how to tell if someone is From Around Here:

they can refer to today’s weather (40ish, sunny, perfect for finishing up shoveling) as ‘balmy – downright tropical, even!’ without a *trace* of sarcasm or irony in their voice. 😉

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reason #537 why i love Little Small:

one of the things in his Christmas stocking was a small notepad. a few days after Christmas, completely unprompted, this appeared:

The Dane and i also each got a little ‘i love you’ note of our own, and The Dane got an ‘i hope you feel bettir soon’ note when he was feeling sick. he is one lovey dovey kid, that one.

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hey. hi there. so, enough snow out there for you?

yeah, okay, so it’s a lame opener, especially because we’re all sick of snow these days – sick of seeing it, shovelling it, and talking about it. (Little Small showed up yesterday in a Hawaiian shirt over a long sleeve shirt – because he’s dreaming of summer.) but it’s about as good as any other opening line i’ve been able to construct.

for quite possibly the first time (one of the few, anyway) in a looooong time, i’m at a place where i can’t seem to talk thru things. and it’s odd. i’ve wanted to write, and also gone thru long days of not having any impulse to write at all. generally, when confronted with a new problem (and i’m sure there will be several votes to back this up), i’ll read, analyze, dissect, turn nuggets of info over and over like some sort of puzzle, and talk. oh, the conversations… endless and iterative, with anyone who will sit still long enough, until i get a handle on what’s bugging me.

but not this time.

i think big chunks of it, the lack of chatty, come from the immense stigma our society places on unemployment. it’s somehow shameful to not have a job. and frankly, it was uncomfortable to even type out the word unemployment. we put so much value, as a society, on what a person does for work. think about it – what’s one of the first questions you ask when you meet someone at a cocktail party? ‘so, what do you do?’ – and the ‘do’ is assumed to be a job. don’t even get me started on how that question must play for stay at home parents. and if you don’t have a ready answer, one that makes sense to the questioner – hoo boy, howdy. awkwardness abounds.

the stigma also comes from internal sources, of course; i’ve always had at least one job for the last *cough*waytoomany*cough* years. since i was 14, let’s put it that way. i’ve never been without a job of some sort, and i’ve been able to pay my own way. once, i think, after college, i borrowed a few hundred from my parents. of course there’s the occasional ‘float me a $50 til Friday’ between friends, but i’ve also been able to do the same in return. other than that, self sufficient. so… what does it mean when that changes? granted, it’s a temporary state of affairs. and plenty of other people have been there, or are there now. hell, hubby and i are in it together. but.

so i’ve just been sitting here, on the other side of the keyboard, mute. i don’t know how to talk about the whole logjam in my head, don’t know if it would do me any good to try to articulate where i am, and don’t know if i *want* to talk about it. i *definitely* am not interested in singing the ‘woe is me’ song, because i still believe that this is a gift, an opportunity for change, a path to a much better situation.

it’s just that change on this scale scares the crap out of me.

and really, that’s what it is. i’m not sure how to face down this enormous thing that scares me, break it down, make it managable.

the funny thing is, as much energy as my brain is expending on denail (sic) (yes, the view from the condo is just fine, thankyouverymuch), it’s also working on solutions. there is progress, and it’s starting to add up. resume, business cards, networking, researching new options… all happening. (see, i don’t even want to say all that – because someone, somewhere (gee, lessee, that would be me) is going to look at that and say ‘well, why hasn’t she done X, Y and Z yet?’. always with the internal critic.)

eh. well. looks like i had something to say after all. 😉

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