Women's Work

I'll do it later

Hello, my name is Elizabeth, and I am a procrastinator.  This week at work, I procrastinated.  I did other stuff, too, but mainly I put off doing something I was dreading.  I had high expectations of myself doing said thing early Monday morning, but then I hadn’t had my coffee yet, and then I had a bunch of meetings, and then it was almost 5.  On Tuesday I thought about doing it all the way to work, but when I got to the office I ended up futzing around on the internet a bit, and then having some meetings, and then going to lunch.  And on throughout the week…Emily emailed me and I had to write her back immediately; I had to work on something that’s not due until May; I needed to clean my desk.  The last straw was when I actually called a contractor about getting our kitchen remodeled, which is something I’ve been putting off for a year, but even that was better than doing my dreaded task.  And the task?  It wasn’t nearly as awful as you are probably thinking.  In fact, today, Friday, I finally did it, and it took 10 minutes and was totally harmless.  However, I realized that this is a bad habit of mine, stemming from college days and probably before, and I started wondering why I put myself through this.

 One of the reasons was that this dreaded task involved making a phone call.  I dislike the phone so things involving phone calls are easy targets for me to procrastinate (same reason I put off the kitchen contractors for a year).  The other reason was it involved sharing bad news with someone – namely, telling an agency that bid for our business that they didn’t get it.  I know I’m supposed to be all “tough businesswoman” about it and deliver the message, but I felt bad.  Putting it off for a week didn’t make it any better, though, and you could say it made it worse because I had to think about it all week instead of just doing it and moving on.  I remember this mental game from college and the sinking feeling it gives me is the same, the old “I have to do this…but I’m not going to do this…but I have to do this…” routine.

 

I got so frustrated with myself I ended up on the Procrastinators Anonymous website.  One of the website’s pieces of advice was “get off the internet and do whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing,” which did shame me off the internet temporarily.  One tip I’m going to try is to always begin the day by working on things you are prone to putting off, because as the day goes on you will have more time to think of excuses.  Also, I’ve found the first hour of the day sets the tone for the rest of it.  If I am productive and hardworking from 8-9, I’m more likely to be so the rest of the day.  Another tidbit from PA is that the hardest part is getting over the hump from “doing nothing” to “doing something.”  They promise that with practice it becomes easier and easier to actually do “something” instead of lying around on the sofa reading a book all day.  I think my problem is that I would much, much rather have the sofa and the book, but I can’t live that way and accomplish any adult goals.

 

So, are you an active or reformed procrastinator?  If you are reformed, do you have any advice for me?

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, Much pleasure doth thou bring me!

For every year the Christmas tree, Brings to us all both joy and glee.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, Much pleasure doth thou bring me!

 

In my house, the official start of the Christmas season is not the first of December, or the day after Thanksgiving; it’s whenever we put the Christmas tree up.  Ours is a Christmas-loving household.  My husband goes at the season with an unadulterated glee that knows no bounds and I am swept merrily along.

 

The Christmas tree is maybe my favorite part of the holiday.  The last few years we’ve bought a real tree from the charity Christmas tree lot in our neighborhood.  Each year we debate just going to Home Depot for a cheaper tree, but I can’t resist the joy of wandering among a forest of trees in the elementary school parking lot, those round lights that are so peculiar to Christmas tree lots dangling above.  So what if their trees are $20 more expensive?

 

I think it is lovely when Christmas trees have a theme, or are all done up in a certain color or style, but ours is decidedly not one of those.  It’s a chaos of ornaments from our families, our respective childhoods, from our lives before we met each other, souvenir ornaments from the trips we’ve taken together, and those random ones that make you laugh each year when you unwrap them from the tissue paper.  Our tree décor is really the story of our lives, so far, and wackily representative of our histories both apart and together.  Here are a few of my favorites and the stories behind them:

 

 

The Dickie Ball

This is the most basic kid-made ornament ever – a large Styrofoam ball, a pipe cleaner hook, and “DICKIE” (my husband’s childhood nickname) written in glitter across the front. Ours is actually a recent replica, as the original Dickie Ball resides with my mother-in-law in Arizona.  Richard has given up trying to hide it around the back of the tree and now just hands it over to me to be placed in a prominent spot for the best viewing potential.  Lucky for him, he can counter by displaying my own childhood craft project, the Christmas Ghost.

 

 

The Christmas Ghost

This ornament came out of a project at my elementary school where we were making colonial-style dolls:  One square of fabric, cross-stitched eyes and mouth, and a puff of fiber-fill for the head, gathered around the “neck” with a ribbon to make a simple doll.  I made my own for our family tree, but lacking the patience to cross-stitch the eyes I drew the x’s on with blue marker.  The resulting ornament looks more like the victim of a hanging then a holiday decoration, but my mother cherished it and hung it up every year.  She handed it over to us only after extracting the promise that it would always go on the tree (not in a box as would be my preference).

 

The Christmas Monkey

For the first 5 years of our relationship, this was the star at the top of our tree, not because we were making a statement about Darwin vs. religion but because we realized, when decorating our first tree together, that neither of us had a star for the top.  The monkey was the most ridiculous star-substitute we could think of, so up it went and there it stayed for years, until last Christmas. When Richard’s grandmother became very ill last December, we replaced the monkey star with a circle of her crocheted angels.

Grandma Angels

Richard’s grandma Mary was a talented crocheter and we have a wealth of her angels and stars on our tree, finely knit out of thin white yarn, flattened and stiffened so they hang lightly on the tips of the boughs.  Her needlework is amazing – in addition to the angels and stars, we have lacily-detailed doilies and a couple wooly warm blankets.  She passed away last Christmas Day at the age of 97.  She was the sort of person who brought happiness to everyone who knew her, and her angels now dance lightly around the top of our tree.  They remind us not only of the joy, wonder and symbolic "beginning" of the Christmas story, but of a woman who embraced and shared joy and wonder through her long life.  That, I think, is truly something to celebrate.

 

May the holidays bring you all both joy and glee!

Learning, Acceptance, and (hopefully) Action

I always thought I liked learning, but it turns out there are several kinds – the nice, cozy, pleasant kind when you’re in school, and then the unpleasant “learning things about oneself” that goes on for the rest of your life. Over the last year my husband and I have learned something big about ourselves: we aren’t terribly fertile. Kids have always been in the back of our minds, but we had a lot we wanted to do – travel, spend time together, get settled in our careers. Finally the time felt right. We got all excited, I ditched the pills, started taking a vitamin, and…nothing. We’ve been doing what we should, at the right time, and I’m just not getting pregnant.

Coming to terms with this has been difficult, and I’m not there yet. There’s an irony to waiting for four years, until we were absolutely ready to be parents, just to wait and wait some more. I can’t help but feel if I was 16 and in high school I would have been knocked up eleven months ago, but of course that wouldn’t have been a good thing either. There’s some shock – this is not how I expected things to go. Growing up, especially as a girl, you get the impression that if you so much as French-kiss someone without protection you’ll be instantly pregnant. However, for reasons I can’t explain, it’s not a total surprise to me either. Whether we knew it or not, this has been part of who we are as a couple for as long as we’ve known each other. We just didn’t find out about it until now.

Today at 3:30 PM, I have an appointment with my doctor for the “trying for over a year, no baby” conversation. We're hoping this leads to answers, after the requisite tests, pokes, prods, and calls to the insurance company to figure out what they will cover. We are eager for any kind of facts at this point; anything that could point us in a definite direction. I hope this is how it turns out – a clear answer, a clear solution, and the ability to move out of limbo and on in our lives, whatever direction that may be. I’m sure that’s a very optimistic hope. At the very least, if the last year has been about learning an unsettling reality, I want the next year to be about discovery and action. And acceptance of whatever comes our way, of course, which is the hardest part.

Introducing Elizabeth

Hello! I’m Elizabeth, and I like flowers, puppies, and long walks in the rain.

Okay, not seriously (although I have no problems with any of those things, except maybe the rain one). I’m in my early 30s, live in Virginia, and am married – we recently celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. No children yet, but hopefully soon. We share our house with a black cat named Frank and 3 hermit crabs. Hermit crabs are my favorite animal, which I think (like preferring invisibility) says a lot about me. I like to retreat into my shell!

My favorite things to do are read, cook, and travel. I love to read, and this is the perfect time of year for it. There’s nothing better than a good book and a warm house on a blustery fall night. I just finished reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, which I really enjoyed, and before that I read the first two books in the Twilight young adult series about vampires. Kind of a weird combination but it worked. I also enjoy travel writing, which combines reading with my other favorite hobby, traveling. My husband and I try to take a trip to at least one new place a year. The most exciting so far has been our trip to Croatia in 2007. We took two weeks and traveled around the southern Croatian coast and the islands. It was a beautiful country, full of vineyards, olive groves, and bright Mediterranean sun. Its one of the most amazing things in the world to me that you can decide to go to Croatia, or Brazil or Uzbekistan, and then you can just get on a plane and go there.

I work in marketing, with which I have a like-hate relationship (my feelings for it never get so strong to qualify as "love".) Marketing as a field is not something that really excites me; in fact I think there’s probably too much marketing going on in our culture. At least I market medical supplies, which are somewhat more necessary to society than chicken nuggets or cell phones. I do enjoy the challenge and occasional creativity my job allows, but I hope that this is not all there is for me. I feel ambivalent about my career and think, as my mother would say, this is what I have been given this lifetime to figure out. A partial list of jobs that appeal to me more than marketing: archaeologist, marine biologist, bookstore clerk, historic preservationist, author, ESL teacher.

I’m very much looking forward to getting to know everyone here and hearing your stories. Cheers!