At home

I have a trash can next to my desk at work. It’s been on the right side of my desk since the day I started; or rather, it used to be on the right side of my desk. The housekeeping staff comes in after hours to empty the trash cans and replace the liners. It’s not a particularly efficient operation, really. Even if there’s one piece of trash in that trash can, they empty it and replace the liner. Or maybe they keep the same liner if it’s clean trash (yes, there is such a thing). But probably not. They probably change the liners no matter what. 

Anyway, I’m only there three days a week but I think they come in nightly and the trash can is or rather was always left exactly in the same spot next to my desk on the right side, until one day last week when the trash can was moved to the left, between my desk and the filing cabinet. 

In typical fashion, I didn’t notice this when I came in, although the space between the filing cabinet and my desk is directly in front of me when I walk into the office. Then, I needed to throw away a paper towel or something, and I was momentarily flummoxed when my trash can wasn’t where it belonged.  After a quick look around, I found it in the aforementioned spot. 

What does a normal person do in this circumstance? Well, let’s keep it real here. I have no damn idea what a normal person would do in this or any other circumstance, but I IMAGINE that a normal person would simply pick up the trash can and move it back to its customary spot. But I didn’t do that. I accepted that the trash can had a new home, much as I would have if it had been made of cast iron and cemented to the floor, and I just adjusted my trash-throwing-away toss (which is pretty accurate). 

*****

My house is in utter disarray right now and if you’ve spent more than five minutes reading this blog, then you know that this is both well out of the norm AND very troubling to me, very troubling indeed. I like order, not chaos. I like things to be neat. But we are replacing a broken-down couch and some very old carpeting in our family room, and the room has to be empty before the carpet and furniture men come tomorrow. 

Even the walls are bare because we painted the room, too, because if you’re going to go to all the trouble of emptying a room of its contents and furnishings, you might as well roll a clean coat of paint onto the walls.

*****

If you want to find out exactly how much stuff a room contains, then empty it of all its contents and place those contents in another room in your house. The family room is a fairly small room, and I didn’t realize that it contained so much stuff. But now that the living room is filled with its own normal stuff AND all of the family room stuff, it seems like quite a lot. I’m writing this in a corner of the living room, where I am hemmed in by two bookcases, a tall and narrow cabinet, two small folding tables that we keep in a corner, and two rolled-up area rugs. It’s kind of nice, actually. It feels cozy. 

The empty room, on the other hand, is rather peaceful. It seems a pity to fill it back up with stuff. Maybe this is my new interior design concept. Makeshift fort constructed of furniture, stacks of books, and rolled-up rugs in one room and sheer empty space in another. I’ll call the furniture people and cancel our order.

*****

The carpet and the furniture were installed on Wednesday, while I was at work. That was the easy part. Then I had to figure out exactly how to organize all of the other family room stuff because the room is configured differently now. The furniture has a different footprint, so all of the other stuff, the cabinet and table and bookcases, needed to be in different locations, and pictures needed to hang in different spots on the wall. I was really a little stressed out about it. But I figured it out. 

*****

It’s been a few weeks now since the unexpected move of my office trash can, and I barely remember the time when that trash can was on the right side of my desk. The right side of my desk is dead to me. There’s a new trash can world order. 

No, I’m not too lazy to move a trash can. I’m just adaptable, a quality that serves a person well when she has to rearrange a room. I figured out where to put all the furniture, new and old, and I found new places for the pictures, and I was pretty happy with the results. It’s not fancy because we ain’t fancy people, I tell you what. But it’s welcoming and nice. Last night, everyone was home for a change, and we all hung out together in the newly spruced-up family room. I watched Game 2 of the World Series, and looked around the room with the new furniture holding the lounging bodies of the three other people I love more than any others. It’s really the nicest room in the entire world. 

Excellent books

I just finished a book that I probably won’t write much about, but just thinking about not writing about that book made me think about all the other books that I have been reading and not writing about, and I think it’s time to get caught up on my slapdash incompetent book reviews. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir. Writer Susanna Moore had what would have appeared to anyone to be an enviable life. Think of a girl, so beautiful that she eventually became a part-time actress (this was the 1960s, when only beautiful women could aspire to be actresses) and a part-time spokesmodel (hence the title - she was actually Miss Aluminum for an aluminum trade group) whose father is a doctor in Honolulu in the prosperous middle of the 20th century. The very description suggests an enchanted upbringing; a beautiful, rich, and accomplished couple settles down in a tropical paradise, where they raise their five beautiful children in the freedom and wildness of early statehood Hawaii, with the added privilege of private schools and the social status of doctor’s children. It seems like a fairytale. It seems almost too good to be true. And it was. Moore’s fairytale girlhood was replete with monsters and dragons. Her father was neglectful and callous, her mentally ill mother died when Moore was just 12, and the stepmother who replaced her was monstrously cruel. Moore escaped by moving to Philadelphia, her mother’s hometown, where she lived with a doting Irish grandmother. She married a man who nearly beat her to death, and was later raped by a famous fashion designer who expected more from his models than a walk down the runway. 

Amid all this suffering and abuse, Moore lived a pretty spectacularly interesting life. She acted in movies (badly, if you take her at her word). She worked for a time as Warren Beatty’s assistant (unsurprisingly, he comes across as a bit of a jerk but when you stack him up against the other men in Moore’s life, he’s a veritable prince). She dated Jack Nicholson. She socialized with Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. It occurs to me that anyone who is younger than 40 (and definitely anyone who is younger than 30) might either not know these names at all or might know them but not know how famous these people really were at that time. Trust me when I tell you that these are big names to drop, and Moore drops them as though they’re just names of people she happened to know. This is not false modesty. This is how she writes about everything, really; she writes about events in her life as though these are things that just happened. It’s almost like she’s an observer and not a participant. Another review of this book described her as “passive,” but I don’t know that this is the right word. The word that I think of is “detached.” There is a distance, a sense of separation between the author and her subject, although they are one and the same. This might be intentional; or it might be an unintentional effect of lingering trauma. But it doesn’t matter. Susanna Moore is a beautiful writer and this book is very much worth reading. 

*****

Invisible Ink, Guy Stern. Guy Stern, who is 100 years old, is an American hero. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, he escaped the Nazis and came to the United States with the help of an uncle in St. Louis, where he attended high school and worked in a hotel kitchen and fell in love with his new country. His family remained in Germany, where they were murdered by the Nazis. Stern joined the Army, was assigned to Camp Ritchie in my own home state of Maryland, and became one of the Ritchie Boys, the famous Army Intelligence unit where native German speakers became spies and POW interrogators. After the war, Stern returned to college, eventually earned a PhD in German language and literature, and became an academic. 

Guy (born Gustav) Stern has lived a rich and interesting life and he comes across as a lovely man, but he is not a writer, at least not in English. Parts of his memoir are really good (especially the war stories), but it’s very inconsistent. In fact, it’s probably not the writing that is at fault, but the editing. The invisible ink of the title is a reference to Stern’s father’s warning that Jews have to blend in if they want to survive. “You have to be like invisible ink,” his father tells him. Invisible ink is a great metaphor for assimilation, but he mentions it just once or twice at the beginning, and doesn’t really do much with the idea afterward. He also tells us practically nothing about his family’s fate, nor about why they were not able to escape to the US or to South America. This is understandable, of course, but I really wanted to know more about Stern’s parents and brother and sister. HIs stories about his time with the Ritchie Boys are probably the best part of the book - both dramatic and hilarious. He even got to meet and hang around with Marlene Dietrich, who was a tireless supporter of the American war effort. But most of the book covers his academic career and unless you are an aficionado of modern German language studies and the internal politics of university language departments in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, then it’s not especially thrilling reading. At times, Stern just recites biographical details and calendar events - he attended this conference or socialized with that person in that city on that day. I’m reminded of P.D. James’ Time to Be in Earnest, but Stern is not as good a writer and except for the war stories, he’s not quite as good as putting the events of his daily life into historical and cultural context. 

*****

The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron. This one was a Kindle recommendation selected because, I suppose, the algorithm believes that one Ephron is as good as the next and that if I liked Nora then I’ll naturally like Delia, too. And you know what? The algorithm was not wrong. If I’d read a synopsis first (three women on the run for various reasons end up stranded in a North Carolina backwater where they take waitressing jobs in a bar where a lion lives in a cage), I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole, but it’s much better than that little summary would suggest. The characters are funny and believable, the story is rather touching, and the writing is quite good. My only real criticism is that two of the characters are supposed to be from Maryland and other than frequent mentions of Baltimore and the fictional small town where the two grew up, there’s really no Maryland local color. But that is a minor complaint. Really, I liked it better than Heartburn. I prefer Nora’s nonfiction to her fiction, any day of the week. Delia is on my list - my good list. 

*****

So Sad Today. Melissa Broder. I don't even know what to say about this book, which is beautiful in spots here and there but is mostly shocking, in that sort of intentional, contrived, look at me, OMG I am so radically transgressively honest that maybe I’m a little too much for you normies way that seems de rigeur among millennial memoir authors. It might seem silly to criticize a memoirist for writing too much or too honestly about herself, but there it is. Because even though this book was frequently shocking, it was also much more frequently boring. Not every thought that a person has is worthy of expression, even if that person has a book contract. 

*****

I had to refer back to my list again to remember what else I’ve read that I haven’t already told you all about. I read a Jennifer Weiner novel this summer. And I had to just look up the title because I couldn’t remember if it was The Summer Place, That Summer, or Big Summer. It was the latter. To be clear, I like Jennifer Weiner. I like her stories, I like her characters, and I like her writing. It’s just that her novels tend to blend into one another, and by throwing “summer” into the title of at least half of them, she does not make it easy to distinguish one from the next. 

Big Summer is a comedy of manners, a morality play, and a murder mystery, all in one pretty entertaining novel. The main character, Daphne, is a Jennifer Weiner archetype - a bit overweight (but still beautiful, if you read between the lines), hard-working and talented and scrappy, making up for in sheer pluck what she lacks in wealth and privilege. The other main character, Drue, is also a Weiner archetype - beautiful, brilliant, and insanely rich and privileged. In some Weiner novels, the rich girl also happens to be a wonderful person (Maxi Ryder, the movie star second heroine of Weiner’s first novel, Good in Bed, for example); but in this case, she happens to be rather awful. And she ends up dead under circumstances that place Daphne, her friends, and her new boyfriend, under suspicion. I didn’t immediately guess who the murderer was; in fact, I was convinced that it was someone else, so the story works on the whodunit level. It also has a lot of not super original but still thoughtful and interesting ideas about modern relationships, wealth and privilege, and social media influencer culture. It’s definitely light reading but sometimes light reading is just the thing. 

*****

British novels of the mid-20th century, especially those set during the war or during the years immediately following, are always obsessed with food. Every few pages or so, a scene will center around breakfast, lunch, tea, or dinner. What to cook, what to eat, how much (always too little), what kind of bread, what kind of meat, what to have for pudding. Kippers, beans, eggs eggs and more eggs, biscuits and sandwich cake and toast with jam or marmalade or butter - all accompanied by tea tea and more tea. Weak tea, strong tea, stewed tea (bad), in mugs (rarely) or thin cups and saucers, with sugar and milk or one or the other or neither. Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Jane Howard and Evelyn Waugh, all writing during or just after the war, were probably always a little hungry. Sometimes their characters are hungry, too; but sometimes, the food just seems to make its way into the novel where it becomes part of the scenery. 

This is what happens in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which I am just about to finish. The main character is constantly gathering food or planning, cooking, serving, or cleaning up a meal. All of this effort around food seems to serve as a metaphor for her life, a life of routines and tasks; a life of cleaning up one meal and immediately wondering what to do about the next one. Barbara Pym: I understand. I see you, girl. 

I’m not sure how this happened but until I found this book, I had never read Barbara Pym, a British author who wrote very observant novels about the English middle class in the middle of the 20th century. How could I have missed her? Anyway, now that I am almost finished with Excellent Women, I will immediately go and read all of her other novels. I think she wrote five or six. 

Excellent Women is about a woman named Mildred Lathbury, a brilliant name for a character; or rather, a brilliant name for this character who is exactly who you would expect a woman named Mildred Lathbury to be. Mildred is an English spinster in her late 30s in post-war London, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who died and left a small income (another modern English novel trope - the character who either does not work or works very little, thanks to a “small income” left behind by a deceased relative) to Mildred, who lives in a small flat, goes on holiday every year with an old school friend, works part-time for a charity dedicated to assisting “reduced gentlewomen,” and is constantly taken advantage of by married friends and male acquaintances who assume that Mildred as a single childless woman will naturally have all the time in the world to run their errands, clean up their messes, and serve as their intermediary. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But it’s actually very funny and sometimes very moving. 

According to the introductory notes, Mildred is supposed to be a sad and pathetic character, with an empty and lonely life. But I find her interesting and lively. She is also the first-person narrator, sharply observant and wryly self-aware. She knows perfectly well that her neighbors and acquaintances and even her friends see her as a comically stereotypical spinster, and she cares about their opinions, but not very much. She knows that everyone she knows thinks that they know her, that they can guess what she is thinking and predict her future, and she doesn’t really bother to disabuse them of their perceptions. She just goes about her business and lets people think what they think. This seems to me a very good way to be. Mildred is a bit of a badass in her own restrained daughter-of-an-English-clergyman way. 

*****

Although Excellent Women is, well, excellent, it’s taking me forever to finish. I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time right now. I get away with this at work because at any given time I have a dozen or more projects, and I just toggle back and forth between and among them. Same thing at home. Sometimes when I’m writing, I walk away in the middle of a sentence, fold a few garments, vacuum a room, cut up an onion or something (I spend a really unreasonable amount of time with a knife in one hand and an onion in the other) and then come back and finish the sentence. 

But I also hate to walk away from a novel that I love. I miss the characters, and I miss the author’s voice. A good novel is good company, and I hate to see it go. I’ll miss Mildred when I finish Excellent Women. 

*****

Well, I do wish that Mildred had politely told the insufferable Everard that no, she didn’t have time to index his dull book and no, she was not interested in proofing his typescripts (for free, of course), but I’m choosing to believe that eventually, she’ll stand up to him and to all of the other men who presume on the goodwill and helpfulness of excellent women like Mildred. 

Yes, I did finally finish the book. I will start another one later today and maybe I’ll report back in haphazard and piecemeal fashion; or maybe the next book I read will be one of the ones that I read on autopilot, forgetting about it completely the moment I close the cover on the last page. Watch this space. Anything could happen. 

Year-round

It's Saturday morning and I am sitting in the stands at the Fairland Aquatic Center, venue for the PVS October Open swim meet. This is a weekend long meet but the 13-18 sessions are first thing in the morning so I am here bright and early, waiting for the Boys 13-18 Breaststroke to begin. The estimated timeline had that event likely to begin at 9:06, an oddly exact prediction. It's 8:42 now so we'll see what happens. 

This is my son's first and last year as a year-round club swimmer. His summer and high school coaches have been trying for years to recruit him to club swimming but he always wanted to play baseball in the fall and spring. Then last spring, he decided that he might want to swim in college. College coaches recruit from club teams so here we are.  

Club swimming is more intense than summer or high school swimming but there's lots of overlap in the personnel. This pool is new to me but I've already run into several people I know. They all said the same thing. "Wait, when did Evan start swimming year round?" And the answer is right now. This is his first club meet. 

*****

It's 9:05 now and we're watching heat 87 or whatever of Boys 13-18 IM so I feel confident in asserting that the breaststroke events will not start on time. So let's talk about the drive over here. Which was oddly enough completely uneventful and stress-free. This is never the case when I'm driving to a new place but even though the pool is new to me, the route here is easy and the roads are familiar. Had it not been for the sun glare, it would really have been a perfect drive. That's where I am right now. I can drive anywhere or any time, as long as it's full daylight but overcast, dry, and nowhere near the Capital Beltway. 

Yeah I know. 

*****

9:22. We're about midway through the Girls’ 13-18 Breaststroke. According to the psych sheet, there are 141 entrants in this event, meaning 15 heats (it's a 10-lane pool), assuming that all 141 of them actually show up. I'm going to assume the opposite and say that we'll probably only see 135 or so, so 14 heats. The fastest kids will swim this race in about a minute. I'm going to guess 30 minutes for the entire event so about 15 minutes to go now that we're watching heat 7. 

There's no program for this thing, only the psych sheet. For the uninitiated, the program lists heats and lane assignments for each event, so that swimmers and spectators know exactly when and where a swimmer will race. The psych sheet lists all of the swimmers in an event, ranked from first to last by seed time. Since it's my son's first meet with this club, he has no official time, so he's way down at the end of the rankings, with all of the other NTs. He will probably swim in an early heat and there will be at least an hour between the breaststroke and freestyle events so I might take a walk while I wait. The chlorine is getting to me, and it's a nice day. 

I was right - there were only 11 heats of the girls’ event, Heat 1 of the boys’ event is now underway. It's hard to tell one swimmer from the next when they're all in black suits and team caps but the scoreboard displays the swimmers names, clubs, and lanes, so I know that my son is not in the water yet. But these races move faster with each successive heat so I need to stop writing and start spectating. 

*****

Can I tell you that my son was in the very next heat after I wrote that paragraph? My timing was impeccable, for once. He crushed it, cruising to a very easy first place in the heat. He won't win the entire event but he's on the radar now. He's no longer a dark horse.

****"

It's 6:15 Sunday morning and way too early for me to be sitting in the shotgun seat on my way to the aquatic center or anywhere else really, but here I am. I volunteered to be a timer this morning. I really love timing at outdoor meets but not so much at indoor meets. It's cold outside but I'm wearing shorts because it will be tropical on the pool deck. 

My son won his heats in both of his events yesterday. He has one more event today, 100 Butterfly. He loves to swim fly but it's not his best stroke. We'll see what happens. I suppose we'll see full results tomorrow or so. 

I'm glad my husband is driving today. It's still nighttime dark outside, and although I feel that I can still drive in the dark, I don't feel as sure of my driving at night as during daylight. And we all know that my daylight driving is a little dodgy to begin with. So I'm happy to sit in the passenger seat and write the blog equivalent of a shit post while someone else conveys me to the pool. 

*****

Timing at a club meet is complicated, I tell you what. They use three timing systems; the automatic system that produces the scoreboard display times, a semi-automated backup system, and the good old-fashioned, stopwatch-around-the-neck method that summer swim parents will be very familiar with. I thought I could escape the timing portion of being a timer by volunteering to take charge of the clipboard, but that only got me out of the stopwatch part. I still had to man the backup system. It was a very busy morning, especially the 50-meter races, which move fast even during the early, slower heats. The fast heats are blistering fast, and you need to check your swimmer’s name, time the race, record the backup time, and be ready for the next swimmer in about 25 seconds. There’s no break between heats; swimmers remain in the pool after they finish so that the swimmers in the next heat can dive right over them. It’s ruthlessly efficient. 

My session lasted for four hours. I haven’t told them yet that I’m also a certified stroke and turn judge (but I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from coaching the judge on my lanes, who missed several egregious backstroke turn violations, and a one-armed overhead pull following a turn by a breaststroker) because timing at 6:30 on a Sunday morning is quite enough. But I didn’t mind. It was time well spent. Still, it’s Monday night now and I don’t think I’m as tired now after a full day in the office than I was after a morning on that pool deck yesterday. That was more work than work. 

Three wheels

I live in an old Levitt-built neighborhood, where the first houses were built and sold some time around 1966 or so. My house, an L-shaped one-level ranch house, was built in 1969. Our neighborhood was “in transition,” as the real estate lady put it, when we bought the house in 2005. “Transition” was, I think, real estate-speak for “becoming less than 100 percent white.” 

Actually, that transition had begun a few years earlier. When this development was first built, I imagine that it was all white or nearly so. Silver Spring was still at that time a desirable, close-in suburb of Washington, DC. It’s still a close-in suburb because Washington, DC didn’t move or anything. But Silver Spring is much more diverse, much more urban, much more densely populated than its counterparts on the western side of the county. We still have lots of green spaces and old growth trees that form shady canopies, but there are also many apartment complexes and townhouse developments here. Hewitt Avenue and Bel Pre Road are divided at intervals by bus stop crosswalks for the many residents who take public transportation between their jobs and their apartments. Spanish is almost as common as English. It’s crowded, sometimes loud, and occasionally chaotic. I love it here. 

Another transition was also underway in 2005; the transition from old to young. I was still young in 2005, at least by today’s definition. I was 39 when we bought this house (I would turn 40 later in the year) and my children were very young. My older son was not quite four when we moved in here, and my younger son was eight months old (making the one-level design of the house ideal for us). Now, we’re not quite old yet, but we’re closer to old than young. Our kids are almost grown. We’re not ready to retire yet but we talk about it. Maybe we’ll move somewhere, depending on where our kids end up. Maybe we’ll stay put (the one-level design is also ideal for retired people). 

In the 17 years that we have been here, many of our older neighbors have moved away, to small condos or retirement communities or assisted living facilities. Some have died. Some are still here. We even still have some original owners living in the houses they bought brand-new and raised their families in. 

*****

This didn’t start as an essay about my classic mid-century suburban neighborhood. It started with me seeing something and wanting to write about it. The thing that I saw–and am still seeing–is an older lady, who is probably really just an old lady, riding a tricycle. 

It’s a large adult-sized tricycle, a thing that I knew existed but had never actually seen in action before. Thankfully, I’m usually swimming laps in the pool when the lady rides her tricycle around the pool parking lot, because she looks a little silly and I always want to laugh when I see her. She doesn’t look as silly as the people riding Segways around the Mall downtown, though. I literally laugh aloud whenever I see someone riding one of those things. That said, they also look like a lot of fun and I’d totally ride one if I had the opportunity. But only with others. If I’m going to do something utterly ridiculous, then I’m taking my family and friends down with me.  

The lady is neither eccentric-looking, nor stereotypically “old-lady” looking, whatever that means. She’s probably in her mid to late 70s, with short, stylish unnaturally bright red hair. I think the extreme color is intentional. I don’t think she’s trying to fool us into believing that her hair never turned gray, like my grandmother, who refused to admit to coloring her hair until the day she died, at age 98–no one was fooled, Nana. I think she just likes punkish, artistic hair color. She wears glasses, probably out of necessity but her frames are also distinctively stylish. I’ve never seen her anywhere other than in the parking lot on her tricycle, so I don’t know what her day-to-day wardrobe looks like, but she wears exercise clothes when she’s riding. 

I assume that the tricycle riding is part of her exercise regimen but she also looks like she has a lot of fun tooling around the parking lot on that crazy giant tricycle. Why a tricycle rather than a bicycle is beyond me. It could be that she never learned to ride a bike. Or it could be that she did once know how to ride a bike but has now forgotten, popular wisdom aside. Maybe she had a stroke or suffered some injury. Or maybe she feels safer and a bit more stable on a three-wheeled cycle. Or maybe the tricycle is just more fun than a bicycle. It looks fun, I have to admit. 

*****

I started writing this a few months ago; maybe mid-July. It’s October. It was hot then and it’s cold now. Well, it’s cold for me, anyway. It’s Saturday morning, 48 degrees, and my summer blood has not thickened yet. I’m not yet accustomed to the cold. Give it until April. 

Anyway, since summer is gone and we’re officially into fall (not just “Labor Day is over” fall, but real, chilly, fire pit at night, leaves crunching underfoot, cable knit sweater fall) and the pool has been closed for weeks, I haven’t seen Tricycle Lady out and about. The pool parking lot remains open but that’s where the neighborhood middle school kids hang out after school. Maybe she rides her tricycle in the morning when I’m at work and all the kids are at school. I don’t know how tough she is but I can tell you that it would take a tough person to ride a giant tricycle through and around a gaggle of seventh graders. That is a tough crowd. Trust me when I tell you that they are not laughing with you. They are laughing at you. 

*****

When I wrote the first few paragraphs of this, I finished with the words "inverse proportion," because I had an idea for a conclusion and I thought that I should write it down so that I would not forget. That is good thinking, right? But it didn't work. When I tried to finish, I couldn't remember what those two words were supposed to mean. But now I think I know. I think I was thinking about the advantages of getting older, chief among them being that the older you get, the less you care about what other people think of you. Desire for approval is in inverse proportion to age, from ages 10 to 90, let's say. So this lady, who is probably in her late 70s or so, is rapidly approaching the age at which she will not care at all. Laugh your heads off, middle schoolers. Tricycle Lady doesn’t care. Much like the Honey Badger of circa 2012 internet fame, Tricycle Lady doesn’t give a shit. She’s going to keep on riding. 

The critical path is narrow and few will find it

I took a project management class last week. It was not terrible, and given my noted aversion to the entire discipline of project management AND my hatred of online training, this is high praise. But of course, also given the said aversion and hatred, it would be reasonable to ask me why I took this class in the first place? Well it had to do with training dollars that needed to be spent and the rapidly approaching end of the fiscal year and before I knew what happened I was signed up to learn all about project management. Sometimes you just happen to be walking through the station, and you end up on the train.

Project management trainers (this was a live synchronous class, offered via Zoom) love to tell everyone who will listen that project management has broad applications beyond the realms of software development or construction, and I’m sure they’re quite right. I would simply suggest that if they want to really make that case, then write training class scenarios that draw on examples from any other industry. But she was a very good trainer and what the class lacked in direct relevance to my job, it made up for in energy. 

Lack of relevance aside, I did learn some ideas that are generally useful and relevant, though we spent far too much time on the critical path, a thing that I will never track, measure, or even think about, ever again, God willing. I couldn't pick a critical path out of a lineup. I wouldn't recognize a critical path if it lived next door. The critical path and I move in different circles. Nothing personal, it's just that the critical path and its friends have nothing to do with my life. 

*****

Maybe I need to project manage this blog because these half-finished drafts continue to proliferate, and yet I just keep writing new stuff. 

*****

Do you know what else has nothing to do with my life? Data. Data and metrics. Just as not everything is a project that can or should be managed, not every endeavor lends itself to measurement. Almost anything can be evaluated, but not everything can be quantified. At least that's how I see it, but most of American management theory has not yet caught up with my visionary thinking on the subject, which is why I spend so much time thinking about metrics when I would really rather not. 

Give me any data visualization other than the simplest pie chart, and it will make no more sense to me than an ancient Greek scroll or whatever those ancient Greeks wrote stuff down on. I can barely read a map, so don’t get me started on histograms. Ask me about almost any number, whether it’s a completion percentage estimate, or a reasonable length of time to finish a project, or (and this is a big one) how much something is going to cost, and I’ll look for all the world as though I’m crunching the numbers and analyzing the data. And then I’ll take a guess. And it’ll be a wild guess, pulled out of absolutely nowhere. 

I’m just keeping it real. I’m terrible at quantitative reasoning, but I excel at keeping it real. 

*****

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately (define "lately" as "every day of my life.") I come home and feel like I have a million things to do; a million tasks. Most of these are self-assigned tasks, but if you prick them, do they not bleed? Well, you know what I mean. I mean just because it’s a self-assigned task doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be done. I’m a demanding supervisor of myself, but I’m fair. 

So every time I feel overwhelmed (which is all the time, but I mean every time I feel really overwhelmed, like beyond reason), I think that I should give something up and the only thing that I can think of to give up is my writing habit. Daily writing is a self-assigned task like all the others; a self-imposed burden. But it’s my favorite self-assigned task and so why do I have to  give it up? Why not give up laundry-folding or bill-paying or meal-planning? 

*****

I was driving to work one day last week singing along with Bruce Springsteen’s “Trapped” on the radio. “Trapped” is about a bad relationship but it’s also about living in a prison of one’s own making and it made me feel both validated and accused; validated because I know how those prison walls feel and accused because I feel that it’s my fault that I’m behind those walls. It is my fault, really. I worry about things that are beyond my or anyone else’s control. I force myself to complete tasks that maybe don’t need to be completed right away or maybe ever. My to-do list is the absolute boss of me, and interruptions to my routine throw me into a tailspin of dithering indecision and panic. I’d like to be free. I’d like to break out of this trap, but I don’t know how. I’ve been inside too long. I’m institutionalized. 

*****

Oh my gosh. I DID need that project management training. For God’s sake. I need to project manage my life.