I almost forgot to update on how the school volunteering thing is going. First of all, the comments on that post were SO HELPFUL. I find it so soothing to have a list of ANSWERS—I think partly because it makes me think “Other people go through this too” and “Other people need to think these things out too rather than just Naturally Handling It,” and partly because I feel like I have a Next Thing to Try, and then a Next Thing if that doesn’t work, and so on.

Anyway, I did my first official shift (so far I’d only done training), and there is one bad news and two good news. The bad news is that the woman in question is even worse than I thought. After I’d gone away from her the first time and calmed down a bit, I’d started to feel like she might be manageable after all, and/or that maybe I’d just had a bad first impression. But no.

I am tempted to say “She is awful” as if it were an objective fact—and that is certainly how I say it in my brain, with incredulity: “She’s awful! She’s AWFUL!” And I DO think a satisfying percentage of people would ALSO find her awful, if I could take a survey (*drifts into reverie, considering how fun that would be*).

And yet it seems clear to me that some of this is more like a chemical reaction. Do you get that, sometimes, with certain people? Like, it’s like EVERYTHING THEY DO hits you wrong, and if you tried to explain to someone else what the person in question had done it wouldn’t sound all that awful? That’s part of what’s going on here. I couldn’t even focus enough to give some of the Next Things to Try a fair shot, because it was like electrical interference. She’d say something and I’d want to burst into tears. It felt so hopeless to even attempt a reply—like, the FACT OF HER EXISTENCE was too much for me to cope with, let alone whatever she’d just said.

Fortunately this kind of thing doesn’t happen often, but when it does I’m curious what percentage of the time it’s a reciprocal feeling. Like, when I feel like I can’t tolerate the mere existence of another person, how often is that other person completely neutral about me and/or even favorably inclined toward me, and how often do I set their teeth equally on edge? It’s probably similar to the percentages with romantic sparks, where one person can be Really Feeling It and it seems like the other person MUST be feeling it too—and yet the other person is completely flat-line. Or sometimes the sparks are completely reciprocal, or sometimes the person likes the other person enough to be friends, but there are no romantic sparks, or WHATEVER. People don’t always feel the same way about each other, is I guess my Captain Obvious point here, and it would be interesting to have a chart of that.

So that’s the bad news. Do you know that song The Twelve Pains of Christmas, where the woman who mentions her in-laws is holding it together pretty well until she blurts out tearfully “She’s a witch I hate her!!” during the verse about the eleventh pain of Christmas? That is how I feel. It’s a panicked, tearful kind of dislike. Or maybe this video clip from Clue is a better way to describe it:
 
 

HERE IS THE GOOD NEWS. There are two. The first should probably count as more than one, because it’s “basically everything else”: I like all the other people I’ve met so far, and the job itself is good, and it went well, and it’s just the right level of work and flexible scheduling for my first crack at this. And also the first good news includes that I don’t think the other people there like this woman either, though they seem better able to handle her (but perhaps I seem that way to them, too), and they DO seem to like ME, and I felt like we were compatible and things were likely to go well. One of the other people there made a statement everyone else disagreed with, and she registered that from our awkward non-responsiveness, and so she changed the subject—unlike the awful woman, who in that scenario pushes harder and tries to force agreement.

The SECOND part is that I HAD THE WOMAN’S NAME WRONG. So when I’d thought I’d inadvertently signed up to work with her for five of the six days I started out with, I WAS LOOKING AT SOMEONE ELSE’S NAME. I THOUGHT it was the awful woman’s name, BUT IT IS NOT. So I will have to look again at the schedule to see if I’m just ALSO working with the same THIRD person every time—but it’s more likely I inadvertently avoided her almost completely. And of course now that I know her, I can try to avoid her, as long as she signs up first. And if I want to get bold about it, I can keep asking for the schedule as if I’ve had something come up, and I can keep scribbling out my name and putting it on different days or whatever.

Don’t you wish sometimes that you could access the hive mind and find out what percentage of other people dislike someone you dislike? Imagine how wrongfully delightful it would be to find out that no one else likes someone either! I suppose that would be more than counteracted by the horror and despair of the times when you’d find out that actually a majority found the person you disliked just wonderful. Plus I’d feel some pity for her if I found everyone agreed with me. Okay, so I don’t wish I could access the hive mind. I DO wish, however, for several other parents to make subtle remarks over the next few months that let me know (without it turning into back-biting, because that feels wonderful at the time but comes with a nauseating hangover) that they don’t like her either.

I have finished my Jincy Willett tour, and now I am recommending reading The Writing Class first and Amy Falls Down second. Unless you don’t like mysteries: The Writing Class is a mystery. In which case, Amy Falls Down works on its own completely fine: it only partially cheeses up The Writing Class by letting you know not to suspect a couple of people, but that’s no problem if you’re not going to read The Writing Class anyway. I feel like re-reading Amy Falls Down now that I know some backstory, but you don’t need the backstory to try it.

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I have planted the tulip bulbs. I hate messing with dirt, but it went fairly well except when I saw something out of the corner of my eye and it was a substantial (more compact than some, but also sturdier) daddy-long-legs on my shoulder, just PERCHED there like “Hey.” I practically saw its little chin do the “Hey” lift. In my panic (SOMETHING TINY THAT CANNOT HURT ME IS NEAR MY FACE!!) I first BLEW on it; it flinched down irritably. I then brushed it away with my hand without looking, which is a good way to not have to see your hand touching a spider but is a bad plan in the long run because then you don’t know if you got it and you have to search your entire self multiple times and you still feel like it might be, say, on the back of your collar, or sitting on top of your bun (*compulsively checks back of collar, and then bun*).

Something must have bitten me while I was out there, too, because one ear is itchy and magenta. Let’s say you have it on good authority that that’s what happens if a daddy-long-legs bites you. That should not inspire you to TELL me so. Especially since the daddy-long-legs was on my OTHER shoulder, and I don’t want to imagine it spending that much time on me before I noticed it.

********

An interesting part of the menopause book I ended up giving up on and returning to the library right around the time she said it was no accident that the word menopause sounded like “a pause” from “men” was that she said men tend to get more domestic right around the time women are feeling (and here I’ll paraphrase) like they cannot spend one more goddam second with saucepans and washcloths. (It’s no accident that the word washcloth contains the words “ash” and “lot,” “ash” signifying burnout and “lot” signifying what a lot of them we used.) That’s consistent with how things have been going at my house: I feel like I am just absolutely out of the energy it takes to clean something for the hundred thousandth time even though I have plenty of time to do it, and meanwhile Paul has started gardening, canning, and baking bread.

I’m not complaining per se, but I plan to later on when I figure out what it is I want to complain about. It has something to do with his domestic inclinations seeming to lean only toward the impressive (rather than also including cleaning toilets, dusting shelves, or putting away the summer clothes), and something to do with how at this point I would kind of like to start going on adventures but now he wants to stay home and make jam, and something about how nice it would have been to have this kind of domestic participation going on when I was so exhausted and busy with babies. Except I think I would have killed him if he had been fussing around with jam for hours in the kitchen while I was dealing with infants and diapers, whereas now I appreciate having a little space—so again, please stand by while I eat homemade jam on homemade bread and figure out what specifically it is I want to complain about.

Here is the order in which I have been on a Jincy Willett kick:

(photo from Amazon.com)

First: Amy Falls Down. I found this on the library’s New Books shelf and thought it looked like just my sort of thing. When I finished the book (having confirmed my guess about it being just my sort of thing), I noticed there were quotes on the back of it from David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. I looked up Jincy Willett online, and found that David Sedaris is the guy who brought her to national attention. Which is interesting when combined with the plot of Amy Falls Down, which is about an older female writer who is brought to national attention by lucky fluke.

All through the book I kept saying to Paul things like, “This is DIFFERENT. This is my kind of thing, but in a way I can’t figure out how to say it.” There are a few authors I’ve reacted to this way over the years: I’ll be reading along and I start thinking, “Wait. What is this. What is happening here.” Authors who make me lose appropriate punctuation. I’m not saying YOU will necessarily feel the same way, but David Sedaris and I are in agreement and maybe you would be too.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Next I requested Jenny and the Jaws of Life through the library system, because our library didn’t have a copy. I liked this book less. One reason is that I rarely like short stories. (They are too short, which is similar to the reason Paul’s grandmother didn’t like cats: “Too soft.”) But also, I felt like I was pushing my way through character summaries rather than reading a story. “Can we stop talking about what this person is LIKE and instead move the plot ahead just an INCH?,” I would think, my punctuation having returned to me. And I was left feeling depressed and upset after most of the stories, and I prefer not to feel that way unrelentingly even if the dismal stories are very nicely-written, so that was the final blow. I still liked the book, even though it sounds like I didn’t, but I’m glad I didn’t start with it or I might not have tried others.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Next I read Winner of the National Book Award. It was dark, like the short stories, but longer. Character descriptions felt worthwhile because we were going to be spending so much time with these people, and because the plot did keep inching forward. (Though I would sometimes have to put the book down because I felt worn out waiting for the next inch.)

This is the kind of book where you know upfront that something bad is going to happen: in this case, that the narrator’s twin sister is going to kill her husband (her own husband, not her twin sister’s) (the second twin sister’s, not the first twin sister’s) (okay, so the sisters are Dorcas and Abigail, and Dorcas is the narrator, and we know from the start that Abigail is going to end up killing Abigail’s husband, is THAT clear?). And then you jump back so you can work toward this Bad Thing That’s Going to Happen, feeling jumpy about it and wondering how/why it’s going to happen. And then it turns out there is another layer or two of things to anticipate.

It wasn’t cheery, but I liked it. I kept pausing to re-read particularly good parts, wishing it worked well to quote little pieces to someone who wasn’t reading the book. (It never does, which is why I dislike Meaningful Quotes.) (Unless they are meaningful to ME, in which case they’re marvelous.)

Thinking over it afterward, I find I still don’t feel like I understand the characters (despite all the description), so Amy Falls Down is still my favorite.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Now I am reading The Writing Class. I am only a little ways into it, but I see it comes before Amy Falls Down. You definitely don’t need to read this one first, and in fact so far I’d advise against it. The narrator (not the author, as the author keeps using her narrator to remind us) is trying a blog, and the way I feel about what she says about bloggers and blogging is very similar to the way the narrator (and perhaps also the author) feels about the things everyone says to her about fiction-writers and writing fiction. I’ve nevertheless already found several parts to wish I could read aloud to someone, though, so clearly I am ENJOYING it, it’s just that she happens to be hitting some of my personal irritations. [Edit: The part that was irritating me is over, and now I really love it.]

To sum up: I recommend trying the author. I recommend starting with Amy Falls Down or else with The Writing Class (The Writing Class is meant to be first). [Edited to add: I finished The Writing Class, and now would recommend reading that first, then Amy Falls Down. But Amy Falls Down stands alone, if you only want to read that one, and/or if you don’t like mysteries.] If you notice a self-conscious stiffness to this post, it’s because the narrator-who-is-not-the-author says she uses Google Alert on herself.

Last night I had such bad dreams—and they’d started out so well, too, with the classic romance-novel plot of “I thought he didn’t like me but actually he was in love with me,” plus I also had David Boreanaz interested. But then the first guy wasn’t where he said he’d meet me, and instead there was some blood, and I realized something bad had happened to him and was about to happen to me, and I was thinking, “Ah, so this is what Gavin de Becker meant about how when it’s Real Fear it will help you—but then, shouldn’t I be able to run faster than this?,” and I ended up at a dead end and couldn’t tell if THAT was the trap or if backing up and going the other way was the trap, and anyway maybe I shouldn’t be watching Bones so close to bedtime.

I got up and did the Nightmare Cure from my childhood (go pee, eat a Tums, brush teeth, get a drink of water), but as I was getting the drink of water, a spider threaded down from the ceiling a foot in front of my face. And when my eyes had followed its return climb, I saw two more spiders up there. So it is not particularly surprising that when I went back to bed, it turned out the Nightmare Cure had not worked and I dreamed that I was at the animal shelter and it was flooding and I couldn’t figure out how to get the animals out without releasing them into the wild, and also it was clear someone was flooding the place on purpose and therefore was out there waiting for all of us.

I have no reason for being so sleepy and laggy and unmotivated and sad the last few days. Except that we’re all going to get old and die and so will everyone we love.

Rob has been at the moodier/angrier end of the teenager spectrum recently, surprising me with his sudden outbursts over what seems from my point of view to be NOTHING. It’s hard to respond peacefully/defusingly [ha—I originally had this as “diffusingly,” like I was making tea] when I’m not even sure what’s going on. Sample conversation:

Other child, looking at Paul’s desk: “OOOOooooo, a new keyboard! Let me try it!”

Rob, turning around and getting involved with sudden and unexpected scorn: “It’s not even PLUGGED IN yet.” *scoff sound*

Me, in a friendly voice: “It’s a cordless one.”

Rob, with even more intense feeling: “It still has to be PLUGGED IN. The thing that MAKES it cordless still has to be plugged in SOMEWHERE.”

Me, puzzled by this outburst and unsure how to respond/proceed (i.e., is it that he’s embarrassed to have been wrong so he’s trying to prove he really was right, or does he know the thing that needs to be plugged in hasn’t been plugged in yet so he’s trying to rudely-but-nevertheless-accurately correct what I said?): “Mm hm, yes, that’s right.”

Rob: “WHAT?? It DOES. There’s a THING that gets plugged into the computer!!! YOU SAID it didn’t need to be plugged in!!”

Me, cautiously, in a mild, explaining tone: “Yes, I know, I just thought you might think it had a cord, since the last keyboard did. You can check if you like to see if that other thing is plugged in yet. Maybe it isn’t yet, but I thought Daddy already set it up.”

Rob: *exasperated sound; hands briefly beseech the heavens; he spins around in his chair and is back to his computer typing crankily*

Me: *bewildered and annoyed*

It’s difficult to imagine this going on for the next decade or so, but perhaps it gets easier with practice. I’m trying to remember if it got easier to deal with toddler irrationality/outbursts or not, and I THINK it partly DID—if only because by the time the fifth child was being a toddler I was aware that the stage would pass without me having to actually make a toddler understand that he/she was nuts.

I have started the menopause book recommended by the nurse-practitioner at my OB/GYN, and I am having mixed feelings. The author is Not My Type, and nor is her ex-husband, and in fact I would be mincing rapidly away from either of them if I encountered them in a social or work setting. And so when she is describing how their marriage fell apart due in part to menopause, I have to do extra work to separate out the actual point of the story from the parts catching my attention, which are things such as him saying he hates when she acts disempowered, and her saying he should be more supportive of her truth, and me thinking “I would divorce BOTH of you without even FLINCHING.”

So what happens is I skip ahead a few chapters, because I think, “This part about marriage readjustments is making me dislike her, and I don’t want to dislike her because I want to glean usefulness from this book, so I will skip this part.” But then as I’m skipping ahead, something useful catches my eye and I think “Well, it DOES make sense that the marriage would need to adjust to the new stage of life…,” and then I have to go back to see what she’s talking about, and before I know it I’m back to where I started skipping. And then a minute later I’m wondering if she and I are too different for me to apply her advice to my life anyway.

Another big issue is that the author and I are not of like minds on the subject of what causes what, medically speaking. Certainly I allow room for the idea that one day in the future it will be proven scientifically that uterine fibroids occur when a woman has been prevented from giving birth to something creative and powerful, or that acne occurs as a literal manifestation of something metaphorical “getting under our skin.” In the meantime, I am not following along—and such things form a strong foundation for the book. If you stop taking care of your husband the way you did when you were in your mother role, he may get heart disease or high blood pressure in unintentional revenge—that sort of thing. It makes me wonder if I should even bother to look up her take on the physical changes I’m curious about. If I try to look up this hair-thinning-at-one-temple situation to see if it’s from hormonal changes or if it’s because I grew my hair longer/heavier and I’m wearing it up, am I going to find information about how this is really my body’s way of communicating to me that I am metaphorically “pulling out my hair,” and that it’s because I’m struggling to style my old dead strands of creative energy when I should be “cutting away” the old stage of life and welcoming the new growth?

But then I got to the part about how many women have trouble switching from “the mothering stage” to “whatever is next,” and so they try to prolong the mother stage and delay decisions/adjustments about the next stage by having more children, or by adopting more children, or by getting very involved in their children’s activities, or by taking care of their grandchildren, or by over-mothering their grown children, and I thought, “That does make a certain level of sense, and also I recognize that category of impulse.” So in short, I’m still reading, but Paul is getting tired of hearing me read sections aloud in that tone of voice.