Curriculum vitae

If I have applied to you for employment, don't read this post.


This is my eleventh or twelfth job, I think. I used to clean my dad's office. I spent the whole time telling him when I was going to stop working for him. Quitting, in other words. When I was fourteen I got a job as a library page. The library page job was my first exposure to professional politics, and dreary, windowless break rooms, and doing boring stuff because someone else is paying you to do boring stuff, and suspecting that I was too smart for it. And not yet knowing that no one pays you to be smart, or cares if you're smart, in the workplace. Smarts are not the point. If you have the right kind of smarts, a combination of political smarts and problem-solving smarts and willingness-to-devote-hours-to-bullshit smarts, you can go far. If a solid part of your smarts stems from suspicion of authority, dogma, and consensus, you better develop a feasible plan for self-employment. If you think you are too smart to get over yourself and just do the work that needs doing, you might be a little immature. Not that I speak from experience.

My favorite official part of the job was restocking storage books in the dusty catacombs. My real favorite part of the job was hiding in the 700 stacks and reading craft books about making miniature dollhouse furnishings. (I'm pretty good with the ol' Dewey decimel system, let me tell you.) The bulk of my job was straightening the large print Westerns in the fiction stacks. Those are really popular with the big font crowd. I got pretty much very nearly fired from that job for being arrogant, which I was. (Turns out that it does not behoove you to believe yourself sharper than your direct supervisor, especially when you were hired, not by her, but by her boss. But I digress).

After that I was a clerk in a candy shop (where I ate A LOT of roasted cashews and "accidentally" punctured holes in the maple candy boxes so that they would be unfit for sale and become break room fare). My bosses were a couple of old Greeks who played chess. Sometimes one of my coworkers would come in on acid and I would cover for her. Hawking artificially colored and flavored "fruit" slices to people is surreal enough without LSD, and there isn't much demand for someone to sit in the back and count the cashews.

I did a couple of summers as an assistant to the assistant of the community education office at a local technical college. That involved accepting checks and entering data into a crotchety DOS database. One time my old third grade teacher came in with her daughter. The experience of having me as a student was apparently sufficiently scarring for her that fifteen years was not enough to wash away the pain. I hung up the phone and heard her say, slowly and sinisterly, "I'd remember That.Voice.Anywhere." Yeah, well, bitch, Modern Egypt? What the hell kind of third grader wants to write that report? 

The Star Island clown-car-of-comedic-job performances finds me slacking to an extent heretofore unattainable, although I actually did lots of work and learned a lot. But I also did lots of slacking. And conflicting with the boss, of course, because...well, because. I think I very nearly got fired three years in a row. There were some traumatic incidents involving the overuse of cilantro and a lack of serving spoons and my perverse insistence on listening to the same record at top volume for an hour every evening, very nearly backing a truck off a pier and causing a large (but contained, don't panic) diesel spill.

Let us not forget the barista-and-sandwich-assembling gig. With my native flair for psychodrama, I managed to get embroiled in all sorts of shenanigans. That one culminated in the gentle "suggestion" that I take some time off after failing to put turkey in the turkey sandwiches five times. That poor woman, and her damn turkey sandwiches. Sliced turkey is not turkey, anyway; I don't care what anyone says.
 
There was absolutely no comedy involved in my job at the recycling center at UNH. That was a sweet job.

I nearly forgot the assistant financial advisor job. One does not cold call.

Then I landed an internship at a mutual fund company.

I had wanted to work on Wall St. since I was in third grade (when a series of unfortunate events led me to conclude that I wanted nothing to do with NASA or flying or engineering). I was genuinely fascinated by economics, and believed the stock market to be a fairly pure demonstration of economic mechanisms (which it is, to be sure, but not the true free market mechanisms I was interested in, and therein lies another diversion in the frantic trajectories of my intellectual evolution). Not knowing the difference, as a kid, between the sell-side and the buy-side, I loved to imagine myself as the analysts on the investment-advising television shows. Really, I did.

When I actually got a job as an equity analyst, I was sure I was on my way. I was determined to be good at it, to be focused, diligent, unassuming, effective, and subservient. That last one is a big one, in business. I bought an expensive suit after being told on an "networking interview" (which turns out to be shorthand for bullshit ego-stroking of some jerk on Wall St. who just wants to show me the fancy view from his corner office and make sure I understand the hierarchy of things) that my wardrobe was insufficient. I still cringe when I think about the way he called out some woman stuffed into a fancy pink suit as an example of appropriate attire. I learned a few things about the role of women on Wall St. that day, you can be sure.

About that subservience, though. I am not good at it. I tried. I did try. Only once did I shout "FUCK YOU!" at a slimy, sneering, pompous-ass colleague. Really, only once, and everyone agreed he deserved it. I also learned through the grapevine that my boss thought I had "scolded" him about something. What can I say? I have a naturally commanding, authoritative tone, which is not a tone that a junior employee can use with a senior employee. I'm working on it. Sort of. While I did not technically get fired from that job, either (I've never actually been fired, I don't think), I got sidelined and I knew it. It was easy to walk away from everything but the money, and I'm glad I did because I never got to the point where I made enough to stay.

Having made the decision to leave finance behind, I worked for a couple of plant nurseries, and a few gardeners, and I did some freelancing.

When Wallace was born, I was still working as a greenhouse manager and a gardener. I knew all about babies, hippie-style, of course: you just put them on your back and they smile and do whatever you do.

Well, not all of them. Wallace, for one, did not. He did not want to rake, or weed, or prune. He did not want to play on a blanket while I did those things. He wanted me to engage with him. And so, since I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a gardener, and it was impossible to actively do both at the same time, I made my choice. 

I don't know what makes something a calling. Is it something that comes naturally? Do you get better at it if you work harder at it? Does every other possibility seem a poor substitute? Would you do it anyway, even if it didn't pay? Does it seem like something you can't not do? That describes the experience of motherhood for me. If I am going to do something, I want to do that thing. I don't want to balance it with other things; I want that one focus to cause all my cylinders to fire. When I realized that I was a mother, and there was no going back, I decided to be consciously, actively, intentionally, the best damn mother I could be. No one was going to fire me, and I couldn't quit. And I didn't want to, and I never have. I got really lucky, I guess. The one thing I couldn't not do turned out to be the one thing I couldn't not do anyway.

It is not, however, the only thing that I feel called to do. I write. I can't not write. I've always written. I don't know if I will ever produce a kind of writing that anyone else wants to pay for, and that's okay. Don't misunderstand me; if I can find a meaningful way to write AND get paid, I will, but whether or not I write doesn't depend on whether or not I get paid. I observe, I think, I analyze. It may be that no one else ever needs my abilities to do these things, but I know I can't stop doing them.

Some people wake up in the morning and do what they love, and someone else values the product enough to pay for it. Some people seem to fall into opportunities, to find their calling knocking at the door. Eventually, that's what happened to me. Well, at least the calling part. No one seems interested in paying for the product yet. But, like the lady says, I'm gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn't pay.

What, you may be asking, is the point of this post. People have been asking me my point as long as I can remember. Perhaps I'm not as concise as I could be. If, by chance, I have applied to you for employment and you read this post anyway, the point is this: There may be a straight path to one's purpose in life, but I sure haven't found it. I know now that it is not always easy to do a good job, and it isn't always necessary for the job to be worth doing, to be worth doing right. Sometimes you just do the damn job. But once I know  what calls to me, everything I do is about that. 

As I set out from this crossroads, six months after transplant, and choose which direction to go, life has never been clearer. It has never made more sense. I will build it, and they will come. As to what "it" is, let me get back to you.

It's My Birthday!

It's my birthday. One of them, anyway. The dragon gets one, too, but that's not until July. As is the case every four years, my birthday falls on Thanksgiving, which means I get turkey and cake. A couple years ago I started writing a post on Facebook on my birthday so that anyone wishing to acknowledge the occasion could just click “like” and be spared any awkward effort of trying to think of something clever to write on the “wall” of a person they have most likely not seen in years, don't know very well, or have never actually met in real life. Such is the nature of social media. I'm okay with that.


The custom this time of year is to write about things for which you are grateful. In the first draft of this post I wandered off on a digressive rant about genocide and economics at this point. No one needs that from me, if anyone even needs it at all. If you are interested in reading about British colonial cruelty, genocide, religious fanaticism and the folly of collectivist agricultural policies, Google is there. You don't need that today. You need a novel take on gratitude.


Life threatening illness is one of those things that makes life really simple. All your priorities become very clear. The people you love, the people who build you up, the emotional requirements of survival: these are what move to the foreground. The physical demands of your body and the illness are consuming; without the cushion of your health to absorb assaults, you must put yourself in the middle of the universe and make everything else revolve around you. That you are not in control becomes very clear, but so does what you do have an influence over. You know what you miss, and what you don't, when you can't do very much. The muse is really loud, the path is really clear.


Then a funny thing happens during recovery, or at least during my own. All that stuff that seemed so simple, whether important or inconsequential, starts to feel complicated again. Where there was in focus and out of focus, now there is soft focus, and then everything gets crisp and urgent again. Life returns to...normal. The difference, though, is that it's easy to see that you are choosing. You can see that you are deciding what is or isn't a priority, whether you realize it or not. You have the chance to say “The universe has handed me a moment in which to redefine myself. What matters to me? Who do I want to be, starting right now?” I know that sounds wonderful and amazing, and it is. But it is also traumatic and terrifying. It is a rebirth, yes, but it is also a re-adolescence, with all the struggle and drama of that liminal passage of self-realization.


Today, I turn 38 years old. My relationship with my husband is almost 15. My marriage is nine. My children are eight and four. There is a lot on my horizon. At some point in the next six months, I will be able to resume normal activities with other people (as opposed to, you know, wearing a surgical mask into the bank. That took some explaining). This means that anything I want to do, I can do, at least in theory. In other words, I am out of excuses.


The second big thing that is happening is that the “mom” part of my stay-at-home-mom job description is being redefined by my customer base, who don't need, or want, my undivided attention all day. In fact, these days I often find that, once everyone has had breakfast and the dishes are done, I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself until lunch. The third thing is that we are rapidly outgrowing our little house, at least in terms of space for John's business or any prospect of my developing one, which means that we have to start planning for a major investment some time soon.


How do I manage my present, when the certainty of sixty years of future no longer feels guaranteed? It's not that I expect to die young, indeed I expect the opposite, but the importance of living young comes into greater relief after cancer. I don't want to waste time when I know I feel good, because I know how easy it is to start feeling really, really bad.


What does all this have to do with gratitude? Remember that part about adolescence? There is a big difference, too. Serious illness can teach you that you have to take care of yourself, focus on yourself, make space for yourself. At fourteen, I felt completely alienated from myself, adrift in a foreign culture I could not navigate. At 38, I know that I am responsible for taking care of me, and that the world will come to me if I give it a soft and solid place to land. I have spent most of my adult life honing the ability to hear and interpret the muse. When I act, whether buying a brokedown palace, quitting a soul-destroying job, choosing to stay home with my kids, selling a house, buying a huge boat, or whatever harebrained scheme comes next, I know that I am doing it because it is exactly the right thing for me, right now. I don't seek balance. If something feels worth doing, I'm going to do it like I mean it. Because I do. I'm so grateful that my experience with leukemia and transplant has made it so easy to stand on the ledge and look out over the landscape and say, “Who I want to be starts RIGHT NOW!” You don't need to get sick to do that. I just got lucky.

What's Natural?

I was watching my son play soccer the other day. He is not a natural. Field position, speed, initiative and attack do not come to him intuitively on the field. When he gets to the ball, I can see him thinking through the things he has been told about what to do next. Sometimes it takes me back to my own childhood, to the trauma of not understanding the game and not wanting to be there, on the field, on the spot. There is a big difference, though. He does want to be there. He asks to play. He's chatty and bouncy on the field (to the frustrated looks from some of his fellow players, who would like him to get his head in the game or at least know where the ball is). I have never insisted that he play soccer, or any other sport. I make it his choice, and thus far, he chooses to play. If he chooses to stop I might get my fall Saturday mornings back.

What does it mean to be a natural at something? More importantly, what does it mean to not be a natural, and do it anyway? I play the banjo. I sing. I sing harmony. I love the banjo. I love singing. I am not a natural. While I have gotten much, much better over the years, I have to work really hard at it and I am constantly coming up against limits in my ability.  There are lots of places where I am going to have to work harder than others to improve, and levels I probably won't ever get to.

I didn't start playing music for myself until a few years ago. My life has always been full of music, but in seven years of playing the piano I never quite got it. I guess I wasn't ready, or it was the wrong instrument, or the wrong teachers. No one introduced me to the idea of playing music as a casual social activity, separate from standard notation and scales. When I was a teenager and people I admired played music for fun, I felt like I had already missed my window and was destined to be a consumer forever. I felt left out. As a young adult, I was envious of the people in my life who would sit and play music together, but it still took me years to start to believe that I could participate. Sometimes I wonder where I would be as a player if I had let myself take it up as a teen and be bad at first; what would it have been like to learn to do something for the joy of it, without feeling self-conscious about my competence? I still struggle with that question.

These days, it feels like everyone wants to be a tech entrepreneur. Certainly, if you are a tech entrepreneur you are more successful than everyone else because you were making millions in your twenties. If you lack aptitude and interest in programming, you are a has-been in the "old" economy. Computer technology never spoke to me, though. I am happy enough to use it, but, like a car, when I can't get it to do what I need it to do then I find an expert and put it in their hands. I keep thinking that I want to learn more about computers, I even went so far as to buy a pc instead of a mac so that I could (haha) learn open source operating systems. Alas, mostly I just get frustrated when it acts like a creaky old pc and search the internet in hopes that someone else can solve my problem.

Given that, I am unlikely to found a successful tech startup and finance my way to happiness. I often lapse into thinking that people who start businesses that gain traction in the marketplace are almost passive, or pre-ordained, as if they are struck by divine inspiration and driven by an unerring compass to navigate the vagaries of their chosen field and the market. Naturals.  I don't actually know a single person who has built a business or carved out a career that way, however. When you are passionate about something, or even just genuinely interested in it, that doesn't mean it's going to fall into your lap as soon as you start to work at it. The most natural thing, I suspect, is to make a lot of mistakes and have some successes, and hope that what works is sufficient reward and motivation to keep trying. It's about making your own luck, and knowing that you are doing what you are doing by choice; that you intend to be there. Finding the path and making the path are two parts of the same process: the process of being open to what we really want.

I don't have to be born a natural to find a path, naturally.

Too Many Apples

I ate too many apples. Really, I did. I started to feel bad, the way you do when you eat too many apples, but I kept eating them. The next day, too. I've been dreaming of apples since mid-August, when the first bland Jersey Macs come out, because I knew that I wasn't supposed to eat an apple until October 17, the one hundredth spin of the earth since my re-birthday. So on October 17, I went to the orchard and bought two bags of apples and ate them all the way home.

And here we are in the days of no counting. The dragon is an infant whose life has been counted in hours, in days, and now in months. The dragon sheds some more soft scales. I can eat almost anything I want now; my nascent immune system is functioning and I can be in some situations without a mask. (Not the farmer's market, though, and I got some pretty strange looks doing my shopping on Saturday morning in my mask and gloves. More for me. The crowd gives me plenty of space. I went to pick up Lysander at a birthday party and the birthday boy took one look at me and recoiled in terror.)

Winter is coming. It's kind of cold in here because I haven't gotten the okay to handle firewood yet, and I'm home alone. 100 days has been the goal for so long, it has taken a few days to accept that there's still more to do, still more waiting. And winter is coming. The time when everything closes in on itself a little, when there's a little less motivation to get out of bed, when everything starts a little slower. It's been winter for me for a while. I returned from North Carolina in early January, in the middle of a brutal cold snap, to go to the hospital and begin this journey. For most of a year, I've been a little more closed in on myself, working a little harder on finding the center, moving a little more slowly.

The problem with milestones is that life can become about the goals. The future can take my eyes off the present.  Having a point on the horizon to move towards can make the time pass, but it can't make the time be. What I struggle with most is seeing how I am exactly where I need to be, when where I am feels stuck. What if there is no other place to get to? What if I reach all my milestones and find out it's still just me, here, at the end of it all, and that doesn't feel like enough? What if it is up to me to actually do something about how I feel about my place in the universe?

I guess, while I'm working on that problem, I'll wait for the next milestone.

How Not To Get Eaten By Dinosaurs

We wanted to watch Jurassic Park. The kids were up for a dinosaur movie. I got a pirated copy, which was too laggy. Got a different pirated copy, also too laggy. Then I decided I would pay for it, and ordered an Amazon instant copy. After dinner we went to the computer room to watch the movie, and the door was closed. And the doorknob broke. So the door was frozen shut, with no one inside. After several attempts to break in to the room with credit cards, screwdrivers, or brute force, John had to go outside and break in through the window. This required using a paperclip to open the screen and then crawling through the half-open casement. (It also demonstrated the security of our house when the windows are open). Upon successful removal of the doorknob and mechanism from the inside, we were able to get in the room...to discover that the Amazon video buffered constantly and was too frustrating to watch.

At this point a friend suggested that Jesus did not want me to have dinosaurs.

Finally, John went to the video store and got a hard copy. It worked beautifully. The kids loved it. They've been discussing the finer points of Jurassic Park ever since.

There are a couple of lessons here. One, there are a lot of ways to approaching a problem. Two, there are times when most of them fail. Three, if you want to watch a dinosaur movie, you have to keep trying.

I'm not supposed to be worrying about the future. I can dream about it, or I can stay in the present, absolutely, but it will obstruct my healing to create any anxiety about what might be. For the first several weeks out of the hospital, I felt very antsy about how I should spend my time and what might  happen in the years to come. (I learned from my homeopath that steroids interfere with emotions in a way that can trigger these types of feelings, which helped me to let go of them as part of a passing phase in the process. Nonetheless, they felt real and I wondered how to deal with them.) But there still is some kind of future coming, and this recovery is non-linear, and there are as many types of long term outcomes as there are people who undergo transplants.

Sometimes I get frustrated. I feel pretty good, considering what I've been through, but I don't feel really good. I had withdrawal symptoms when I dropped the ativan too fast, so I have to go back on it and taper it and hope that I can normalize my sleep and be free of the drugs. I can't figure out what to eat that makes me feel well and is healing. My doctors are extremely conventional and conservative and not knowledgeable about anything outside of allopathic medicine, so they can't work with me on other approaches to my recovery. I either have to go maverick and do things I am comfortable with but know they disapprove of, or I have to forego doing things that I know will help my body. I have to take medicines that are much worse for me than they realize (not that I wouldn't have to take them anyway, but I think the doctors are a little cavalier about a year of prophylactic pharmaceuticals). I have to deal with extra fatigue and shortness of breath and other unpleasant symptoms and I can't get second opinions outside of the transplant world because it is a packaged deal.

So it's up to me to experiment, because I know that my body is unique and the one-size-fits-all approach of allopathy isn't sufficient for my recovery. But there are a lot of things to try, and some of them won't work, or they won't work all the time, or it's too soon after transplant to feel the way I want to feel all the time. Do I eat wheat, or not? Gluten, or not? Dairy, or not? What do I replace salad and sauerkraut with? How do I compensate for the fact that the doctors want me to take folic acid, which is hard on the body and may be dangerous as a supplement, or prophylactic anti-fungals, which are a neutron bomb to the microflora in the body that are responsible for, well, everything from mental health to skin texture?

There are days when I feel sorry for myself. Times when I wonder if I'll ever feel better than this, or if I'll suffer permanent setbacks as a result of this process. Moments when I don't feel grateful or joyful, just irritated. When I can't keep up with my kids during a soccer game, or even with my husband on a walk, I wonder if this is the rest of my life. It's the only one I've got, though, so I have to keep trying, stay flexible, and hope that sometimes I'll get it right, or at least right now.

What I Don't Know

I haven't followed the referendum in Scotland. I don't really know what ISIS is up to. I'm not entirely clear on Question 1. In fact, from a news-of-the-world standpoint, I am utterly uninformed.

It's self-preservation, really, but it is larger than that, too. It is possible to fill every minute of every hour with news media and analysis. It is possible to occupy the entirety of one's time with the angst of the world. Some people enjoy that, but I have discovered that I feel worse about myself and the power of peaceful interaction when I immerse myself in news.

Access to information has gone from nonexistent to tightly controlled to more loosely available to completely saturating. The old saying "If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention" says a lot about the level of psychic misery we think we are supposed to experience to be contributing members of society. My experience on the internet, either through Facebook, or twitter, or innumerable comment threads, is that hostility and negative energy are the driving emotions behind much public "debate." Every time I have tried to engage in these environments in a meaningful intellectual way, I have discovered that there is always someone, somewhere, that wants a fight, or a ten second hate, and that person is happy to bring a steamroller into the garden to shout and squish. Yes, it is a good exercise in not internalizing other people's anger and being mindful of one's own emotions, but it is also exhausting.

So I've dropped out. I'm looking for peace in the moments I'm in, in the human interactions where I have an influence, in dreams and visions. I am staying local.

I have been fortunate to undergo an utterly transformative physical experience. Three months ago I was a different person; now my blood is 100% generated by donor cells. The dragon has shed a skin. As I find out who I am all over again, as I process the ordeal I have endured, I have the opportunity to see the world and my role in it anew. A large part of this is being able to recognize the places in my life where there is psychic dysfunction; what makes me feel out of sync? I do not like being angry, I do not like feeling powerless, I do not like playing rhetorical games of one-upsmanship. I do not like having my information flow create a dark haze over the beautiful realities of the life I am living right here.

Last week I went for a hike with a group of kids and parents who are wonderful, loving people. It was a gorgeous day. I have been nervous to take on a day out with the kids, but my aunt came with me, and I came home feeling completely recharged. On Sunday I visited a friend with a one-month old baby, and spent a happy few hours in her kitchen just chatting. Yesterday I trucked the kids around to pre-k and coop and they got to create and experiment and run with friends; they came home so tired and happy.  

This is my world. This is my news. It is a beautiful place, full of optimism and promise. It might not make the headlines, but everywhere I look, I see peace. And when I am full of peace, I can share it. And that can make the world more peaceful. So I'll have to accept what I don't know as a fair trade for what I do.

What I Know

I am starting to tune into what is hard about right now. Remember everything I said about not having control? All those lessons I thought I had learned, all those things I thought I understood? I was wrong. I am not there yet. Sometimes I wonder if I ever will be.

During the history of my treatment, I have always been able to come home and heal however I chose. This time, though, I have to endure, and embrace, a year of taking pharmaceutical drugs and not being able to eat some of my favorite foods. In addition, I can't go out and engage with people or take the kids anywhere. This is a whole different level of lack of control.

Not surprisingly, the combination of food, drug, and movement restrictions has left me feeling sad and restless. I am trying so hard to be grateful for the opportunity to learn to let go all over again, for declaring that there is nowhere else I'd rather be, but I have to be honest with myself. I am not loving this right now.

But I know what I love. I love dragonflies. I can watch dragonflies for hours. I love the way they zig zag around the yard. I love the way they appear out of nowhere when the mosquitoes come. I love the way they will land on John's hand while they are eating a bug, and just sit there, crunching. I love the way they look. I love that they are ancient insects.

And I love my daily walks. I love the way the moss grows on the trees along this road. I love the rock formations. I love how the light filters through all the great oaks here, differently at different times of day. I love when Wallace comes with me on his bike, and chats. I love when my leg muscles are sore from pushing myself.

I love having cancer behind me. I love having received this gift of a transplant. I love that I feel so amazingly, surprisingly, well. I love that this is a challenge, and that I can rise to it.