elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

I love hanging out with people who read my blog. It slices through the tons of awkwardness and false starts that regular social interactions have, where you have to have the "how are you doing" and "what's new" type of conversation. It's actually quite challenging to come up with headline summaries of your life, appropriately weighted per category and an "interrupt me for more" type "links." Instead, us bloggers can just grunt or use hand gestures or eye rolling and everyone knows what we're talking about. It has already been printed.

Perhaps my inability to write here is the result of wanting to bridge the chasm between people who do read my blog and people who don't. (Isn't that the best excuse for not blogging you have ever heard?) The "are they readers" attribute is fairly arbitrary and doesn't necessarily reflect how much I want to know someone, or where our relationship is going, or anything like that. It's only an indicator of how much background they have, and whether or not they will get my dreadful jokes. So I've written here less, and find myself having even to catch my RSS friends up verbally on what's new, what's happening, and it's evident that NOT blogging is the great leveling mechanism.

I thought of an interesting social study. Plan 5 events and invite everyone you know to each one. Send the invitation for the next event only after the previous has happened. The people who show up to the last event are your "real" friends. True or false? Hmmm. We do this study every day via RSS and yes, occasionally people unsubscribe. (Hello! Number 19? What was it, the salad post that crossed the line?)

So. Regardless of why I have been writing less, and the interesting social consequences therein, I still need to gush out an update about last weekend. I was very honored to have been invited to the Dillow's, and to meet Shel. I was amazed at how many feelings this event stirred up in me, about ambition, and "making it," and feeling like a child still, memories of sneaking cups of egg nog and not knowing it was spiked. I find it hard to separate the concept of money from the concept of success. Don't tell me you don't have the same problem. However, my shred of dignity in that is I know I will be successful once I make that leap.

On a less self-centered note, I was so proud of the Naked Conversations gang for getting it together despite the hundreds of e-mails and thousands of things to blog about daily and even hourly. I have witnessed people (usually execs) reach a certain point where they decide, they can't scale, and need to handle everything in person (and therefore realtime). If documentation needs to happen, it is videotape, the most time efficient medium on your part. Instead of watching your e-mail pile up, or fractionate your attention via link juice, you are one person, in one moment, one decision at a time. This is quite the prudent way of handling time management, especially for execs, and especially if they have assistants. But if that works so well, how did The Naked Conversations gang do it? The book is proof that you can still accomplish your goals without unplugging. Blogging is a great example of technology that gives back, and we all need the user's manual for WHY to use it.

Anyway. I'm excited to go to Northern Voice this year, to hear what everyone has to say. We'll be, like, the OTHER family with kids, as I'm sure there will only be two. And you Canadians better be nice because we have a bunch of you in our family, more every day in fact. Sourry aboat that.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:54 PM | Permalink

I am not a religious person, so it is interesting to have some sort of prayer in my life. Interesting incongruity. When I think of people who pray, visibly and consciously, I have an image of kneeling by the side of the bed with hands flat, eyes gazing upward, everyone airbrushed. There is a nightgown, a quilt, the house looks warm, and the person is typically a child and likely white. This is my image of conscious prayer.

When I look at personal benefits, I hope that no OS product in the next few years actively solves the problem of PCs taking so terribly long to boot. Yes, my hope for Vista is to leave this feature out. I don't need to have access to my desktop within one second of turning on the machine. Admit it, you were going to run all the side programs after displaying the desktop, so the boot process continued although cloaked for the usual amount of time. But the usefulness of this feature can be debated. Where my personal benefit lies from keeping boot times at their current pace is - this is my time that I use to pray.

All of us optimizers have thought through what might be accomplished during this 2-3 minute window. It's not a lot of things you can do that give back in proportion to even having bothered to do them while booting. More times than not, the new thing takes longer than the boot process and you end up distracted and losing time anyway. The prayer thing works well for me. Often I pray for someone to have responded like I hope to an e-mail. Many times I have prayed for a job, or a job interview. These are very specific. Other times I pray for stability, for groundedness, for the presence of mind to interact with the world meaningfully but not hastily.

I have not found that it works in any measurable sense, but I would miss it if the problem were fixed.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 06:16 AM | Permalink

There was big trouble brewing in 2001. Public, worldly trouble as well as private battles. The world endured the actions of bad guys behind the wheel of airplanes, as well as simple choices of how to make a living. I assume it is a universal characteristic to have the sense of entitlement that a career choice should be a simple one. And, as with most entitlements it turns out to be far more complicated. What is my relationship with money, am I attracted to it, and it to me? Do I like it for its own sake, or is it inexplicably bound to other more primary topics?

To those of us familiar with XML, the time of questioning after 2001 can be thought of as: is money an element or an attribute? My personal story with money places money squarely as an element before 2001. It was a primary differentiator, there were the things I could do with money or en route to getting money, and there was other stuff. After 2001 I was forced to question that model. I did not yet know it was to become an attribute – merely a descriptor of other topics, characterizing the level of depth possible. For example, you can have a vacation as an object and the amount of money you spend as an attribute of that vacation – right during when the planes hit and when my own personal planes were hitting, I did not know the structure money was evolving into. I only knew that change was rampant and mandatory.

The one thing I drooled over, craved completely, longed for, coveted more than a menopausal chocolate fiend, was a true raincoat. The second things turned around for me, I thought, I would get me one of those. Seam sealed gore-tex decent color sit-on-the-bleachers-in-the-rain butt coverage multi pocket highly engineered babies. During all those years from 2001 to 2003, as I gave away my possessions not even being able to afford the storage to keep them, I thought about the coat. Sure, I managed with what I could find. I wasn't walking around coat-free, in a hooded sweatshirt or something silly like that. I didn't look like the cover of Les Miz. But I certainly didn't have anything you could characterize as GEAR.

When things finally did turn around, in 2003, the first thing I did was buy this coat. It's black (not soccer-mom blue, which is what I had before). Black turns out to not be such a flattering color on me – so sayeth my personal shopper – but I see that as my problem and not the coat's. The brand is ArcTeryx (there is an apostrophe of some kind in there). It is supposed to fit slim, but I tried it on at REI with a sweatshirt and a purse underneath, so of course that resulted in Men's XL. Each pocket is kinda gluey where the zipper is, as if someone applied one of those waterproof fake skin bandaids and then made the zipper magnetic. There is a simulated hat, which can be adjusted with pull strings, and can be set to not be much like a hat at all and more like a hood. I paid $450 and credited my Dad's REI account for the purchase, as I have his number memorized and not my own – it has so few numbers as he has been a member since they started. $450. That's four months of storing those possessions I gave away.

At my new job – the first of what would be three temp positions in three years (either a good thing or an embarrassment depending on your attitude) – my new boss noticed the coat right away. He'd kindof fawn over it as it hung over the corner of my cube – we didn't have real coathooks. Then I got knocked up, so the coat went on semi-permanent loan to my dh, whose feeling of desperation of needing a coat was far out of proportion too small compared to his actual need.

Once I could fit into the coat again, we spent a Fall season in Seattle with no car. Despite the jobs, money was still tight, so we shared the raincoat. This meant it was mostly my coat, except when my dh had to go out solo and there was no reason to let it just sit there. The last thing I did with the coat was to visit my mom's house, accept grudgingly a letter with a check for our oldest's Oct birthday, and place it in the pocket.

Then we lost the coat.

Who had it last? Where did they go? Why did the person who found it not contact us via the letter, the check? Surely foul play was involved. Maybe our ultra-valuable (and semi-stolen) bus pass, good until July 2006, was in there too? The season dripped on with no word, and we were both back to wearing non-serious rainwear. Why buy a new piece of serious rainwear when we had already done so? The 7 stages of guilt had not quite cycled, I suppose we were still in denial. Plus, it was no longer a symbol for me of post 2001 security. I could be out in the rain in crappy rainwear and not die. I could be soaking wet and it just made the bath more fun. It wasn't Kenneth Lay's fault nor Osama's that I lost my raincoat. It was just too valuable a thing to keep around. In retrospect, we should have held a little service. We were happy to have you in our lives, it was good while it lasted, perhaps too good for this world even. Well, it's a good thing we didn't do any of that because

We found the coat!

I am looking at it now, hanging on the side of the armoire, and it still has a little bit of power. It's the kind of thing someone who "really has it together" wears. Ready for anything, no vulnerabilities, redundancies on every axis of comfort. We lost it in Portland, in the home of the engineer for my dh's band he's producing, and it stayed on the hook perhaps doing a little secondhand smoke on occasion, it's well-meaning birthday check unmolested.

What is it like to have this thing back in our lives? It's a little like knowing we can turn a new page, that the past is persistent and the present it incredibly malleable. It's also now turned into something to live up to. The coat says, you can go outside even though it's so crappy outside you want to scream. It says, I am made for this. Bring it on. And while I still have not lived up to this coat fully – nor cashed the birthday check – I look at it on the hook and am glad it's there. The trophy coat, a preposterously indulgent prize awarded for valor on the battlefield of personal possessions.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 03:49 PM | Permalink

I have been teaching my Dad to use ebay. The purpose is so he can start selling things on his own. We followed the advice of others and started buying things to build up his feedback rating. I picked out something for the baby – a vintage fisher price family houseboat – and paid him back for buying it for me. One thing we worked on is choosing a friendly id. Mine is not so friendly – it's just egrigg – but his is a variation of seattledad which is appropriate and friendly for future buyers I hope. You would cut someone named seattledad some slack if he only had one feedback so far, right?

Then I realized the main thing he wants to get rid of is books. Mom is his broker. She wants to bring some over here – we have hardly any purchased books in the home – and I had to lay some ground rules. No books about death. No Russian war sagas where everybody dies. No civil war epics where the limbs get sawn off and then the folks with any arms left get to help out sawing off the rest. I figured that would limit quite a few candidates from the collection. She still brought over a few.

So, all edicts aside, I was reading "Stuffed – Adventures of a Restaurant Family" by Patricia Volk and of course it turns into cancer watch at the very end like most family stories do. I was caught by the irony of being willing to read THIS story of death even though I had supposedly forbidden the subject. Writing about death must be so healing, it explains why so many people have done it. I could almost make out the interview of Joan Didion "Year of Magical Thinking" in the car, before swirling down to level F where all radio is static and ye had best get ye-self upstairs to work. But the part I listened to was the essence of gravitas. So I'm reading Ms Volk's account, and actually interested. Her dad was rude, but wonderfully so, the days measured in minutes, the TV absorbed like a nutritive concentrate. Her ability to show her feelings to her dad was extraordinary and heroic, if completely token, superfluous, and dismissed in his mind. She mentions something later:

"I don't like lasts. Even if I am moving to an apartment with more room, a bigger and better apartment, I'm sad leaving the old place. 'This is the last time I will cook oatmeal on this stove.' 'This is the last time I will use this tub.' 'This is the last time I'll come home from this particular job with my children racing to this particular door.' 'This is the last time I'll wake up with the sun hitting my face this particular way.' It doesn't matter if what I'm headed for is better. It's about a thing disappearing. Something will never be again."

This paragraph had more to say about love and loss to me than the detailed account of her dad turned cancer patient. We all resist change, place some security in the fact that change is certainly optional and we only pick the parts out that we really want to change in the first place, so is somehow within our control too. The reality is very different. This week we say goodbye to the kid's school who have helped define us as a family since 2001, the school that even now we have a chronic problem living up to any sort of parenting ideal, not to mention the financial ideal of writing the check every month and having it clear. We are saying goodbye to this school which has helped shape our family and saying hello to something new. 2 new schools this year, one to finish up preschool nearer to my new job, and the other to start kindergarten. I can't really explain to either son how everyone can love them so much and yet still, we will not be seeing these people at anywhere near the frequency we have been accustomed to. There is a death there. Like other deaths, particularly like ones involving parents, the surviving child has mixed feelings of never quite having lived up and now perhaps that chance is gone. We bring cupcakes to stuff this feeling of inadequacy, to stuff the undeniable stress of change, and stuff the impossibility of something that was once so persistent can now actually be gone. Those incongruities must be stuffed away, buffered by a full stomach and television and the memories of people who have no incentive to love you but somehow still do.

Anyway. I still won't let books about death into my home. At least not intentionally. There's just too many little deaths to go around.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 03:43 PM | Permalink

Hooray for entry number 400! And in the style of many others in the critical years, I assault your senses with yet another set of updates.

Goal this weekend is to move into my office. With, like, pictures and everything.

Totally overwhelmed today by the public school fair held at the John Stanford center for international educational excellence and emerging thought processes. Or something. Very loud. I had flashbacks to CES back when CES was cool. Ahem, I mean back when *I* used to go to CES. Booths, booth babes, nametags, chaos. I'm glad they weren't selling Starbucks because I was all over the choco-grahams like they were going to save my life. The good news about that is there was only three bucks of a dent in the "entertainment" envelope. Yes, we're back to envelopes.

Social life is very warm. I love how small a world this is, and people seem to know people. I love how the internet made this happen as well as good old fashioned gettin old. I love how people I don't see every day are reading the same books as me. I love how everyone wants to get this one right - this one life right - bringing to mind the "life is not a dress rehearsal" cliche. In a good way.

Considering going to Northern Voice. I have sworn to do the budget first, even though it is only eighty bucks or something. But still, it looks like loads of fun, and with God and birth certificates on my side it should happen. Speaking of budget, we are hosting the cupcake event for our kids leaving their current "school" (daycare. thing we are spending money on that could be used for a second home.) next Wednesday. Very emotional time for us. Urban kids, urban parents, now changing to be ultra-protected Bellevue suburbanites who never cross the street. That's OK, who can manage it anyway with the heels.

With all the extra time I expect to be spending in the office because I don't have to commute downtown at 4:15pm, I will be moving in an air mattress sleeping bag and pillow for under my desk. Other people have this, why not me. Have to figure out how to turn off the automatic lights though.

OK, more than you needed to know as usual. Salud!

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 06:34 PM | Permalink