First world problems

I've been having a rough time of it professionally, lately. A few weeks ago, a grant I wrote (which had been extensively internally reviewed before submission, and which was expected to be funded, to the extent that they'd already given us a cost code and started holding meetings) was turned down, with the least constructive and most unpleasant commentary I have ever received on anything I have written. And yesterday I learned that my application to have my position re-classed, which I was assured was a shoo-in, was rejected. My supervisor is looking at workarounds for making it happen anyway, and everyone tells me not to take it personally, but it lets the latent Impostor Syndrome come rushing in regardless.

I don't feel like I'm asking for all that much. I have no wish to empirically verify the Peter principle. I don't want a raise. I just want to use the skills I have in a worthwhile way and not damage my resume while I'm at it (my current job title is doing my CV no favors.) But I do know that the expectation that I should get things if I work hard enough for them, that I should have a job that recognizes and utilizes my skills, that I should be interested and engaged in what I do - that's an artifact of privilege, white privilege and class privilege and the privilege that goes with cultural capital. Most people just work for a paycheck, and I feel like a total whiner when I complain that that is not enough for me.

So, I've been in this job for eight months now. I said I'd check in after half a year, evaluate how things were going; I pushed it a little further out to see what would happen with my bid for reclassification. Given the outcome of that, perhaps now isn't the best time, but this job has been really good for me in a number of ways, so maybe I should take this chance to remind myself of the positives. I put a lot of hope into this job from the beginning, even as I knew, logically, that it was highly unlikely that a new job could make the kind of difference I wanted it to make in my life.

I have never been happier to report that I was wrong. While it was no panacea, this job has made massive, comprehensive positive change possible for me. Most of this has to do with the existence and form of the job rather than its content. Working in an office is everything I needed it to be. It gives me structure in my life, creates boundaries between home and work and vice versa, keeps me from noodling about on the internets as much, gives me a space of my own, and helps me manage my time. I harbor no illusions that I would/could have instituted all this change on my own - I know myself too well - but the job served as a catalyst.

My co-workers are mostly smart, capable, and pleasant people, and adult conversation on a regular basis is another nice part of working in an office. Being able to interact with people I work with easily and directly keeps me much more engaged in my work and my workplace, and makes me more energized and focused about the projects on which I work.

I also get to learn from them. Granted, because I was hired in below my skill level, that learning curve has now flattened out dramatically, but there are so many people in this organization, doing so many fascinating things, that there is always something new to learn, however small. I've also gotten large chunks of procedural knowledge useful in my field, things that were covered by other people in my past positions so that I didn't get to experience them directly. OJT (On-the-job-training) is my favorite way to learn, and the most effective at giving me flexible and applicable skills for a variety of situations.

People here say "thank you," when I do things for them, for routine things as well as above-and-beyond things. They notice when I do something well, and they remember to give compliments and kudos where due. This is huge, for me, and makes a massive positive difference to my satisfaction with my work. Part of the nice thing about coming in under my skill level is that I consistently outperform everyone's expectations, and it feels good to be a rock star, even if it is just relative. I'd still rather be "just good" at a more interesting job, with the accompanying title and respect, but there are mitigating advantages to where I am.

And I could leave, too. It's a shitty job market, and it would be even harder to find a better job now that this one is on my resume, but with patience and persistence, I could. I'm staying because I choose to stay, because I do, for the most part, like it here and like what I do, and because I have faith that I will eventually be able to move up and out of my current position. It's nice to remind myself of that, sometimes. I have other choices. I am not stuck.

That doesn't mean that I have been taking this setback super well. I went home and got a little drunk last night and woke up in the middle of the night panicking that maybe I am a terrible unprofessional person. I left work early today to get a massage. I haven't exactly been working as hard or as well as I usually do this week. But I figure I'm allowed a little time to feel sorry for myself before plunging back in. To paraphrase Emerson, Monday is a new day; I shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with all this crap.

Squidbits

Holy shit, I just realized that I wrote this two weeks ago and never posted it. Um, happy heteronormative Hallmark holiday to you all. Have a post about my kid.

(No pictures this month, as our Official Photographer has been out of town for most of it.)

It's a pretty excellent time to be the mother of the Squid. I'm a bit tired; solo parenting and travel and work have tuckered me right out. But even in the chaos I'm still finding room to be amazed at how fast he is developing. You can practically see the gears turning in there as he figures things out, and every new day brings a new level of understanding.

New words since last update: Shoe, Box, Thanks, Ball, Toes, Morning, Bus, Bone, Grandpa, Kitty, Stairs, Banana, Icky, Nose, Milk, Cookie, Apple, Book, Keys, Juice, Cup, Cookie, Dinosaur, Pizza, Rice, Flower, Out, and Hello (as opposed to hi). In just three weeks! Language explosion, though I have to admit to a lingering twinge of jealousy when I hear that friends' children born at the same time are making full sentences on a regular basis. I have to keep reminding myself that all these early benchmarks mean very little as long as they fall somewhere on the normal curve; they don't have a lasting correlation to ability or intelligence.

Word and sound associations are definitely getting much, much clearer; when he was ready to go at Grammy's house, he ran to the door and started yelling, "bye bye!" He hoots like a monkey now when I give him a banana, implying that he understands that monkeys eat bananas; I'm not sure if that is a genuine logic chain or just something he picked up from me calling him a little monkey in that context. I suspect the latter, as he said "monkey," yesterday after being handed a banana. After Grandpa honked his nose, beeped his cheeks, and ding-dinged his earlobes, he was able to associate each body part with the correct sound. He says "hello" when the phone rings.

Sometimes his logic is a bit off; he says "thanks" when he hands us a banana peel to throw away, but I think he says it because that's what we say when he hands us things, not because he is thanking us; perhaps he even thinks that's what a peel is called. He also says something that sounds pathetically like "sorry!" sometimes when being made to do things he doesn't want to do; there's nothing more guilt-inducing than dropping a sobbing child off at daycare who is saying, "soi! soi!" over and over. However, I don't think he's apologizing to me for imagined transgressions; I think I say "sorry" a lot to him when I make him do things he doesn't want to do ( e.g. "I'm sorry, honey, but I have to go to work, so you have to stay here,") and he's made the association between "DO NOT WANT" and "sorry."

The building of correct associations is also leading to an understanding of what an incorrect association might look like. This is the beginning of rudimentary humor; he made his first joke the other day, and I almost died of pride. He was brushing the dog with my hairbrush *pauses to let you all give me a disgusted grimace* and I told him not to brush her face, "just her sides and back, honey." He started to brush her paws, instead, and I said, "No, silly! Those are her toes! We don't brush toes!" and he looked up at me and giggled and lifted up one bare foot and brushed his own toes.

Himself worries that we are going to raise a smartass. I, too, worry about this. But I'm not sure how to avoid it, either. Himself said, "We've got to tone down the sarcasm around him." But I'm not prepared never to talk to my partner again, and I swear to God, if you took all of the sarcasm and snark out of our conversations, ours would be a very silent marriage. It's just how we are. But we both came from nicer families and developed this kind of attitude on our own; what do you get when you start a kid out on a steady diet of it? I'm a little afraid to find out. I think about that sort of thing a lot; I had a good childhood, a great childhood, even, and my parents were and are incredibly good parents. So I've been able to layer my own laxity and vice on top of that strong starting base and still get a fairly decent result; sure, I get a craving for boxed macaroni and cheese now and then, but I can make really tasty healthy foods. Sure, I watch some TV, but I've read more books than 95% of Americans ever will, so whatever. But the Squid is wandering into my life after I've instituted the downgrades; not that I would raise my child exclusively on boxed mac and TV, but he has definitely had more convenience food and more movies already than I think I had had by age ten. Possibly age 15. If he hates to cook or read, I will feel so guilty I may never recover.

Physically, he climbs furniture like a jungle gym, and people like trees; he can get into any chair (and more horrifyingly, onto any table) in the house. He can feed himself cereal with milk or pasta from a bowl, using a spoon; it's messy, but he gets the great majority of it into his mouth. He'll be able to dress himself soon; he understands the general shape of garments and the process, and will put his arms in the right places without being asked, and help me put on his shoes. He can pet animals relatively gently and go up and down shallow stairs upright on his own; he needs to have a hand to hold onto for larger stairs. He catches himself in tumbles that would have resulted in nasty bumps just a month ago. He even sings; his babble is still babble, but when he is singing it is distinctly tuneful. I could have sworn he actually hit the correct notes for "The Wheels on the Bus" last night, but it was probably just coincidence.

He brings me books to read all the time now; I promised myself that I would always drop what I was doing to read to him, so sometimes I'm reading them standing up, holding the book down with one hand and reciting it more or less from memory while I stir the soup with the other. He used to prefer to stand up when being read to, but no more - when we sit down to read now, he pushes me to sit and then turns himself around and lowers his butt squarely into my lap, settling in. He has favorite books, and favorite pages in each; he likes the page with the fire engine and dump truck in his Trucks book, and the junk food page and final spread of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He particularly enjoys books about food and eating and books about trucks and trains.

Which, hello gendered preferences. It happens. He's out of my circle of influence 9 hours a day during the week, in daycare with a very gender-traditional provider, and I'm sure that Himself and I have gendered behaviors and assumptions that we don't even recognize that we're passing along. We've exposed him to books and movies. it's a gendered world. But it bothers me. I realized the other day that I had defaulted all the non-gendered animals in his toybox and in his books to "he" - I'm now making a conscious effort to refer to some of them as female. The Very Hungry Caterpillar loses absolutely nothing if it's read about a girl caterpillar, and many other children's books can be re-gendered that way as well. (I have also altered the wording in many of them to make them scan properly; I am a metrical snob and I hate it when children's books don't scan.) I want to get him a doll stroller for his second birthday (he loves the one at the neighbor girl's house.) I'm not going to fight the gendered preferences he picks up - though if I have to read that damn truck book one more time I may explode - but I am going to do my level best not to reinforce them through my own behavior.

We have not yet arrived at the glorious free-will-assertion period of "No." Rather, we are in a hilarious period of "Yeah," in which "Yeah" is the default response to anything asked in an interrogative tone of voice. "Do you want cereal or oatmeal?" "Yeah!" "Where do you want me to put this?" "Yeah!" "Are you made of cashews and toothpaste?" "Yeah!" I'm thinking this is a golden opportunity for me to extract binding promises - on camera! - for the years of struggle ahead, ne c'est pas?

Never let it be said that I lack a sense of humor about my Issues.

Twelve years, seven prescriptions, five addresses. It's all about finding balance, right?

Internet as confessional

I just managed to fuck up laundry - laundry - in the most idiotic way possible.

I went into the laundry room hauling a hamper full of today's third load of laundry.

I took out the dry clean clothes, put the wet clothes in the dryer and turned it on.

I put the next load in the washer, added soap, and started it.

Then I went to leave the laundry room and remembered, oh yeah, I need to take the clean, dry clothes and fold them!

So I turned around to grab the hamper and saw...the dirty clothes I'd brought in to wash.