were sending off emergency alerts, which could not be turned off. Men from the state cyber security office and the federal department of homeland security were there to tell us why libraries are now targets for Domestic Violence Extremists. Librarians spoke in hushed tones to each other about how worried we were that someone might get shot in line to vote this week. There was a full blood moon lunar eclipse, and the winds picked up, the waves crashed, and Stacey Abrams lost the governor’s race. It was hard this week not to feel like I was somehow in a movie about the end of the world.
When I was given the opportunity to travel for work again, I was excited to get back to Glynn County. I’ve written before about my trips to Brunswick and the coast – in fact, nineteen years ago I was at a similar professional conference in Savannah. That conference in 2003 must have been one of the last times I was in the low country before I married the husband. Both of my maternal grandparents are from the region, and not just from there, but descended from the first big wave of European settlers four hundred years ago. Nineteen years ago, I stayed overnight with my Grandma Alice, and she was so pleased to see me in suits giving professional presentations.
I thought about her a lot on this trip, and even made sure to drive through her favorite fast-food restaurant, stop at her grocery store, and even cruise by her old condo on the way out of town. All these things are on the same road and on the way to I-95 anyway. These places were full of meaning to me, but I couldn’t ignore the way things had and had not changed. The roads on Jekyll are completely different, and the beach narrower as the sea rises and storms rip at things in a way, they didn’t twenty years ago. The dollar store next to the Piggly Wiggly looks like so many US retail stores have started to look the last couple of years – half empty, with merchandise just sort of thrown around. The Piggly Wiggly was unchanged in an almost creepy way though, smelling the way it always had, store inventory exactly where it had always been. I considered for a moment buying Diet Dr. Pepper, grandma’s soda of choice, but instead just grabbed the phone cord that hadn’t been available in the dollar store on the way out.
Then I started driving back to Atlanta, which took nearly all day. I made it home around 8pm, and the hurricane – just a small one, category one falling then into a tropical storm – hit before dawn well south of Jacksonville, so hopefully Brunswick and the Georgia islands will be ok. Not that any of this is ok. It’s not ok that Jekyll Island will be much smaller in the next twenty years. It’s not ok that the Torras causeway to Saint Simon’s will have to be rebuilt to avoid the kind of flooding that happened this week. It’s not ok that the chemical plant blew, and that the election was so frightening. Maybe I’m just scared because I’m older now, I don’t know. It’s hard not to look at the everyday unraveling of things like retail stores and see the frayed edges of society. I guess I’m just rattled by all the emergency alerts on phones around us, but we’re not going to be able to fix any of these things unless society changes in some very real ways.
Just over the Glynn County line on the Eulonia interstate exit, which was my Grandpa’s exit the last twenty years of his life, I stopped. Someone had taken an old restaurant, some house paint, and with a small business loan had made something now called “Georgia Peach World”. I stopped because I found this hilarious and because I respect a good hustle. The owners had collected locally made peach flavored things, and because pecans are a bigger crop, half the store was pecan themed as well. If my family had never left the area, I suspect I’d be working at something very much like Peach World, repurposing an abandoned restaurant to sell what I could to tourists riding I-95 down to the end of everything. We might be living some sort of apocalypse, but there’s always someone ready to sell you locally made soap, saltwater taffy, and lemonade with peach juice added in to keep with the theme. It’s 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.
When I was given the opportunity to travel for work again, I was excited to get back to Glynn County. I’ve written before about my trips to Brunswick and the coast – in fact, nineteen years ago I was at a similar professional conference in Savannah. That conference in 2003 must have been one of the last times I was in the low country before I married the husband. Both of my maternal grandparents are from the region, and not just from there, but descended from the first big wave of European settlers four hundred years ago. Nineteen years ago, I stayed overnight with my Grandma Alice, and she was so pleased to see me in suits giving professional presentations.
I thought about her a lot on this trip, and even made sure to drive through her favorite fast-food restaurant, stop at her grocery store, and even cruise by her old condo on the way out of town. All these things are on the same road and on the way to I-95 anyway. These places were full of meaning to me, but I couldn’t ignore the way things had and had not changed. The roads on Jekyll are completely different, and the beach narrower as the sea rises and storms rip at things in a way, they didn’t twenty years ago. The dollar store next to the Piggly Wiggly looks like so many US retail stores have started to look the last couple of years – half empty, with merchandise just sort of thrown around. The Piggly Wiggly was unchanged in an almost creepy way though, smelling the way it always had, store inventory exactly where it had always been. I considered for a moment buying Diet Dr. Pepper, grandma’s soda of choice, but instead just grabbed the phone cord that hadn’t been available in the dollar store on the way out.
Then I started driving back to Atlanta, which took nearly all day. I made it home around 8pm, and the hurricane – just a small one, category one falling then into a tropical storm – hit before dawn well south of Jacksonville, so hopefully Brunswick and the Georgia islands will be ok. Not that any of this is ok. It’s not ok that Jekyll Island will be much smaller in the next twenty years. It’s not ok that the Torras causeway to Saint Simon’s will have to be rebuilt to avoid the kind of flooding that happened this week. It’s not ok that the chemical plant blew, and that the election was so frightening. Maybe I’m just scared because I’m older now, I don’t know. It’s hard not to look at the everyday unraveling of things like retail stores and see the frayed edges of society. I guess I’m just rattled by all the emergency alerts on phones around us, but we’re not going to be able to fix any of these things unless society changes in some very real ways.
Just over the Glynn County line on the Eulonia interstate exit, which was my Grandpa’s exit the last twenty years of his life, I stopped. Someone had taken an old restaurant, some house paint, and with a small business loan had made something now called “Georgia Peach World”. I stopped because I found this hilarious and because I respect a good hustle. The owners had collected locally made peach flavored things, and because pecans are a bigger crop, half the store was pecan themed as well. If my family had never left the area, I suspect I’d be working at something very much like Peach World, repurposing an abandoned restaurant to sell what I could to tourists riding I-95 down to the end of everything. We might be living some sort of apocalypse, but there’s always someone ready to sell you locally made soap, saltwater taffy, and lemonade with peach juice added in to keep with the theme. It’s 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.
Thursday, November 03, 2022
It All Ends Up Under Water Anyway
The first Friday in November was supposed to be the closing day on the Lake Claire house. Someone wanted to buy the place, and we wanted to sell. The difficulty came when it was revealed that selling to at the price the buyer wanted to pay would cost us over 40k in realtor commissions. It was a simple miscalculation on our part; we thought that commissions were part of closing costs. SURPISE! The husband and I laughed our asses off in panic and fear when we heard about the 40k, as we didn’t have 1k to clean up the yard in Lake Claire, let alone 40k from anywhere to pay realtors’ commission. Even if someone offered to loan us 40k, I wouldn’t continue to throw good money after bad on the place.
Maybe on Friday some sort of strange financial miracle will have occurred, and the house sale will have gone through. I seriously doubt this. Loads of well-meaning friends and neighbors have offered us bits of advice, because no one can believe we’re losing the Lake Claire property. I remain convinced that foreclosure is the best move, as any other option presented to me somehow puts us in more debt. Even having part of our mortgage forgiven (unlikely, but whatever, we’re trying everything) would generate tax debt, as having loans forgiven is measured as income.
We need to take the loss, but no one can believe that betting on Atlanta real estate generated anything less than profit. I have assured everyone that we played every delaying and COVID relief card we could, which is why we’re losing the house thirty months after quarantine started. I just really want the financial hemorrhaging to stop by the end of the year. It is unknown if that will happen, but I can hope.
My maternal grandfather appeared in a dream to me this week, as he sometimes does. He wanted me to move back to the low country, back to the area his family had lived continuously for 400 years before his death. I had to explain to him again that the Atlantic is rising, and most of the coast of Georgia will disappear within my daughter’s lifetime. He just shook his head. “Not all of it”, he insisted. “There are places with high ground”. Maybe I argued, I can’t remember. Probably the dumbest property purchase I could make – assuming I ever have the capital to own anything again - would be on the coast, so maybe it’s in my future anyhow.
I have a similar dream about Grandpa whenever I’m about to drive to the low country. Grandma only shows up in dreams about travel to far away places. I dreamt of Grandma Alice when I was in London, in Berlin, in Costa Rica, in Hawaii. Grandma Alice wanted me to see the world, and when I’m asleep I wish I could have her with me to see everything. Grandpa Brown wanted me to stay connected to the family, so he shows up when I’m anywhere within a couple of hours of Brunswick. Now there's no close family there, but part of my brain still thinks he wants me on the coast.
No matter what happens with the Lake Claire house, the husband and I will be living within our girl’s High School district for the next three and a half years. Our youngest is just in the first half of ninth grade, so it would take something extreme to make us leave. Frankly, I hope to stay in our current rental townhouse for at least that long. I hate moving, having done it so many times before I was thirty. If I live until retirement though, maybe moving to the coast won’t be such a bad idea, as the land should be very cheap by then. Going out in a hurricane any time after seventy doesn’t sound like a bad way to go either now that I think about it. So maybe climate disaster will have the upside of cheap real estate and a quick natural end in my family’s traditional lands by the end of my life. Who knows what will happen? It’s 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.
Maybe on Friday some sort of strange financial miracle will have occurred, and the house sale will have gone through. I seriously doubt this. Loads of well-meaning friends and neighbors have offered us bits of advice, because no one can believe we’re losing the Lake Claire property. I remain convinced that foreclosure is the best move, as any other option presented to me somehow puts us in more debt. Even having part of our mortgage forgiven (unlikely, but whatever, we’re trying everything) would generate tax debt, as having loans forgiven is measured as income.
We need to take the loss, but no one can believe that betting on Atlanta real estate generated anything less than profit. I have assured everyone that we played every delaying and COVID relief card we could, which is why we’re losing the house thirty months after quarantine started. I just really want the financial hemorrhaging to stop by the end of the year. It is unknown if that will happen, but I can hope.
My maternal grandfather appeared in a dream to me this week, as he sometimes does. He wanted me to move back to the low country, back to the area his family had lived continuously for 400 years before his death. I had to explain to him again that the Atlantic is rising, and most of the coast of Georgia will disappear within my daughter’s lifetime. He just shook his head. “Not all of it”, he insisted. “There are places with high ground”. Maybe I argued, I can’t remember. Probably the dumbest property purchase I could make – assuming I ever have the capital to own anything again - would be on the coast, so maybe it’s in my future anyhow.
I have a similar dream about Grandpa whenever I’m about to drive to the low country. Grandma only shows up in dreams about travel to far away places. I dreamt of Grandma Alice when I was in London, in Berlin, in Costa Rica, in Hawaii. Grandma Alice wanted me to see the world, and when I’m asleep I wish I could have her with me to see everything. Grandpa Brown wanted me to stay connected to the family, so he shows up when I’m anywhere within a couple of hours of Brunswick. Now there's no close family there, but part of my brain still thinks he wants me on the coast.
No matter what happens with the Lake Claire house, the husband and I will be living within our girl’s High School district for the next three and a half years. Our youngest is just in the first half of ninth grade, so it would take something extreme to make us leave. Frankly, I hope to stay in our current rental townhouse for at least that long. I hate moving, having done it so many times before I was thirty. If I live until retirement though, maybe moving to the coast won’t be such a bad idea, as the land should be very cheap by then. Going out in a hurricane any time after seventy doesn’t sound like a bad way to go either now that I think about it. So maybe climate disaster will have the upside of cheap real estate and a quick natural end in my family’s traditional lands by the end of my life. Who knows what will happen? It’s 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.
Friday, October 28, 2022
Why We Don’t Have Halloween Decorations Anymore
We’ve been in the rental townhouse in Virginia-Highlands for two months now, and we’ve almost fully unpacked. I’d like to say we have time now to put up Halloween decorations, but we don’t have them anymore. The story of why we don’t have any decorations is the story of what happened to us the last decade, so it’s as easy a way to catch up this blog as any.
The kids and I used to love decorating for Halloween, starting with the year we went to a pumpkin patch the first year the youngest could walk, around 2009. We went outside the city with some of our oldest friends who had just moved to Atlanta and set the whole thing up. We went on a hayride, and the tiny girls picked one orange and one white pumpkin from the field. I carved classic jack-o-lanterns and placed them on the front porch of our loft in Inman Park near Little Five Points. Over the years, we collected more decorations. A first, we just put out ghosts I made of old bedsheets and things the kids brought home from school projects. Around 2011 we gained parts of a teaching skeleton a babysitter found in a dumpster and started hanging the realistic looking bits in the tree near our porch. As our fortunes rose in the following years there were fake tombstones and a few other pieces from Target, including a full plastic skeleton that could fold away neatly the eleven months of the year it wasn’t in use.
My crowning piece of Halloween décor was something I had wanted for years, a pottery jack-o-lantern from Mexico about thirty inches tall sold by Kroger I bought in 2014. The terracotta clay was thick and heavy, with the natural dark orange accented with dark green at the top for the stem. The shape was tall and skinny, pinched a bit in the middle like a malformed gourd, and the face was frightening. I adored this piece of Halloween. It was permanent and something we never could have afforded before. With an electric light puck inside the jack-o-lantern was the perfect combination of scary and dumb. I loved it. I loved that we could own something specific to a holiday that wasn’t strictly functional and was strong enough that I use it for the rest of my life. I loved that we had enough money that I could buy something seasonal and expensive from the grocery store that wasn’t food. I had always admired these imports from Mexico stacked in front of Kroger every year, and in 2014, the year I made the most money I ever would, I had one.
I don’t own the terracotta jack-o-lantern anymore. Last March, I smashed it to pieces.
Like everything else, the gain and loss of our Halloween decorations followed our family fortunes. After building up that steady supply of fun stuff, it all outgrew the loft we owned on Dekalb Avenue, and in 2018 we moved into a rental house – quite a famous one in Little 5, right across from the community center where Austin meets Euclid. There, at the heart of the neighborhood’s Halloween parade, our family went all out for our favorite holiday. We bought a giant inflatable black cat that looked ready to pounce and moved its head from side to side. The husband and our oldest daughter climbed up on the rental house roof and managed to anchor and plug in the cat up there so that it surveyed all who passed. People took pictures, and the neighbors complimented us. We tried to buy that house, but the owner, who was devoted to demolition by neglect for the historic home laughed in our faces. Half a million dollars, the amount we had been approved for by the bank, was not enough. The neighbors mourned our leaving when we finally bought the closest house in our school district we could afford. After over fifteen years living within the same square mile of Inman Park near Little five, the husband and I bought a house in Lake Claire.
The house in Lake Claire was bigger by nearly three times to any house I had lived in before, three stories of fixer-upper madness. I was sad the first Halloween when I realized there were no external plugs for the inflatable black cat, but we had plans to have all the electrical redone, so I stored the cat with the idea that it would come back in a year or two. That first year we threw the random bones and skeleton around the yard, put the jack-o-lantern out near the corner. I took the youngest daughter to the Lake Claire neighborhood pumpkin carving where she had a great time. I bought a few more decorations, as for the first time we had a big yard, but none of them really worked. The ghost that should fly on a string didn’t. The solar-powered light up skulls died in the first rains, and birds nested in the dragon skull. Still, next year decorations would be better. The kids went up and down Page avenue for the first time with the husband, a Lake Claire street blocked off with over-the-top decorations with all the other neighborhood kids. The amount of candy they brought home was so incredible that I found secret piles of it stashed around the house for months later. The next year was 2020.
Quarantine Halloween was our skeleton poised on the corner around a plastic cauldron full of candy. Contactless trick-or-treating happened up and down surrounding streets. Still fun, as neighbors built candy chutes and pinned bags of treats to clotheslines. No electrical work on the house, so no inflatable cat. Well, things would get better.
Last Halloween – 2021 – my niece and nephew came up from Augusta for the first time, and the four kids and all the adults hit Page Avenue. I knew it was likely the last year for my kids, who were 13 and 15. The older child was late in growing tall, so the party of four did well, especially with the two cute small cousins with them. I was drowning in work and the lawn had just the bones thrown haphazardly and the one skeleton now. The ghost that should light up and fly on a string hung carelessly on a branch like an afterthought, but my jack-o-lantern was at least right against the house in the driveway, so we could see it when I came home every day exhausted. In the days after last year’s Halloween, I would beg the kids to help me clean up the stuff. They did so near Thanksgiving, setting the decorations near the front door. Because of the way the Lake Claire house worked, I couldn’t put the items away in the attic myself, because opening the dangerous attic ladder was a two-person job. I asked the husband for help, but he was trying not to drown himself, as his solitary law practice shut down at last after eighteen months without a full workload. He went back to bartending at the Fox as he had when we first married, and then to ninety-day job helping with COVID PPP loans six days a week while we struggled to overcome our own financial COVID disaster.
The decorations sat on the porch through winter, collecting dirt and real cobwebs. I wanted to put them away, but every day I came home from work to find something else broken in the giant fixer upper I hated more daily. All the doors stuck when it rained. We had constant plumbing issues. The money we had set aside for fixing drainage and landscape problems was used to float us while the husband’s law practice stumbled, then failed, leaving me to do what I could on the weekends. I was always tired, and the kids had morphed into teenagers who wanted to fight me any time I asked for help.
In late March of 2022, my work gave me the opportunity to travel again for the first time in two years. A conference was being held in Portland, where my middle sister had just moved for a career change. I was able to fly across the country for almost a week, stay with my sister, and get some much-needed time away from the house. I had a great trip, and then on the way home suffered a chain of mishaps too mundane and stupid to document. It all ended with me alone on the porch on a Friday evening far away from a school event for the younger child I had desperately wanted to attend. I had lost my phone at the last minute in a scramble to get out of a dodgy Uber from the airport, and I was alone.
The Halloween decorations, now fully six months away from legitimate use, stared at me from the front porch. I had asked that they please be put away while I was gone, but of course that hadn’t happened. The teens were still too young for the dangerous attic ladder, and the husband couldn't do it by himself.
I grabbed the terracotta jack-o-lantern and heaved it off the porch as hard as I could onto some rocks below. The sound it made as it smashed irreparably made me feel a little better. Then I took what was left – the sadly aged ghost that had never worked, the remaining bits of scavenged teaching skeleton, the Target skeleton and fake tombstones, all of which were partly broken by age and exposure now – and threw them all away. It was easier to throw away the stuff that get it stored properly, and none of it was whole anymore, anyway.
So, it’s Halloween again on Monday, and we don’t have any decorations at the new place. There’s nowhere to put them anyhow, as the townhouse we’re renting is part of two rows that face each other, not the street. The kids are both in High School now and have plans with their friends. My youngest sister can’t afford the drive from Augusta to bring my niece and nephew up to trick or treat this year. Maybe they’ll visit again next year, when the holiday isn’t on a school night. 2023 will be better. It has to be. It’s 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.
The kids and I used to love decorating for Halloween, starting with the year we went to a pumpkin patch the first year the youngest could walk, around 2009. We went outside the city with some of our oldest friends who had just moved to Atlanta and set the whole thing up. We went on a hayride, and the tiny girls picked one orange and one white pumpkin from the field. I carved classic jack-o-lanterns and placed them on the front porch of our loft in Inman Park near Little Five Points. Over the years, we collected more decorations. A first, we just put out ghosts I made of old bedsheets and things the kids brought home from school projects. Around 2011 we gained parts of a teaching skeleton a babysitter found in a dumpster and started hanging the realistic looking bits in the tree near our porch. As our fortunes rose in the following years there were fake tombstones and a few other pieces from Target, including a full plastic skeleton that could fold away neatly the eleven months of the year it wasn’t in use.
My crowning piece of Halloween décor was something I had wanted for years, a pottery jack-o-lantern from Mexico about thirty inches tall sold by Kroger I bought in 2014. The terracotta clay was thick and heavy, with the natural dark orange accented with dark green at the top for the stem. The shape was tall and skinny, pinched a bit in the middle like a malformed gourd, and the face was frightening. I adored this piece of Halloween. It was permanent and something we never could have afforded before. With an electric light puck inside the jack-o-lantern was the perfect combination of scary and dumb. I loved it. I loved that we could own something specific to a holiday that wasn’t strictly functional and was strong enough that I use it for the rest of my life. I loved that we had enough money that I could buy something seasonal and expensive from the grocery store that wasn’t food. I had always admired these imports from Mexico stacked in front of Kroger every year, and in 2014, the year I made the most money I ever would, I had one.
I don’t own the terracotta jack-o-lantern anymore. Last March, I smashed it to pieces.
Like everything else, the gain and loss of our Halloween decorations followed our family fortunes. After building up that steady supply of fun stuff, it all outgrew the loft we owned on Dekalb Avenue, and in 2018 we moved into a rental house – quite a famous one in Little 5, right across from the community center where Austin meets Euclid. There, at the heart of the neighborhood’s Halloween parade, our family went all out for our favorite holiday. We bought a giant inflatable black cat that looked ready to pounce and moved its head from side to side. The husband and our oldest daughter climbed up on the rental house roof and managed to anchor and plug in the cat up there so that it surveyed all who passed. People took pictures, and the neighbors complimented us. We tried to buy that house, but the owner, who was devoted to demolition by neglect for the historic home laughed in our faces. Half a million dollars, the amount we had been approved for by the bank, was not enough. The neighbors mourned our leaving when we finally bought the closest house in our school district we could afford. After over fifteen years living within the same square mile of Inman Park near Little five, the husband and I bought a house in Lake Claire.
The house in Lake Claire was bigger by nearly three times to any house I had lived in before, three stories of fixer-upper madness. I was sad the first Halloween when I realized there were no external plugs for the inflatable black cat, but we had plans to have all the electrical redone, so I stored the cat with the idea that it would come back in a year or two. That first year we threw the random bones and skeleton around the yard, put the jack-o-lantern out near the corner. I took the youngest daughter to the Lake Claire neighborhood pumpkin carving where she had a great time. I bought a few more decorations, as for the first time we had a big yard, but none of them really worked. The ghost that should fly on a string didn’t. The solar-powered light up skulls died in the first rains, and birds nested in the dragon skull. Still, next year decorations would be better. The kids went up and down Page avenue for the first time with the husband, a Lake Claire street blocked off with over-the-top decorations with all the other neighborhood kids. The amount of candy they brought home was so incredible that I found secret piles of it stashed around the house for months later. The next year was 2020.
Quarantine Halloween was our skeleton poised on the corner around a plastic cauldron full of candy. Contactless trick-or-treating happened up and down surrounding streets. Still fun, as neighbors built candy chutes and pinned bags of treats to clotheslines. No electrical work on the house, so no inflatable cat. Well, things would get better.
Last Halloween – 2021 – my niece and nephew came up from Augusta for the first time, and the four kids and all the adults hit Page Avenue. I knew it was likely the last year for my kids, who were 13 and 15. The older child was late in growing tall, so the party of four did well, especially with the two cute small cousins with them. I was drowning in work and the lawn had just the bones thrown haphazardly and the one skeleton now. The ghost that should light up and fly on a string hung carelessly on a branch like an afterthought, but my jack-o-lantern was at least right against the house in the driveway, so we could see it when I came home every day exhausted. In the days after last year’s Halloween, I would beg the kids to help me clean up the stuff. They did so near Thanksgiving, setting the decorations near the front door. Because of the way the Lake Claire house worked, I couldn’t put the items away in the attic myself, because opening the dangerous attic ladder was a two-person job. I asked the husband for help, but he was trying not to drown himself, as his solitary law practice shut down at last after eighteen months without a full workload. He went back to bartending at the Fox as he had when we first married, and then to ninety-day job helping with COVID PPP loans six days a week while we struggled to overcome our own financial COVID disaster.
The decorations sat on the porch through winter, collecting dirt and real cobwebs. I wanted to put them away, but every day I came home from work to find something else broken in the giant fixer upper I hated more daily. All the doors stuck when it rained. We had constant plumbing issues. The money we had set aside for fixing drainage and landscape problems was used to float us while the husband’s law practice stumbled, then failed, leaving me to do what I could on the weekends. I was always tired, and the kids had morphed into teenagers who wanted to fight me any time I asked for help.
In late March of 2022, my work gave me the opportunity to travel again for the first time in two years. A conference was being held in Portland, where my middle sister had just moved for a career change. I was able to fly across the country for almost a week, stay with my sister, and get some much-needed time away from the house. I had a great trip, and then on the way home suffered a chain of mishaps too mundane and stupid to document. It all ended with me alone on the porch on a Friday evening far away from a school event for the younger child I had desperately wanted to attend. I had lost my phone at the last minute in a scramble to get out of a dodgy Uber from the airport, and I was alone.
The Halloween decorations, now fully six months away from legitimate use, stared at me from the front porch. I had asked that they please be put away while I was gone, but of course that hadn’t happened. The teens were still too young for the dangerous attic ladder, and the husband couldn't do it by himself.
I grabbed the terracotta jack-o-lantern and heaved it off the porch as hard as I could onto some rocks below. The sound it made as it smashed irreparably made me feel a little better. Then I took what was left – the sadly aged ghost that had never worked, the remaining bits of scavenged teaching skeleton, the Target skeleton and fake tombstones, all of which were partly broken by age and exposure now – and threw them all away. It was easier to throw away the stuff that get it stored properly, and none of it was whole anymore, anyway.
So, it’s Halloween again on Monday, and we don’t have any decorations at the new place. There’s nowhere to put them anyhow, as the townhouse we’re renting is part of two rows that face each other, not the street. The kids are both in High School now and have plans with their friends. My youngest sister can’t afford the drive from Augusta to bring my niece and nephew up to trick or treat this year. Maybe they’ll visit again next year, when the holiday isn’t on a school night. 2023 will be better. It has to be. It’s 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
So, Ripped Denim is Back
I left work Monday on foot, walking towards the eBike I had reserved on my phone. The app that lets you pay for eBikes also shows you all the available ones to rent nearby, and you can put a hold on one for 30 minutes in advance. As I walked down Peachtree from work to my reserved ride I stopped, as I often do, to see what the custom couture shop near the library has in their window. One of the windows was full of artfully cut and torn denim. I had a moment to remember an old MTSU Professor, one of the editors of the Journal of Pop Culture, talking about torn denim in fashion decades ago. "It projects the image of a neglected child" she had said. Of course torn denim is back. People pay a lot of money to project poverty, patched and mixed textures in their clothes, on purpose. I remember thinking even when I was young how dumb it was. I grew up poor, and I have kind of a thing about dressing in clothes that look nice.
As I continued on to my reserved bike, I was sad to find that the first reserved selection had bent wheels and a smashed seat. The next bike was so damaged it couldn't be scanned. The third bike I found on the edge of Woodruff Park was rideable, but the bells had been broken and someone had twisted the left hand break a weird way. I was still able to use the third bike to ride to the grocery, and then home.
I know it was likely one of my unhoused neighbors breaking all the rental eBikes out of frustration. I would be frustrated too, if I were unhoused in Atlanta with all the vacant business tower space just sitting there around me.
One morning during the quarantine phase of pandemic as the husband drove me into work, we watched EMS workers collect the body of a homeless person off the side of Atlanta Medical Center. The unhoused neighbor had died on the sidewalk outside the hospital overnight. This did not make the news. It happens all the time. Now that same hospital is closing because it could not make a profit of any kind, but lost money year after year. Too many people needed help. I don't blame the hospital. I don't blame the person who got angry and went around breaking all the bikes. But we did use that hospital, and I do need the bikes to get home after work, so I wish things were different.
Sometimes I think about the fact that I had a life for about ten years where I mostly wasn't scraping by all the time. There was about a decade where I didn't feel fucking poor, and I thought, hey, I'll never have to be poor again. Then this thing happened that happened to everybody, where the federal government was gutted first, and then a million people died, some of them right out on the street.
Most people didn't see it. Most people in Atlanta still don't know that there were refrigerated trucks beside the stadium for the bodies. I know there are people in the suburbs who still think it was a hoax, because it wasn't in their face.
A friend of mine is using crowfunding for medical expenses now, because even if you are employed with health insurance, most of us don't have enough. I fantasize about finding a way to steal or scam enough to fix all of my loved one's medical bills. I try not to scream when the husband reminds me how much better we have it than the single parents he sees in his work every day, living in rental conditions that in any sane state would be illegal.
We don't live in a sane state. All I can do is get up every morning and go to a job that pays less than I could make anywhere else. I go to this job because I think I am making a difference. If I don't get up and do something every day to make living in this country, this state, and this city less difficult, I think I'll lose my mind. I'll start screaming and shredding my denim pants, because I want to project that we are all the neglected children of a state that lets people die in the street. I worry that by working the job that keeps me from screaming - the job that pays so much less than I could be making elsewhere - that I am damaging and neglecting my own children.
I tell myself that of course, the money isn't what matters, having the time off and holidays this job allows me will fill in the gaps left by the lack of money. I have less than twenty months now with both my kids in High School, and I want to maximize my time with them. We can't afford artfully ripped denim. We can't even afford invisilines to correct their slightly crooked teeth, teeth that on one child were *so close* to being straight until the pandemic hit and she outgrew her invisilines and we've not been able to replace them. But at least we aren't on the street, breaking bikes out of frustration, or dying on the side of a hospital for lack of care. I can make sure my children's clothes don't have holes in them. It's 2022, the world is on fire, and we're all just doing our best.
As I continued on to my reserved bike, I was sad to find that the first reserved selection had bent wheels and a smashed seat. The next bike was so damaged it couldn't be scanned. The third bike I found on the edge of Woodruff Park was rideable, but the bells had been broken and someone had twisted the left hand break a weird way. I was still able to use the third bike to ride to the grocery, and then home.
I know it was likely one of my unhoused neighbors breaking all the rental eBikes out of frustration. I would be frustrated too, if I were unhoused in Atlanta with all the vacant business tower space just sitting there around me.
One morning during the quarantine phase of pandemic as the husband drove me into work, we watched EMS workers collect the body of a homeless person off the side of Atlanta Medical Center. The unhoused neighbor had died on the sidewalk outside the hospital overnight. This did not make the news. It happens all the time. Now that same hospital is closing because it could not make a profit of any kind, but lost money year after year. Too many people needed help. I don't blame the hospital. I don't blame the person who got angry and went around breaking all the bikes. But we did use that hospital, and I do need the bikes to get home after work, so I wish things were different.
Sometimes I think about the fact that I had a life for about ten years where I mostly wasn't scraping by all the time. There was about a decade where I didn't feel fucking poor, and I thought, hey, I'll never have to be poor again. Then this thing happened that happened to everybody, where the federal government was gutted first, and then a million people died, some of them right out on the street.
Most people didn't see it. Most people in Atlanta still don't know that there were refrigerated trucks beside the stadium for the bodies. I know there are people in the suburbs who still think it was a hoax, because it wasn't in their face.
A friend of mine is using crowfunding for medical expenses now, because even if you are employed with health insurance, most of us don't have enough. I fantasize about finding a way to steal or scam enough to fix all of my loved one's medical bills. I try not to scream when the husband reminds me how much better we have it than the single parents he sees in his work every day, living in rental conditions that in any sane state would be illegal.
We don't live in a sane state. All I can do is get up every morning and go to a job that pays less than I could make anywhere else. I go to this job because I think I am making a difference. If I don't get up and do something every day to make living in this country, this state, and this city less difficult, I think I'll lose my mind. I'll start screaming and shredding my denim pants, because I want to project that we are all the neglected children of a state that lets people die in the street. I worry that by working the job that keeps me from screaming - the job that pays so much less than I could be making elsewhere - that I am damaging and neglecting my own children.
I tell myself that of course, the money isn't what matters, having the time off and holidays this job allows me will fill in the gaps left by the lack of money. I have less than twenty months now with both my kids in High School, and I want to maximize my time with them. We can't afford artfully ripped denim. We can't even afford invisilines to correct their slightly crooked teeth, teeth that on one child were *so close* to being straight until the pandemic hit and she outgrew her invisilines and we've not been able to replace them. But at least we aren't on the street, breaking bikes out of frustration, or dying on the side of a hospital for lack of care. I can make sure my children's clothes don't have holes in them. It's 2022, the world is on fire, and we're all just doing our best.
Friday, October 14, 2022
It Was Fall Break
For the majority of the time my kids have been students in Atlanta Public Schools, we've been lucky to have a calendar with full week breaks in early October and mid January. These extra weeks off give teachers and students much needed down time, reduce our summers to a managable ten weeks, and, best of all, used to give us amazing and affordable family vacations. Before COVID, we took the kids to Disney three times over the years, and each time saw other Atlanta families we knew there at the same time. We went to Costa Rica, we went to we visited family, the kids went to week long camps offered by local arts and crafts places or their karate dojo. The October break, in particular, has always been nice because early October is when the heat has finally lifted off Atlanta.
During the COVID years - the school years that started in the fall of 2019 through last Spring - those three years didn't have week long breaks, because of a number of factors, and it made me mad every damn time. Luckily this year we have our old calendar back, and so the kids had this week off.
There's no money to go anywhere this year. We still haven't sold the Lake Claire house. It's under contract for an amount we considered insulting as recently as ninety days ago. Now we'll just be happy to get anything at all, and avoid foreclosure before sale.
I did manage to take the kids out for a nice dinner Monday, right after I took them to get their annual flu shots. Years ago I made the holiday formerly known as Columbus Day our family flu shot day every year, as a kind of object lesson in applied history. The kids always have it off, and even when I don't I can usually skip out on work a little early to make vaccinations happen. Now that we live in Virginia Highlands, I was able to walk with them down to the CVS and then over to the restaurant after.
Other than that one walk out, I was unsuccessful in getting the kids out of the house during their break. I tried, but as teens they legitamately want to lay in bed and play video games with their week off. I am hoping that after the house sells, we can afford to travel again. Winn and I are considering driving the kids up to the UGA Athens campus over the Thanksgiving holiday week. As difficult as it can be to get in to UGA, that's currently the 16-year-old's safety school. We only have about a year before she has to make her decision about where to spend her first few years of early adulthood away from us.
I really want both the kids to go somewhere far away, as I think being outside your home culture is an important part of growing as a person. I don't know if anything outside the state will be possible with our current finacial situation though, and honestly, none of my friends with college ended up making any more than my friends without college in the long run. I am pushing college on the oldest child because I think she has the best shot at scholarships right out of High School, but maybe that's a mistake. It's 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything about the best path thorugh early adulthood, or what might lead to success. We're all just doing our best.
During the COVID years - the school years that started in the fall of 2019 through last Spring - those three years didn't have week long breaks, because of a number of factors, and it made me mad every damn time. Luckily this year we have our old calendar back, and so the kids had this week off.
There's no money to go anywhere this year. We still haven't sold the Lake Claire house. It's under contract for an amount we considered insulting as recently as ninety days ago. Now we'll just be happy to get anything at all, and avoid foreclosure before sale.
I did manage to take the kids out for a nice dinner Monday, right after I took them to get their annual flu shots. Years ago I made the holiday formerly known as Columbus Day our family flu shot day every year, as a kind of object lesson in applied history. The kids always have it off, and even when I don't I can usually skip out on work a little early to make vaccinations happen. Now that we live in Virginia Highlands, I was able to walk with them down to the CVS and then over to the restaurant after.
Other than that one walk out, I was unsuccessful in getting the kids out of the house during their break. I tried, but as teens they legitamately want to lay in bed and play video games with their week off. I am hoping that after the house sells, we can afford to travel again. Winn and I are considering driving the kids up to the UGA Athens campus over the Thanksgiving holiday week. As difficult as it can be to get in to UGA, that's currently the 16-year-old's safety school. We only have about a year before she has to make her decision about where to spend her first few years of early adulthood away from us.
I really want both the kids to go somewhere far away, as I think being outside your home culture is an important part of growing as a person. I don't know if anything outside the state will be possible with our current finacial situation though, and honestly, none of my friends with college ended up making any more than my friends without college in the long run. I am pushing college on the oldest child because I think she has the best shot at scholarships right out of High School, but maybe that's a mistake. It's 2022, and the world is on fire. Nobody knows anything about the best path thorugh early adulthood, or what might lead to success. We're all just doing our best.
Friday, October 07, 2022
Parties Past and Present
Twenty years ago, I was surrounded by friends and celebrating my birthday at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival.
There's so much more to that memory than I posted at the time. I have a draft story saved somewhere entitled "Nobody Gets Laid at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival". Last November I was at a backyard party where a professional storyteller who was actually from Jonesboro laughed when I told her about the premise. No one gets laid in Jonesboro ever, apparently. I'm not the only one - which is the lesson that the internet has taught me, over and over again. Nothing we do is ever truly unique, we're all in this together.
The backyard party where I met the storyteller was being hosted by a prominent local artist couple I've known for a long time. We're not close friends - I'm not sure how many people at my age have close friends. I know them, they know me, we're all cool with each other. That's kind of how it goes at forty-six. I know a lot of people, but there's no more of that intimacy we had in our twenties, where a bunch of us could sit on a couch and say we felt loved. Even the intimacy we think we have that might be unique isn't. I learned by accident at that artist's party that someone I had dated was now with someone one of the artists had once dated. There's no one-off anything, really.
The backyard artist's party last November was the first party anyone had been to since the quarantine. Since then, the husband and I have been to a few get togethers. There was one just last weekend, hosted by friends I've had since 1997. The husband went early in the day, and stayed until the evening when I came to pick him up.
I didn't go to the board game party all day like the husband because I was busy. The kids needed pick ups and drop offs at their different activities, and a friend from Florida came downtown to visit. The Florida friends are staying with family far north of Atlanta with their kids. We've all seen the sharks swimming down the Tampa area streets and the destruction of neighborhoods on TV. No one knows yet when schools in the hurricane area will resume. The kids can't go to cirtual school because there's no cell service towers or internet. Even if they did have online access, it will be weeks before there is drinkable water and restored roads in many areas.
So since the Florida friends will be around for a while we walked the two blocks down to the Beltline and showed the teens Ponce City Market, the old Sears building which is now a mall. It was the first time I've really seen the return of teen mall culture. For the majority of my daughter's lives, malls were semi-abandoned places we only visited occasionally to go to the movies. Of course, not all malls were like that over the last two decades, just the ones near us downtown and on the east side. But now there's a proper mall again, and my teens can walk to it, and younger daughter was thrilled to show her Florida friends around and run into her school friends. Next week is fall break for my girls, and I suspect all of them will be at the mall at least a few times, since they can walk.
I did go to the very end of the game night party that evening. It was at a house in East Point. I've been going to parties thrown by these friends since 1997, first in Murfreesboro, then in Nashville, and now here, for twenty-five years. As I sat around the bonfire, we all talked about random shit - the kids, and the floods, and the neighborhoods, and caught up. And we all agreed - it's 2022, the world is on fire, nobody knows anything, and we're all just doing our best.
There's so much more to that memory than I posted at the time. I have a draft story saved somewhere entitled "Nobody Gets Laid at the Jonesboro Storytelling Festival". Last November I was at a backyard party where a professional storyteller who was actually from Jonesboro laughed when I told her about the premise. No one gets laid in Jonesboro ever, apparently. I'm not the only one - which is the lesson that the internet has taught me, over and over again. Nothing we do is ever truly unique, we're all in this together.
The backyard party where I met the storyteller was being hosted by a prominent local artist couple I've known for a long time. We're not close friends - I'm not sure how many people at my age have close friends. I know them, they know me, we're all cool with each other. That's kind of how it goes at forty-six. I know a lot of people, but there's no more of that intimacy we had in our twenties, where a bunch of us could sit on a couch and say we felt loved. Even the intimacy we think we have that might be unique isn't. I learned by accident at that artist's party that someone I had dated was now with someone one of the artists had once dated. There's no one-off anything, really.
The backyard artist's party last November was the first party anyone had been to since the quarantine. Since then, the husband and I have been to a few get togethers. There was one just last weekend, hosted by friends I've had since 1997. The husband went early in the day, and stayed until the evening when I came to pick him up.
I didn't go to the board game party all day like the husband because I was busy. The kids needed pick ups and drop offs at their different activities, and a friend from Florida came downtown to visit. The Florida friends are staying with family far north of Atlanta with their kids. We've all seen the sharks swimming down the Tampa area streets and the destruction of neighborhoods on TV. No one knows yet when schools in the hurricane area will resume. The kids can't go to cirtual school because there's no cell service towers or internet. Even if they did have online access, it will be weeks before there is drinkable water and restored roads in many areas.
So since the Florida friends will be around for a while we walked the two blocks down to the Beltline and showed the teens Ponce City Market, the old Sears building which is now a mall. It was the first time I've really seen the return of teen mall culture. For the majority of my daughter's lives, malls were semi-abandoned places we only visited occasionally to go to the movies. Of course, not all malls were like that over the last two decades, just the ones near us downtown and on the east side. But now there's a proper mall again, and my teens can walk to it, and younger daughter was thrilled to show her Florida friends around and run into her school friends. Next week is fall break for my girls, and I suspect all of them will be at the mall at least a few times, since they can walk.
I did go to the very end of the game night party that evening. It was at a house in East Point. I've been going to parties thrown by these friends since 1997, first in Murfreesboro, then in Nashville, and now here, for twenty-five years. As I sat around the bonfire, we all talked about random shit - the kids, and the floods, and the neighborhoods, and caught up. And we all agreed - it's 2022, the world is on fire, nobody knows anything, and we're all just doing our best.
Friday, September 30, 2022
eBike Rides
Something I've discovered I love in the last year is renting the Lime eBikes. You download an app on your phone, link it to funding, and then use QR codes to activate the bikes, which are parked around the city.
Previous to the pandemic, I did rent the scooters offered this way whenever I got the chance, and my favorite brand was Byrd. The husband always thought the scooters too risky, and didn't like me using them. He feels more secure about me on the bikes, and of course I use a helmet. Before our recent move, I biked about twice a week home from work. Now I'm biking a few more times per week.
I don't like that the money I spend this way is going to Uber, a company that's anti-union, but the Lime bikes are the most practical for us right now. We've always been a one-car family, and now that the economic reality of the last couple of years has really set in, the truth is that we're likely to remain a one car family for some time.
I rode a bike to the bank and the grocery today on my lunch hour - I'm working from home today. The bike ride felt good. I have to focus on what feels good, so I don't get sad about what doesn't.
We should have bought a new car this Spring. That was the plan, for years. Buy a new car when our oldest was 16, and give the 2008 Prius to her. There's no new car. There's no new used car. We're still okay.
I do like bike riding. It does feel good. Honestly it's faster, I think, than running errands with a car would be. Maybe if things pick up in the next year I'll buy my own eBike, but for now I'm happy enough to rent on the spot - most of the time I use them for one-way rides home after the husband has dropped me at work.
It's 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We're all just trying our best.
Friday, September 23, 2022
Now it is Autumn
It's autumn now. The kids are 16 and 14.
It's been over a decade since I last updated this blog. I could write about everything that happened between now and then, but that's not why I'm restarting this blog. I stopped writing here for all the usual reasons - the internet moved away from personal blogs into the walled gardens of Livejournal, and then Facebook. I was busy being a mom and having a career, which included a lot of professional and personal publishing in different ways.
Then there's been the pandemic.
I'm restarting things here to get back into the habit of writing personally on a regular schedule. I'm writing a blog to keep track of the things that started happening to us on March 13, 2020, and have yet to stop happening us because of the pandemic. Everything was always going to change, of course. Summer was always going to end, and the autumn of everything was always going to come. But the summer was so long, and so warm, I guess I forgot to plan better for this.
Welcome to fall. My mantra for the year has been this: It's 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We're all just trying our best.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)