Pertinent to my Interests

The Christmas Fruity Pebbles Commercial
How is it so good. My sister and I still text “ho ho ho I’m hu hu hungry” to each other regularly. This commercial is 100% the reason I always say yes when my kids request Fruity Pebbles.

My Buddy & Kid Sister
On the other end of the spectrum we have this commercial: as insipid as it gets. I can’t hear the word “buddy” without playing out this whole thing in my head and it’s kind of awful. Someone please carve this one out of my brain!

Puppy Surprise
Similarly, the word “surprise” seems to activate this song for me, but I find this one fun and I will sing it to my children and sometimes rework the lyrics to fit the occasion. My family thinks I’m delightful.

They Do Exist M&Ms Commercial
This one is from a little later in my childhood and I still love it. In part because it’s hilarious but also because the little red and green M&Ms are a big part of my childhood Christmas memories.

I try to keep my complaints to myself, mostly because I think people who complain all the time are really terribly boring.

Well, this is my time to let my boring shine.

I did not sleep well last night. I got sucked into Wikipedia and got way too excited about Hilda Petrie and the Sothic cycle and all of a sudden it was ten o’clock at night and everyone in my house was already asleep except for me.

I’ve noticed that if I go to bed at exactly the right time, I fall asleep pretty easily. But if I stay up just ten minutes too late, I will be unable to settle myself and I just roll around with my nighttime anxiety for hours. This is what happened last night.

I woke up this morning at 5 AM to find a text message from my lead clerk saying she wouldn’t be in this morning due to major plumbing issues in her house. This would be my first day in the office without her and although I have been looking forward to having a chance to shine like this my first thought was “I am way too tired for this today.”

Well, I made it through. A substitute walked out halfway through the day, and I had a kid laying in the office door screaming for ten minutes and there were major bus issues but I made it.

And then my car broke down on the way home from work. Well, it tried to break down. It was making awful, dying noises and I managed to limp it to our mechanic and take an Uber home from there. The place was packed with cars and all they could do was shrug and tell me they would try to get to it tomorrow.

I spent the next hour at home grousing to myself about how much time I spend just picking up and tidying. Seriously. I did not have a long list of chores this afternoon: water plants, scoop cat litter, finish laundry, trim BT’s claws, order new bras, grocery shopping. That was it, that was the list. But I spent at least 45 minutes just dealing with packages and cleaning up the kitchen and hanging up coats and piling up shoes and sweeping up crumbs from breakfast. And only then could I get started on my actual list of chores.

It sucks to live in a house where you are the only person who cares about keeping things tidy, and it especially sucks to care deeply about keeping things tidy.

And the weather. THE GODDAMN WEATHER. It was 81 degrees here today and I am so mad about it. We still have our window AC units installed and I’m really glad we do and that is just ridiculous. I am starting to really overreact about how hot it has been in Minnesota this month and thinking to myself that maybe I should just get rid of all our winter coats since we clearly won’t need them in the future. I probably will never see snow again in my lifetime, right?

And then I picked up my youngest and he announced that he had lost his school iPad but he was characteristically nonchalant about this. And then I picked up my oldest and he, too, discovered that he had lost his school iPad today, but he was characteristically devastated and has had approximately three full mental breakdowns over this just this evening alone.

And then I remembered that I was supposed to pick up a candy donation today for a school event later this week. I did not do this because I was busy limping my car to the mechanic.

And I guess I can do that… tomorrow? On the bus?

And tomorrow the lead clerk is out again. And we have three unfilled vacancies.

I can’t be the only one who turns to the spooky movie selection in October. But horror movies are so hit or miss, and I prefer a really particular ghost-y, suspenseful genre within the genre.

In no particular order.

The Others
This is one of my favorites. Underrated by the rest of the world.

Shutter Island
Not great for rewatching, but so well done and keeps my attention every time.

Smile
Disturbing, disturbing, disturbing. Only watch this one if you don’t need to sleep that night. I will not be seeing the sequel. This one maybe doesn’t count as a favorite because it’s too scary for me, but I am also very impressed by it.

The Shining
Did not fully appreciate this one until I watched it alone at the cabin one night and got totally freaked out.

The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2
Great movies with exactly the level of ghost-y suspense that I need.

Annabelle: Creation and Annabelle Comes Home
Nearly perfect.

Crimson Peak
The first time I saw this it was because my sister put this on and I didn’t understand what I was watching. I have rewatched it twice now and still don’t quite understand it, but it’s very good and very creepy. Great setting.

The Haunting (1999)
A favorite of teenaged Casey!

Poltergeist
Totally freaked me out when I was a kid.

The Exorcist
I saw this for the first time only last year; I can see why it caused such a sensation when it was released fifty years ago.

Scream
I dislike stabbings and gore–and Scream has plenty of that–but nostalgia wins out on this one. I rewatched it recently and can still remember so many lines!

The Haunting of Hill House (2018 series)
Technically not a movie, but great setting, great themes, great characters. Cannot recommend this one enough.

The Haunting in Connecticut
I don’t remember when I first saw this one, but this hits all my sweet spots for a good scary movie.

Paranormal Activity
Scary enough to freak me out, but not too scary that I couldn’t rewatch it.

Here I am, working half-time and having thoughts again.

It’s October, which means I have been living with the worst bedside calendar ever for ten months now. Ten months! I should have abandoned ship right away in February when it became clear that this calendar was not a winner, but here I am having already turned the page nine times.

Usually I pick something adorable for my bedside calendar. Like kittens, or hamsters driving tiny cars. One year I had a whole calendar of ducklings (that was a good year).

Vintage arts and crafts wallpaper is just not doing it for me.

I have been thinking a lot about age. At my temp job, and this new permanent job, I have found myself working closely with people who are younger than me. Not super young, but–you know–in their thirties young.

The last time I was a working person, back before kids, I was in my mid-twenties and I was surprised to be working with so many people in their mid-thirties.

Or no, that’s not right. I wasn’t surprised to be working with people in their thirties. I was surprised that I liked and enjoyed these people in their thirties. They were witty and fun and enjoyed going out to the bar as much as I did. People in their thirties… they’re just like us!

Of course, now I’m on the other side of my thirties! Hoping that I can still be witty and fun even if I don’t enjoy going to the bar as much as I used to.

I also wanted to recommend the documentary Ethel on Max, which I have already watched several times and will likely rewatch this weekend. Ethel Kennedy’s obituary in the New York Times is wonderful, but the documentary is even better.

I have a new job.

After four weeks of working full-time for the temp agency in a nearby school office, I officially started a new job on Monday.

This new job is:
also in a school office
permanent
half-time
even closer to my home than my previous job

I even have a real employee ID badge! And benefits!

I was enjoying the temp job at the other school. I actually really miss some of the people I met there. I liked being busy and I liked feeling useful, but everything that wasn’t my job was slowly falling apart: the house, the kids’ piano practice and homework, the meal planning and grocery shopping, the laundry. We went to the cabin one weekend during my full-time gig and two weeks later I still felt like nothing at home had recovered from that trip.

Now I feel like I can breathe again.

The new job is good. It does suck to have to start all over again after I had settled in so well at the last place. But I am getting to know some adults and getting to know some kids and the other clerk in the office is awesome and helpful and I’m really going to enjoy working with her (and being entertained by her) for years.

I am so grateful I landed this unicorn of a job, and am looking forward to a better balance in my life for the foreseeable future!

I have always been a terrible sleeper.

My worst years of sleep were probably in early elementary school; I would lay awake in bed for hours most nights unable to fall asleep. Back then I shared a basement bedroom with my sister, and I had a collection of stickers stuck to my bedside table. I made up elaborate stories for these stickers and would repeat them to myself several times each night while I waited for sleep to come.

Some readers of this blog will be familiar with my stuffed dog, Bernard, who was my nighttime companion for most years of my life. I had stories for Bernard too. By manipulating his ears and his tongue and his jowls I could turn him into different members of the Bernard family, and replay stories from their lives.

If I turned my head toward the wall, I could examine the Precious Moments wallpaper that my mother had hung when we first moved into that house. I created stories for the Precious Moments people on the wallpaper too.

Sometimes things weren’t so precious. At one point in my staring at the wall I started to consider the wall itself and then I thought about the dirt behind the wall and then my mind wandered to the cemetery that was just a half mile from our house. It occurred to me that if coffins could travel (and maybe they could?) a coffin could break right through the wall exactly at the level where I was now lying in bed.

I got pretty freaked out about that, and tried to not have that thought again.

One time, maybe when I was in preschool, we went to the store and bought 101 Dalmatians on VHS.

“Everybody who takes a nap gets to watch 101 Dalmatians after nap,” my mother declared. We eagerly climbed into our twin beds and within minutes my sister was snoring away. I stared at Bernard. I stared at the wall. I stared at my sticker collection. I could not fall asleep and the more time ticked away the more upset I got. I wasn’t going to be able to watch 101 Dalmatians! I was trying to sleep but I couldn’t! It was so unfair that my sister was so good at sleeping and I was so bad at it! Would I have to stay in here while she got to watch the movie?

After what felt like hours of fretting, my mother opened the door and announced it was time for 101 Dalmatians. Warily, I said nothing about my inability to take a nap. My sister, having been asleep herself, could not betray me. I got to watch 101 Dalmatians despite having not fulfilled the prerequisites.

Things didn’t improve much during my teenage years. By then my sister and I were sharing the big room in the basement and the Precious Moments wallpaper had been ripped out of the little room to make way for my brother who apparently would not appreciate just how precious the moments could be.

I did get a portable CD player and headphones at some point in those early teenage years, and I spent most nights listening to Enya as I tried to fall asleep. I had scenes that I played in my head for each song, and there were nights when I listened to all four of my Enya CDs and still would just lay awake, bored.

College wasn’t much better at first. My first roommate was a bat, and kept an opposite schedule from me. I would cover my head in blankets attempting to drown out the noise of her typing or the light from her opening and closing and opening and closing the door to our room all night long. Why do they keep the dorm hallways so bright all night long, anyway?!

But that first year of college was probably the last year of really bad sleep. I had a great roommate the next year, one who shared an interested in going to bed early so we could make it to breakfast almost every morning. Eventually I moved off campus and had my own room again.

I am generally better at falling asleep now than I was as a child, but I am just as bad at staying asleep. Any small thing will wake me up, and the older I get the less likely I am to be able to fall back asleep after waking. I am sometimes filled with rage at others in my radius who do not contribute meaningfully to (nay, they sometimes even sabotage) the absolute darkness and quiet that I need for peaceful slumber.

I have, though, developed some tips and tricks over the years for good sleep which I will share here now in order of importance.

1. The most important thing is to stop caring how much sleep you get. Seriously. Don’t count hours, don’t look at the clock. Turn the number display off or hide your clock in a drawer if you must. Knowing that it’s 2:13 AM and that you have to get up at 5:50 AM is information that can only harm you. Ignorance is bliss.
2. Read in bed for a little bit each night. Preferably non-fiction. Preferably about the British royal family. I love the royal family, but I’ve never been kept awake because I am so eager to turn the page and find out how many pheasants George V shot in 1918.
3. Charge your cell phone somewhere other than your bedroom.
4. Do not allow yourself to think about scary things or stressful things after 8 PM. Tell yourself that you can pick it back up tomorrow at 6 AM but for now the subject is off-limits. Find something else to think about. My go-to safe topic is Star Trek and that usually leads me to other safe topics (Dyson sphere! how do they do it?!).
5. Don’t get cats. If you already have cats, I’m sorry. I adore my cats, but they are the worst creatures after 9 PM.

That’s it, that’s the secret sauce. And while I still would classify myself as a terrible sleeper, I would say I’m much better at it than I used to be. The above rules have at least made it much less stressful to stare at my ceiling for hours some nights.

But there are nights when I wish I still had that sticker collection.

Despite my last post about that one negative interaction at work, the temp job is going well. So well, in fact, that they have asked me to stay on indefinitely.

I’m also suddenly getting requests to come in and interview for permanent jobs similar to what I’m doing now. Yesterday I returned a call from a principal and explained to her that I was looking for a job with an earlier release time than what she needed. To my surprise, she assured me that she was willing to compromise (quite generously!) on the release time.

So I have two interviews for permanent positions next week. This does not mean that I will be offered either of these positions (obviously), but it’s a step in the right direction. After several years of unsuccessful applications, I had begun the process of incorporating the word “unemployable” into my identity. I have paused that for now.

My brain has shifted into a different gear. This job is very much one that I leave behind the moment I clock out, and that’s important to me. But my days are much, much busier now and there are so many more things to process. I fall asleep easily, but wake up too soon. I’m just ON in a way I haven’t been for years.

It’s nice to be busy and it’s nice to feel competent again but I am missing having the space in my brain for this blog! I am determined not to let this thing go defunct yet, and I think am going to focus on recording childhood and young adult memories for a while. Those mini essays are mostly easier to access, organize, and write than some of the other stuff I like to do.

Anyway, here I am, wide awake at 5 AM on a Saturday, but I’m enjoying the dark, the quiet, the coffee, and my strangely favorite comfort documentary.

Today at work someone screamed at me on the phone. She does this to everyone, so it’s not really a big deal. But it did not feel good and I still have not recovered completely.

Today I dealt with two separate crying students at two separate times. All problems were solved eventually.

Also, I had to send the same student back to her classroom at least three times. She kept wandering into the office asking if she could call her mom.

Today at work a fifth grader who only speaks Spanish came to the office, looking stricken. Her mother was picking her up because the girl had gotten her first period. I dug up a graphic novel that had been floating around the office all morning and brought it to her. “Quieres mirar?” I asked. “Si, gracias!”

Today at work I saw my great-aunt-in-law.

I emailed an old friend with a database question, and she responded happily, immediately.

Today at work I got “the look” from my boss because a task she had wanted completed last week was still untouched.

Today at work I gained the ability to print.

And then I almost missed a printing deadline.

Today at work I made several mistakes, but I also had many successes.

And yet, the only thing I can think about is the lady who screamed at me. She will probably come in tomorrow and scream at me again.

My temp job started last week. My first time working for pay in twelve years, and my very first time working and also being a parent.

It was an interesting experiment.

I liked going to work this week. I liked getting emails and solving problems for the teachers and staff. I even liked answering the phone and finding information for parents. I liked feeling like I was making a difference, and that difference did not involve the cleanliness level of anything. I liked being busy and part of a team.

A few of my working parent friends had given me some advice, and I think the best advice I received was not to plan any complicated dinners, especially that first week. So I didn’t. We had frozen enchiladas one night, and macaroni & cheese out of a box another night. I have decided we are just getting Jimmy Johns every Wednesday from here until eternity.

My sister reminded me that new jobs are always extra tiring, and that made me feel better about how exhausted I have been since Wednesday. In addition to learning how to do my job, I feel like I am learning how to do life all over again. Every system I had in place has to be reworked. When do I manage to do laundry and when do I manage to fold laundry? How do I get myself and my youngest ready to leave the house at the same time? Should I be going to the grocery store on Sunday with the rest of the working parent zombies or should I try to go on Tuesday evenings?

Everything feels more difficult. I’m driving through both morning and evening rush hour. I’m picking my kid up from childcare at rush hour. My younger son doesn’t have time to practice piano, do his homework, get his usual one hour of screen time, eat dinner, shower, and get in bed by 8 PM and I hate that. My older son is home alone for several hours some afternoons and I hate that too.

Everything feels so much more frantic, and I feel so frazzled, and although I’m sure it will get better with time, I’m also sure that two full-time working parents will always, to some extent, be a no-win scenario.

But is it worth it? The slight increase in my sense of self-worth, the satisfaction I get out of my productivity, the enjoyment of being part of a team: are these things worth it to make our lives more complicated and rushed?

I’m not sure yet.

I did reach one important conclusion this week, though: I am glad I stayed home with the kids when they were little. Even though they certainly missed out on things by not being in daycare and I certainly missed out on things by not being at work, it was the right decision for our family at the time. And I will never have a big, cool career or be a big earner, but I still have twenty-five years of gainful employment ahead of me and that is plenty of time to enjoy functioning as a professional again.

“Hey, Casey!” my youngest says to me. “I’m playing a game about World War II! I know how you like World War II!”

My eyebrows shoot up at this and I freeze in the kitchen, Triscuit in hand.

Me? I like World War II? Not me. He must have me confused with my father. Old men read books about World War II. Dads and grandpas know the important dates and players. This is not a thing for a charming, middle-aged woman like me!

My eyes travel back to the kitchen counter where my latest pick from the library is waiting, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. And wasn’t it just last week I was watching a documentary and when they noted the date September 1, 1939, I knew exactly what major event they were referencing without looking it up?

Yes. Yes, that was me. Clever, attractive, middle-aged woman that I am. It’s me, hi, I’m the one who is into World War II now. I can already see the thick, dry non-fiction books that they will gift me on future birthdays. The texts they will send when me when they are studying for their college course on 20th century European history. And after I die, they will hear mention of World War II and they will sigh and turn to their own kids and say, “you know your grandma loved World War II.”

Dear God what have I done.