Campfyre Stories

The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.

I think we all visit from time to time.  Depending on how we got there and where we’re going, our stay might be shorter or longer, boring or interesting, lonely or social.  It’s all personal, but we all know it.  We all visit.  And I don’t mind visiting.  Sometimes it’s nice to have a little break from that go go go life, where things change all the time and you’re never quite sure if your footing is actually stable.

But sometimes I feel like I live here.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wait around waiting for things to change.  I’m a pretty get-going, take charge kind of person and I don’t like the course of my life to be charted by anyone except me…  or at least with my input.  But no matter how hard you try, you can’t force things to happen sooner than their time.

I can feel change in the air.  I can see it, every single day, happening around me.  People who I trust, people who are wise, have told me that my time for change is coming.  That I’ve laid my foundations and done everything right and that it just takes time.  They’ve been saying that for years.  I’m still waiting.

It feels like it’s getting closer, though.  As the people around me change, I change too.  My relationships change and that changes me in ways I probably don’t even recognize.  I lose people, I gain people, I make new contacts and open up new opportunities.  Gods know that I’ve opened myself up to new people and opportunities, but the things I’m really looking for still elude me.  So I wait.

What’s frustrating is that I don’t know what I’m waiting for, really.  I have vague promises that tie into my employment, but I’ve learned from experience to not count my eggs and to wait and see if there are any actual chickens in there.  I have this cruise coming up, but other than 15 science seminar courses and a trip to Bermuda on a giant boat, there are no guarantees there.  I don’t know if my life will change from this cruise, and it’s really hard to keep that in mind when folks tell me how much they hope (expect?) that I’ll find any number of the things I’m waiting for on that cruise.  I’m really trying for a wait and see attitude, but the “and see” part is still a ways off.  I’m stuck at “wait”.

So how to  escape all this waiting and staying?  Where are the bright places where Boom Bands are playing?

Clearly, I’m looking in the wrong places.  Or maybe at the wrong times.  I’m looking.  I’m trying new things and attempting to meet new people, it’s just not working.  I haven’t given up, I keep looking and I keep doing new things and going new places and talking to new people.  So why am I still waiting?  I’m starting to feel like I’m doing something wrong, but I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what.

So I fidget in my waiting place.

But this is the last stop on that journey, isn’t it?  You go from your journey to Great Places to a Lurch, then a Slump, then right into the Waiting Place.  From here you get Boom Bands…  right?

Right?

…

I think that you can’t know just how sick you’re getting until you try to do something “normal” and suffer for it.  I found out the hard way just how sick I am when, walking less than a block to a bus stop, I first fell down in the slush and then found myself coughing and wheezing at the bus stop.

I’m hardier than this.  I mean, come on.  I come from  hardy peasant stock.  Less than a block shouldn’t debilitate me to the point of needing to actively control my breathing.

But it did

So I’m sick, but I only feel it when I try to function.  As long as I can remember to “take it easy”, I’m fine.  Until I’m not again.

My mom says it sounds like the flu that’s going around.  I’m not willing to get ANY flu, so I am insisting that it’s just a bad cold.  Not even that, just that “I’m sick”.  And, frankly, I don’t know that I care WHAT it is.  The bottom line is that I can’t do half the things I want to be doing and that I need to take it easy (at least until I forget again just how sick I actually am).

But I have to say, if I’m going to be sick, I prefer this.  Where I don’t know how sick I actually am most of the time.  Maybe it can run its course without actually getting to much in my way.

A girl can dream.

I’m a pretty nice person.  I kind and friendly and fun and funny and smart.  Don’t get me wrong, I have my negative qualities, too, but for the most part, people tend to like me.

Except when they don’t.  And it seems like it happens more frequently the older I get.  Maybe that’s not a fair statement.  Maybe it’s that I notice it more now that I’m older or that it’s more obvious to me.

A lot of the time it’s about being a woman.  Most women don’t like other women.  Even women who have predominantly female friends often don’t like many of them.  Hell, I’d go so far as to say “don’t like all of them at some point or another”, but that might be taking things a little too far.

Women feel threatened by other women much of the time.  There’s this weird idea that other women are going to “steal my man” or that the success of one woman somehow belittles me or lowers my chances of success, even if I work in a different field.  (Understand that the “I” and “Me” here is generalized and not me, FyreGoddess.)  It’s something that I’ve known most of my life, but these days I see a lot more of it…  and less of it.

The older I get, the more women I meet who don’t play those games.  Those are the women I choose to spend time around or who, at the very least, I don’t go out of my way to avoid.  At the same time, the women I meet who DO play those games seem even more threatened by a 35 year old me than previous women were when I was under 30.

Maybe it’s my “I’m gonna be a cougar” idea.  Maybe it’s that I really am confident and self-assured.  Maybe it’s because I am, by my own standards, successful in life.  Who knows, really?  And I’m supposed to be working on Not Reading In.

Which is a heckuva lot harder than I thought it would be.  At least when it comes to people not liking me.  I’m trying to just accept that, yes, some people won’t like me, but that’s a hard thing to do when you don’t know the reasons.

Women spend a lot of time reading in and creating excuses.  If I were having this conversation with any number of women, they would be inclined to say something along the lines of “Well, they’re just jealous,” but I think that’s a cop out.  In a lot of these situations, they don’t know me well enough to BE jealous.  “Well, then maybe they’re bigoted toward fat people.”  Well, maybe they are, but I didn’t get a sense of disgust (which tends to be the root of fat prejudice in my experience).  But here we are, reading in again.

Some people just won’t like me.

So I keep trying.  I keep accepting invitations and trying to expand my horizons (and social circle).  In a lot of ways, it’s working, but it’s a long, slow process.  In other ways, it’s still really hard.  Trying to deal with rejection and now, moving on without trying to understand and explain other peoples’ motivations.  I am terrible at the former and still trying to make the latter work for me.  So I’ll say it again and try to incorporate it into my life…

Some people just won’t like me.  And that HAS to be okay.

Not me.  I’m actually pretty good at being poor.  I learned how to do it successfully and have taken those lessons and abilities with me into my (non-poor) adult life.  It means that I live frugally, while still living well.

I’m good at finding sales; reusing items; using up every bit of the available food in the house, even if it means experimenting.  I don’t see the shame in buying secondhand clothes or furniture or household items.  In fact, it’s sometimes preferable.  I know how to stretch a dollar, almost to its very limit, and I often “luck” into sales I wasn’t expecting or deep discounts on the things I happen to need at any given moment.

But I know so many people who just don’t get it.  I know these people who think that if they don’t *act* poor, then they somehow won’t BE poor.  This really isn’t the case.  You can’t spend your way out of poverty, although there are a significant number of people who think they can.

And I don’t know where it comes from.  It might come from the societal expectation that we will be good consumers and that our personal worth is based on the amount of things we buy.  It might come from family – wanting to live a “better” life than our parents did.  Maybe, even for those raised poor, their parents were so good at being poor that the kids never even realized.

I get it.  It’s hard.  Especially when you go from living comfortably to finding out that you’re not as comfortable as you thought you were.  Or maybe it’s that extra mouth to feed that pushed you over the edge from “just getting by” to “how am I going to make my rent this month?”  What’s interesting to me is how many people I know who have found themselves lost in a poverty situation.

And they can’t really blame the recession.  This is not circumstances and people who were laid off and can’t find new work.  These are people who chose to leave a 9-5 job to “work for themselves” only to find that they couldn’t make it.  These are people who decided to have multiple babies, despite their financial situation.  These are people who accumulated massive amounts of debt and didn’t stop to realize it until it was too late.  These are people who are “too good” for low-paying jobs.  They’d rather struggle than work for (they claim) pennies.  These are people who still eat out, while bemoaning the fact that they have no money.  These are people who use “retail therapy” to feel better about life when what they really need to buy is gas, or food.

My dad was bad at being poor.  Our family comes from money, which was stolen from an addled and sick grandmother of mine by a trusted source (the Catholic Church).  I think my dad never got over the fact that things were stolen from him and he was “owed”.  He always had kind of a regal air and, with money, everyone’s lives would have been different.  Not necessarily better, but different.  But he was destined to poverty.  My mom is pretty good at bargain hunting and secondhand shopping, but dad always wanted better.  Not just for himself, but for all of us.  When there was money, he spent it a little too freely, as if there was an unlimited supply.

I see more and more of this.  You’d think that, in the recession caused by overwhelming amounts of debt, that people would be more likely to stay within their financial means, but I see more and more people spending well outside of their means.  Or, at the very least, not being smart about how they actually spend their money.

They say that people haven’t saved enough for retirement, but are retiring anyway, only to find out that they’re going (further) into debt as they age.  Once upon a time, you didn’t retire until your debts were paid off, but now it’s considered a god-given right to retire at 65 – whether you can actually afford it or not. Now me?  I don’t know if I’ll ever retire.  I have a 401k, but I don’t expect to be able to retire at 65, whether or not Social Security still exists; whether or not the retirement age gets upped.  I have no idea if I’ll be in a position to retire or if that 401k will be some extra bonus cash to use on a fun trip or something.

I read a study a few months back (that I can’t find now) that stated that people who spend their money when they make it are happier in the long-term than people who save “to have something to leave the kids” or with the intention to enjoy it in their golden years.  Wow.  That sure does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it?  That doing fun or crazy things in the now makes you happy.  Delaying that gratification by decades means that you won’t enjoy that money as much when you finally do spend it.  If you even get a chance to spend it.  I mean, you might die, but let’s assume not.  Looking at the whole bit about more and more people retiring into crippling debt, do you really think that savings is going to go to pleasure, rather than paying off your debt and keeping your head above water?

I think that people who are good at being poor get it.  You spend some money on pleasure, even if it’s only now and again, even if it’s only enough to see a matinee at a knock-off movie theater.  You don’t do it to the detriment of bills and food, but you do it to keep yourself happy.  At least happy enough.  You save for a rainy day, if you can, and when that rainy day comes, you spend that money that you set aside.  But you don’t forgo entertainment so that you can save for retirement.  You don’t choose new clothes over rent.  You stay within your means and live in there here and now, all the while keeping an eye out for what’s around the next bend.

The shame of it all is how few people seem to really understand that.

My step-sister and I took my niece Moon to see Fiddler on the Roof.  It was her birthday present.

While we were filing into the theater, my step-sister noticed that a woman in front of us was wearing fur and she was horrified by it.  Now I don’t agree with slaughtering animals for reasons that do not lead to using every piece of an animal (across the board), but I also don’t have a problem with people wearing fur.  Or, for that matter, ivory.

Everyone knows that “Fur is dead”.  While, yes, there are still coats, hats, etc. made of fur and fur-linings on some higher end items, for the most part our society has moved past that.  Most of the fur owned in the US has been handed down through the generations.  Same with ivory.  Elephant poaching still goes on, but Americans have been well-educated on issues related to animal cruelty in fashion and beauty products.  People know that ivory means that cute not-so-little elephants suffer and most people don’t like that.

But there’s all this fur in the world.  There are antique pieces of jewelry that are beautiful and happen to contain ivory.  So now what do we do?

The truth is that the assumption that someone recently purchased a fur coat is a lot less likely than that same fur coat being decades old and handed down.  I recently chatted with a woman in the coop (!) who was wearing a fur coat and said to me “It was just sitting in my closet.  I figured, why not get some use out of it.  It’s really a beautiful pelt.”  And she was right.  The animal(s) that were going to die for that coat are long dead.  Owning something that was created decades ago doesn’t support the industry NOW.

Shouldn’t we enjoy the things we have?  I mean, that woman was right, what’s the point of having [insert pretty much anything here] if it only takes up space in your closet or pantry?  Jewelry that doesn’t get worn, warm clothes that you could (potentially) wear anywhere, useful items that have been designated “too special” to be used in the purpose for which they were designed – why do we allow these things to just take up space?  I feel like the 21st century is trying to teach us to downsize and to USE the useful things we collect.

I would wear a fur coat that belonged to a grandmother.  I would (and do, actually) wear ivory that came from decades ago.  And why shouldn’t we?  Reduce, reuse, recycle, right?  So we SHOULD wear those things.    As a society, we’re starting to move past our hoarding, stockpiling ways and starting to move toward a greener, gentler society.  While that might mean no longer killing animals for their resources, it also certainly means using up the things we already have – like fur, and ivory.

So a little over a year ago I joined the coop as a working member.  After a couple of months of feeling my way, I landed, happily, working a regular Monday night shift.  We’ve got a great crew.  We all know and like each other and are happy to see each other every week – curious when someone doesn’t show up.

This, for me, was the extent of the socialization that I’ve actually gotten.  Seeing the same people every week and starting to recognize the folks I see for an hour or two between shift changes.  But nothing life changing.  Nothing earth shaking.  Nothing more than a new weekly routine in my life.  Two people from the coop added me on Facebook – one because we chat while we do our member hours, the other (I think, at least at first) because my mom is kind of famous.

And then came 2011.

Well, that’s not entirely true – I feel like it actually started in mid-December with an invitation to a birthday party.  I couldn’t make it, I had other plans, but the invitation meant a lot to me.  There’s some validation and acceptance, I guess, that I hadn’t been feeling.  Even though I couldn’t make it, I appreciated the invite.

Just before Christmas, I got invited to a vegetarian pot luck by someone I banter/flirt with.  He made a point to invite me, not to the “next” one, but to the next one that he would be at.  Which was good, because he was the only person there who I knew by name.

Now, people who know me well find it hard to understand just how shy I am when I’m out of my element.  Even the single person I knew wasn’t someone I know very well at all and without a “safe person” to rely on or to hover near, I get a little shaky on the inside.  That said, I was raised at parties and can fake it reasonably well.  I won’t be the upbeat, aggressively friendly person that my friends know, but I’ll hold my own…  quietly.

I felt like I connected with one or two people, but when the hostess (sort of, I guess) started hinting that it was time for folks to go, I took my opportunity and said my goodbyes.  The person who invited me said “Come back…  if you can find us.”  (Not exact wording, but pretty much “We don’t know when or where the next pot luck will be, but you can come if you want.”)  Then someone else who I sort of connected with led me around trying to find a solution to not knowing where/when.  “Give me your name and I’ll add you to the Facebook group,” said a girl who mostly kept to herself through the evening.

I haven’t heard anything since.  Oh well.  Honestly, it’s their loss.  I’m a damn good cook, but all they get to try is my quinoa risotto.  Too bad, since I have some truly exceptional recipes.  My biggest disappointment of the night was just how bland the food was (and this from the girl who’s allergic to pepper!).  I expect flavor from vegetarians – particularly ones who work at the coop.

So we move on.  The truth is, I’m not sure that I fit in that circle anyway, so why force it?  It’s not like I’d be able to go to the next one, anyway, since it conflicts with the coop’s member (worker) appreciation dinner.

Monday everyone was asking everyone else about it.  “Are you going?  Will you be there?”  And, without fail, every one of us answered with, “Ehhh….  I dunno yet…”

And then someone told us that we had to RSVP by Thursday.  Which changed the game.  I think we all had decided to either show up or not on that day.  So my Monday friend asked me what was holding me back.  “Well, I don’t know who’s going and I’m not sure how to get there.”  And it turned out that I’m not out of her way and she can pick me up.  And I can help to save her from creepers.  Heh.

The best part, I thought, was being the trendsetter cool kids.  Once she and I decided to go, everyone else fell into place.  “Oh, you guys will be there?  I’ll come, then.”  There’s a fear, even within the coop, that one might attend only to find that they have no one there to talk to.  My assumption is that this is really only a member worker thing, since we (mostly) only work one day a week and (mostly) only know the folks we work with directly.  As soon as one (two) of us determined to go, everyone else knew they wouldn’t be isolated in their attendance.

So, you see, it’s starting to pay off.

There will be people there I know and can chat with and will be very happy to see.  And, who knows, maybe the invitations will keep coming.  You know my rule – if I haven’t done it before, I don’t let myself say no.  Eventually I’ll find a setting where I fit well.  Until then, at least I’m trying new things and meeting new people.

It’s true, she is.  She’s not nationally famous, but locally, people know who she is.  She’s worked really hard her entire life to have a career in music and she is a working musician.  She performs regularly and teaches music to children.  She’s active in the arts community and is a networking maven like you wouldn’t believe.  Even if you know her, it’s hard to believe just how many people she knows and how many connections she has.

So I don’t really tell people who my mom is, especially in situations and communities where she is better known.  Like at the coop.  Where I’ve been a working member since last November.  Where people know my mom and have known her for a long time.

I wanted people to get to know me for me, and on my terms.  I didn’t want for people to rush to judgment because they know my mom.  My mom and I have a lot in common, but we still have a lot of things that we don’t agree on.  It’s important to me that people get to know me without preconceived notions.

So I don’t tell people who my mom is.  Not at first and not very often.

But they always seem to find out.  When they find out after they’ve made whatever decisions there are to make about me, I don’t mind.  When they are judging me based on what they think “Deb’s daughter” should be like, everyone loses.  I’m not like my mom.  I mean, I am, but not really.  I don’t like children, I’m not a radical, I’m a much more mainstream person than my mother.  Even if I do stick to the fringes of society, I still spend a good bit of my time on the cloth.  My mom is almost entirely a fringe person.  Hell, she’s all the way off the cloth a lot of the time.

It’s not a denial.  There are a lot of people who I know through my mother.  I don’t avoid or ignore them, but they also (mostly) know me for me and know me to not be what you might expect.  It’s the people who I don’t know, the ones who know my mom as famous and see me as, first and foremost, her daughter.

I think that the real problem is that many of the parents of the wee ones that my mom teaches are my age.  They are people I would probably get along with and, often, who are drawn me for some reason.  But as soon as my mom’s name comes into the conversation, I have to battle pre-conceived notions.

So I met a number of people recently who asked me upon finding out my last name “Are you related to the [last name]s of the coop?”  And, of course, I am.  the entire rest of the evening was an uphill battle.  I think some folks were disappointed in the reality of me.  If I said things that didn’t fit with their preconceptions, it felt almost as if I had made a major faux pas…  and there are a lot of things about me that don’t fit with the notions that come from “Deb’s daughter”.

I guess I’m getting used to it.  As much as anyone can, at least.

And I’m still, for the most part, keeping quiet who my mom actually is.  Because, you know, she’s kinda famous around here.

…  I said, knowing that it’s as simple as logging in and writing a post.  I mean, I just renewed the domain, I should really put it to good use.

What’s funny is that I have written.  I have at least 3 drafts sitting there, unpublished, unfinished.  I get the inspiration and somewhere along the line it just peters out.

The truth is that it was easy to write about things that weren’t going quite so well.  It was easy to force myself to write about my past, but somehow a lot of my life had become tied up in work and other things I don’t feel comfortable discussing online.   I hope to change that.  I don’t like being consumed by any one thing. I’d so much rather be consumed by a myriad of adventures and options.

So it’s a new year and I’ve made a resolution this time around.  This year, I resolve to take people at face value and stop reading in (so much).  It’s turning out to be a whole lot easier than I thought it would be.  Instead of trying to guess people’s motives and secret thoughts, I’m finally able to just let things be as they are.  Of course, I say that 4 days in (having really started a day or two early), so who knows what the long-term will bring.  That said, I don’t make resolutions lightly and am still standing by my resolutions to laugh when things are funny, dance when the mood strikes me and to not say “no” to any invitation to something I have never tried before.  I fully expect to incorporate this “face value” into my life.  After all, I strive to be a face value person, it only makes sense to give other people what I want from them.

So that’s my starting point for 2011.  Other things on the agenda are my cruise to Bermuda in May and starting to plan my promised trip for Spawn as a graduation present.  He’ll graduate in June 2012 and I’ve promised him a trip to almost anywhere he wants.  He needs to decide by the end of this school year.  I don’t know what his current thoughts are and, while I remind him from time to time that he only has until June, I don’t want to push him.  I’d like to take a long weekend down to DC at some point, but I’m not sure how, when or even if I can pull that one off.  I’ll also finish the one year of the moderator job I’ve been doing since late April.  I don’t know if I’ll try to find some other online scheme (I am signed up as an answer-finder for ChaCha which pays, but not well) or maybe take a for-real part time job or just go back to making what I made before.  Regardless, I will have to make a decision about what to do next.

In the meantime, though, I do want to blog more.  Hopefully I can twist that to mean “opening my eyes to more random adventures, and making a point to share them.”