Category: grindstone

All about breadwinning.

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why i work


3:30 on a Monday afternoon and it’s clouding over outside, making the light in the living room all grey and somehow damp feeling. I’ve got a sleeping baby nestled in the crook of my left arm, a crocheted pink blanket draped over her naked-save-diaper body to keep her warm; I couldn’t be happier. Sharaun’s out shopping, something that I think is actually pretty therapeutic for her – so I’m glad she’s feeling up to it. The iPod’s jacked into the stereo on “shuffle,” and is currently offering up some Doors – fitting the weather well. Today I wrote about the baby more. Oh, and here’s the toplink to her gallery – updated with a few more things yesterday afternoon.

A week folks, one measly week – that’s all the vacation I asked of work when Keaton arrived. One week vacation and the next week “working from home,” which means I sit on e-mail and attend meetings on my cellphone. But, one week without worry, not spent thinking about what’s due next or who I have to call tomorrow. I seriously just want to lie down on the couch and drift off to a lazy sleep, soundtrack provided by my newborn daughter on my chest and the little smacking sounds she makes with her mouth. Just one week of that, guilt-free. I’ve got friends who just had babies, and they took off three weeks – I only asked for one, yet I can’t seem to “escape” work. It’s more me than it is work, I suppose – not being able to detach myself completely from that sense of responsibility – but it’s not made any easier by people who seem not to care that I want, nay, need, some downtime. So today, a little late I know, I decided to give the whole deal the figurative middle-finger. I’ve got all the time in the world for friends and family and my wife and little girl – but just for the rest of this week, work doesn’t get a spot on the rotation. You hear that work, eff you.

I’m still in that giddy new-father phase where I actually smile hearing my baby cry. Where I just like looking at her little mouth wide open as she tries to communicate with us, the skin around her little eyes pursing up tight as her face reddens. But man, we’re thankful daily that she’s as “easy” as she is – I can’t imagine having one with a less sunny disposition. We’re lucky. We haven’t had a terrible night to speak of yet; last night being the “worst” of it with back-to-back set and stanky diapers and feedings keeping all three of us up until 2:30am. But, after that she sleeps right through to her next boobytime and lets us do the same. She did pitch a fit through the emotional clincher of Brokeback Mountain Monday night, right as they were trying to suck me in – effectively preventing me from getting tied up in the gay-cowboy love story. She was entirely silent, however, during the buttlove-on-the-range scene – go figure. Anyway, she’s a great baby – and we’ve decided to keep her, or, at least evaluate her a little longer.

Goodnight folks, we love ya.

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this nest has wheels

Who needs it?
Today I was proud of myself. We’re moving floors at work, so I spent all yesterday packing boxes, and we were told not to come in today – but to work from home. Additionally, I had an optometrist appointment at 2pm and needed to drop my truck off at the stereo place before that at 1pm. To make matters worse, I had an important conference call I needed to be on between those very times. How to manage this? Here’s what I came up with: Throw the bike in the back of the truck; drive up to the stereo place and drop off the truck; ride the bike up to the Starbucks near the optometrist and take the conference call while enjoying ‘bucks’ most secret beverage; meeting’s over at 2pm, walk the 30ft to do the optometrist thing; hop back on the bike and go get the truck. Well, it seemed brilliant to me, and it worked, too.

I think I liked the plan so much because it didn’t rely on a vehicle to convey me. Bear with me for an aside here, but, I work with several folks who live in Shanghai, PRC. A good cut of these folks don’t own a vehicle. They are too expensive, not practical on the city’s congested motorways, or the prefer pubic transit. When I tell them that, between Sharaun and I, we have a vehicle for each of us – it only reaffirms their view of America as a country full of rich people. Knowing people who don’t own cars and live perfectly normal lives, I get a kick out of realizing I’m not really that reliant on the beast. Yeah, not using the car made me happy. That, and I was able to utilize the cellphone to take my meeting. I love technology, it amazes me how it’s changed the way I do some things. For instance, my cellphone has replaced the following: my alarm clock, datebook, calendar, land-line home phone, and Post-It notes.

At baby class, our instructor talks a lot about the urge to “nest” that some couples feel before the baby comes. She talks about women wanting to clean, vacuum, and generally prepare the house for their new arrival. I can understand the preparing part, at least having the necessities on hand – but I’ve yet to see Sharaun go all cleaning jihad. Me, however, I think I just had my first “nesting” freak-out. Yeah. You wanna know what nesting is? Nesting is realizing your truck is so dirty and nasty that it’s not fit to ferry your child. It’s spending four hours in the garage painstakingly cleaning the interior and carpets, wanting to remove every smudge and speck of dust.

When I was in Shanghai, one of the $2 DVDs I bought was Jim Henson’s 1982 classic, The Dark Crystal. I absolutely loved the movie when I was a kid, it was the perfect mix of magic and fantasy – things I didn’t even realize I loved yet. Then yesterday, I stumble on this news online – they are making a sequel! I know most folks won’t care, but I sure was pumped. I mean, you know what they say: the darker the crystal, the sweeter the juice… or something like that.

In blogging news, using those larger images in last week’s Gimp-a-day baby theme, I decided that I prefer them to the tiny 100px I’ve been using for years now. Maybe it’s because I recently switched to a smaller screen resolution, so the bigger images don’t fill the entry as much – but whatever the reason, I’m stickin’ with ’em. Live with it.

Until tomorrow, love ya.

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at least it’s better than r. kelly

For the love of!
Monday evening, pre-Coldplay show. Another “woe is me” post I’m afraid; when it rains, it pours.

Just a quick update on yesterday’s post before moving onto today: Turns out Sharaun’s car problems were covered under warranty, which is great – take that Axiom. Next, the stereo fix-it place can’t get the Ford in until Wednesday – which means I’m driving around with nothing but the rhythms of roadnoise to jam on until then, hey – at least it’s better than R. Kelly. Not sure what the stereo overhaul will run me, but hoping for less than the deductible I’d pay were I to file an insurance claim. For what it’s worth, I did file a police report, just in case they caught some teenager Friday night with a gymbag full of radios or something. Stupid ghetto neighborhood filled with half-million dollar homes and Cadillac Escalades… I should’ve known it’d be a thief’s Disneyland.

Sharaun called me on her way home from school today in tears… She’s angry and upset with herself for not doing enough to help transition her student teacher into the role of permanent teacher, which he’ll inherit this Friday – her last day before maternity leave. She sobbed about her disorganized classroom, her lack of instruction and guidance to the fledgling prof, and her guilt over “dumping” things on him. I tried my best “listening husband” routine, which seemed to work OK, but it’s hard when she’s so upset. I hate when she’s like that. I tried to remind her that, come Friday, none of that will be her responsibility anymore – and that surely her student teacher has been under her tutelage long enough to take over – but she didn’t seem to agree. Me, if it were my last week of work, I’d be more concerned planning the party I’d be continually throwing for the foreseeable future than any turmoil my leaving might cause.

My TiVo will have not made a daily call in 100 days on Wednesday, and, believe me, it won’t let me forget it.

Goodnight.

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back to work

Mountains of junk filling my house.
Wednesday night; working… at home… on work stuff. Management is hard. Although, I can totally see how, from the outside looking in, it would appear cushy and lazy. There’s not a lot of concrete results to be had by a manager, rather the sum of the concrete results of those they manage. So, management is hard. I’m really trying to get back into the caring-about-work phase, despite Lil’ Chino’s looming arrival. I did, however, finally communicate that I’m not bending to the tremendous pressure, being placed on me by my management, to do some traveling in mid-March. Only two weeks from the projected due-date, and I’d be gone for a week. Sharaun, predictably, puked all over the idea – and my initial attempts to back out were met with more pressure. However, today I just laid it bare and said “no.” Really, it doesn’t make sense: My first baby, two weeks old, and I leave my just-gave-birth wife alone to care for her? No, sorry, not gonna do it – the world of work won’t stop turning if I’m not up in front of the customer.

You may have noticed the apparent lack of focus last week that caused me to slip and miss two consecutive week-ending days. Oh, and yesterday too. It’s true, I’ve been cheating on the evening blogging routine with a number of things: running, iPod fiddling, and, God forbid, work. Yeah, I’ve picked up that old torch of working during the evenings again – things are really getting hot and heavy, and my “duck it all until the baby comes” strategy is clearly flawed. So, I chose to react, to step up and try and kick ass in the little time I have left. It may sound lame to refer to what I do as “kicking ass,” as there’s not much that sitting getting fatter in front of a monitor and winning a fight have in common – but in my cubicle-dominant world, that’s how we do it. Y’know, like tax bitches do six 1040s in one day – that’s kicking some tax-ass. Me, answering 100 e-mails and attending five meetings – that’s kicking some what-I-do-ass.

In preparing the baby’s room, it struck me last night how “modernized” the process is these days: We got our rocker off Craigslist, our custom-painted letters spelling K-E-A-T-O-N off Ebay, ordered the bedding on the internet, and manage our gift registry in cyberspace also. I swear, Lil’ Chino’s gonna come out watching the latest episode of Diggnation on her PSP (OK, that sounds super-relevant now, but won’t make a damn but of sense in a year). Speaking of “preparing” for the baby… getting a baby means an absolute explosion of “stuff.” We’ve got all kinds of stuff, piled all over the house. I swear, we have enough to fill, like… a whole other room, a baby’s room… even.

Downloaded an album by an outfit called I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness the other night, on name alone. Turns out, they are pretty dang good. Kinda melancholy and a little bit same-sounding throughout, but I like the plodding feel of the songs a lot. Also in music, I found this recent post over at stereogum hilarious – I don’t know quite why, but it really epitomizes a common feeling amongst the greedy hipsters who covet “good” bands. Oh, and, even if this Coachella 2006 poster was a fake – it seems the rumors about the Pumpkins getting together to gig this summer may indeed be true. Being that I was completely infatuated with the Pumpkins once upon a time, I’d love to go seem ’em again for old times sake.

Goodnight.

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i’m no nike shill

I just liked the colors, that's all.
Home from work, 6:30pm. Off with the shoes and shirt and pants, on with the fuzzy slippers, t-shirt, and sweats. Around 8:30pm I decide to run. For some reason, having an iPod makes me want to run – more time to listen to music on that little gem of modern technology. The hard drive takes my puny strides without missing a beat; I hate running, but I’m trying to do it three times a week – maybe Keaton won’t have to look quite as far back as my high school pictures to ask, “Daddy, you were skinny?” I don’t think I’ll ever get off on running like those people on the sneaker commercials seem to, but if it’ll keep me from an early, artery-clogged, grave whatever… I’ll give it a shot.

Well, not to tread over and over and over again on the same theme – but I really am having trouble keeping the “appropriate” focus on work these days. It’s a mixture of some form of “senioritis,” the inevitable winding-down that overcomes most people when they know a big break from the grind is coming, and a general sense of work seeming less-than-important. I find my mind distracted by all things baby. Thing is, we’re now pretty much ready, nursery-wise, for Lil’ Chino’s arrival. The room’s painted, the crib, changing-table-dresser thing, and glider/rocker are all set up, waiting. Out registries are, for the most part, depleted – for which I consider us to be very lucky, babies are not cheap to welcome home. But, I catch myself letting work pile up, slip, and fall off… I sit in front of the screen and work on things of little importance, but things that keep me engaged. Writing Visual Basic for scripts for Excel… sure, it’s valuable – but it’s nowhere near as high as the things on the priorities list I’m shirking while doing it. Right now, nothing’s more important than this fetus.

Y’know, funny things happen when you look at your budget under a microscope as part of a simulated-Chino re-budgeting analysis. Thing like discovering that you spend $35 a month on Starbucks coffee at work, and that’s just one a morning each morning. That’s too much to spend on coffee, methinks. So, you head to the local-economy-ruining Wal Mart and buy a buy of Verona for $6, then you spend 5min each night telling the coffee maker you got in college to make you a fresh brimming mug right before you leave for work. Throw that in a travel mug, kiss the morning ritual of “going down for coffee” goodbye, and save $30 a month. Sure, $30 may seem petty… but it’s funny how making simple trades like that can add up if you really need them to. Me, I’m not going to mind the extra $30 one bit. $30 a month on dang coffee!! Stupid Starbucks.

Time to link you up a bit. If you’re a music nut like me, you’ll surely appreciate this outstanding blog I recently discovered: coolfer. With a keen eye and ear for industry news and other music-related info, it reminds me of my days working retail and reading Billboard or ICE weekly – solid music news on a daily basis. Also, snagged from a God-blog I read from time to time, I found this quick “God plausibility” test kinda cool. You’re presented with a list of checkboxes and told to mark as many or as few attributes which the God you believe in has. Then, a team of “metaphysical engineers” tell you how plausible your conception of God is based on the combination you choose. Frivolous, but kinda neat. My God? 0.9; plausible.

I shaved my beard. Just when it was getting nice and shaggy. I also left a sweat-towel from last week’s inaugural gym visits in my truck over the weekend, now the whole thing reeks of football locker room. Goodnight my friends.

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oh my god there’s a human in my wife’s belly

Behind the iron curtain!
Evening folks. I was going to post some pictures of Lil’ Chino’s pink and pink nursery today, but other things came calling and it just didn’t happen – tomorrow perhaps.

Tonight was our first baby class at the hospital, two hours every week for the next six weeks. Tonight there was lots of talk about vaginal mucous and other such unsavory items – but, overall, I think I’ll enjoy the class. I’ve certainly got things to learn, so a class isn’t such a wacky idea. To kick off the class, the instructor played Bill Cosby’s famous birth/labor bit from his Himself standup – a classic through and through. At some point in the class, I think when the instructor was saying that some babies actually “play” with their mothers’ bladders like constantly inflating beach balls, I realized that this “thing” inside my wife isn’t just some fluid-breathing “growth”… no, this is a human being. While I know she’s not in there contemplating the meaning of life or doing algebra, it’s not like she’s a rock or some other inanimate object – she stretches, rolls, flips, covers her eyes when it’s bright, etc. Oh my God there’s a human in my wife’s belly.

Work today was furious-productive, which is good as I need a kick in the pants to get me going. It was one of those days where I decided to work smarter, not harder, and it seemed to pay off in the end. I always feel good when I have some measurable accomplishments at the day’s end – output really justifies effort for me. Also in work news, I got word late today that I’ve been tapped for a trip to Moscow and Prague in late April – two months post-Lil’ Chino. Now, normally, I wouldn’t really want to travel that close to the baby… but… Moscow and Prague?! I mean, I’ve never been to Europe, and something about Moscow has fascinated me for a long time. So, I asked Sharaun, and she grudgingly said OK. While not official yet, I’m leaning towards going – that could all change after the baby though, who knows if I’ll be interested in travel… maybe I’ll just want to sit around a stare at my new daughter.

Sometimes I hate how heavy-handed I am. I’m just not built for fine, detailed, or small work. I’m all forced, dumb-muscled motions, largely due to my severe impatience and low frustration-factor. I rarely eat something without some of it ending up on my clothes, I break things trying to fix them, and I cut-corners out of frustration and accept less than perfection just to “get the job done.” Now, that’s a generalized statement. When I really have pride in what I’m doing, I go to extra effort to ensure it’s 110% – the catch being that, for whatever reason, I have to care about the results. My backyard, certain tasks at work, etc. The amount of pride I have in, or effort I put into, something is directly related to how skilled I am at the task. I.e., if I’m good at it and/or it’s easy for me, I take extra care in making sure it’s done right. If I’m so-so at it, I put in so-so effort. Not a good way to build skills I suppose, I should work on that. Although I’ll never carve the alphabet on a grain of rice, perhaps I can hone some lacking skills.

Writing that last paragraph, I waffled between using the phrase “take pride in” or the phrase “have pride in.” Do those actually mean the same thing? Strange.

Goodnight my peoples.

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breaking ground

Onto the new.
In my ongoing effort to prevent this now somewhat “mature” blog from sliding into repetitive boredom, I’m trying to establish a few “new” styles of entry that’ll hopefully help me write more interesting material, and give me something to “fall back” on when the creative juices aren’t exactly flowing. I know, how “creative” is this thing? Not very; but that still isn’t stopping me from trying to make it a little more engaging to the hardy few who do try and read regularly. So, in addition to my “one liners” idea, I’m going to again debut something I think may be worthwhile – new entries that look back on past entries and re-hash or re-examine them. I know that going back and talking again about something that’s already been talked about may not strike you as particularly “new” or original, but I think it has potential to be interesting for me from a writer’s perspective – and that, folks, is what it’s all about if I intend to continue filling pages with words. So, today I’ll kick off the new hotness part II – the “one (or two) year ago today” themed entry.

It just so happens that December 8th’s entry last year was my “best of 2005” roundup, and I didn’t feel there was much more I could write on that – so I cheated, and used December 7th’s entry (hey, I’m all timezone-impaired right now anyway, gimme a break). So, here, in another stunning display of my stylesheet mastery, is December 7th’s entry – one year ago today.

Liar.
Happy Monday to us all. Writing this, it’s Sunday morning. I think we’re gonna use the day to put up the Christmas tree and hang lights on the house. I’d like to get out of my slump and finish the porch in the backyard, since the stone-saw magically starting working again yesterday. I had a feeling you know, that it’s brokenness wasn’t final. So I decided to put it in the garage and wait, just let it relax, maybe not cut bricks for a couple weeks. And just as I suspected, when I plugged her in yesterday to see if she had self-healed, she fired up right away. So, now I have no excuse not to finish… time to get off my butt and get out there. Cut the remaining bricks, make the final adjustments to the sprinkler-head positions, then do the cleanup, topsoil, and finally sod and plants. It may seem like a lot, but having a finite amount of steps until I can be “done” is really exciting to me.

The above is the centerpiece of this entry – another letter Shaine managed to scan in. You can read the backstory here. Looks like I switched to typing in this letter, probably because my handwriting was so deplorable in 6th grade. Anyway, where the last letter was only a tad on the fantasy side, with this one I’ve decided to weave an entire narrative of lies. I mean, read it; it reads like I was making up each sentence as I went. The part about Kristina was true, at least the gist of it. She got mixed up in some deep stuff early on when we moved. Maybe I’ll get into the whole Kristina thing one day, it’d make an interesting story I think. The part about the VCR and cable in my room was true too. I remember saving a lot of allowance and mowing more than a few lawns to buy that Goldstar VCR, $99 is a lot for a 6th grader. I loved that VCR, it enabled us to rent and watch Rebecca De Mornay’s And God Created Woman… remember the pool table scene?… I do.

As for the letter’s main subject, fighting, there are some loose connections to real events I suppose. I do remember the candy-stealing incident of that 1st Halloween… and I did somehow end up with the perp’s candy at the end, but I don’t think there was a single punch thrown in between those events. As for the supposed four other fights, they are bald-face lies. The one with Chad may have been based loosely on an afterschool tussle that actually did happen, but I certainly wasn’t involved. Seems I concocted all sorts of brave tales to impress my long-distance best-bud. I mean, I can recount nearly every fight I’ve been in, and I surely would’ve remembered five fights in one night… anyway, I was a pacifist. Well, if anything, I guess it shows I’ve always had a knack for narrative…

Sunday’s over, back to work in the AM… the weekend happens too fast y’allz, the stench of cubicle is still fresh in my mind from Friday afternoon – and I’ll be punching in again in a mere twelve hours. I did, however, make good use of the day. I put up our new dartboard (in accordance with the standard British pub rules, of course), cleaned/organized the garage, finally put away the Halloween decorations, and put the lights up on the house. We pulled down the tree and in-house baubles, but didn’t get around to setting it all up. Tomorrow night perhaps. Putting up the Christmas lights is always a chore, but today it was OK. Up on the roof in the cool weather, me neighbor across the way was also putting up lights… we shared some light-putting-up banter from rooftop-to-rooftop. At one point, our other neighbor came out and we were all chatting about thisnthat, and it struck me how “suburban” it all was. Here we all our, decorating our houses, shouting to each other from rooftops to driveways, sharing waves and smiles… and I deemed it all very good and enjoyable. In the end we all told each other our respective houses “…look(ed) good man,” and went about our business. Nice. Very homey.

This week is the Arcade Fire show in San Fran. I’m really looking forward to it. I hope they are as good live as I’ve heard, and that they’re worth the drive. Now I’m off to bed, goodnight.

So how do we take this full-circle? The reason I chose the 7th’s entry was the part about making up junk for Shaine – I figured I could write more about that than I could recapping my top 10. I was always out to impress Shaine, he was older than me – and a good measure “cooler” too. In 5th grade, we became an inseparable duo of mischievous friends. So, it’s only natural that, when my family moved away at the end of that year – I wanted to keep in touch, and, use my new cross-country anonymity to spin impressive yarns. So, apparently, I decided to send letters with completely made-up goings-on, inventing fanciful stories of daring-do and lawlessness. I mean, this is a guy who sent me three Mexican Redhair seeds through the USPS, years before I’d discover the virtues of weed on my own. In turn, I’d send him fireworks – which were abundant in the south. I don’t know how long we corresponded after I moved, but I can remember calling him every so often, especially on his birthday, which I remember to this day, and chatting about what was going on.

I can remember talking to Shaine once, and him telling me that he’d let his hair grow to his butt. I remember him telling me that his family had moved up north, and that he’d been smoking “marijuana,” something that, at the time, equated him with serial killers to me. It seemed like he’d become quite the badass since I’d left, and the scared child within me was kinda glad I’d managed to get away before joining him in his descent to juvie. Alas, I would make my own descent only a few years later – but in my pre-hoodlum innocence, who would’ve known? We stayed friends – despite my slower-than-his ramp into true adolescence – and we talked and corresponded for at least a few years. And, believe it or not, we still keep in touch to this day – although my keeping-in-touch skills are admittedly lacking sorely.

Remember how much I was sweating my India presentation? Well, it went great – better than expected actually; much better. Having that under my belt kind of “legitimizes” this trip to me, a trip for which, other than the presentation, the sole purpose was some kind of “meet and greet.” So, my guilt over not preparing and even coming in the first place has been soothed… and I’m back to feeling good about what I did and why I did it. That’s good, right? Yes; I think that’s good.

Leaving this country in just about twelve hours, I bid you farewell.