March 25, 2013 or The Closing of the Goat
It occurred to me today that I’m in a bit of a crisis. In one week, I’m going to lose my job. For over two years this job has come before everything else that is important to me, with a few triumphant exceptions. During this tenure I have gotten my first gray hairs, constricted to the bowels of a nonagenarian, unlearned how to relax, adapted to so much daily stress that I avoid adventure. Boring! So now, it’s going to end. This is something I want.
The next months are the third time in the last ten years that I have quit and leapt into the big blank future. The first time was the end of a bad relationship and I hadn’t really grown up yet so that had to happen fast, which led to the most memorable year of montage material. The second time was after I realized that living in Boston required a meaner disposition and an indelible belief that I was not skinny enough, so I quit, moved my stuff into my parents’ garage and hiked over two thousand miles in almost 6 months. That turned out to erase the belief that I needed a 9-5 job. While my pride waned and my relationships blossomed, there was a year in there, living in my parents’ basement (they told me they liked having me there), when I was getting a lot of it right. But I wasn’t writing, and I had decided that was the most important thing, in the long run. Right then, of course, it was too much fun to spend all my money on visiting my friends who had moved to many interesting places.
So when a job that sounded like a real grown-up position became available in another state, I excitedly applied after considering it for exactly three hours, and planned to work full time running a store that was losing money, using all my spare time to write a book. The futility of that plan took a while to settle in. Confession: I still haven’t swallowed the futility of getting the store to solvency. In the mean time, I was settling in to a sweet little town and the apartment of my dreams. It’s tacky to say, and in a blink two years were gone, but somehow there was a lot of blinking, and a lot of not memorable months. I want to edit what I wrote before, about settling into the sweet little town, because that didn’t happen until over a year in. I always loved my apartment, and the little mountain in my backyard, and my landlords, who as deaf farming seniors, were the ideal combination of generous and oblivious, but it wasn’t until I dated a local womanizer who claimed to know everyone that the town actually seemed like an interesting place to explore. I can admit dating a womanizer because I didn’t really believe in them before he stopped calling. I thought it was a character type screenwriters use to advance the plot. So there we have it.
Seven years would be more accurate than the ten I wrote above. And this weekend my store closes for good. When I am at work that inevitability causes me stress, but here at my computer I am free. I spend most of my time at the store, however, and in the last two weeks noticed that when I’m not at the store, I am pacing my apartment eating cake and watching countless episodes of the two sitcoms that make me laugh out loud. Some books fit in there, too, I’m on a Nora Ephron binge at the moment, if you couldn’t tell, but what I recall, because I am mean to myself, is mostly the television shows. So when I absolutely could not motivate myself to go on a run, or even a hike, which is right out my back door, today, the anniversary of the day, four years ago, when I started hiking the Appalachian Trail (and it still thrills me to think about how I started walking, wearing an old raincoat that was no longer waterproof, in the pouring rain, in Georgia all by myself, and I thought, I will not stop walking until I’m in Maine. All I have to do to get to Maine is to keep walking every day), because nobody can make me do something I don’t want to do, I am really that stubborn, I wondered whether all my out of character couch potato behavior has to do with being in crisis. It makes sense, doesn’t it? In a week I will have no job, no health insurance, but a great apartment and a car. In a week I will be where most citizens consider a bad place, a place to try to get out of, a place that is not as good as a job that gives you stress exzema or gray hairs when you’re 30, but a place that I surely crave.
What it comes down to, every two or so years when I get into this transitional period again, is that I really have no desire to do anything but be a friend and a daughter and a sister, and hopefully a writer. I get that this is America, and we have capitalism, and I can’t keep my apartment by being really nice and clean. So what now? I really believe that what has kept me on the couch for two days is this impending toss up of all my order. Do you know I crave it? I can’t wait for the new stress of being unemployed, letting go of the other stress. I dream about sleeping until 9 and running an impressive number of miles and then typing the rest of the day and then deciding to make beer on a Tuesday. Money shmoney. So this is a crisis. I am in crisis mode and my medicine is Parks and Recreation. In one week everything changes. I can’t wait to be unemployed. But this must be a crisis. Or maybe mercury is in retrograde. I heard that’s a thing.
The next months are the third time in the last ten years that I have quit and leapt into the big blank future. The first time was the end of a bad relationship and I hadn’t really grown up yet so that had to happen fast, which led to the most memorable year of montage material. The second time was after I realized that living in Boston required a meaner disposition and an indelible belief that I was not skinny enough, so I quit, moved my stuff into my parents’ garage and hiked over two thousand miles in almost 6 months. That turned out to erase the belief that I needed a 9-5 job. While my pride waned and my relationships blossomed, there was a year in there, living in my parents’ basement (they told me they liked having me there), when I was getting a lot of it right. But I wasn’t writing, and I had decided that was the most important thing, in the long run. Right then, of course, it was too much fun to spend all my money on visiting my friends who had moved to many interesting places.
So when a job that sounded like a real grown-up position became available in another state, I excitedly applied after considering it for exactly three hours, and planned to work full time running a store that was losing money, using all my spare time to write a book. The futility of that plan took a while to settle in. Confession: I still haven’t swallowed the futility of getting the store to solvency. In the mean time, I was settling in to a sweet little town and the apartment of my dreams. It’s tacky to say, and in a blink two years were gone, but somehow there was a lot of blinking, and a lot of not memorable months. I want to edit what I wrote before, about settling into the sweet little town, because that didn’t happen until over a year in. I always loved my apartment, and the little mountain in my backyard, and my landlords, who as deaf farming seniors, were the ideal combination of generous and oblivious, but it wasn’t until I dated a local womanizer who claimed to know everyone that the town actually seemed like an interesting place to explore. I can admit dating a womanizer because I didn’t really believe in them before he stopped calling. I thought it was a character type screenwriters use to advance the plot. So there we have it.
Seven years would be more accurate than the ten I wrote above. And this weekend my store closes for good. When I am at work that inevitability causes me stress, but here at my computer I am free. I spend most of my time at the store, however, and in the last two weeks noticed that when I’m not at the store, I am pacing my apartment eating cake and watching countless episodes of the two sitcoms that make me laugh out loud. Some books fit in there, too, I’m on a Nora Ephron binge at the moment, if you couldn’t tell, but what I recall, because I am mean to myself, is mostly the television shows. So when I absolutely could not motivate myself to go on a run, or even a hike, which is right out my back door, today, the anniversary of the day, four years ago, when I started hiking the Appalachian Trail (and it still thrills me to think about how I started walking, wearing an old raincoat that was no longer waterproof, in the pouring rain, in Georgia all by myself, and I thought, I will not stop walking until I’m in Maine. All I have to do to get to Maine is to keep walking every day), because nobody can make me do something I don’t want to do, I am really that stubborn, I wondered whether all my out of character couch potato behavior has to do with being in crisis. It makes sense, doesn’t it? In a week I will have no job, no health insurance, but a great apartment and a car. In a week I will be where most citizens consider a bad place, a place to try to get out of, a place that is not as good as a job that gives you stress exzema or gray hairs when you’re 30, but a place that I surely crave.
What it comes down to, every two or so years when I get into this transitional period again, is that I really have no desire to do anything but be a friend and a daughter and a sister, and hopefully a writer. I get that this is America, and we have capitalism, and I can’t keep my apartment by being really nice and clean. So what now? I really believe that what has kept me on the couch for two days is this impending toss up of all my order. Do you know I crave it? I can’t wait for the new stress of being unemployed, letting go of the other stress. I dream about sleeping until 9 and running an impressive number of miles and then typing the rest of the day and then deciding to make beer on a Tuesday. Money shmoney. So this is a crisis. I am in crisis mode and my medicine is Parks and Recreation. In one week everything changes. I can’t wait to be unemployed. But this must be a crisis. Or maybe mercury is in retrograde. I heard that’s a thing.
posted by Sara Haxby at
4:01 PM
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