2009 has been rather dramatically unpleasant for us. I even kept a list of reasons why:

high-risk and expensive pregnancy
extended and expensive miscarriage
weird and expensive horseback-riding situation
moved
moved really quickly
got rid of most possessions
left friends
left good teaching job
Husband traveling all the damn time to Europe
Husband commuting five hours every week
Husband work stress
my work stress
realtor problems
lost lots of money selling house
cat Tang died
Husband car accident
moving to Sweden stress and worry
roofing scam
lemon dishwasher
driveway problems
lost my glasses
constant construction/yardwork etc. noise in neighborhood
beach house living weirdness with mom
chronic arthritis pain
grandmother’s Alzheimer’s decline
granddaddy’s strokes and decline
money continually going away
two speeding tickets
broken washing machine, useless dryer

Nothing on here about Little Girl, though. So that’s good. On to 2010! It has its own massive set of risk factors, but I guess it might be okay.

It’s the end of the year and it seems like a good time to clean out my Drafts folder again and try to figure out, from cryptic notes and sometimes absent titles, what I meant to post about but did not. Usually very sensibly:

Ersatz
It starts like this, “A friend of mine, way overeducated for it, is a nanny. Her current employer has gotten all whack-jobby so she wants something new but, due to the above-mentioned whack-jobbiness, she’s nervous about” and there I stopped, below it posting a redacted version of all the back story my friend wanted to me to use while I was being her fake job reference. I had no problem with the lie: the details were what made me nervous. I’ve actually been a fake reference before, for a friend who was applying to the police force in NYC! Neither time was I called. It’s been a bit of a let-down, really. I remember once when I was doing hiring for my social work job, I called a reference and it turned out, I could tell from the answering machine, that the applicant was using her roommate as her “former boss.” The best part of this story is the social work agency was so hard-up for employees they hired the unsavvy fake-reference lady anyway.

Sick
“Omigod, I have some horrible illness that just causes high fever (102!) but no obvious symptoms (no coughing, sniffling) so no one is sympathetic. Not that it matters, since Husband had to go out of town for work again anyway. I’ve got my fever down to 100 so at least I no longer feel like I am near death.” That was a really brief illness because I think I was better within six hours of starting that draft. But I really did feel bad!

Correct
“I correct other people’s children.” Yep, it’s true. I was probably going to to on to describe specific incidences of this behavior. Hm, maybe that’s why we haven’t made any friends here.

Really good gossip about people you don’t know
Wow, I really wish I knew what this was supposed to be about! I love gossip!

Evolution
Aha, I’m not going to reprint it here, but you can imagine what follows: I’m trying, but not too hard, to be sympathetic to evolution doubters, and to explain why they are wrong. But that was way too overambitious for a post.

Passport
Oh, this was supposed to refer to this excellent post about infertility and expound on the comment I left there: “I’m a mother after infertility (2.5 years) and loss (one) and am more bemused by all the effortless fertility around me. However, the more I talk to people (and I am really open about the infertility–I always mention it in the kinds of conversations you mention above) the more I see many other people have had those problems, and if not those, then others. And I don’t feel like I am less a member of the motherhood community. Honestly it makes me feel MORE like one–like for crying out loud I WORKED to be here, I deserve it. Now when I was going through infertility, I was totally miserable and uncomfortable with fertility, but now I’m like, eh. And I’ll be honest about something else: I am a little happy that I am not so fertile and don’t have two under two accidentally now or whatever. There are some benefits!”

Religion: I just don’t get it
Again, obvious. This is how I started: “As Steven Weinberg said, ‘With or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’ “

Awesome and Swedish all at the same time
Let them sing it for you!

What’s on her mind
A transcription of one of Little Girl’s monologues

(no title)
“At just barely three years old, Little Girl has caught on to irregular past tense verbs. “You bought that at the store, mommy!” When talking about our late cat Tang,” and that’s as far as I got. I guess writing about irregular past tense verbs is boring.

Help
Oh yes, I remember this. I wrote this whole long post about something from my past and then realized I’d already basically written that post before.

Seattle trip 2009
This is a bunch of pictures that I worked on uploading and ordering forever, before realizing I wasn’t uploading them to the private blog I keep for family.

Public work
Here we have a comparison of my two jobs and an inevitable complaint. I bet you are super-disappointed I never posted it!

Defending Sweden
Well, that certainly doesn’t sound like me.

Scary
Again something positive about Sweden. When did I write all these posts? “You know, none of this emigrating-to-Sweden business was intended to be analogous to the I’m-gonna-move-to-Canada musings many people professed during the Bush years, but it’s starting to be very troubling, even frightening, to me that right-wing domestic terrorism is, like, normal now. I feel compelled to point out that you don’t see liberals killing people who work perfectly legal jobs that they nonetheless don’t approve of. These hate-filled murderers are, to my mind, unable to cope with modernity, so act out in primitive ways.” But that’s a little mean, so I didn’t post it.

Mice on bikes*
?????????

Good things
You know me, so surely you aren’t surprised I didn’t have any actual text to go with that optimistic of a title.

The Handyman
I was writing about the handyman at the beach house, and how, in Husband’s absence Little Girl was getting attached to him and how sweet that was, but then I got all pissed of at how slowly he works and didn’t want to say anything nice.

You can’t bring it with you
Things the internet says you can’t buy in Sweden:
Adult-size broom
Large trash cans and garbage bags
Underwear if you wear over a size 10
Baby powder
Chocolate chips
Ziplock baggies
Baking soda

Posting to other blogs
Before my camera broke, I was getting really into taking pictures of things and sending them into snarky blogs. Like this one about apostrophes.

Okay, I am getting bored with this activity. There are 51 drafts left! If I posted as often as I began a post I would break the internet!

PS: Bloglines seems to be pretending my blog doesn’t exist again, but it really, really does!

So I haven’t been posting under the “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” guide to human communication. Just a lot of stress and illness here. Money worries. Work issues. Nothing major. It could be worse, but when did knowing that ever make anyone feel better? So my gift to you is not to moan biliously all over your holiday spirit, should you be possessed of any.

+++

Little Girl is doing well. She now likes to assign rotating names, like “Steeny, Ganina, Sito, and Loli” to her toys. Lately she’s been talking a lot about “Fweeden” and our various relatives there, with whom we’ve been talking on the webcam more often. She and her four-year-old cousin A have managed, characteristically of children, to play together despite physical and linguistic boundaries, and that’s neat to watch. Little Girl really has quite the imagination; she can be entertained merely by her own two hands for twenty-minute stretches at a time, in which they talk to each other (did you know her hands were boys?) and gambol about.

Originally, she has wanted a a remote-control helicopter from Santa. When we saw such an item in action at a family party, though, it was clear this would not be the right toy for her, and since she was kind of scared of the thing in close quarters, she agreed. Instead, she wanted a cow. Uh. So I suggested what I, as her mother, know would be a big hit with her–a baby doll you can wash in the tub–and, possessed of a high order of self-awareness, Little Girl wholeheartedly agreed. We “called Santa” to change her order. After quite a lot of research, I settled on one and ordered it and it came and I am SUPER, SUPER EXCITED about this dolly. She’ll love it.

She’s taken after my grandmother, who is constantly calling out “yoo hoo!” when she’s looking for my grandfather (which is her primary occupation, never remembering where he is if he’s not right in front of her). Now when Little Girl wants attention, it’s “hoo hoo! hoo hoo!” until you pay it. It always works since I find it so endearing.

Oh, and I discovered a solution to her tangly bedhead hair and the complaints I get when I comb it out: a braid at all times. My little girl has a hairdo! So grown up!

I guess it’s Sweden Week because here’s another post on the topic. Maybe that’s because it’s about to be MY LAST AMERICAN CHRISTMAS. Did you know they open their presents on Christmas Eve in Sweden? No running down the stairs in the morning to see what Santa left, no stockings and cinnamon buns, no spending the whole afternoon trying out your new things. And what about Santa? It’s barbaric! Of course we could still visit the US for Christmas (I confess to having been surprised to learn that planes can still fly when it’s snowing; of course I’m from Georgia, where any snow completely halts society) but my mother has been talking about how “neat” it will be that we can get together in various spots–like Italy–for future holidays. That sounds pretty stressful, I have to say.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I speak Spanish, and my brain has a nice niche for it under “foreign languages.” For many years now I’ve been sporadically exposed to Swedish, and can usually understand whatever the topic is and often more than that, but in terms of production I’m quite limited. And when I am expressing myself in Swedish and I meet a hole in my lexicon, my head helpfully supplies the Spanish word. A few times the opposite has happened if I’ve been hearing a particular Swedish word a lot in my studies or whatever. This phenomenon does not increase my fluency.

There are a few differences that really trip me up. In Spanish, verb infinitives (like “to go”) end in the letter R. In Swedish, it’s the conjugated verbs that end in R. And the pronoun “he” is “han” and “she” is “hon“–so the A goes with the masculine, and the O with the feminine. Since it’s the opposite in Spanish, I had to create a mnemonic: “hon” is what waitresses, who are female, say in diners to customers.

I keep trying to get out of doing Spanish translation at work so I can focus on Swedish but they really don’t have anyone else. There’s a good chance I, in fact, will keep this job after the move (I work remotely as it is) but I just can’t operate effectively in three languages, one of which I am struggling to acquire. It’s confusing!

We’ve had a roof leak much of the time we’ve been here. (It took me a while to figure it out; I just kept thinking Little Girl had had an accident, since the leak is in her bathroom). We’ve had it fixed. It still leaked. We had the roofers out again. It’s still leaking. Apparently the roofers suck. And I can’t get them back out here to work on our roof–they keep lying to me and blowing me off. (I feel like the person who complains that the food is bad, and the portions small. But I really want the same company to fix it because, you know, I already paid them to do so. Surely they know how and are just being lazy).

My keyboard has started randomly, intermittently, of its own volition, typing series of Ts. I have to reboot to get it to stop. It’s so frustrating. And kind of freaky.

Next week I have to go take care of my grandparents while my mother has a little vacation. I’m happy to help, but I’m not actually able to do so. I can’t get them to take their meds. I can’t get my grandmother to use her walker. She won’t let me change her (I know, change!) or dress her. My grandfather won’t let me cook for them. And Little Girl always gets into trouble for doing regular little-kid stuff. But if it makes my mom feel better, I’ll go. But it’ll suck. Mostly I don’t think my grandmother knows me anymore, and when she does, she just gets pissed I’m living at the beach house, and keeps asking me when we’re leaving. That or she, in her forgetting-how-to-walk Alzheimer’s way, will keep fleeing whatever room Little Girl and I are in, confused by us, I guess. And they’re both so complainy and sad. But we’ll go.

I have too much work and I can’t get it done and it’s performance review time so I can’t say no to tasks and I keep volunteering to do shit I don’t have the time or interest to do and it’s really stressing me out.

As per my mother’s request, we are getting a new driveway here. After much prep, the concrete should be poured tomorrow. I am not altogether thrilled with how it is turning out, though I think it’ll be fine. The problem is that it’s all on me since I’m the only one here. I had to get bids, I had to pick one, I had to get approval from the architectural review board, I had to work on the plans, I had to answer all the questions (“Where do you want the 4-inch sleeve?” Uhhhh…), I have to live through the work. Sometimes I really wish Husband were around more. For the roof situation, too. Partners are useful.

As a sub-topic to that, I am super-excited about the landscaping opportunities the new driveway (which is in a different place from the old one) will provide, but then we only have a few months more here and they’re mostly in winter so it’s sort of like the gardening version of blue balls–all anticipation and work and no payoff. And that’s no fun.

Our one friend here is about to have a baby and so we’ll be down to no friends at all, since obviously she’ll be in the newborn hole for at least six months.

I’ve been trying to eat really, really well, and tonight I was compelled to purchase donuts. I ate two. (Little Girl had one and a half). They weren’t even good. Now I’m irritated with myself.

Let’s see. There’s more, but they’re in the vein of “I have to move to a beautiful country with a high standard of living and omigod peanut butter is expensive there!” and “My toe hurts” so I’ll just stop.

Husband and I both work from home. He’s physically in the office three days a week, and I am physically in the classroom three hours a week, but for the remainder of the time for him, and about 20 hours a week for me, we’re laboring over our laptops at home. Of course, he works during normal business hours, while Little Girl and I go to storytime and put away the laundry and whatnot, and I generally toil away from bedtime (8 PM) until, occasionally, the early morning.

That totally sucks, by the way. Since Little Girl doesn’t nap, that means I don’t get that much-vaunted “break” during the day, and then I don’t really have any free time at night, because even when I cut myself some slack on my research job, I really ought to be preparing for my class, the curriculum for which is entirely new and up to me. I am often pretty tired, too.

Work is even busier for me right now (both jobs) as I’ve been asked to create and present an in-service to the other instructors on, basically, how to be as totally awesome an ESL instructor as I am. This comes as a result of my recent teaching observation, and is of course wonderful and flattering, but is a whole extra bunch of work and stressful to boot.

And things with my research job are basically fine, but right now there’s a joke about my doing “participatory research” into the use of a newly-popular mind-altering substance among the VPs (all I said was maybe we should add it to our list of substances youths abuse if it’s common enough even I’ve heard of it!), and plus I’m having to hammer out this contract with this really problematic vendor we have to use for stupid political reasons, and I also realized that I really ought to be higher up on the totem pole, job title- and compensation-wise, so I’m gearing up for my arguments on these points in my upcoming performance review.

So with all this my work is spilling into my days, which equals Little Girl in front of the television, because no other method of keeping her quiet during conference calls or careful parsing of phrases in important emails works as well. And that’s the exact opposite of how I want work to fit into my life. I want it to be this thing I do she knows nothing about, that affects her in no way, while nevertheless affording me monetary and self-esteem gains as well as an increased feeling of security and progress and, well, fulfillment in my professional and intellectual lives. I want to be an attentive full-time mother but also something of a career woman. Keep dreaming, Antropóloga.

The last few weeks have had me reviewing translated reports of research findings. For work, obviously; it would be a horrible hobby. Coincidentally, the last few weeks have totally sucked.

I’m comparing hundreds of pages of text that basically go like this, but I have to read them in English and Spanish:

Slightly more [redacted]-ineligible youth experience [bad things] due to [other bad things] (47.0%) than their [redacted]-receiving counterparts (40.0%), even though the difference in [how much of the bad thing] was not statistically significant (÷2 = 2.45, df = 1, n = 1,094, p > .05).

And I can’t skim, either, I have to make sure it’s exactly perfect in all APA format and numerical particulars, for both language formats, and also keep track of certain vocabulary and phrases we need to be consistent, and other really boring things. The project is ultimately related to providing needed services for physically and mentally ill children, but it’s hard to feel buoyed by helpfulness when I’m mired in how many spaces are after each period and how exactly did we decide to translate the 18-word name of the program again?

My favorite part is that no one is ever likely to read these documents. Even if they tried, readers would find them so boring and repetitive they’d give right on up pretty quickly. I bitterly envy all who have the option of not reading this stuff.

In my ESL class I’ve got a handful of au pairs from Europe and Latin America. I have to keep myself from pestering them with questions about their jobs because when they do share tidbits about lives with their host families it is beyond interesting to me–in fact, it’s downright titillating. It’s like some real-life Nanny Diaries, complete with distant, wealthy, indulgent parents (who have vacation homes just one hour from their regular homes!) with cross-cultural highlights and domestic service worker abuse. Plus it’s absolutely surreal when we can compare notes about the weird children’s librarian in the area who does storytime (since he just transferred from the library they go to to the one we do).

Tonight they were venting about how hard it is to have to work when they’re sick. What pricked my ears is that what they were calling work–taking care of little kids–is what I do for, well, definitely not work; actually, for me, my basically full-time mothering is pretty fun, and I certainly don’t get paid. It’s neither entertainment nor occupation. It’s just my life. It’s my default. And since it’s all under my control, if I’m sick, I can let Little Girl watch her favorite video, a Swedish thing about a cow and a crow that I imagine she would be happy to watch all her waking hours, for indeed all those waking hours, if I feel like it. I make a million little decisions all on my own every day about how to raise my little girl, and it’s all up to me.

But not for the au pairs. The parents, their employers, have decided, say, the kids can only 30 minutes a day, and since these women (really they’re all in their late teens, so I’m gonna have to change that to girls) have all the responsibilities of mothering and none of the agency, for often twelve hours a day, they have to work. They can’t have a lazy sick day. They can’t take off, because then who would watch the kids? Certainly the employers are too important to miss work. And the au pairs can’t decide how to discipline the kids. They can’t decide what activities they want to take the kids to. They put the kids to bed, even if the parents are there. And then they’re supposed to shut their caregiving selves off and sit quietly until their rooms until it’s time to make breakfast.

Once upon a time I was a nanny, though I didn’t live there, and I recall acutely the trapped, impotent feeling of waiting for parents late to arrive home from work. It felt so unfair when it turned out they’d just been out shopping, like they were using my time, even if it was compensated, against my will and contrary to our agreement. There were schedules that weren’t mine to follow, norms to uphold that went against my grain (like letting the baby cry herself to sleep). I felt guilty taking the kiddos to do the errands I had to that could only happen during the day, like the DMV. Whenever I looked at my old driver’s license pic I recalled, down out of the frame, that my hands were each gripped by a smaller one.

They had fun that day, playing I Spy in line, but they weren’t my kids. Perhaps their mother would have preferred that precious day of growing up to have been spent some other way. With Little Girl it’s completely automatic, not to say unavoidable, that she goes everywhere with me, and I think it’s good for her to participate in society along with me. But then she’s mine, and I’m her social director, and I love that our lives are entirely enmeshed, and I’m there alongside her taking in her experiences and helping her to understand them. No one else would or could, no matter how long the instruction sheet, replicate that with her. Certainly no one to whom it was just work, something they only have to do, not get to do.

I’ve yet to hear a caring word about their charges from the au pairs, or something that even individualizes the kids they’re with so many hours. The events of their daily lives are so alike to mine and yet their motivation and enjoyment so different, it’s like some skewed mirror that reflects back only a faint and colorless outline of my life with Little Girl. I guess my take-home message really shouldn’t be “non-parental childcare is bad” but rather “these au pairs and/or their situations are kind of shitty.” Still, learning how those girls feel about caring for other people’s children makes me so grateful I’m the one caring for mine.

And…we’re back. Actually, we were back in the wee hours of Friday, and then that day I had a big conference call, and then the start of my new class, the response at enrollment for which was so vast that I’ve been asked to tack on more hours to accommodate the students. And we did so, so much on our trip to Seattle–mountains, beaches, skyscrapers, libraries, fountains, attractions, parks–that it’s a bit overwhelming to recount. Then there’s the special comedic chemistry my father and I create when together, leaving us laughing so hard we’re almost silent, stomachs aching, buckled over, or on all fours, on the sidewalk, concerning Little Girl.

For example: During one morning walk through the neighborhood there was a donation truck for a charity for the blind making a similar route, driven by a gangly, hatted, plaid shorts-wearing guy listening to NPR. Some people had left collections of items out for him to pick up, and we passed one tidy box of electronics with a little hand-lettered sign: BLIND.

I peeked in: They’ve got some good stuff in there.
Dad: You could say you were blind if anyone asked.
Me: And I just walked by, and happened to see these items and the sign?
Dad: Maybe Little Girl is your specially-trained seeing eye toddler.
Me: That I carry? What, does she direct me by flinging her body in one direction or the other, causing subtle shifts in my movement?
Dad: Maybe she communicates with you with American Sign Language.
Me: Right, that makes sense, since I’m blind.
Dad: Look, they’re donating a picture! For the blind to put on their walls and enjoy!

A few months ago the company I work for was bought by another company and the named changed. Now there’s an acronym in front of the old name. For the life of me I have not been able to keep straight what the new name is. I know I keep saying it wrong in one way or the other, which is awkward on conference calls, and when the IT people recently had to reset my password and they used the company name in it and I was so completely unable to type that password correctly–was it CF or FC??? which one was capitalized???–and clearly too stupid to look it up, I ended up locking myself out of my computer from putting incorrect passwords in so much and I had to contact IT all over again. You can bet they love me over there.

So finally I created this handy mnemonic to help me remember the name of the place that employs me: if you say the acronym like a word, it can kinda sound like “isasyif.” Like “it’s as if.” So now I can remember my damn password if I just chant, “it’s as if this job leave me with no free time.” See? Easy as pie. And next time I update the password, which my company seems to ask me to do ever other time I log in, I’ll just use this handy technique, and create Ih2cmpatgt, or “I hate to change my password all the goddamn time,” which I mutter frequently enough I surely can’t forget it.

When Husband is abroad for weeks at a time, I frequently get emails like, “Place sucks, everyone is an idiot,” followed by phone talks that consist largely of his venting about his unhappiness about his work. Meanwhile I am torn between sharing what we’re up to with not wanting to make him jealous (e.g. “We went to the playground and then rode the free trolley around and then did some window shopping and then danced to some live music and then fed the turtles under the bridge and then walked on the beach with the dogs, and that was all after 5 PM!).

Everyone he’s surrounded by is really into this macho work-is-everything attitude that’s anathema to Husband. I mean, he’s brilliant and hardworking at what he does, but at the end of the day he wants to put it aside, go home at a reasonable hour, and be with me and Little Girl (if he’s here), or take some pictures, or play on the internet, whatever. But whenever he’s not working at home, and particularly when he and his co-workers are all in Europe, he has to put in 12-hour days and then several more each evening at bars, at restaurants, hanging around with these men, most of whom he not only is tired of seeing all the time but doesn’t even like to begin with. This evening (his time) he had to go out with the big wigs, despite plans he was excited about to photograph an abandoned mine, where they boasted about all the birthdays of their children they’d missed, made fun of the mere 38-hour work weeks of the staff there, and shared wisdom like, “You can always get another wife, but you can’t get a new career.”

Being the main money-maker around here, Husband just has to put up with that crap for now. But I’m not sure what he’s more excited about with regards to relocating: being closer to his family, or having an excuse to quit his job.

Where did you meet your husband?

Aha, well, there is an official answer and a truthful answer. The latter is more interesting of course. Online, but more than that: this was the early days of the chat service ICQ, where you could push a little button and it would raffle through all the tens of thousands of users online at that time, and connect you randomly with one. And I got him. I actually think that’s rather fatefully romantic but people tend to make funny faces when you say you met online, hence the pseudo-fake version.

Do you have a job already lined up in Sweden?

Indeed no. I originally went to grad school for what I went to grad school for under the theory that it would make me employable there, but it turns out I’ll have to do a few more years of schooling to complete their requirements, and then they’d still rather hire Swedes. More importantly, Husband doesn’t have a job there yet, either, but then he also hasn’t really looked. It should be several months before I get my residency permit and there’s no point looking before then. (It’s been suggested I keep my telecommuting research gig when I move, but I understand I’ll have to pay taxes in both countries, and that is just too appalling.)

What’s the funniest thing Little Girl has done recently?

She really likes for me to pretend to be the little girl and for her to be the mommy. So I ask her for something, like “Mommy, can I please have some milk?” and she always grins slyly, shakes her head, and says, “Not right now.” Cheeky.

Have you killed any tourists yet? Have you seen the ones who let their toddler wander off again?

The toddler-losers seem to be enjoying the TV in their rental most of the time, though I did see a boy from there biking around once. I have to remember not to scowl at the tourists when they come creeping by, checking out my neighborhood, dozens of people, from all appearances, crammed into their SUVs. I mean, they’re just trying to have fun, and there’s only so much fun to be had when you are spending all your time with all your blood relations. Plus, they’re on vacation, and I shouldn’t spoil their good times just because I’m having my regular life and am all pissed off about my internet connection problems or whatever.

I’d love to find out what freaks you out (and what you’re looking forward to) about your upcoming move.

I’ve got a long post on the freaking out part in Drafts, but what I’m looking forward to? Seeing what it’s like to be surrounded by family; the intellectual challenge of learning a new language and culture; making the house ours; hiking in the forest; not being in transition anymore, living in someone else’s home.

What’s your dream or passion? (career-wise or otherwise)

Oh man, I don’t know. I do like teaching English to non-native speakers. I feel it’s genuinely helpful to them in a nice, narrow way (as opposed to social work, when I was trying to fix every problem everyone had) and I’m good at it and enjoy it and I’m only slightly bothered by English language hegemony concerns. As for my dream, I’d love to travel a lot, but magically not have to worry about the logistics of it or be in airports.

What will you miss the most about living in the U.S.? What will you miss the least?

I’ll miss knowing how to get things done and being able to sound smart and competent when I speak. I won’t miss the extreme economic disparities and how willfully ignorant so many people can be. I will also miss the fried okra and I will not miss the pickled pigs’ feet in the stores.

Did Husband ever get over the hair debacle? :)

Ha, yes, pretty much, though he refused to let me tell his parents about it. :) His hair grows super-fast so the ponytail is fine now. I actually got a really stupid haircut so, while I made him look like 12-year-old girl, I now look like a 10-year-old skater boy, so I suppose we are even.

What’s your favorite music?

You know, I don’t listen to music a lot. In the car it’s usually books on CD from the library. Though (and this is something I will miss once in Sweden) occasionally it’s very fun to catch a series of songs on the radio you know and sing along, windows down, sun in your eyes. In the move, however, I did run into all these CDs of mp3s I had illegally downloaded back in college and I put them on my laptop, so now I’ll put on different things–80s pop, Caetano Veloso, Moby, Aqua, classical guitar, etc.–and Little Girl and I will dance around wearing my old clubbing clothes (and other, more child-appropriate items) from the dress-up box.

If you had $1 million, what would you do with it?

See if we could maybe live part-time here and part-time in Europe.

What’s your position on Obama’s health care plan?

I don’t understand the plan, though I have not really tried. I do think we need one–I want to live in a society where everyone has access to health care–and wish that experts, and not politicians, could hash out the details.

If you were a shoe what kind would you be?

Shoes are a huge problem for me, given my toe issues, so I have a hard time thinking of shoes without also thinking of pain. A sensible clog or something.

If you could be an expert at one thing what would it be?

Overcoming personal inertia. I am too apt to sit. But something useful to the world at large? I don’t know, quantum physics, so I could invent teleportation. That would be handy. And lucrative!

If your life was a million dollar movie what actress would be cast to play you?

I love Kate Winslet! Pick her!

To lower the tone: George Clooney or Brad Pitt?

George Clooney, only because whenever I think of Brad Pitt I get too distracted with trying to understand and imagine his personal/family life.

Where else apart from Sweden have you been in Europe?

My mom and I spent a summer in Ireland once, and I studied in Spain for a semester and visited Paris once for 36 highly memorable hours. Outside of Europe, I studied in Mexico and lived in China for several years as a small child. But while having traveled a bit makes moving abroad seem more possible, it, unfortunately, has also given me the knowledge that I can get really irritated by foreign ways. I’ll try to put that self-awareness to good use when we move and recognize when I need a dose of Americanity (by phone, video, internet, novel, or stomach) to even things out.

I was elected the one to fire the realtor, having the most experience in that area. Totally inappropriately, given my nonexistent relevant background, when I worked for a social services provider that contracted with the local Department of Family and Children Services, I did all the hiring and firing, of which there was a lot, as no competent people could or would stay in that job. I left after just five months or so myself.

I remember interviewing people when the electricity and phone had been shut off (due to nonpayment). And still people accepted the job. Right, if we couldn’t pay for the utilities, we’re definitely going to pay your cut, pocket change though it would be. The whole outfit was just ridiculously mismanaged; it operated out of the back of a super-shabby warehouse. The front half was the owner’s husband’s church, some sort of charismatic variety. The couple’s young kids ran around the office all day. The owner kept hiring people from her church who were just miserably unable to do the job, and I kept having to fire them. And too late I realized that the owner’s argument that I, with just a B.A. at the time, could perform psychological and drug/alcohol dependency assessments as I was being “supervised” by her, as she had a Psy.D. (later this turned out to be entirely not the case, when she told me to write her application to grad school), was flawed.

Lots of things were flawed. Like when I couldn’t get the state to care about finding out whether/how a five-year-old girl had herpes. Or when no resources were available for a family whose kids couldn’t attend school due to lice from living in a home with a mother who was a textbook trash hoarder (if I ever feel attached to some object I need to get rid of, I just need to think of that hovel. Shudder.) I remember the first night I was sent into the field to, it turned out, provide therapy to a family with domestic violence/sexual spousal abuse problems—in Spanish. Boy did I come home crying then. And all the sad, sad kids in foster care I shuffled to and fro doctors’ visits, listening to how they felt about their parents’ rights being terminated, and back to the overstuffed foster homes with “mothers” who thought it was funny to slam the door in our faces when we came back, pretending not to know us, not to let the children in.

Compared to all that, firing the histrionic, deceptive realtor–that was easy.

You may recall my mother insisted, as part of letting us live here, that we employ a housekeeper. I did and do find this insulting, irritating, not to mention unnecessary, given that I am perfectly capable of keeping house and this one isn’t even that big and is relatively easy to maintain, especially as we aren’t allowed to let the dogs in it beyond the kitchen. But I didn’t have a choice and said I would find one.

First I put up a Craigslist ad and got several responses. I had one nice lady come to the house and, though she talked me into paying her nearly twice what I’d posted and didn’t have her own supplies and had scheduling difficulties, I felt so guilty and uncomfortable about the housekeeper thing (too much women’s studies at college?) I hired her anyway. And then thought better of it and told her I had to find someone else. I made interview appointments with two more applicants; one didn’t show, and the next canceled the hour before. Finally I took the recommendation of a neighbor to try her housekeeper, who, like the first lady, asked for 20 dollars an hour. Look, I don’t quite make 20 an hour! (At my research job it’s 19.77 now. I do, or did, make more teaching. Just, you know, FYI). 20 dollars an hour! Christ.

But by this point, it’d been two months here and I still only had a fictional maid when talking to my mother, so I asked her to come today. I was going to have her do things I technically can do but likely will not, like cleaning the window exteriors. And now it looks like she’s not showing up, either. Sheesh. Why is this so difficult? I guess I’d be more pissed if I actually wanted some household help, but I’d at least like people to keep their appointments. *

There’s also a yardman, one my grandparents originally hired. He speaks Gullah, which I am slowly learning to understand, and requires Cokes whenever he comes by. My mother, and now I, pay him really just excessive amounts of money to do very little, as my mother insists I clean up the yard, instructing that “no palm frond should be on the ground more than 24 hours.” And there’s also a handyman, and thank goodness I don’t have to pay him, as he is jovial and talented but OH SO SLOW. I haven’t asked him to come as Husband is up for all that kind of handyman stuff, anyway. (For that matter, he also mowed the lawn.)

In conclusion, good help is hard to find, even when you don’t actually want any help.

* Okay, now she showed up, and I feel compelled the clean the crap out of the rooms she is not in.

It’s been years now since my dad was employed as a philosophy professor. But that’s what he is, and what he should be doing. (Really he’d be an excellent guru, and an even better cult leader, if he had the ambition and worked up a good shtick.) He was laid off about five years ago from his last university and though he applies, of his own volition and as part of receiving unemployment, to several jobs a week, it’s been nothing. For about a year and a half he worked in insurance in some paper-shuffling capacity, but he was, a year ago, laid off from that, too.

Every few months a job possibility that really excites him comes up, and it’ll be all he offers for his side of the conversation. He’ll talk about moving logistics, and tell me all about the program, and his hopes are always so high. And it never comes to anything. It pisses me off. What, they only want inexperienced, unintelligent candidates, is that it? There’s no one better than my dad at expounding on hermeneutics. No one! They are missing out! He oozes charisma and erudition. There’s a reason his grad students like to sleep with him. He is a captivating professor.

But I worry his teaching career may be over. He’s too old, he’s now been out of the game too long, his publications are not sexy enough. The possibility of just giving up and calling himself retired and trying to live on that pittance, though, well, I don’t know that his battered self-esteem can take it. He’s used to being master in the classroom, and he’s not ready to admit defeat and call it a day on a career he’d love to continue. Plus, he’d like health insurance.

There was a period of about six months when I was desperately trying to break into social work and nothing was happening. The combination of impotence and desire–not to mention need–I recall was a constant cloud, a shame and disappointment that was hard to shake. I’m so unhappy my dad has been stuck feeling like his life’s work, all his knowledge and consideration and talent for teaching, is now, for all practical purposes, worthless. Because he’s not.