Invasion of "the Other"

My husband has retired.

[Pause for those of you who’ve already experienced this and are either cringing or just waiting to hear what I write next.]

It’s an adjustment. First came panic, then came hostility, now there’s … contentment.

The panic had to do with my space. I have my own office/studio, but pretty much, the Whole House has been mine for the last few years. He left in the morning and came back in the evening. I wasn’t observed.

For the first days after he retired, he didn’t just observe, he hovered. That must have been when the hostility surfaced. He thought I was going to be available, and I had my own agenda, I owned my own days. [Look at all these words in bold! These are strong feelings.]

According to quantum theory, observation of something changes that something; and I know that’s actually happening: his observation of me is acting on me, changing me. I can get really existentialist about all this and quote my own philosophy thesis on Sartre’s horror of objectification by “the Other.” My “Other” is looking at me.

Whoa, I just now realized how my two main areas of intellectual interest actually overlap!

Anyhow, we got that straightened out. He mostly leaves the house in the morning, and I can share the house by going somewhere else in it. Thank heavens for rooms, multiple rooms. (Although he has observed that while he keeps all his personal items in his office, my personal items manage to migrate to every single common space in the house.)

When my mother first visited us and met Tim, she was enthralled. She and I were sitting at the dining room table, and Tim was wandering around the house, looking up and around. He was looking for light bulbs that might need changing. My mother oohed, “Oh, he’s handy! He’s looking for projects!”

Right now, as I write this, Tim is trekking the lawn, looking for dandelions that need pulling. Tim relaxes by doing things.

I relax by doing nothing.

I know what you’re thinking: she’s not doing nothing, she’s writing. Well, I only interrupted my doing nothing because I needed to tell you about doing nothing. I’ll go back to doing nothing.

I’ve always had issues with productivity and categorizing myself as lazy. Mostly, I try to consider a day productive if I’ve done two things. It used to be three things, but in the summer, I reduce my requirement to two. I count lying on our deck as the extra because I’m outside and not on the couch.

Yesterday, I picked up a paint chip to see if the color would work for our front door. That counted as one productive effort, so I lost momentum because I was also doing laundry; my productivity quotient was met. I thought today I might wash the door, but since I’m writing this, my door-momentum has faded. Besides, I also returned a book to the library when I was picking up the paint chip.

I am married to a man who will get the paint chip, wash the door, paint the door, clean up afterwards, and count all that as one productive effort. And he would have finished it by now – in one day! – except that I claimed the door as MY (eventual) productive effort. But with one mumbled comment, it’s clear he has observed my inactivity, thus proving Sartre’s – and my – horror of “the Other.” I am seen doing nothing! It doesn’t help that I am also forced to observe his activity.

Fortunately, “the Other” has other benefits, such as companionship. Today’s second productive effort will be going on an outing with him. I adapt.

Errands: A Love/Hate Relationship

I had a whole Third Third afternoon free to do what I wanted; I just had a couple of errands. Just a couple, but you know how this goes: the errands ate the whole afternoon. The trip to the grocery store got compounded by an out-of-stock item; the trip to pick up compost put me at the end of the line of pickups unloading at the dump; the simple birthday card wasn’t so simple (if you want just the right birthday card). One afternoon vaporized.

Yet there are Good Errands and Bad Errands.

This is a Good Errand:

• It happens conveniently, maybe even while you’re doing something else and the errand is close by or related.

• It may involve a bit of serendipitous good fortune: running into a friend or finding some other thing along the way.

• It’s intrinsically good: recycling, a volunteer task or delivery, a trip to the library

• It takes the time you thought it would take or less.

• It’s interesting.

• You have a good attitude.

This is a Bad Errand:

• It’s imperative even if you don’t have the available time so you end up rushing or feeling rushed.

• It involves cancellations, misprinted phone numbers, malfunctioning equipment, bad directions, and assorted other kinks in the universe.

• It’s related to a do-over-and-over-again task, especially the do-over-and-over-again task of preparing dinner.

• You have a bad attitude.

There is movement between Good Errands and Bad Errands:

• Good Errands are still Bad Errands if there are simply too many of them.

• A Bad Errand can be recharacterized as a Good Errand if you feel cooped up in the house and the errand is a way to Get Out of the House. Or if you can do the Bad Errand on a bicycle.

• Even a Bad Errand has the opportunity to transform itself into a Good Errand if it encounters a lot of appreciation, gratitude, and courtesy. It can even elevate itself to a Mission!

What’s a Mission? A unique self-motivating errand that launches a search for solution.

Self-motivating means that finding a dress for a particular occasion is only a Mission if you like clothes-shopping, dressing-up, and attending banquets; otherwise, it’s an errand. My missions involve crafts. The search for the perfect butter dish consumed me for a few years, as did the teapot quest.

There’s a BIG difference between an Errand and a Mission.

How an Errand Became a Mission: A True-Life Account

1. You bought an oil pourer on sale at the Corning Museum of Glass and schlepped it back to Alaska because you were really proud of your purchase. It was perfect for drizzling oil over vegetables before roasting.
   
2. Somehow the ridges on the pouring nozzle got smaller and the cork-thing became loose and now oil spills all over the place.
   
3. The usual grocery store doesn’t sell cork-like nozzle things. The whole contraption sits on the kitchen counter for months, reminding you of the necessary Bad Errand. Every time you roast vegetables, you glare at it.
4. Finally, one day, you’re in the mood to deal with it as an interesting Good Errand. You go to the bottling store you’d discovered once.
5. Except that the road the bottling store is on is under construction and you are detoured all over the stupid area and besides, they don’t have it anyway, and this is now a Really Bad Errand.
6. The bottling store directs you to a restaurant supply store. You have never been to a restaurant supply store before. Hmm, things are looking up: before you were a go-fer, now you’re an investigator … on a Mission!
7. The restaurant supply store has nozzles; they have packs of 12 nozzles! They have lots of startling things; this is a New Thing, a new discovery. The solution is taking shape; things are looking do-able. Now you need a gadget store for one nozzle.
8. That means a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond, the kind of store that’s good for about two visits a year to gape at the sheer variety of things that exist to buy. And there it is, a package of two!
   
9. Mission accomplished!

No Leg to Stand On

This is a Second Third story, but I’m going to tell it here because you need it for my next post, the Third Third version. Sometimes it’s a hilarious story that I tell when I’m in stand-up comic mode, and sometimes it’s a lesson-learned story that I need to re-tell myself. Feel free to take it either way, but it does sort of occupy an epic place in my life experience.

Thirty years ago, Tim invited me on one of our first dates. We were going to cross-country ski with his friends in the back country. His circle of friends skied better than I, a fact I discovered right away when I blinked at the trailhead and they disappeared. So I shuffled along by myself – muttering all the while this would be the last date with That Guy.

It was the kind of ski outing where you catch up with everyone else as they’re finishing lunch, and they stand up and say, “Okay, time to get going.” But there’s a mountain, and then they’re all laughing and falling, falling and laughing, which seems do-able to me. I could certainly laugh and fall. Except that my fall was accompanied by a very clear twang as something in my knee gave way.

So Tim and the rest raced back to the car to plan my rescue, and eventually I ended up at the emergency room in a temporary cast. The next day, I was fired.

I know, that seems out-of-the-blue and maybe even un-related. It was. A new mayor had been elected and, since I served “at the pleasure of the mayor” managing the transit system, I was fired. It’s political. I get that.

The day after, I went to an orthopedist. In his office, the receptionist had some forms for me to sign. As she slid the window to hand me the forms; in a freak accident, the window, the frame, and the molding fell out of the wall, landed on my good foot, and fractured it.

You read that right. I went into the doctor’s office with one broken leg and left with two. Or, as the doctor put it, the knee meant I couldn’t stand on that leg and now the fractured foot meant I couldn’t stand on that leg.

“But can I still swim?” I asked, panicking.

“Uh, you’re not going to be able to sleep in a bed,” he admitted. “You’ll be on the floor for a while.”

All this ended up translating into five months of crutches, braces, and limited mobility. My doctor made a case for conservative, non-surgical treatment so I’d have my knee for the rest of my life. In the meantime, I learned a lot:

• You cannot collect unemployment if you are physically unable to take a job. If, as a healthy 30-something, I had not magically checked the box for “short-term disability” when I took the job; I’d be broke fast. This is how people end up homeless.


• I felt helpless and weak, totally un-strong. I felt ugly, pathetic, and worthless. Eventually, a new definition of strength had to emerge: it had nothing to do with lifting things; it had to do with keeping my spirits up.



• I was part of a community of friends that rose to my aid: doing my shopping, making my house a social center, installing bathroom hardware, driving me to physical therapy, checking in on me. I needed help, and they were there. “There-ness” made all the difference.



• I was totally unproductive. When it takes 40 minutes to get to the bathroom, you quickly run out of time in your day. All I could do was Be. Amazingly, I got very, very happy. I think the universe had been telling me to slow down. When I wasn’t listening, it broke the first leg. When that didn’t work, out went the job. Still focused on too much Doing and not enough Being? There went the second leg.



• I learned what it’s like to be disabled. I suffered through office buildings that had ramps outside yet no elevators inside, people parking illegally in the parking space I needed to get into a building, power doors that opened out and knocked over my crutches. Happily, I lived in a ranch house all on one level.



• I had a good story. No, a great story. People loved hearing this story. Telling it helped me be cheerful rather than pathetic. There were the side stories, too: the one about the taxi driver who got lost and I, thinking he was taking me to some dark alley, extracted the crampons on my crutches and prepared to attack him from the back seat.

• During all this, I was in new-love, and love conquers all.


As I fought my way back to mobility – passing through the stage Tim described as “might be called walking … in a prehistoric kind of way” – I set a goal for myself: I would run the Alaska Women’s Run, 6.2 miles. That would be my sign that this episode was over.

In Praise of the Jigsaw Puzzle

There are two ways to pursue a jigsaw puzzle. You can be intentional about it, maybe even plan to do it with a group of friends, and then it’s social and part of a good time. I know friends who do a new one every New Year’s Eve. You can also back into doing a puzzle because you’re in task avoidance mode and feel like all you can manage is wasting time, but you need distraction that’s engrossing and enjoyable enough so you can avoid noticing how much you’re avoiding. The puzzle is a cut above empty-headedness and self-medication, but in your mind not as bad as … playing solitaire, for example.

Everyone has his or her personal prejudices as to what constitutes really degenerate time wasting. To me, playing online games probably takes the cake, but I’m sure there are some people who think it helps their reflexes or memory or whatever. Everyone’s poison – or antidote, I guess – is different.

I like a good jigsaw puzzle. It meets all the requirements for absorbing one’s attention without requiring any preparation, knowledge, or brain sweat. You pull out the box and before you know it, you’ve abdicated any responsibility for completing any chores. You’re gone.

In our house, the jigsaw puzzle goes on the dining room table so doing one also means you’ve disrupted dinner times. Maybe that means you don’t really cook dinner. You say, “Everyone for himself,” and go back to the puzzle.

Recently, a friend and I have been comparing what our brain does on jigsaw puzzles. We both notice how we can pick up a piece and “sense” where it goes. We don’t know if it’s a response to the shape or the picture, but we know it happens without too many synapses jumping. Something in us just responds to the piece, knows its place in the puzzle. It’s very gratifying.

I’m sure the solitaire players say that solitaire does something for their brains, too.

But this being our Third Thirds, I’ve had to modify my jigsaw puzzling. Those big 1,000-piece ones take up too much space on the table so I have to lean way over. After a couple hours, I begin to notice the lower back fading. An hour more, and a spasm might begin. If I don’t quit – but how can I quit when I’ve just made so much progress on the sky?? – I can be stuck with a heating pad for the next couple of days. I’ll walk by the table, reach for a piece, and feel a jab as I lean out. And I keep leaning out, unable to stop puzzling the puzzle.

Recently, I’ve discovered smaller-piece puzzles (the pieces themselves are reduced size). And I’ve tried 500-count puzzles instead of the big 1,000s. That means the whole puzzle doesn’t take up the whole table. I can do it sitting down. Once we even found a four-sided puzzle so everyone could work on it from his or her own side of the table.

I get my puzzles at the local thrift store. It’s a little chancy because they might be missing pieces, but folks are getting pretty sophisticated and write on the bottom whether it’s complete or not. When I finish a puzzle, I pass it on to Judith. She gives me hers, and when we’re both done, it goes back to the thrift store.

I anthropomorphize the pieces. I look for a stubby head with a fat right hand. I look for a skinny neck with a sloping shoulder. After working on a puzzle for a few hours, the Zen of it takes over. Then I just hover over the pieces and the right ones start to jump into my hand. Yes, it happens, and that’s the thrill of the whole undertaking. The universe is lining itself up, putting all its pieces in place. (sigh)

When I was in college, I worked a summer job on the assembly line at the Aurora Plastics factory. We assembled plastic models: planes, cars, monsters. Occasionally, we’d drop one, pick up a few pieces, put them in the closest box – any box – and keep the line moving. At the end, the box would get shrink-wrapped, and some poor kid would think that meant his model would have all the requisite pieces.

What if a jigsaw puzzle came off an assembly line like that? You’d be trying to fit houses into landscapes into general stores into street scenes, and you’d be tearing your hair out. But I don’t think that puzzle would show up in a thrift store. I think that puzzle would end up in the trash. My universe is safe.

Mountains out of molehills

I use two paper calendars. One sits on the kitchen counter and is the kind you flip over day by day. That’s where social engagements, appointments, volunteer commitments go, as well as some daily to-dos. That’s where I’m supposed to look in the morning so I don’t miss anything. It is VERY IMPORTANT to turn over the page each morning.

My other paper calendar has a monthly view. I write down all the appointments and social events in this one, too, but this one allows me to plan ahead. I can see that saying “how about next Tuesday” won’t work because there’s already something there. And the important thing about this one is that it’s portable: it goes upstairs, downstairs, to meetings, in the car. It’s paper, measures 7 x 10 inches, has a simple staple binding, and has proven itself as my most valuable tool.

Every year, I would march down to the Calista Corporation offices and pick up the new monthly calendar for the year. Last year, they stopped printing them. It could have been catastrophic, but miraculously, I found a very similar one at Target.

So today I headed over to Office Depot to pick up my 2016 desk calendar refill. They were all cleaned out. So was Target and Fred Meyer. (Take moment to beat up on myself for waiting till the last minute, even after writing about being “on my own calendar.”) So there’s always Amazon, right?

Aiiiieee, not that rabbit hole again! I found the desk calendar refill easily enough, but an hour later, I’m still looking at pictures of monthly “planners” that turn out to have leather covers, spiral binding, or extra pages of stuff. I put in the product number from the one I have and the manufacturer: Mead. Eventually, I work my way to the Mead website. I guess they don’t make this product number anymore. I keep getting shown bigger, heavier, $20 calendars. I don’t want to carry around a tome. I just want my little cheapie calendar.

I finally found one that might work, but of course this doesn’t add up to $35 for free shipping. Aiiieee, $20.30 to ship 8.5 ounces of paper? Okay, so then you know what I have to do? I have to look around for something else to buy to reach $35.

Bridget had recommended a new game, Catch Phrase. Hmmm, turns out there’s paper Catch Phrase and electronic Catch Phrase and a newer version that is not as excellent as another version so you have to be sure to buy product #A4625 or you’ll get the dud version. How do I know this? I’ve been down the Hasbro rabbit hole. I’ve read reader reviews on Amazon, and one guy checked it all out with Hasbro Live Chat. (My kind of guy!) Initially, Amazon tells me that this product is out of stock and doesn’t know when it will be made available. But after an hour of fruitless exploration, the product disappears entirely from Amazon except for one copy that costs $220! I have to wait till Monday to call Live Chat myself and get to the bottom of this.

So now I’m three hours into the quest for a calendar so my 2016 can be as productive as possible.

Right.

But this is my Third Third and I have a grown daughter. I think she has Amazon Prime. She gets free shipping. I send her the links for the calendars, and she sends me the order confirmation.

What a great new year this might be!

The un-done done!

Ah, victory! Those three big projects I’d picked out to complete, the ones I’d written about before – they’re done! Or at least two of them are. I still can’t remember what that third one was.

The thing about finishing a quilt in your Third Thirds is your eyes. I need to take off my glasses to thread the needle on the sewing machine, put on my glasses to sew, take off my glasses to inspect the stitches. Look around for the glasses, put them on.

The whole quilt project was an exercise in reckless ambition. I signed up to take a quilting class back in 2011. But then, just before the class, I decided I didn’t want to practice on any old fabric. So the night before, I started a quilt.

I thought I could “whip one out.” I have no idea why I thought that. But I started one … and there it sat. I ended up learning to quilt on fabric scraps.

By the time I vowed to finish it, I couldn’t remember how to attach the binding around the edges. I’d never done that before; it was a New Thing. The notes I’d made at the time were no help:

Fold binding along 45°, line up raw edges. (Rotate piece so stitching is at top.) Fold back on itself so fold at top is 1-2 threads below edge.
???

So off I hopped to Peggy’s house. Peggy even blogs about quilting so she made me a little paper model of my binding, folded 45° this way and that. Oh, she said, don’t forget to use your walking foot.

That was pull-out-the-manual time. This is a walking foot. If you don’t put the walking foot on right, you break a needle. Now I know how it’s really supposed to go on. You need to take your glasses off to get the walking foot on.

But then I did it! I attached my binding … until I reached a part I couldn’t remember. Back to Peggy’s house. Quick – before I forgot again – I finished it!

Next I had to finish mounting all my old Daily News columns (339 of them) into hand-made books. That meant needing special giant-size paper called “parent sheets.” I used to love going into Frontier Paper and poking through the paper samples, but this time they explained that paper isn’t really happening any more. It gets stale so they don’t keep much in stock. A paper-poor Third Third….

Forging on, I settled on a paper variety and began cutting the columns so I could paste them onto the pages. Somewhere during that process, my paper cutter disappeared. I don’t know where it went. I have the sneaking suspicion that it somehow got into the mixed paper recycling box with all the scraps and ended up being recycled.

 With a new paper cutter, I finished them all. All that remained was sewing in the pages of the last volume. Then I just stopped.

I don’t know why that happens. You paint the whole room … and then stop before putting the switch plates back on. You hang all the pictures on the walls, put the hammer down … and leave it sitting there for months. It’s like the motor powering all the exertion just … quits. (Am I the only one who experiences this?)

So then you have to really push to get your momentum back. After months of repeating “finish binding” on my to-do lists, I just DID IT!

DONE!

The Time Wars: Productivity vs Blank Spaces

So there we were, a group of retired, unemployed, women on breaks. Guiltily, we broached the subject of how unproductive we’d become. One woman raised her hand and said, “I’m Sue, and I waste time.” One by one, we raised our hands.

In The Third Chapter, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s study of retirement, she writes of one high-powered woman who played online poker endlessly when she retired. Granted, none of us were playing online poker, but we felt just as decadent. Somehow, just as work expands to fill the time available under Parkinson’s Law, not working expands to fill the time available, too.

When I was a super-productive but nuts mother of a young child – working, picking up the kid from child care, getting dinner cooked, spending enriched time with family, child bathed, etc. etc., I stayed up late to write a novel titled “Blank Spaces.” I thought then – and always have – that the best of ourselves emerges in the blank spaces of our lives, the times when we can be contemplative, generous in spirit, and creative. My life had zero blank spaces.

Very soon, I decided I would work reduced work weeks. My whole family could tell the difference between Barbara Monday-through-Wednesday and Barbara-Thursday-through-Sunday. I am a believer in free time!

So why do I spend such a lot of time beating myself up over not utilizing my free time more productively?

My friend Sharon says it took her seven years to “come down” after retiring and give herself permission to enjoy it. (Her husband says it took him seven minutes….) Sharon asked, “Have you taken some days to just do nothing?” Yes, I said, but for a long time I felt terribly anxious about it.

When I unemployed myself, I had three big projects I wanted to complete: a quilt I’d started a couple years ago, mounting all my old Daily News columns in four hand-made volumes, and … I can’t even remember the other one. Or rather, of all the un-done projects facing me, I’m not sure which is the one I put on that list.

I approached my projects with a huge amount of energy and I was a marvel of productivity! And then I wasn’t. They’re 99% done, and then they went on pause while I de-cluttered, fulfilled some contracts, traveled, took a class, taught a class, yarn-bombed. I think now I tend not to “count” what I do accomplish, and even that word makes me nervous because I think I’m an accomplish-aholic.

Enamored with my new spiralizer, I started cooking recipes I’d torn out of magazines. I’ve torn them out for years, but they just accumulated in my big stash. Recently, I started cooking some of them, and they’re terrific! I used to cook to feed hungry mouths. Now I cook to taste flavors.

That’s when I recognize that I’ve found a new rhythm. A Third Third rhythm. It’s so calm, so accepting.

And then I browse through an art book and think, Oh, if I were more productive and used my time better, I’d be able to experiment with this medium or try this technique. And then I write about embroidery and think, “Hmm, why haven’t you done any in a while?”

Way back when, my friend Eric was planning out his ideal day post-graduation: Sleep, eight hours; work + commute, nine hours; exercise, one hour; keeping current on world affairs, one hour. You get the drift. It added up to 27 hours daily. Eric said, “I’ll work it out somehow.” So this is the crux of the problem: we have 27 hours’ worth of intentions and wishes but there are only 24 hours in a day. We’ve never let go of the three hours “lost” from our day. I have LOTS of ideas for those three hours. I have six hours of ideas for those three hours.

One of the things I used to do in workplaces that had become unhealthy is make people go home. I told them they’d lost awareness of what was sustainable, what was do-able in a normal workday. They were killing themselves with overtime and unreasonable expectations, and morale was suffering. See, I told you I was a believer in free time.

So now I have to figure out how to add free time to my free time.