Displaced

Yesterday while I was driving home, there was a promotion on NPR for an upcoming feature on mother-newborn bonding and, one thing leading to another, I got to thinking about why I don’t love my car.

I parked. The automatic shoulder seatbelt which gets in the way of all my intra-car activities annoyed me. As I occasionally do, I wondered why I don’t feel the same way about my second car as I did about my firstborn. Finally, I understood. It’s because this car was stolen less twenty four hours after it came home with me. The mythical mother-baby bond was broken almost as soon as it formed. All I got was the usual post-birth weeks of sleepless nights without the benefit of having an actual baby.

I began to distance myself, for the sake of the other children, the other cars I still had to drive and feed while I waited to hear what had happened. I am not a hard woman: of course, I wondered where it was, if it was safe. But I had to protect myself from those early fears so that I could stay whole.

When I got the car back, it was too late. I had come to distrust its attachment to me and it had clearly developed other interests. We had grown apart. Our birth connection disrupted, I fear we will never be the same.

As I’ve sidled slowly out of the ranks of the corporate employed over the last several months, the most difficult adjustment has been a semantic one. I am accustomed to referring to my employment as, “work,” and my writing as “writing.” “Work” was interchangeable with the name of the company in the same way that, “home,” used to refer to my parents’ house. Just as that word became infused with confusion, disgust and guilt as my parents divorced and relationships deteriorated, over the years “work” has become synonymous with someplace I would rather not be. I have preferred not to refer to writing as work in part because of that connotation. It feels self-indulgent, almost sinful, to spend all of my time on something I enjoy and that matters to me in more complicated ways than my jobs in marketing or technology.

The other part is circuitous but it boils down to this: in the absence of publication, I find it difficult to call my writing “work” no matter how many hours I put in. At this stage, at least in the public eye, there is nothing that differentiates me from Corky. To my mind, publication (in any form) seems required to wrest the title, “writer,” from the clutches of the slacker boyfriends and the self-publishing baby boomers who want to make sure that the public knows every last therapeutic detail of their step dancing lessons and how breeding mango trees leads to enlightenment.

This disinclination to wield the title in combination with the definition transition makes it hard to publicly defend my writing against social incursions. I am used to using work as an excuse, as in, “I have to be at work,” “I’m working that day,” or “I’m busy hating work,” even when I wasn’t or didn’t. Now, I have to re-define “work” and defend a title with which I am not entirely, officially comfortable. While I would enjoy lunch with unemployed friends, I would rather use my hard-earned hours out of the daily grind to…well, work. I am going to have to find a balance between going fully, arrogantly public with my literary scheme and just saying, “I can’t – I’m working.”

I can’t seem to talk about writing either. Basic psychology maintains that social bullies (“Give me your lunch money!”) are frightened and that professional bullies (“I’m the regional vice president!”) are insecure. It’s always the Nobel Prize winner who spends dinner talking about you and your issues with low-fat pet food. In a related and unexpected development since my unemployment, I find I’ve become brief, not a trait for which I’m known.

In retrospect, “The lady doth protest too much,” might characterize my rambling answers to the question, “And what do you do?” Like a second head or eye-crossing plaid pants, my old job struck me as unnatural and required lengthy and apologetic explanation. Now, because my qualms (above) are irrelevant in response to a direct question, I simply say, “I’m writing.” The answer to the inevitable follow-up question, “What do you write?” is proving more elusive, but I am bringing my marketing skills to bear and hope to soon have a one-sentence response to that too.

There is a professional clown in New York who taught his two-year-old son to shake the bars of the playground fence with his tiny fists and yell, “Freedom!”

That’s how I’ve felt these last four years whiling away my days at the southern end of Silicon Valley. As I prepared to leave my position there last week, I tried to identify some permanent achievement I could point to as a symbol of a successful tenure at the company. I finally settled on my bank account. I should be proud of this. I took the job for the money, after all, not for love of computer hardware.

As I have realized on the many frustrating days when I have been yelling on my cell phone in the parking lot, money is not much consolation in the short-term. It is discouraging to think that most of the useful systems I did implement might well be un-done or overwhelmed by disorder within a matter of months. Attrition there is extremely high, despite the salaries, and I was the last of my original team to go, leaving no one with any experience to mind the store. Also, the CEO’s headed for jail, so that doesn’t speak well for them heading in the right direction.

There are two points of consolation however:

1. The primary job of the technology consultant is to make her job unnecessary. That is, if you are managing a system or a site, you should be working to make it so much better that you are no longer needed. In this regard, on many fronts, I succeeded. While it may not be apparent to him or her, my successor’s job will not be as painful as mine was.

2. In a month, I won’t care.

Just for fun, ask me how much my 10,500 vested stock options are worth. Go on. Ask me. Really. Go ahead. Oh, you want to know? Really? All right. $240.35. That’s right, you heard me. $240 big ones and 35 little tiny ones. Drinks are on me.

Two weeks ago, I tried a reverse back tuck off the flying trapeze. The twisting harness belt turned at an odd angle in the air (no doubt, my fault) and one of its side rings drove into the front of my right thigh as I landed. Never one to be put off, I tried the trick again. Same result, other leg. Two 6×4 bruises raised on each thigh, purple and yellow on the edges and blackish-gray in the middle. I decided the tuck would wait and moved on to a layout. Result? I over-rotated and landed off the mat in the net and directly on my neck. That was the same night that R. was the lead car in a four-car pile-up. I left the next morning to fly to upstate New York because there’s nothing a stiff neck and a bruised body likes more than eight hours of travel. Little did I know that the streak was just beginning.

Last Sunday morning, at about 2 AM, I fell down the last two steps of the front stairs at my father’s house in Buffalo as I was going to collect a book from the dining room. That step has gotten me before, disappearing into the dark wood of the floor ahead. Last time, I was carrying luggage. It broke my fall. This time, my full weight landed on the bent-back toes of my left foot as I pitched forward into the dark. I landed on my knees on the Oriental rug and issued an expletive that did not belong in a house with children. I thought my last three toes were broken. Verdict? Only deeply bruised.

The next night, back home at trapeze, I returned to the reverse back tuck with a different belt. No twisting = no side rings in the thigh. I was right. Instead though, I didn’t make it all the way around the tuck, having forgotten to pull my legs in, and landed with my body on the mat and my face in the net. Rope burn across my forehead, missing skin on my nose and lip and shoulder. Impressive.

On Tuesday, I moved boxes all evening. No incident, just sore.

On Wednesday, back at trapeze, this time static, not flying. I abraded the tops of my feet on the ropes. I bruised my bottom taking a pose called the Gazelle, which I look nothing like. For good measure, I laid down some new bruises on my lower thighs – just below the existing ones – doing crunches while hanging upside down. (My toe still hurts by the way.)

Thursday, I had to move to a new storage space because the building next door to my unit is going to be demolished. I have taken the opportunity to sort through everything I own. Since I am doing this in the dark of a storage building and most of this stuff is from a period of my life that is long over, it is not a pleasant task. To make sure I take the point, I hurt myself again. This time, I am using pliers to free a small dowel from the side of a bookshelf. I yank, the pliers lose their grip and my fist, with pliers, fly into my chin. My teeth jar but I assume I’m fine until I see that the hand which instinctively pressed the injured area is smeared with blood. Split chin. Excellent.

On Friday, at training, while stretching my shoulders by hanging from a bar against a wall – with my hands over the bar, not under – my shoulders give in to the pressure and flip around to the front. It’s hard to explain. Try this. Reach up and behind you with your palm down. Now turn your palm upwards and move your arm down. Feel that shift in your shoulder joint? Now imagine that sensation without turning your palm upwards first, without moving your arm down and with your full body weight on those arms. Nice.

Yesterday was Saturday. I managed not to get hurt by spending the better part of the afternoon sitting perfectly still in a movie. So far so good…

The car is listed as “compact” on the rental agreement but could only meet such a description if all the other cars were especially large tanks. I have to assume that they are using this new model as a gateway drug to hook renters on more spacious (read: expensive) models in the future. Its size takes away some of the force of my blinding speed as I careen through the curves of the backroad that until a few years ago didn’t even have center lines marked. The sides of the road are still undefined, up for grabs, fading off into light grass in the summer, now into black ice and then underbrush which obscures the treacherous ditches that lie at the edge of the forest proper.

It occurs to me that I am driving 25 mph above the posted 35 mph speedlimit for no good reason. I drive 60 on this road because my parents always drove 60, sometimes more, on this road and, apparently, I will not be outdone. I drive 60 because there is something about this place, this region, this town, this forest, this road, that makes me panic and want to leave it quickly, pass through it rapidly, leave no pause for it to re-introduce itself, for it to get a toehold in a conversation. If I move quickly enough, at most, I will only have to yell a fading, “Hello to you too!” over my shoulder should it greet me, attempt to waylay me with lazy, dangerous conversation.