Dear Pann,

Just over a month ago, our 10th anniversary came and went, without either of us taking much notice. Oh sure, we knew it was happening, and we wished each other a happy one, and we received well-wishings from families and friends. But on the actual day of our anniversary, I was traveling home from a business trip, you were recovering from two weeks of running summer camp (with a visit from your nieces in the middle), we were getting ready for the onslaught of OT, summer freelance work, Cammie’s trip, and the kids being home all the time, not to mention Carla’s birthday, and we just didn’t have time to celebrate properly.

I’m hoping we can make up for that during our upcoming vacation. I’m doing my damnedest to tie up loose ends before I go away, so we can really enjoy the vacation when it arrives. I’m hoping we can take some time for ourselves during that trip to celebrate:

• 15 years since we met
• 14 years since our first date
• 13 years of living together
• 10 years of marriage
• 8 years of parenthood
• 2 wonderful children

…along with all the other, more mundane aspects of our lives– too many meals, school drop-offs, loads of laundry, doctor visits, and so forth to count.

After all this time, it’s important to say that I love you more than ever. And I think you and I have gotten better and better at having a life together, and understanding where we each are coming from. Our communication has improved. We’ve gotten better at asking each other for what we want. Not to say that we are perfect– we both have our flaws, and they come out most acutely when we are trying to communicate about our feelings. But we’ve gotten better over the years at figuring out how to do this, and I can only see us continuing to get better.

It’s been exceedingly difficult watching you go through the pain of depression. I wish there was some way I could reach into you and take away your pain. My heart bleeds every time I see you struggling with self-doubt, self-blame, and self-hate. I’m confident in you, I forgive you, and I love you– I wish you could do the same.

Our lives are going to continue to change, and it’s clear that figuring out how to make everything work is going to be an ongoing challenge. But after 10 years of marriage, I know I want to keep facing those challenges with you.

Happy anniversary.

All my love,
Drob

1. Dr. S. (her former dentist)
2. George Bush 
3. smoking people, cigarettes, cigars
4. being called names
5. getting eye drops
6. peas and beans
7. getting hurt
8. getting scratched or bitten by a cat.  Or by anyone.

Howdy folks, Drob here. Remember me? Will you all excuse a non-seasonal post from the quieter half of this blog?

Two things have happened this week which have caused me to spend a lot of this pre-holiday weekend thinking about my job. First, I just got a big end-of-year bonus. Second, I just saw a listing for a job I think I might like. And I’m full of doubt about whether I should apply for this job.

I’ve been working for my current company for 7 years. I’m a programmer and computer systems guy, and then got promoted to manage my group, which now consists of me and six others. So, I write code, set up computer systems, and manage other people who do the same thing.

I really like my job. I like programming, but I’ve gotten to the point in my career where there are certain computer tasks that I’ve just done enough times that they hold no interest for me anymore; being able to now delegate those tasks and focus on the ones that ARE new and interesting to me really helps me maintain excitement about my job. I think I’m a pretty good boss. I’m pretty good at communicating technical concepts to non-technical people, and business concepts to technical people, which I think is a real asset in my position.

I also like my company. The company is big enough that there’s a fair amount of novelty in the situations we find ourselves in– there’s always something going on, a new challenge to deal with. But it’s small enough that I know nearly everyone who works for my company– certainly I know everyone who works at corporate headquarters by name, and I know many of the people at other locations also. I like my boss, and most of the other partners in the company. And did I mention they just gave me a bonus?

But even though I like my job, after seven years, I’m starting to think about whether this place is all I want out of my career. A few thoughts about this:

• This is the only “real job” I’ve ever had; I worked various temporary and part-time jobs in high school and college; after graduation I ran a business for a while, then took this job.
• I’m well paid in my current job, and I get decent raises on a fairly regular basis. However, I suspect that I could be making substantially more money if I went and did the same thing in a different kind of company.
• I hate commuting. Honestly, this is only barely a negative on my current job– although I don’t like my current commute, there are many other jobs where the commute would be much worse. And, although I don’t like the travel time, my job is in a vibrant city neighborhood. I would be less happy with a shorter commute that terminated in some anonymous suburban office park.
• The prime jobs in my industry are not in Philadelphia, they’re in other cities. But, we are staying put in Philly for the foreseeable future– we love the neighborhood we live in, and the school our kids go to, and being close to our families.

So all of those factors are in the mix in my thinking about my job. But in addition to those factors, there’s an elephant in the room. Actually, there are two elephants, a small one, and a large one.

Here’s the small elephant: My company’s business is selling DVDs. We sell them wholesale, we sell them on the internet, we sell them in stores. Boy howdy, do we sell DVDs.

I’m passionate about computers, and the internet, and the power of these technologies to make people’s lives better. But I’m not passionate about the retail industry, or about selling DVDs. I’m not even passionate about film. So I’m just selling widgets. And I feel like my life would be more fulfilling if my job ultimately served some goal I felt passionate about.

I do feel passionate about feeding my family, and sending my kids to a great community-based independent school, and my job does serve those goals. But still.

Okay, I’ve been edging around it long enough, here’s the larger elephant: what’s on a lot of those DVDs we sell is porn. Not all of them; maybe half, give or take. In some ways, this is the same issue as the smaller elephant. In addition to lacking passion and excitement about porn, I’m somewhat embarrassed and ashamed of this aspect of my job. I can’t talk about many of the products we sell in polite company. Every time I tell someone where I work, I wonder whether they think of the company as a porn source, and whether they judge me for it. And if I ever do decide to move on, will this aspect of my work make it harder for me to get other jobs?

Beyond that, as a parent, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that my job is not kid-safe. I have great memories of going to work with both of my parents between the ages of 7 and 16. Those experiences were great for me as a kid, and helped me form a comfort level with what different kinds of workplaces were like and what kind of work I might like to do when I grow up. It disappoints me that I won’t be able to do that with my kids. C is 7 now, about the age when I started to be interested in my parents’ jobs. This seems like a small concern in the scheme of things, but it bugs me.

So all of these things have been rolling around in my head. I’m not itching for a change, and it would be really easy to live with the status quo. I’m not sure the perfect job for me exists– I think that most jobs which would be more fulfilling would be unacceptable in other ways. It’s hard to know what I should settle for.

But anyway, there’s this one job. I don’t actually know too much about the job, but it looks interesting. I don’t know how much it pays. I don’t know the company, but at least it looks like they are doing work that definitely intersects with some things I really do feel passionate about. The commute would be about the same as my current commute. I suspect that my qualifications are not quite ideal for this job and my salary requirement would be too high, but I don’t know that for sure… I should really send in my resume and see if I can get an interview. I’d need to update my resume, and write a decent cover letter– but doing that would take about the same amount of time that I’ve just spent writing this blog post. So why am I so reluctant to do it?

Okay, I know this isn’t a particularly original or profound observation, but socks are a real pain to keep track of.

This has driven me crazy for years, but now that there are 4 of us? Aaargghhhh!

Sorting socks sucks. And trying to get out the door in the morning when neither I nor the 7-year-old have a matched pair in the drawer? Gah!!!!

I just took a load of laundry out of the drier and sorted it. It had 4 matched pairs of socks, and 7 mismatches. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? The socks were all together when they went into the basket, weren’t they? This isn’t even a particularly bad load of wash– it didn’t have much of the kids’ clothing in it. Those loads generally have many more mismatched socks.

Has anyone, in the history of the world, found a way to deal with this that isn’t crazy-making?

And now for something completely different…

I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep enough last night– late night spice-purging activities kept both of us up late, and although I had the most leisurely day at work in recent memory, I’m still feeling pretty exhausted at this point. But, I promised a post on self-help books today, so here it is.

A lot of people ridicule the self-help book industry. This is partly deserved– many self-help books paint themselves as The Solution to All of Your Problems. And of course, no book is going to solve all of anyone’s problems. Not even Panaceas for Complete Idiots.

But I’ve found these books fairly helpful over the years. I won’t go through the whole list of books– maybe some time when I’m less tired– but we’ve read books that have helped us be better parents, helped our relationship with each other, helped our relationship with Pann’s crazy parents, and helped us learn new skills.

One of the skills I’ve learned from these books is organization. Actually, I’d say I’ve learned several different skills, from several different books. I started this particular odyssey about 10 years ago and I’d say I read about one book on organization or time-management per year. Here are some of the best:

• From Julia Morganstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out I learned about organizing rooms and space and stuff.
• Barbara Hemphill’s “Taming the Paper Tiger” taught me some useful skills for managing the piles of paper that build up in my life (not linked because the version I have is out of print; she’s now got two separate Paper Tiger books, which I haven’t read).
• Organizing for the Creative Person, a book which deals with some of the special challenges that we creatives run into when we try to get organized– and some creative solutions to those problems.
• Also from Julia Morganstern, Time Management from the Inside Out taught me to map out my time, set up a schedule, and manage it.
• David Allen’s Getting Things Done, a favorite of geeks everywhere, taught me to manage the incoming demands on my time and maintain a comprehensive set of to-do lists.

All of these books have taught me skills, and I see their authors as mentors: people who realized “I understand something that’s difficult for other people; let me write a book to teach what I know.” I could imagine that if I knew these people personally, they could help me get even more organized than I am now.

Which brings me to this year’s book, on the topic of decluttering. As Pann already mentioned, we’re reading It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh. Clutter is definitely our biggest organization problem at the moment– a variety of factors have caused to us to compress our possessions into an ever-smaller number of rooms, while new things seem to keep coming in the door each day, and oh baby do we have clutter.

It’s All Too Much is, I should be clear, a pretty good book. Reading it, I definitely picked up some lessons that will help us have a less cluttered house– one thing is that I’m kind of pumped right now to get all of our books to fit on the bookshelves by the end of the year. Walsh makes the excellent point that if you claim something is important to you, you should treat it like it’s important to you, not shove it in the back of a closet. The book has good insights, and like the others above, we’re learning from it. It’s already having a positive impact on our lives.

The problem, though, is that Walsh comes off as kind of an asshole. Unlike the other authors I mentioned above, I can’t imagine talking to Walsh about my clutter problems. The style of his book is “I’m not going to accept any of your nonsense excuses for why you need to keep this clutter. Out it goes!” And while that can be a kind of liberating thing to say to yourself, it isn’t really the attitude I want from a self-help book.

Interestingly, Walsh seems to have it in for self-help books:

I walked over to their bookshelf and started scanning the titles. There were diet books. Exercise books. Self-esteem books. Parenting books. Finance books. Marriage books. Books on how to live better, happier, richer, fuller lives. It was a complete library of self-help books for every issue a family might have…. “You think the state of this house is no big deal, but look at all the problems you’re trying to solve.” (pp 5-6)

An odd attitude from the author of a self-help book.

Decluttering is great. It’s liberating, it makes you more at peace with your home, your family, and your stuff. But it is not The Solution to All of Your Problems. It’s just one more skill. A skill you can learn from a book.

Those who know me might scoff, but I’m fairly well organized.

I’ve started this post about four times, and I can’t write that sentence without following it up with a paragraph of defensiveness. I’m going to physically restrain myself, and stick to my guns on this statement. Here, I’ll say it again: I’m fairly well organized.

There are a couple of reasons I’m well organized. One is that I’m on medication, and therefore my attention deficit disorder isn’t as bad as it was when I was unmedicated. This goes a long way.

However, the other reason is that about 10 years ago I realized this organization stuff was something that I don’t have a natural aptitude for. And I realized it was going to be important to my life to keep both my stuff and my time organized. This turns out to be particularly prescient, since when I had this realization I wasn’t even really thinking about having kids.

It turns out that organization is a skill that can be learned. Although I’m by no means perfect at it– and I have a deep and abiding jealousy for people who are– I’ve managed to acquire some skills at time management, at organizing my space, and at keeping the enormous piles of paper at bay (you just feed them raw meat twice a day and they stay away from your family members.)

So this is the first in a series of posts on this topic. Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little bit about my love-hate relationship with self-help books.

TBH has a post about how tired she is from all her cooperative commitments. Like TBH, Pann and I are members of lots of cooperative organizations. We’re members of two cooperative schools (one for each kid), a food coop, and a babysitting coop. I feel sure I’m missing at least one organization, but that may be all of them at this point– Our kids also went to a cooperative camp but have since outgrown it. And I’m actually deliberately leaving out two organizations that are structured as co-ops but don’t have an explicit work requirement for all members (although we do participate anyway).

I should be clear that I love these organizations. I don’t regret joining them. My older daughter’s school, in particular, is a real source of community for me, and I also think they provide great value– more on this later.

That said, I feel TBH’s pain. I’ve been thinking a lot about the energy we put into co-ops and whether it’s worth it. Making this work for a family is sort of a martial art, something you get better at with time and hard practice; it was a lot more overwhelming a year ago. I think we’ve gotten a little better at this.

Here’s a quick braindump of some of the things I wish someone had said to me when I first got involved with so many cooperatives around the time our kids reached toddlerhood.

1. Have a time-management system. I think lots of parents, coming from working a single job and being the master of the rest of their time, are not prepared at first for the number of evening and weekend commitments you start to have once your kids are in school. Being part of coops magnifies this. You’ve got to have a good system for keeping up with all those commitments, to make sure you can be in the right place at the right time, to make sure you don’t double book yourself, to help you predict your own energy levels, and also to make sure you’re covered for your own kids.
   
   Pann once accidentally committed to coop at two schools at once, but beyond that we’ve also run into a few situations where we both needed to be somewhere (cooping, a meeting, whatever) but we never got around to making arrangements for our own kids while doing that. (We’ve gotten better about this one, but we still mess it up occasionally).
   
2. Find out whether your cooperative organizations have options where you can do work with your family or kids, instead of taking additional time away from them to do coop work.
   
   My family spent 2 hours picking vegetables at the local cooperative farm this morning, for credit at our food co-op. Although we had to get up REALLY early, it was something we were able to do as a family, and get 4 hours of credit (for two adults) in two hours of time. And the kids hung out with us and had a good time too!
   
3. More generally, can you choose the work you do? If so, this goes a long way toward making it all less draining. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, but sometimes you do. I’ve tended to move my school cooping commitments toward administrative and technical stuff, which is valuable to the school, but takes less out of me than chaperoning on field trips. I still go on field trips when I feel like it, but it’s not because I have to do it. Schools have other needs– If you’re a writer, can you fulfill some of your obligation to the school by writing an article about the school and getting it published in a local newspaper? Or something else that uses your unique skills?
   
   One parent at my older daughter’s school recently shared with me that he started out doing fundraising, and then switched over to helping the art teacher keep her materials organized. He hated the fundraising, but he loves working with the art teacher and has now been doing it for nearly 10 years (two kids in the school through 8th grade); the change of job made all the difference in his satisfaction with the cooperative organization.
   
4. For babysitting coops in particular, consider the age of the children and what they’re going to be doing in addition to simple logistical concerns.For me, there are certain plum sits I’ll take anytime they come up, and others that require a lot more thought. For example:
   • Sits which start after I’d get home for work, and end after bedtime. Assuming the kids are reasonably good about going to bed when they’re supposed to and reasonably okay about having a babysitter put them to bed, these can be great because once the kids are asleep, I can get my own work or reading done.
   • Having a kid the same age as one of mine come over for a “playdate”– the kids do a lot of the work. Sure, there’s supervision involved, but I find this takes a lot less energy than many other kinds of sits.

   These aren’t the only sits I’ll take, but for other kinds of sits, it takes a lot more consideration– how badly do we need that credit? Am I likely to be really exhausted at that time? Will it be taking me away from something I want to do with my family?

5. Is the coop work distributed equitably in the family? For the coops we’re part of, Pann and I try to participate somewhat equitably. This really helps avoid burnout on the part of either parent. It isn’t always possible– for example, our younger daughter’s school requires classroom cooping around once a month from 8:30 to 12:00, and while my work schedule is flexible; it would be really hard for me to do half of that, so I end up doing it once or twice a year and Pann does the rest. However, I make up for that by doing other parts of the commitment for that school.
   
6. Are you taking on too much? Sometimes these organizations need specific additional help, and they just know you’d be the best person for the job. If you don’t have the time or energy for it, it doesn’t matter how good you’d be, you shouldn’t take it on. Doing so can only lead to burnout. And ultimately, if you’re burned out, the job doesn’t actually get done well.
   

At the end of the day– is the value we get from the co-op worth the energy we put into it? Co-ops allow us to save money on a product or service by performing some of the labor involved in delivering that product or service. In other words, they allow us to trade time for money. There are other ways to trade time for money (”work”, “do it yourself”, and also “doing without”) and sometimes those other methods provide better value than the co-op does.

On the other hand, sometimes the cooperative organization provides qualitative value that can’t be purchased elsewhere (community, better quality food, better quality school, babysitters who aren’t teenagers, etc.) so that has to be taken into account. But my personal store of energy also provides me with qualitative value that can’t be purchased elsewhere, and I need to consider that every time I take on a cooperative commitment. It comes down to honoring our own energy, something that can be exceedingly difficult to do as a parent.

September always feels like the beginning of the year to me.  I don’t know if it’s because this is when I have my birthday– I turned 32 on Friday– or if it’s just that I’ve never managed to escape the academic calendar, but September always seems to be the time when I pass on to the next stage of things.  There’s a feeling of tiredness, coupled with a feeling of renewal and new opportunities.

The academic calendar may have a lot to do with it.  There has never been a time in my life when I haven’t been touched by the school year– from birth!  My parents were grad students, then my dad was a college professor, then I was in school, then Pann worked at a college, and then we had kids going to school.  So maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that September always feels like the beginning of a new year.  But it does. These days, I’m teaching continuing education courses at a local college, and my older daughter goes to a wonderful school that in many ways is a center of community and social life for our family (our younger daughter will start there next year).

And then there’s my birthday.  Thirty-two somehow feels important to me in a way that 31 and 30 didn’t.  Why?  I can’t tell you, but I all of a sudden I feel like I need to start thinking about the rest of my life.

Coincidentally, last week was the culmination of a huge work project for me, one that I’ve been working on since January.  Part of the feeling of new opportunities comes from having just finished this project– is now the time to start thinking about a new stage in my career?  I like my job, but it has its drawbacks.  (I started to rant about my job, but I think I’ll save that for another post.  You’ll thank me for not opening up this can of worms any further here).

Anyway–  I had a lovely birthday weekend.  Pann and I went out on Friday night, left the kids overnight with their grandparents, and had a very nice evening:  dinner, theater, walking around town, dessert, and then home to spend the night together without the kids.  Today I had a lovely day to myself; Pann took the kids to a street fair with a friend of hers and I went out to the garden to water, and harvest the basil, marigolds, and pumpkins.  I think Pann’s mentioned that our community garden is at a swim club.  The pools are closed for the season, but the grounds of the club open for a couple of hours on the weekends for anyone who wants to use the facilities for picnicing, gardening, sports, or other activities.  Today I was the only member there, and it was lovely; our swim club is on 17 acres of woods, and today there were groundhogs, bunnies, and many birds around.  We don’t usually see quite so much wildlife when the place is full of swimmers!  So I had a nice, quiet couple of hours in the garden.

So as I sit here, on Sunday night, oops, Monday morning now, at the beginning of another year of my life, I’m thinking about my love for my wife and kids.  And I’m thinking about our home, and my job, and my other job teaching, and the communities we’re part of.

And as all these thoughts are swirling around in my head, the question that keeps coming back to me is:  What next? Which isn’t a bad question to ask yourself, at least once a year.

Thanks for the welcome, Pann.

Summer is over. C has started school, we’ve got a pumpkin on our front steps, and at 6pm the light is already fading. But it isn’t quite gone– today is a perfect, lazy, Indian Summer day, and we’re just bumping around the house. We had brunch with my parents this morning, then came home. Since then, Pann has been getting some fall plants into the home garden; I’ve done a few little jobs around the house, caught up on some prep work for the class I’ll be teaching this Fall, and took a brief nap. The kids are doing their own things, wandering from their rooms, to playing in the garden with their mom, to playing on the computer. Like I said, it’s been a lazy day, and I’m really enjoying it.

It will be my last one for a while. After a blissful August with almost three weeks of vacation, tomorrow my work is going to get quite intense, and stay that way for the whole week. Next weekend we’ve got plans all weekend long. September is intense, and this particular September is shaping up to be more intense than usual– and in fact, now that I’ve convinced Pann to let me post here, this may be my only post for a week or two; it’s just going to be that busy.

Sometimes we talk about simplifying our lives. I think it’s problematic in our civilized world to figure out exactly what simplification really means, but there’s no argument about the fact that our lives get too complicated from time to time. On the other hand, I think there’s an element in my personality that likes that complexity, likes variety, likes to have a lot of irons in the fire. I was never somebody who could do one thing until it was over and then move on to the next; I’m just not wired that way. I need things to overlap; I need the excitement of a new project to get me through the tedium of finishing the old one.

But as summer fades, it’s nice to lay back, enjoy the slow pace, and be low-key for a while. We’re both overwhelmed, but today for a couple of hours, I think we’re successfully avoiding the feeling of it.