To plan or not to plan?

"Your destination has arrived," announced the GPS lady, talking to me through the speakers of my car.  She sounded confident and cheery as if she had steered me right, a self-congratulatory note of pride in her voice at a job well done.  Except that the said destination was not in my sights.  I was at the edge of a traffic circle, getting blinded by the angry headlights seen through the rearview mirror of my car, wondering what to do next.  Traffic circles aren't new things.  They are anachronisms.  So even if my GPS hasn't been updated since 2006 chances are the circle predates the GPS, new traffic circles just aren't being built and as such I shouldn't have been told that my destination was a traffic circle when I was really looking for an Arts Center in the New Jersey town of Watchung, a town I had never heard of before.
The planners would tell me life isn't as simple as just getting in your car and driving off without having mapped your route and convinced yourself that you couldn't possibly get lost.  They wouldn't be wrong.  Life really isn't as simple as just driving off in your car, armed with nothing but an outdated GPS, a bag of Doritos and oodles of senseless overconfidence.  But in this world of ours there are the ant types and the grasshopper types.  Ants with their super organized, super structured life, all work and no play, marching along, single file, carrying bits of food.  Grasshoppers...well...no idea what happens to them during their life cycle.  Do they have more fun doing all that hopping on the grass or are they miserable drones (no pun intended) drowning in the cluelessness of their next move? Who knows.  But they aren't known for planning and organization.  Somehow my life refuses to run a course similar to that of an ant's.
I know the merits of scheduling and mapping, of carrying around an agenda with all 365 days neatly marked, but that's where it stops - at this wide-eyed admiration. These excellent qualities are frozen within a beautiful diorama inside the glass walls of a museum.  I have stared at them in awe.  I have admired but have never been tempted to emulate.
Regrets? Yes.  Of late nothing but regrets and yet the leaf is stubborn and refuses to turn over despite the sticky fingers of fate trying their level best. Someone up there is licking those fat fingers with a vengeance, forcing the turning over.  I look around and I see how streamlined some lives are, how self-assured, how confident and I wonder if it was their incessant planning that got them there.  I want something like that for myself because, in retrospect, things appear to be falling apart with a degree of certainty.
So after being lost around a traffic circle, disoriented and disgusted with my inability to find a place, today I sat down and mapped my destination using MapQuest.  I looked for the Panera Bread in the town of Sparta and was told that it was at 25 Country Lane.  I printed out detailed turn by silly turn directions...get out of your front door...turn left to your car...go straight for a few yards...leave your driveway...etc. Then I got in my car and fired up the GPS.  This time I was not taking any chances.  If the GPS got me lost I would have the paper.  Off we went admiring the picturesque settings of Sussex county, the quaint bungalows and the large mansions, the farms, the hills and dales, pointing at this or that while our dear friend, the GPS lady, told us to bear right or bear left or go straight for eight miles.  So far the paper and the disembodied voice were in sync.
A few more twists and turns and there I was outside the largest mansion I had ever seen in New Jersey, set back inside a cul-de-sac, as the voice announced, "Your destination has arrived".  Panera Bread anyone? Nope.  Chances were that the folks who lived here would say, "Panera Who?" if we rang their doorbell. My destination, dear GPS lady, would never be a castle like home in this neighborhood, but I am flattered you thought I had arrived!
What did I do wrong this time? See, planning just doesn't sit well with the people who just aren't used to planning.  The paper from the Google Search and the GPS lady both wanted me to go ask some millionaires if their home was pulling double duty as a Panera Bread.
So I came home.  Told the people I was supposed to meet that I was sorry I couldn't make it but I was perpetually lost these days, that I probably couldn't find my way out from inside a paper bag I was inhabiting with a GPS woman telling me my destination had arrived.
So despite an awakening desire to plan, despite making my plans to plan, I am in a state of paralysis.  I sit there with my notebook, making lists, filling out my calendar, I pause to think, I lift my eyes up at the TV screen and I see some very calm and serene Japanese people pushing empty carts through empty supermarket aisles while the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen tells us of consecutive nuclear reactor meltdowns.  Some announcer talks about lunchtime in Sendai...people would have been thinking about a return to their work desks, about picking up their kids at school, about dinner plans and their own mini-universes within the larger one and at tea time their worlds as they knew it had ceased to exist. Plans washed away, slid under a mobile tectonic plate, crushed beyond recognition.
Can those who live in doll houses with matchstick walls, drive toy cars, sail toy ships and work in pretend jobs at pretend offices afford the luxury of a plan?

Fiction hasn't done it well, yet!

I read this blog in The Guardian today and agreed with the author in that I couldn't think of any fiction with a description of childbirth that sounded real to me.  The descriptions almost always were from the point of view of expectant fathers or midwives or someone in the story who was the only one around when a childbirth was imminent and had to direct the whole "warm water and lots of towels" operation.  No one ever writes about how it is for the woman giving birth.  And like Emily Cleaver says, women often tell her how wonderful it was and how one forgets the pain.
Well, not all of us forget the pain.  I can never forget that pain, nor will I forget the sense of accomplishment, the sense of having walked through fire and emerged stronger, gilt-edged and transformed forever.  I remember the first dull pain.  It felt as though someone was scooping out a small part of my insides with a spoon.  And then the pain subsided completely.  I walked around the hospital corridor waiting for the next one because they told me the pain would come again and would keep coming back with greater intensity.
And then it started.  The next one had me doubled over until it passed, as did the next one and the next one.  It went somewhat like this:
Pain...............Calm (play Solitaire)................Pain................Calm (more Solitaire)..............Pain.........Calm (a few moves of Solitaire).......Pain.....Calm....Pain...Calm...Pain...Calm (don't worry, the anesthesiologist is coming)..Pain..Pain..Pain..Help..someone help me..where are they..where are the anesthesiologists..they're late..Hubby says, "Where are those idiots!!" I say, "Stop it, shut up, HELP, HELP ME, SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!!" Nope...too far gone, no epidural possible...Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.UNBELIEVABLE PAIN.  A sense of breaking apart and splitting in two.
And then somehow it was all over.  The baby was out.  I got a glimpse and then she was taken away to be cleaned and swaddled.  All the family members trooped out behind the nurse carrying her.  There was no one around me.
I was no longer the picture and was not yet the frame.  The spotlight had moved away with unquestionable finality.  Things would never be the same.  The lights, perhaps, would only hit me as slanting rays and with partial incandescence from now on.  I was just someone who appeared to be no one's concern at the moment. No wonder not much fiction about childbirth gets written from the perspective of the woman giving birth, she (an important part of the thing that was "she") ceases to exist, a new one takes her place.
Hubby was gone, the doctors were gone, the nurses were gone, the baby was gone, the TV was on and still showing the smoking rubble of the Twin Towers and I was all alone in a hospital room, listless on a gurney, staring at the ceiling to avoid staring at the television and wondering why I was so very cold.  I felt the bed shake with my shivers and my teeth chattered like they never had in the worst of winters.  This frightening state of solitude probably appeared more pronounced to me in that state.  Perhaps it lasted just a few short minutes.  But it felt like an eternity.  Eventually a nurse came in to do some things to me, sew things up, take out stuff that no longer belonged inside me and then asked me to rest and take a nap.  I asked to see my baby first.  They brought her in, I held her for awhile and then slept for several hours.
In the days that followed I felt as though I had moved.  As if my mind had sold its old familiar home under some kind of duress and now inhabited a place that would take some getting used to. Things didn't look as I remembered, things didn't work the same.  The mirror reflected a different person.
The times with the bundle of joy were immensely rewarding most of the times but often one just felt like food.  The bonding was instant on some levels and not so much on others.  There appeared to be a short-lived tug of war inside.  One that the baby finally won and continues to win day in and day out.

Employed at Will

Today I was putting together some employee handbooks for an organization where I am volunteering.  I read through all the standard employee handbook language as I copied each page and placed them in binders and gave in to nostalgia while conducting each mechanical action.  There was a time when I was a frequent recipient of these things (well, okay, not so long ago).
I read about the PTO (paid time off) policies, the sick leave policies, the code of conduct and the ominous phrase that reads, "employment at will".  I wondered if that language suggested that it wasn't slavery one was going for but employment at will, or whether it meant that an employer was employing you at will and could dispose of you at will as though you were the human equivalent of a plastic stirrer.  There was also a note about appreciating the altruism and nobility of volunteers and to ensure that they were treated with the utmost courtesy by all employees.  Can't say I had ever had an opportunity to read a passage like that.  My former places of employment didn't do things sans profit motive, so there were no altruistic volunteers for them.
There were notes about 401K plans, about the percentage of employer match...oh how the familiar terms played havoc with my bruised heart!  Perhaps those who request assistance from volunteers should be sensitive and not hand tasks such as the putting together of employee handbooks to people who are no longer employed, perhaps they should make like they are walking on eggshells around this rather sensitive group of people, don't you think? Sigh.  Of course I am being facetious, in case you were starting to take me seriously.
The people for whom I am doing this grunt work are quite incredulous at my desire to help them do this kind of stuff for them and they struggle to find ways to appreciate the help.  Today, as I stood there punching holes, making copies, stacking pages, binding and creating each book, I kept playing imaginary dialogues in my head.  I imagined them saying to me, "Thank you so much, you don't know how much this means to us. Wish there was something we could do for you. Can we wash your car, buy you lunch?"  To which I'd say, "No, perhaps you can just find a reason to hand me one of these babies", while waving one of the freshly minted handbooks at their chagrined and slightly guilty faces.
I am volunteering at a few other places where I am doing more cerebral rather than mechanical things.  The cerebral tasks don't send me into as bad a wallow as the mechanical ones do.  While doing the mechanical tasks I keep telling myself it's alright, I volunteered.  So what if I am just using my hands in carpally repetitive motions and not my mind, the cause is right, it can't hurt.  But there are days when all my pep talk to myself falls flat.
I finished my work early today and was ready to make my escape when they asked if I could also help with alphabetizing and filing some applications.  I hemmed and hawed this time.  I could have walked away and said that I had better things to do but I didn't do that.  I told them I would help but not for the next two days.  I said I would return after a couple of days and get it done.  They were pleased.  I don't know what it is that's motivating my actions.  Is it really a desire to be a proud owner of an employee handbook again or is it something else? Whatever it is, it makes me feel rather strange because I am doing a great job, a perfect job for these people and there is no incentive to be so perfect, so conscientious, so dedicated.  The strangeness I feel manifests itself in a either a sense of detachment and a need to just live through each moment, doing what each moment dictates or in a bout of nostalgia that can even be triggered by a pair of jeans I've owned forever.  I look at this pair of fly button jeans and think of how it has seen me through lean and weighty times - in the literal sense.  I remember wearing it during a trip to Vancouver or to Paris or Amsterdam and then I wonder if I'll ever feel affluent enough to give these jeans another whirl around the globe.
After my hard labor this morning I headed out to the grocery store.  I had been ordered to buy Ore-Ida Crinkle Cut Fries because that's what the little one wanted for an after school snack.  I shopped for a few other things while I was there.  Later as I plucked all the bags out of the cart before starting my walk to the car, I flashed back to my first few months in this country when I lived in Riverdale, MD, before I owned a car, when I used to have to walk to the grocery store three quarters of a mile away and then walk back with the heavy bags, their twisted up handles cutting into the skin of my fingers.  But just before I tell myself those times were not pleasant another thought crosses my mind and tells me that I had a paycheck coming in even then, a miserable $234.35 every week, but there was a paycheck.  I have never been unemployed in my adult life until now.
I did wish for it.  I wanted to see how it would feel.  There are days when I rejoice, when I love how the day stretches ahead of me, full of possibilities.  I cherish the hours I now spend with my daughter, doing things with her, cooking things for her, I love it all.  I willed this.  I have always got what I wanted when I've wanted it badly enough and I wanted this.  I wanted it with a growing sense of desperation over the last year.  So I have it now.  But the joy I feel at an entire day stretching out in front of me, a day where I don't have to visit Microsoft Excel for even a minute, vanishes as the sun sets and I realize I haven't done much to own it.  It has just been another day.