Tag: pressure

Happy Bunny Trails to You

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David never knows when Easter Sunday is coming, he says, until three or four people ask him on Friday what he’s doing for Easter. Of course we’re doing nothing in particular for Easter, since we never do. He likes to report the grumpy answers he thinks up, usually Easter-inappropriate activities. I’m the only one who ever hears them.

It’s not that we don’t like Easter. It just doesn’t mean anything to us. The kids are grown up, so we don’t do Easter baskets. We try to keep candy and refined sugar-somethings out of the house, so we don’t gnosh that way. It’s not springtime here, so there’s no celebration of that aspect. We no longer consider ourselves Catholics; arguably, we never did. And, for whatever reason, this is usually a busy time of year for us, so we almost always have Easter Sunday as a breather day — to catch up on at-home stuff.

Now, if we lived somewhere with a decent Easter brunch, I’d probably do that. I love a champagne brunch. But what I love best is the afterwards, the lazy buzz on a Sunday afternoon of bubbly in my veins and enough food in my body to last the day. Like this bit from Wallace Stevens:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

There’s something to be said for the “just after.” Many of the people who ask what we’re doing for Easter are hitting the road to visit family. And they look pressured. It’s a difficult holiday, being confined to Sunday and working folks needing to be back at it Monday morning.

My friend, Julianne, just posted that it’s “an oddly gray sky in Laramie this morning. The grackles are puffing their chests and making that funny sqwak sound in the cottonwoods.”

What am I doing for Easter? I’m listening to our black birds. And to the moment just after.

Horseplay

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This morning, on our way out of the rec center, David and I passed one of the guys who works there. I commented that, typically, the guy didn’t look at or acknowlege me, though I’ve seen him pretty much every day at the same time for a year now. David compared him to an old acquaintance of ours. “He’s all about work being serious business,” he said, “no horseplay.”

Ooh, I thought, I want to blog about “horseplay” today. When I got home, I looked it up in my phrase & fable dictionary: nothing. My word & phrase origins dictionary goes right from “horse opera” to “horsepower.” I went to one of my all-time favorite sites, The Word Detective, to search his archives — a concession because I’d wanted to do my own research — and even the witty, all-knowing, all-word-powerful (omnietympotent?) Evan Morris doesn’t have it. I even resorted to Wikipedia (the same Evan Morris quips that Wikipedia’s motto should be “it could be true”). Article not found. I even tried a general google search. All I get is the completely unhelpful suggestion that “horseplay” is a combination of “horse” and “play.” Eureka! “Possibly from observing horses at play.”

Shoot me now.

I mean, my question is: why horses?? Why isn’t it kittenplay or bunnyplay? Okay, if we want the boisterous aspect, why not dogplay? The deer and antelope roam — apparently no playing there. If we presume we have to stick with domestic animals, I can see why cows weren’t picked. But goats? Goatplay involves all sorts of rowdy, sundress-eating types of activities. (Don’t ask — I was only five at the time.)

I can see David’s point, that the “no horseplay” attitude makes for the serious worker. The kind who doesn’t say good-morning. The rule-keepers. I wonder, too, about the pressure we all seem to be feeling. Like me, most everyone I know has the same amount of day-to-day money as they have ever had. Sure there are people getting laid off — we hear about them on the news — but I don’t know any of them. My mom and her husband, Dave, say they now have 50% of what they had, but their monthly income from pensions remains the same.

The loss is more or less theoretical. We worry that we might lose our jobs, or that our 401Ks will dissolve, but it’s theoretical pressure. It’s not now. Napoleon Hill, when he worked for Eisenhower, observed that the most profound effect of The Great Depression, was that peoples’ attitudes changed. The fear of loss made them think of themselves as poor, whether they’d lost already or not. The curse of the cerebral cortex is that we can worry about things that haven’t happened. The blessing of the animal brain is that it is only for the now, the immediate experience.

Give me a little horseplay.

With Your Faith and Your Peter Pan Advice

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David confessed yesterday that he’s feeling a lot of pressure. I said, of course he is.

In a few short months, we’ll totally uproot our lives and leave the small community we’ve lived in for over 20 years. David will leave the career he’s had most of his life to return to school to do what he really loves. We’re moving to a foreign country, with all of the attendant rules. Never mind that we’re pursuing a dream — it’s a huge effort.

Assembling my tax information for our accountant this weekend, I ended up thinking of 2008 as a lost year. I made a little over $100 on writing — the least I’ve made for five or six years. No wonder it felt weird to me going to Evanston on a gig for Wyo Trucks: I didn’t do any in 2008.

I wondered what I did do last year. Well, I made a lot more money at my day job, especially when I add in the moonlighting I did for another enviro consulting firm. The last six months of the year I went on a business trip every other week: everyone on my team lost huge chunks of their personal lives to this crushing pressure.

I finished my novel — the first full-length manuscript I’ve completed — and made progress on two others. Otherwise, I spent the year breaking into a new market. A couple of essays and a story were accepted or published. Oddly, the money on these came in right at the end of 2007 or now in 2009.

And we worked on the house. Beginning last March, we commenced work to bring our house to top sellable condition for this big move. We spent over $25,000. I’m not counting our time.

This sounds like it’s all about money, which it isn’t. Though our annual tithe+ to keep the country afloat brings these evaluations to mind. What it’s about is keeping your head above water. This article from the Washington Post talks about the multi-tasking pressure that results in tragedy. It’s a long article and well-worth the time to read through to the last word — even through the really horrifying parts. Fair warning: I wept several times while reading it.

The “fatal distraction” of the title is the kind that results in parents leaving the baby in the car to die. No, not trailer trash types who lock the kid in the car while they go hit the bars. Instead these are the conscientious parents. The ones who forget the child hasn’t been dropped off at day care. Who have no idea the child remains baking in the hot car all day. The article describes the kind of person who could do this. They’re the muli-taskers. The ones under a lot of pressure.
Sometimes we get so frantic, so focused on keeping all the balls in the air that something gets dropped. For these people, the thing forgotten isn’t a meeting or a cell phone. It’s the most awful thing possible.

But the point is, if someone can forget their beloved baby in the car, perhaps we can all forgive ourselves for the balls we do drop. Most of us go through our days with two men out and three men on.

Of course we feel the pressure.