I’ve decided that for the next month or so — however long I need — that when I journal here, I’m going to photojournal rather than communicate with words and text. Even that’s tough, posting a photo or a piece of artwork and not saying anything about it. I tell you, you’d think that my odd little mind is convinced that if I shut my yap, the world will stop turning.

One of the challenges I’ve always had when it comes to being creative in more than one medium is striking a balance. It’s fine that I have phases where one medium is the primary one, and the others more secondary. That’s not the issue, or at least not the issue when those phases are days, weeks, maybe even a couple months. But sometimes, any one way of communicating, of creating basically monopolizes all others. That one way will rudely shove every other medium into the closet and lock the door, only letting them out when they whine and say pretty, pretty please, and sometimes, refuses to open it at all, no matter the plaintive wailing, which gets softer and softer as time goes by until one can barely hear them at all.

I feel utterly steamrolled by my own words lately, both in writing and in talking. Not only is that not leaving room for anything else, they’ve been so fever pitch that managing them in the way any writer needs to has become far more difficult than it should be.

I’m missing visual imagery these days. While images certainly have things to say, they’re communicated in a silence which I find meditative. It helps me listen to the world with my eyes and my more intuitive senses. (That sounded both completely convoluted and cheeseball, but so be it.) I’m more observant of everything around me when I do photography or other visual artwork, and that’s an important meditation for someone who is a far better talker than she is a listener. (Being hyper and a bit ADD also is a factor in this.) Words tend to energize me and work me up, whereas the visual — and music, too — calms, stills, quiets and centers.

I may even just write for myself a bit in the interim. It’s been a long while since I’ve done that, sparing my to-do lists, which while they have a flavor all their own, and are occasionally amusing, aren’t exactly the deepest form of personal expression.

Of course, I can’t get away with not writing anything, nor without conversing, simply because for two out of three jobs, I need to do those things. But I think that even limiting it in one avenue will be the good news.

So, you get a piece from a full set I put up today, of Melissa (Happy birthday, gal!), which is apt, really, and not just because her setting and posture speak — as it were — to some of how I’m feeling at the moment. Even though we spent this day last October talkingtalkingtalking, there’s still that quiet, that calm, that observation and meditative focus I get when I take pictures sewn throughout.

And now you get me being quiet. Starting now. Here I am, quiet, quiet, quiety-quiet. La la la, wordless bliss. Okay, no really: right now. No, wait, I — now. Quiet. Hmm. This kind of reminds me of The Monster At The End of This Book. Fine, seriously. No more words.

(Oh, hush.)

posted in Heather Corinna, subconscious life, photography & art, wah | permalink | comments (7) »

Mark and I watched Once the other night, and it was all kinds of brilliant. Possibly my favorite film of the last year, for a whole lot of reasons I won’t spoil the film for you by listing.

It reminded me that I’ve been struggling for some time to figure out a piece for Scarleteen addressing the fact that relationships can have great importance even when they don’t go on for years or even months, and when they’re not sexual or even romantic. Obviously, this is super-pertinent for young people who are often having watershed relationships that also don’t tend to last long periods of time. During them, they’re hyper-aware that they’re important, but there are so many messages that pivotal = long-term that often when they end — or even throughout them — they discount something so huge, or diminish it, and all just because of that misconception. As well, we also have this funny cultural idea about romance that says that anyone who doesn’t stay with you is rejecting you, or feeling you weren’t worth their time, and it’s an idea that discounts the complexity and multifaceted nature of our lives and the value of every single moment.

It’s a big deal for me, too. Even when Mark and I were watching that film, the two main characters have, on the day they first meet, one of those first-meeting-days that turns into this long day and then a long night, mostly of talking, sharing common interests, and suchlike. I was telling him that I just LOVED days like that — we had one when we first met, too: those meetings that just stretch on and on, and there is a certain energy to them that’s all about meeting anew. I’ve had a bunch of those in my life, and sometimes you do continue seeing the other person, and sometimes you don’t, but the import of what happens on those days just isn’t determined by anything BUT that one day.

In college, for instance, on a flight to Oxford-via-Amsterdam in 1990 — back in those halcyon days when there was a smoking section on international flights, and that section was often like a cocktail party — I wound up sitting beside this poetry professor from Iraq. This was a double boon, since previously, I was sitting next to a male schoolmate who had teased me all the way to the airport about the fact that I was a nervous flyer, only to immediately vomit on my feet twice during take-off. So, being able to move at all was a lifesaver. But there I was reading my Blake, preparing for my Big Blake Immersion, and there was this professor reading over my shoulder and sighing blissfully. We wound up in this amazing 7-hour-long conversation, punctuated by an awful lot of wine and the distribution of many cigarettes; about poetry, art, death, poverty, racism, world peace, love, longing, the whole enchilada. We laughed, we cried, we even yelled once or twice, we held hands. When we parted ways, we exchanged things of great value to each of us, so thankful to have made that connection: I gave him a bunch of stones and crystals I always kept with me for my back (I used a cane for walking for six months in college due to an injury), and he gave me this heavy, woven gold ring. I still have and cherish it: I call it the world peace ring because not shortly thereafter, the first (though technically the second- we’re really in the third now) gulf “war” started and it struck me as so tragically silly that if two strangers, from the U.S. and Iraq, could get along so quickly and easily and talk about difficult subjects so freely and openly, surely world leaders apparently schooled in diplomacy could freaking work it out.

I don’t even remember his name. He wrote it in one of the many books I had with me, but I haven’t yet run into which book that was again yet. It’ll be a fun day when that happens. But it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter that I don’t remember his name, it doesn’t matter that that was our only exchange, and likely the only one we will ever have. It is the connection and the moment itself that matters. We both left different than we came. (And after I left him, I had a long layover between flights, so I took this great solitary walk through the city, hit a couple bars, ate half a gingerbread house by myself in a park, and, having my dulcimer with me, played street musician in my traveling pajamas for an hour or two. I was so dazzled — and okay, a bit dazed, too — by the time I got to Oxford, and so high on the conversation, sleep deprivation and alright, the hash, that I slept for nearly three days solid when I arrived.)

The point is, you have that meeting, however short, something happens, you leave it transformed. It is incredibly important, and it’s import is in no way determined by time. I’ve had an awful lot of instances like this in my life, romantic, sexual (one of the many reasons I have always very much enjoyed one-to-two-night stands) or otherwise, and I consider myself blessed in that. As a Buddhist, there’s also an extra-special sweetness to things like that, which is that without any attachment, even the hint of possible attachment, there’s a certain magic that can happen that isn’t the same as in exchanges which you think or know are not temporary.

I’m always torn dealing one aspect of with young adults and relationships, and this is part of why. I never want to keep them from enjoying that feeling that strong feelings and relationships are eternal. It’s a beautiful thing, and I think it’s very developmentally valuable and poignant. I also think it’s okay to think that and find out otherwise. It hurts like hell when it happens, sure, but I often say that I’m much more worried about young people who never get their hearts broken than those who do. I think we all need some heartbreak to grow. But at the same time, they can get in some weird emotional spaces where I feel the need to explain that realistically, their teen relationships will likely NOT last forever, and even when they do, will rarely be the same relationship later that they are now; that it’s far more likely if they sustain a YA romantic relationship it will become a platonic friendship, for instance, than it will stay a romance. That that love and mad like does feel eternal, and it’s even possible those feelings may be eternal in some respect, but that isn’t the same thing as spending your whole life in a romance with the person you’re dating at 15. And part of me thinks that some of why those relationships are so watershed is expressly because they are fleeting: two people will meet, connect, share something unique, then take it with them as they move on to the next place. Clearly, you gotta walk a fine line to explain things like that without raining on their parade. For as long as I’ve done this work, I’m still not sure I get it right with them when it comes to this.

But again, some of that is this issue of time, and battling what they’re told about what makes interpersonal connections and relationships important — an issue of quantity over quality, really — out and about. Adults will often make clear, overtly or covertly, that young people don’t understand love or that their relationships aren’t meaningful because they won’t be marriages of lifelong romances, and it’s bollocks. Or projection. Or both. (Maybe wishful thinking? I seem to see a lot of parents telling their kids that it’s what lasts over time that is the biggest deal, of the most emotional import, but whose long-term relationships are clearly substandard at best.) I tend to think that there are aspects of love which we probably understand best as children or adolescents which we either forget as we grow older, or which our disillusionment — particularly if we have been given the idea that the shorter a relationship is, the less worthwhile it is — poisons. If we’re lucky, we get the chance to relearn it.

Anyway, food for thought for me over the next few days, that. Mark just spun off to Austin for a couple of days for his day job, which gives me two days and nights completely to myself that I hope to use working on things here like a maniac. Because of the holiday, I’m not back at the clinic until Wednesday, so I have some time to play catch-up, per usual, here at the home office and at the house in general.

(Perhaps hilariously, we realized last night that one issue for us in our sex lives is that because we started out long-distance, we’re both most amped up when one of us is leaving or coming back home. We never fail to have the best sex then, and sometimes struggle to have sex outside of that context as amped as it is within it. I guess we need to go away more often. Heck, maybe we’re grooving on the exact kind of thing I was just looking at: the feeling — even though in our case it’s not a reality anymore — of what is fleeting and potentially temporary.)

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

Today at the protester corner outside the day job there sat a couple signs. One was an illustration of a baby seal, holding a sign itself that said “Save the Humans.” I’m so not kidding.

I looked once, then again, then turned to Mark (who was driving me in) to express that I had strong doubts that seals would want more people around just so we can continue to club them to death, poison their environment or, on a good day, take them far away from home and lock them up in claustrophobic living spaces at no pay for our own amusement.

I mean, if a seal was going to hold up a protest sign that had anything to do with human beings in front of an abortion clinic, I’m inclined it’d read something like “YOU.S. OFF MY BODY!” or “At least they won’t skin THEIR babies alive,” or “Good Choice! Less People = More Seals.” (Or maybe they’d be protesting the protesters, with a sign that said, “I’M the seal of God, not you!”)  And they’d probably be clapping.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, workworkwork, because sometimes I'm an asshole | permalink | comments (5) »

CHOOSE WIFE.

That was a sign being held up by a protester in front of our clinic this week. Two words, but they speak volumes. (Though I confess, it took me a little while to get pissed, because I couldn’t stop saying it in an Elmer Fudd voice for a few minutes.)

This has been one of the biggest blind spots I’ve had to contend with when it comes to both working in sexuality education and working in women’s health, and with women’s reproductive choice. There’s a very pervasive idea out there — and boy howdy, does it serve the agenda of the far right — that somehow, getting married fixes absolutely everything for women when it comes to unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and just about anything and everything you could think of when it comes to sex, sexuality and reproductive health and choice. That married people — but more to the point, married women — don’t need sex education, don’t need birth control, don’t need abortion, don’t need sexual healthcare, don’t need to know about their bodies, don’t need safer sex, don’t need to know sexual negotiation skills. Women, if you want to be protected and safe, get married. That’s what’s been said to women for most of our history, and despite knowing better now — especially if you provide any of the above services and happen to notice that married women are among the clients you serve — it’s still what is said to women daily and incessantly.

I’ve talked before about the flaw in that logic when it comes to STIs. Historically and currently, marriage, in and of itself, does not and never has offered protection from sexually transmitted infections, especially when you consider not only what the rates of infidelity are — particularly among men, who more often transmit disease to their spouses, simply when we’re talking about the physiology of sexually transmitted infections — and as well, when you consider that most people will have had other sexual partners before marriage, and how many people (again, especially men) never get STI screenings, and also don’t use latex barriers consistently, or at all. I’ve talked before — and you hardly need me to deliver this news flash — about how anyone with ears and eyes knows that marriage does not guarantee a safe or satisfying sex life. I’ve talked before about how given domestic violence rates, the notion that women are guaranteed lifelong safety, on every level, simply by getting married is an incredibly cruel piece of propaganda.

There’s not likely a woman in the world who needs me to tell her that getting married does not mean that birth control is no longer needed or wanted at times, or constantly — remembering that funny little factoid that not all women or couples want to reproduce at all — or that getting married does not mean a woman thus wants to spend the rest of her reproductive life pregnant or risking pregnancy. Getting married doesn’t necessarily provide even the woman who DOES love being pregnant and does love rearing children, who wants to be pregnant and parenting every waking minute of her life the financial or practical means to do so. My mother grew up with two parents in an Irish Catholic family: she has eight siblings, and would have had more save one stillbirth and a couple of miscarriages. Mind, her mother hardly had a choice in when she got pregnant, or when she had sex, but still. Anyone who wants to tell me I just don’t know what I’m talking about and what nirvana it is to be a kid in a household stretched that thin can bite one of my grandmothers dry Bisquick-and-water biscuits (and be unable to afford the dental care needed to repair their chipped teeth, too).

Even most conservative women know these truths. They too, are either using a method of birth control, or if they are not, are trying to just avoid sex to try and prevent pregnancy. Very few women in the world with any real agency are choosing to have ten children, and to be at constant risk of pregnancy, unsure when they’ll be pregnant again at any time. Conservative women come into clinics for abortions who make very clear that they do not believe in abortion, all while choosing to have one. For those most vocal about how not-okay with abortion they are, when a clinician tells them that IF they are really not okay with it, they can’t perform a procedure for them, the outrage is often astounding. (Because, of course, abortion providers are supposed to be just DYING to give everyone on earth an abortion, since the aim is apparently to wipe out the human race and make millions from abortion procedures, so we are never, ever supposed to say no to anyone. After all, we’re supposed to be lying when we say that we’re committed to women, committed to their choices being choices they can live with: when we show up that untruth, the antichoicers get mighty pissed.)

I’d posit that a lot of conservative women have the best of all possible worlds. They can malign or try and limit sexuality education, birth control and abortion all they like, even very publicly, even fight it actively, and yet, it’s still there for them — for now, and tenuously because of their efforts to make it so — when they need it, without judgment, and most of them do use at least some of these things. They can benefit from the feminist movement when it comes to getting them out of the house, allowing them the ability to be public spokespeople, to be politically visible, and reap those benefits while denouncing their source. They can even beg off sex to prevent pregnancy by being able to say they are so, so tired from doing the things in a day that only movements they oppose have allowed them to do. They can also cheerlead marriage and abstinence even if their marriages are a mess and they didn’t abstain from sex themselves. They don’t have to be consistent or truthful in any of this, because they know they can rely on our consistency, and the truth of our commitments.

From what I can gather by polls at Scarleteen over the years, as well as the daily conversations I have with teens and young adults there, around 30% of our users are not yet sexually active. Plenty have no intention of becoming so any time soon, and plenty are, in fact, right now waiting for marriage. (Some of them are even swift enough to know they may well change their minds about that later on, but acknowledge that even if that’s how things work out, this is their plan for now.) What they’re doing, see, is this crazy-smart thing we call preparing for the future. They know that someday they likely will become sexually active, and that at that time, they’re going to need to know about their bodies, about how to work sexuality out alone and with partners, about birth control and/or safer sex. They’re looking this stuff up now, asking questions now because they both know they’ll need it later and because they are curious about it now. Some of them WILL be people’s wives or husbands later, but most are smart enough to know — smarter than some of their elders in this regard — that that doesn’t mean they won’t need to have an idea about using birth control or how to take care of their sexual health. I feel pretty confident saying that most teens would do this — including those who do become sexually active in their teens — but many don’t simply because having the information in advance isn’t an option for them, and they don’t know where to find it.

As a former — though it still informs the way I educate — Montessori educator, it’s a very big deal to me to try and educate in such a way that I am teaching what I am in the windows in which someone’s mind is absorbent, or for you non-Montessori geeks out there, at the times when a person is in a stage of development where a given set of skills or knowledge are most likely to be learned, and a natural curiosity is most prevalent. For instance, the usual window for language is, not surprisingly, under the age of six. Children under six can often become bilingual or trilingual without even trying, just by listening and being talked to in several languages, simply because that time is when they’re forming most of their basic language skills and when doing so is so gangbusters for them. And one of the ways we, as educators, determine windows of the best absorbency is simply by watching and listening to our students: they tend to show us or ask us, pretty directly, when they want to learn something. Of course, when it comes to sex education, that can be tricky simply because so many young people have been shown by so many that it’s just not okay to ask questions about sex.

In the same vein, it’s no big shocker that during the big peak of physical and emotional sexual development, young adult minds tend to be particularly absorbent to sexuality information. For sure, if they are or are becoming sexually active at that time, that information is all the more essential because it has a very immediate and practical application. But even for those young adults who are NOT yet sexually active, even for those few who WILL not be in any way sexually active until their twenties, this is STILL a great time to teach them about it because they are so absorbent, and also because it’s obviously ideal to educate someone about something they will need before they actually need it. There’s a reason we try and do Driver’s Ed before someone is ever behind the wheel, after all, and why people who start factory jobs with big, sharp machines are given training first, rather than just being told to blindly try it out, see what happens, and hope they don’t lose a limb.

Again, I’m going to state the obvious. Speaking as one longtime sex educator, the idea that I somehow would profit from someone getting a sexually transmitted infection is hilarious. No one is going to donate to Scarleteen because what I do results in greater levels of infection. I bust my arse trying to do everything I know or suspect will be effective to reduce rates of STIs. Really, either way, profit isn’t my motivation, because I’d be a moron if I hadn’t figured out by now that no matter how great a job I do, I will rarely get paid, and when I am, I should never have any expectation that I will be paid at a rate at or much higher than your average high school kid working at the drive-through gets: in a good year, I tend to make around the minimum wage. If I wanted to work in sex ed for money (and had no problem leaving my conscience at the door), I’d work for the abstinence-only faction. THAT is who has been making the big bucks in sex “education” over the last ten years, kids. Leslie Unruh, for example, as executive director for the Abstinence Clearinghouse, reported compensation in 2004 at $109,920. In the same year, her reported compensation as executive director of the Alpha Center — a CPC — was $57,547. That’s an annual personal salary — not a gross for her organizations — of almost $170,000. I haven’t done my taxes yet, but for my sex ed work — at Scarleteen and with the book — I’d estimate (and I just took a closer look) that my personal salary for 2007 is going to have been somewhere around $16,000, if that, and I likely work more hours than she does, no less. Without the one larger private grant I get (knock on wood), I just couldn’t do this as a job at all anymore — in 2004, the same year Unruh was raking in the big bucks, that huge profit I was making from sex ed was a big, fat $7,026 — and it’s been crystal clear over the years that how hard I work, how many people I educate, or how good a job I do has little to no bearing on if I get paid and how much. No matter what, this girl just picked the wrong side of the wrong fence, and it is THAT which influences my finances.
I’m sure I’d horrify Wendy Wright and her ilk and perhaps even prove the link she’s reaching for: after all, I now am not only a sex educator, I also work at an abortion clinic. Surely, this has been a very crafty plan on my part. Work like the demon I am in sex ed for ten years, talk myself blue in the face about safer sex knowing that all sexy talk about condoms and Chlamydia is only going to make teens want to race out and have sex even more (Herpes sores, in case no one told you, are all the rage now, because with all that public hair removed, you’ve got to have something to decorate your vulva with, after all), know that those young girls with the STIs will get pregnant because of them, which assures that they’ll wind up for an abortion at my other job. And don’t you think for a minute that given the lousy pay, I didn’t negotiate in advance for a steep commission from all that new business I’m going to be bringing them. I’m no fool.

(Ten bucks and two doses of EC says that at some point I find what I just said there quoted out of context in some conservative blog or book.)

But what Wright and the woman standing in front of our clinic doesn’t seem to realize is that our lobby isn’t overflowing with nothing but teenagers and fallen, unmarried women. Married women are in there every single day, some even with their husbands sitting right beside them. Some of those couples are military, flag-waving, apple-pie baking, churchgoing folk. Why on earth would they be there?

It’s a stupid question, and we all — even Wright — know the obvious answer. Because there is NO woman on earth, no matter her age, marital status or station, for whom it is always the right time to be pregnant and no child on earth for whom it is always the right time and environment in which to be born and raised. Women like Wright, of course, are likely planets away from families who can barely afford to feed themselves, let alone more — or any — kids. Most women who come into the clinic do already have at least one child. I saw someone just last week who already had two, and whose biggest concern about having an abortion was that it would impact her fertility, because while there was just no way she could afford to remain pregnant or have another child now, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t want to have another somewhere down the road if things improved. She “chose wife,” and yet, there she was. A lot of women who get abortions do use birth control, and plenty correctly — this business about BC not being 100% effective isn’t a fairy tale. This one, though, not only wasn’t, she didn’t know how to. No one had ever taught her how, discussed her options, or even let her know that if she wanted to keep using natural family planning as she had been, there was a far more effective way to do that than the calendar method.

Suffice it to say, an abortion clinic doesn’t profit from STIs. That’s just silly. But it also doesn’t exist to profit from unwanted pregnancy. When I took this other job, for certain, some of it was financially motivated. I was working full-time and still having a helluva time paying my bills, despite already being without things many people have: a car, a house they actually own or are in the process of buying, health insurance. And this other job will help me pay my bills, but only because I live so leanly to begin with. Your average pencil-pusher makes more on the hour than most of us at the clinic, just for sitting in a cubicle and clockwatching every day, and he’s also not risking being shot or bombed, nor is he likely responsible for anyone’s physical or emotional health. And if suddenly there were methods of birth control that were 100% effective, totally safe for, and affordable and available to everyone (and you can tell me complete abstinence is when a) people stop having a libido and b) men stop raping women or obligating them to have heterocourse), if suddenly there was no more unwanted pregnancy, ever, I can assure you that not a single person at the clinic would shed a tear and be upset that the part of our job that is about providing abortions was over.

The thing that gets me the most about this “Choose Wife” stuff, whether it’s on a sign in front of my workplace or on the nightly news is that I have to also hear strong statements — from these same mouths — that women are no longer mere chattel. And yet, it is also stated or implied that once/if a woman marries, there’s just no need for any of these discussions about birth control, choice or sexual health because part of marriage presumably still requires a woman to forfeit all of that agency to one’s husband, or somehow removes a woman’s desire to have any of that ownership over her own life and body. Suffice it to say, it also — so far as I can make sense of it — implies that these children we’re told are SO important, are so UNimportant as to disregard their quality of life, whether we’re talking about having the means to feed and clothe them or we’re talking about assuring that they grow up without one or both of their parents resenting the hell out of them, telling — overtly or covertly — them HOW much they gave up to bring them into the world. Gee, thanks, Mom: lucky me.

I’m a blunt gal. I’m not going to say that some people’s opinions don’t horrify the hell out of me, they obviously do, particularly when they seek to make those personal opinions public policy. However, even with the seriously scary stuff, I prefer it straight up.

If you just think, as a woman yourself, that it’d be best for women to be without options anymore, for women’s lives to revert (and when I say that, I’m not even talking about all women: for the poorest women and women of color in many areas, marriage never even pretended to offer financial security, stability or safety) to being about nothing but preparation for marriage-and-mothering-as-career, then just freaking say it, and out of both sides of your face, please, with baby food in your hair and in your sweatpants, not a $500 hairdo and a Brooks Brothers suit. If you want to say that comprehensive, accurate sex education benefits no one, then you’d best start planning now for how you’re going to cover it up when your perfect teenage kid who has pledged abstinence gets knocked up, or winds up with PID due to an untreated STI from their new husband — who wanted to marry them, so he must have been a good guy, and who said he loved God and was waiting until marriage, so he must have been — an STI they didn’t even know they had since marriage = safe sex and no one who waits for sex until marriage needs regular pap smears and STI screenings. If you think, as a woman, women should have no choice as to when they have sex, when they become pregnant, if they remain pregnant, if they parent, then just say so and mean it…. which means you’re going to be saying it to a house full of whining tots, not on the evening news, not in your new Random House book; not with your sign you can somehow afford to stand holding every day in front of clinics where women are working, plenty to support the freaking kids women have already, plenty to support women just like you on the day you show up there, talking about how against abortion you are while you’re there getting one.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, feminism, women, rantapalooza, sexuality, education | permalink | comments (9) »

I started today with the best of intentions, doing a bunch of Scarleteen grunt work and then answering some posts. But within a few hours, I got whacked upside the head with a migraine, then also realized I was just flat-out wiped.

Taking a glance at the calendar, the why of that became obvious. Not counting the span of time I had bronchitis — because being horribly ill really doesn’t count as time off — it’s been around 20 days since I have been able to take a whole day off. A whole day off, all by myself, without having to take care of anyone? Over a month. Criminy.

I suppose today doesn’t really count either, but at least I got 3/4s of a day to just tidy up the living room, lay on the couch, read a bit, watch a movie, steam my face and cuddle with the dog. I also got to sleep in until 8, I’m heading for a bath shortly, and Mark is going to swing by the market for me on his way home and pick me up the goods to make myself a well-deserved (if I do say so myself) hot fudge undae. I have to run some errands on Friday, but I think it’s pretty imperative that after work tomorrow, I get everything set for those errands so that I can do them in the midst of a nice walk and give myself that whole day to really mentally vacate. Maybe I’ll get lucky and catch some weather just warm and dry enough to fit in a bike ride, too.

I did know that it wasn’t going to be super-easy to add another job in, but I wasn’t prepared for how tired it’d all make me. Sometimes I manage to forget that I’m nothing close to 21 anymore, when it was easy as pie for me to work a zillion jobs, get home and take care of other business, grab a couple hours of sleep, and still be full of energy. I don’t need my 21-year-old ass back, but bloody hell, it’d sure be nice to have that stamina again.

Tomorrow I do some more observations in the morning, but I finished the last of my reading and competency tools earlier this week, so by afternoon, I get started with doing the actual counseling myself. It’d hard not to be nervous. One thing I’m lucky with when it comes to Scarleteen is that if I forget something, I can always go right back and add it in, and the chances of a user returning to read more are very high. Too, even when I’m talking someone through a crisis or a difficult time , they’re rarely RIGHT in the middle of that crisis, literally. Mind, it is a comfort to be able to actually see the person I’m counseling, get a read for their body language, and even hold their hand when that’s what they need. The other day, there was a woman who was in desperate need of a freaking hug. We gets users like that at Scarleteen, too, obviously, but all I can do is advise them to go find someone to hug, I can’t just say that it’s okay to blow snot in my hair and give them the hug myself.

But it’s just one of those things you want to be sure you do right as rain. I clearly remember the support staff I had for my abortion way back when, and while I was not in any way conflicted about my choice, and in fact felt very good about it, the way they did their jobs turned a good thing for me into something even better, and in many ways, very watershed. Obviously, I want to do the same for everyone I counsel, and obviously, I’m worried about the times that I can’t help as much as I’d like to, or just don’t do my best.

Mind, this is me we’re talking about, and I do hold myself to very high — often impossibly high, I know — standards. I know in my guts that I’ll do just fine when I’m completely on my own. I also know that I have the benefit of a really amazing staff around me who I can ask for any extra help I need: I remain just so impressed and awed by the other women there. I was also a bit worried at first that I would have a hard time not being distracted about other work while I was there, but that’s not been an issue at all. In fact, it’s been really quite nice to have a few days a week without even having any access to Scarleteen, even though it does mean that that on the other days I do that work, there’s a bigger backup to deal with. I tried to do a little work on the boards when I came home from the clinic Monday, but since the first thread I opened was some creep talking about how his 14-year-old daughter was filling out and how he had to get into her pants and the next was a rape survivor I have counseled on and off for some time who just cannot seem to move forward, and who tends to direct her anger about her rape unto me? Had to just lock the creep’s thread and then just back the hell away from the computer, verifying that as I suspected, two venues in a day for counseling work is one venue way too many.

And I just heard Mark’s car door slam, which means that we need not ask for whom the Tofutti tolls: it tolls for me!  If you can’t get a whole day off, you can certainly make up for lost time with chocolaty goodness, and I intend to do so immediately.
P.S. The Storm are staying here. YIPPEE! This makes me very, very happy. My apologies to the five lesbians who live in Oklahoma (for so very many reasons), but really, y’all, not only was that location just not going to work, this is one of the few big perks I’ve found of living here, and taking them away from me would have broken my wee little heart.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, yummy, workworkwork | permalink | comments (1) »

Being able to take twenty minutes this morning to snuggle with my sweetie (have I mentioned, ever, that that boy has got the softest skin on the planet?), and get out of bed at 8, not 5 — with some glimmer of light, not total darkness — makes today a winner right out of the gate.

I don’t care what else happens today: that alone made me very, very happy.

I am reluctantly getting used to this wake-up-in-pitch-black, get-home-in-pitch-black thing. And it’s not like I haven’t dealt with worse. I had a teaching gig many years ago which meant getting up at 4:30 five days a week, and where the working conditions were so horrendous that the alarm going off filled me with dread. For the eight or nine summers I did the Chicago farmer’s markets, I had to drag my ass out of bed at 5 on the good days, for the nearby markets, and as early as 2 for the ones that were a long haul, and go from bed to clothes to driving to manual labor to cheerful, overalled sprout-selling. When I ran the school, I usually had to start working around 6:30 and be done at the same time, often with no breaks at all. So, this is hardly some new form of torture, especially since I am a morning person, but I have gotten spoiled by being able to work from home for all these years. It’s a lot easier to wake up at 6 when starting work at 7 just means putting a sweater on over your jammies, plopping your dog in your lap, and starting a morning fire as you leisurely enjoy your coffee. When I’ve had people ask how on earth I can work for as many hours as I do in a week, I usually remind them that even a 60-hour-week in your house, in your pajamas, even with difficult work, is a very different beastie that 60 hours out and about.

Making this work with everything else is also proving the challenge I thought it would probably be. With Scarleteen in particular, I’ve been there full-time for so long now that the rhythm of the thing isn’t so great when there isn’t at least one person basically always around every day and night to keep the question queues from becoming unmanageable. We’re so behind with questions and answers right now, I just don’t know what on earth to do about it. As I expected, the days I work at the clinic, I have to come home and do something else, or just do nothing: I’m just way too wiped to do more counseling at night. I’m pretty much having to kiss the days off I usually gave myself at least in part goodbye for now. Again, I knew I probably would, but that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to have it verified.

Morning misery and workflow issues notwithstanding, all is still awesome with the new gig. Once I’m there, not getting back and forth, it feels like home (sans dog, disarray and a toasty fire). I am going to add one extra day there to my workweek for a while: I can do it, I like it a lot, it’ll move me faster into where I need to be, plus, I seriously need the cash. I’d decided that before the bill from the ER came, and once I opened it up and had a very satisfying primal scream, I was all the more glad I’d asked for the extra day the day before. Jaysis.

Had a very enjoyable night out with Ben, Mark and tequila last night (the middleman of whom, though I gave him a very close, fair fight, kicked my tucas at darts at the evening’s end), and today I’m shuttling off to get a couple graphics done for new Scarleteen piece, work on another unfinished piece there, and keep slogging through the backed-up photo processing that remains formidable. This weekend will be more of same, and some much-needed housekeeping. I still have little trails of toys and the lot all over the house from The Baby Liam’s visit that really need picking up. However tempting it may be for me to leave out my Playmobil collection to play with it myself, I do have other things that need doing, and finding the right place for the little plastic sheep to sleep in the little plastic house isn’t a priority I can particularly justify.

posted in Heather Corinna, home, workworkwork | permalink | comments (2) »