Retrospective

Yesterday was my 1 year anniversary at my current job. Feels more like I was a partner in a struggling upstart than a new employee joining a well established corporation.

Coincidentally, I admitted to my husband this past weekend that Boston really isn't the town for me. I've been here close to two years now (including the time I spent studying for and taking the Bar exams) - I think that's enough time to know whether a place is right for me. I just can't make it work here.

What next what next?

I am completely uninspired

You know that feeling you get, when you think something is one way, but then someone bursts your bubble and you find out it wasn't the way you thought it was at all? Like, you think people like you but then you find out they've just been making fun of you all along. Or like, when you think a relationship is special, but then you find out that the guy was just on the make.

That's how I feel right now. Not for any particular reason, or due to any particular event. I just feel like, "what's the use?" Really let down and ripped off.

If It Is Your Destiny to Be this Laborer Called a Writer

"Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise, ... we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it's perfectable, that you're gonna get it all straight.

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. I tried to put this into that song called 'A Thousand Kisses Deep,' you know, where you understand that you abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece."

-- Leonard Cohen, from I'm Your Man

Christmas Eve

If I channel surf to find only Home Alone (any variation), Bourne Identity, Ice Age or Prancer playing on all the movie channels - AGAIN! - I’m gonna scream.

My beloved Mac G-4 died this morning. It makes a car-gear-like grinding noise when I try to start it - you know, like when you try to shift gears on a manual and miss. And after mucho minutes twirling spikes in a circle, up pops a folder icon with the Finder logo trading flashes with a question mark. I take that logo to mean that my OS is somehow corrupted and I need to re-install. I would re-install except that there’s a DVD stuck inside the drive, a kool one too - I’m Your Man, a documentary about Leonard Cohen. So re-installing is out of the question. And no, it’s not the DVD that’s making that terrible grinding noise. That was happening before I inserted the DVD. Besides, the noise is coming from the battery side of the box, not the DVD side of the box. I’m not brave enough to open up anything more than the battery port and the memory port. As far as I can tell, nothing’s out of whack in those two places.

Sigh. It’s been a good machine for five years. I’m going to have to bite the bullet and take it to the Apple shop and cross my fingers that it can be saved. And while I’m at it, get an OS upgrade, if it’s not too old. The timing sucks as Christmas has left us cash strapped. Blah.

Dan is performing tonight and again tomorrow morning. I’m off work and will spend the day baking, by special request, my first ever red-velvet cake. When Dan gets home, we’ll put pizzas in the oven – after Thanksgiving and all the Christmas baking I’ve been doing, I’m too burned out to cook again – and then open gifts. Who knows after that. No new snow is predicted over the next few days. Back to ghost-town work on Friday – I kind of enjoy working when no one else is around. It’s stressless and I get a lot done when I don’t have everyone shoving “emergencies” my way. How much of what people shove at you are emergencies anyway? Honestly, nothing that crosses my desk would cause death, destruction or even mayhem if left undone. Such drama. So, though I’ll be at work on Friday, it’ll probably feel like a seamless beginning to the weekend.

So, bitch slap that seasonal affective disorder to the curb and count all your blessings, yo, ‘cause we all have them, no matter who you are, no matter how broke, how lonely, how sick, there is something good somewhere going on in your life. Look at it, embrace it, warm yourself with it, even if just for this one day out of the year. Live in a little denial and fuck the rest of it. At least for 24 hours, believe that nothing but good exists in your world. Even if you read this and roll your eyes, think for a minute. Even if you have to work at it a little bit, isn’t it better to explode into the New Year than piss and moan your way into it?

Well, okay, piss and moan if you want, but don’t blame the rest of us if pissing and moaning is all you get out of 2009. I mean, if that’s the way you start out…

I, however, will hear none of it, at least until January. I mean, Daniel Craig was just on tv without a shirt. And Ghost Hunters airs later tonight. Things are looking up. Have a happy ya’ll.

Too Good to be True

Sorry, if you were interviewing a potential investment advisor and he showed you a map of his returns that looked like this, wouldn't you get a little suspicious? Some folks at my office commented that if Madoff were smart enough to carry out such an elaborate hoax so believably for such a long time, then he was certainly smart enough to go legitimate and earn handsomely on the market for real. Except that even if you're smart, you're still not going to get these kinds of returns - it's simply NOT the way the market works. Madoff is the reason why more regulation is NOT the answer to our economic crisis.

Courtesy of NPR's Planet Money blog.

PTSD and the Working Girl

And most impactfully, I have been and am still training myself to react according to the truth of the moment, rather than to overreact to events that trigger a trauma memory. More on that in another post.

So I started my job last February. It had been a pretty bleak job search. When Dan and I strategized our life together – my moving to Boston because a law degree was more portable than his freelance musician work (not in terms of pulling in a paycheck – Dan always pulls in a paycheck – but in terms of pulling in a steady paycheck, which was important as I had consolidated my education loans to lock in a low rate, which meant there was no grace period after graduation – I had to start paying them off immediately) – I had not factored in the number of good, local law schools that were feeding the area’s legal job openings. And, not being an economist, there was no way for me to have predicted that the country had gone into a recession last November, the month of my admission to the MA Bar. So here I was, very bright and hardworking, graduated from a 4th tier, albeit prestigious public interest law school, not summa cum laude (there was no such thing at my alma mater) but with impressive accomplishments nonetheless, competing for $40,000 a year jobs at Legal Aid (high by Legal Aid standards, but still not enough to cover my expenses, by the way) that were, in the end, being awarded to Harvard graduates. None of my cold-call resumes, of which I mailed out about 200, resulted in an interview. My targeted search resulted likewise. The most exciting position I applied for was as an attorney at the new consumer protection unit at Boston’s Legal Aid (my sources inside Legal Aid had told me the organization was undergoing a renaissance – an unusual surplus of funds – I don’t know if this is continuing). Even though I had an inside connection who allowed me to use her name when I contacted the Consumer Protection manager directly, the best the manager could do for me was to suggest that my chances of be awarded the job would increase substantially if I were to volunteer my time with the unit. That wasn’t possible on a full time basis what with $120,000 in loans immediately due. But I was willing to try to squeeze my work-week around to volunteer at least a couple of days a week – maybe even weekends. But the unit manager wouldn’t return my calls after that first conversation. She was willing to see my resume. But I had to find out well after the fact that the position was filled without my even being called in for an interview. During those uncertain months, I couldn’t even get a contract attorney position even though I was registered with and checking in every day to all the agencies in town – and firms don’t care from where you graduated if all they want you to do is document review. No, during those uncertain months, the only work I could get was administrative work, paying between $8-$15 an hour.

So when my company offered me a paralegal job starting in early February 2008 at a substantial increase from the salary I was last making as a paralegal, I took it. It was at least a law related job, in an industry with which I had experience, and my manager had put the possibility on the table, right up front, of my being promoted into an attorney position somewhere down the road. It was the best offer in a series of non-existent and otherwise terrible offers.

I’m not cocky about too many things, but I am cocky about my ability to bounce back from adversity or change/violence, because it’s been tested so often. I’ve always been resilient – more resilient than most. Which is what my last therapist credits for my survival. And, while I’ve lamented ad nauseum about all the change I’ve been through in the past two years, I don’t think that most of what I went through in the last couple of years was too much for me to handle. It was draining yes, and more so than I expected. So there I was, depleted after the marriage, the move, the graduation, the Bar exams. Depleted, needing rest, and vulnerable. But not so much that a month or three of keeping my head low and getting enough sleep every night couldn’t have healed. What it was, was the grim understanding that I was in the exact same professional circumstances I had been in four years ago. I did not have to spend four years struggling through law school, go into$120,000 of debt (indeed, I’m still paying off a portion of my undergrad loans), and move states in order to be a paralegal doing SEC disclosure work at a large, multi-national life insurance company. The straw that broke the camel’s back (funny, I almost wrote, “the camel that broke the straw’s back,” which somehow, feels even more appropriate), what depleted me in the end, was the enormous amount of energy – because time is energy, money is energy, physical motion is energy – I spent to go absolutely nowhere.

Sick of your bank nickel-and-diming you to death?

I've been a big fan of credit unions for years now, but in the current economic climate, they make more sense than ever. Here's some information in case you're wondering why they're so great:

The Differenc Between Banks and Credit Unions

Banks vs. Credit Unions

I love you

Some advice from someone whose been banking at credit unions for a long time:

1) Learn the state usury laws. Because credit unions are usually incorporated in the state where they reside, they will be beholden to that state's usury laws, which limit how much the institution can charge you in fees. For example, a New York credit union can't charge you more than 9% on its credit cards because it is incorporated in New York and the law limits the rate. Citibank, however, is incorporated in South Dakota which has no usury laws and, therefore, no limits. So even if you live in New York and opened up a Citibank account in New York, if something happens to your credit, Citibank can ratchet up your fees and interest rates as high as they want and they can do it legally!

2) Also shop around for customer service. Customer service at banks has notoriously plummeted in recent years, but don't assume that a credit union is automatically better. The difference is that, bad service at a credit union may more likely be blamed on lack of resources whereas at a bank, it's because they're trying to squeeze profits.

But once you find a credit union you like, it's soooooo much better than banking at most of your national banks. Think of it as the green answer to banking.