Blue-Footed Musings

At work there has been no official news, but I heard indirectly that our jobs are probably safe for a few months. The schedule is tight, which means my department will likely be needed at full capacity for a while. But, given how quickly recycled material can be put together, I’d say we’ve got six months tops.

During the previous round of layoffs, I worried about losing my job, but I never really thought they’d let me go. This time I’m less sure. From a long-term standpoint, they’d be stupid to let me go, but given how they’re doing things now, I don’t think the long term is a big consideration. I’m putting my odds at 50/50.

In a way, the previous layoffs did me some good. They changed my expectations. I used to think I’d keep working as long as I wanted and/or needed to. Once I knew my employment wasn’t guaranteed, I started to think differently. I started hoping simply to get another five years out of it. When I spoke to my brother in January, I told him I’d feel lucky to get another two. I’ve already lowered my expectations so much that if the axe falls on me now I might just say, “Whatever.” And if working with the recycled material is as bad as I anticipate, I might even be relieved to say good-bye.

But I am crushed. This is the end of an era for me. Much of my identity is tied up in my job, and I genuinely enjoy what I do. Now, just like that, it’s all changed.

However, I will not worry. I refuse to. I’ll do whatever tasks are put before me, same as always. I’ll collect my paychecks for as long as they last or until I decide I can’t stomach my radically-changed job anymore. And that’s all I’m going to do. No fretting. No contingency planning. Just going with the flow and hoping the flow goes well.

I got some awful news in a work email today. It was phrased so casually, but it was absolutely shocking. All work projects will now be made primarily of recycled material. We’ve already done a few projects that way, and it was found that they reduce editorial time by close to 75%. At best, this means that my job will be radically changed. I’ll work on only a subset of my former tasks, leaving most of my expertise wasted. At worst, I’ll lose my job. Certainly some people will be laid off, because there won’t be enough work to go around. I estimate 1 lateral move and 2 exits. With our department so reduced, they might decide they don’t need my boss anymore either.

This is it. This is the beginning of the end. 🙁

• Yesterday I went looking in the yard for violets, and I found about a dozen open flowers. That means I missed the first of the year (oops!), but it couldn’t have popped too long ago. Today, only one day later, there are already at least three dozen open flowers. The thing about violets is, once they get going, it’s like bam! VIOLETS EVERYWHERE.
• If I were to make a list of all the things I’ve forgotten, screwed up, or failed to understand lately, it would be rather lengthy and perhaps a bit alarming. I haven’t been entirely with it. Yeah, I haven’t been sleeping well, and I’ve been stressed. That must account for some of the problem, but all of it? I wonder. There’s not much I can do but keep going and hope for the best, though.

• This morning I had been dreading writing a blurb and dealing with an unrelated issue that required immediate attention. But then both problems were solved for me without my needing to lift a finger. That’s two totally unexpected gifts from the Universe on the same day. Love, love, love that!
• I checked on my 401(k) today, and it was doing fine. That’s good. But I don’t like the way the economy’s looking. While no expert on anything to do with investing, I can read, and all I seem to read about these days is trouble: layoffs, businesses closing, the U.S.’s unsustainable debt, rising oil prices, rising interest rates, farmers facing massive losses, shakiness in the private credit industry, and so forth. I figure that, should it all go south, my 401(k) will recover before I retire, so maybe I don’t need to worry about that right now (and it’s not like I have a ton of money in there anyway, TBH). But what about the shorter term? Are there things I should be worrying about? Things I ought to do to prepare? Something to consider.

In most of my work projects, there is one page for which I must write two single-paragraph blurbs on subjects of my choice. I have to choose the subject early on, because each gets an art spot, which I have to request from another department. But I hate writing the blurbs so much that I put them off for as long as I can. They’re almost always the very last thing I do before handing my projects in.

For years and years, I’ve wished for someone to come along and take this task from me. I’d be willing to pay. No kidding. I’ve even mentioned it in meetings, hoping some other editor might accept the offer. But no. So I’ve had to write them for myself every time.

But now, ironically, my prayers have been answered–by AI! AI could bang out those blurbs in no time. Not only am I allowed to use AI for this task, I’ve been encouraged to. But I can’t do it. To use AI for writing would be to cross an ethical boundary. Darnit.

So, on my latest project, after dragging my feet for as long as I could, I finally, grudgingly wrote the two blurbs and handed the project in. Then, last Friday, just one day before the project was scheduled to go to Typesetting, the art guy contacted me and said, “Art for one of your subjects is not available. Sorry I waited so long to look for it. What should we do now?”

Grrr. The guy had months. Months! If he’d just contacted me a few days earlier, it would have been fine, because I’d postponed it so long myself. And the answer to “What should we do now?” is that I’ll have to choose a different subject and write a new blurb. And I’ll have to do that very quickly, because the thing will be, come Monday, past due.

And I know it’s silly, but I can’t help but feel on some level that the Universe is mocking me with AI and punishing me with this little work snafu, as if it’s saying, “Time to get over your issues with writing.” And the Universe would be right, if that’s the message it were attempting to convey. I don’t appreciate the method of delivery, though. No, I do not.

As I was headed downstairs to get my coffee this morning, I noticed two packages sitting on the front porch. I brought them in, and they were both for me. Hooray!

One was obviously, almost glaringly, a box of Grove soap. I buy soap from Grove because I like the quality, but they make a big deal out of their supposed sustainability, touting it all over the box. It says things like “Earth win,” and “Most sustainable home on the block” (LOL–“most expensive soap on the block” might be more accurate!). I’m a huge fan of sustainability, mind you. I’m just not sure how big an impact I’m making with my choice of soap.

The other package was from Amazon. Having ordered several items from them recently, I couldn’t know exactly what was inside until I opened the package. It turned out to be a keyboard pedal. Yes!

See, last night my keyboard’s sustain pedal died. It had been giving me trouble for years, but last night no amount of prodding or twisting the cable would make it work again. When I pulled the cable out, the plug came apart, apparently broken in some way. I put it back together, tried more prodding and twisting, but nothing worked.

In fairness to the pedal, I should say that it was probably close to 30 years old. I’d certainly gotten my money’s worth. But its demise really sucked, because I can’t play the keyboard without a pedal. If a piece of music doesn’t require any sustain, it’s fine, but when you need the pedal and don’t have one, its absence feels like missing a limb.

So I went to the Amazon website and ordered the first universal pedal they offered, which was from M-AUDIO, a real brand that I knew I could trust. Its arrival today was earlier than expected, before I’d even had the chance to miss having a pedal. It’s already plugged in and good to go. There are a great many terrible things one could say about Amazon, but today they did good.

• The daffodils have started to bloom.
• Yellow is the happiest color.
• I was kind of annoyed when Netflix brought back The West Wing after I’d struggled to watch the entire series on the public library’s decrepit DVDs. If I’d just waited a little longer, I could have streamed it with ease, and I wouldn’t have missed any scenes due to disk damage. <sigh> But there is a pretty big bright side. Having watched the series before the accusations against Timothy Busfield came out, I was able to like (and root for) his character. I doubt I could do that now.
• We got a home heating oil delivery today, and the bill breached the 4-figure level. I’m not going to name any names, but we all know who’s responsible. That’s all I’m going to let myself say. Ranting won’t do anyone any good.

• I often go through periods when my temper seems to be under control. I don’t rise to the bait of people deliberately trying to get under my skin. I am unbothered by the things that normally irritate me. I am forgiving, and I laugh a lot. All seems well. That’s exactly the moment when my temper comes roaring back, as it did today. I am always sorry afterward, and I will do what I can to atone to the person on the receiving end of it, and/or to the Universe. But what I never seem able to do is to either continuously keep up my guard against it or to finally banish the anger at the source of it. I think the anger will always be a part of me, thanks to the way I was raised, and that the anger will always be simmering, thanks to the way the world is going and the feeling of nonstop heartbreak that it causes me. That constant heartbreak makes it so hard to be happy.
• Perhaps related: I woke up to Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “All My Trials” playing on my mental radio. I’m not sure exactly what prompted it. I haven’t heard the song in a long time, perhaps not since childhood. It’s a very sad song, but at least it’s also beautiful.
• I went for a walk on the driveway yesterday. I was surprised to see a few lingering patches of snow. I was also surprised to see that the crocuses had already started blooming. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, though, given that spring had officially begun the day before. The peepers were out a few days ago, too. I bet they love all the rain we’ve been getting. Me not so much, but I am thankful that most of the snow had melted by the time we started getting so much rain.

I saw the shoulder doctor again recently. As expected, she now wants me to get an MRI. There has been a delay in scheduling it, though, because my health insurance needed to approve it first, an extra step that really pissed me off. My old insurance didn’t require preapproval. I’d just get whatever procedures I needed and they paid for it (or didn’t, as was usually the case, because of my giant deductible). How outrageous it is that my health insurance is now making these decisions, not me and my doctor. But hey, that’s the way of things lately. Bit by bit our control over our lives, our spending, our health, even our very own bodies, is taken from us.

A few days after my appointment, I received an e-mail from my insurance. My request for an MRI had been approved. And also denied. It was confusing until I read through all the nonsense. What they’d approved was the place where I wanted to get the MRI done, which was not, incidentally, where my doctor wanted me to get it done (she wanted to send me to the hospital where I’d been charged more than $3,000 for a cortisone shot. No thanks!).

But the insurance had denied my request for the MRI itself. They’d based their denial on the crazy notion that I hadn’t already done physical therapy. I was like, “Oh, you mean the physical therapy that I did have but that you denied my claims for?” I could feel my blood begin to boil, but I let it go. I knew the doctor’s people would straighten it out. And they did. The insurance has since approved the MRI, and I’m just waiting for the MRI people to call me to set up the appointment.

I feel like I need to keep my expectations low, though. Reading between the lines of what the doctor told me: surgery is unlikely to bring my shoulder back to its previous state. What they can probably do for me is to get rid of the pain. It’s less likely that I’ll get back a full range of motion. She says most patients in my situation are happy with just the pain relief, and yeah, I think that would be enough for me, too. But even that can only happen if the MRI reveals something that can be fixed surgically. Otherwise, my only options will be more physical therapy, more cortisone shots, and a lot of positive thinking.

• I reread the last year or so of my blog today. I like rereading my posts. It reinforces my memory of recent times. I reaffirms my decision to keep a blog. It inspires me to write more.
• Old blog post of note: last year in June I mentioned trying a dead hang while on the walking trail. I wrote, “My hands and shoulders were like “WTF!” Is it suspicious that I developed a serious shoulder problem later that same year? Can’t help but wonder. That brief dead hang seemed innocuous then (I made no mention of being in pain afterward), and maybe it was. But also, maybe middle-aged women with limited upper-body strength ought to be more cautious in the future?
• I keep falling asleep while watching TV at night. At first it was accidental, but lately I’ve been aware as it’s happening and have chosen to snooze there instead of going to bed. It’s weird, because sleeping on my daybed, with the lights on and the TV still playing, is not very comfortable. But there’s a sort of logic to this bad habit. I’ve really come to dread the moment when I wake up in the morning. It will be too early and I won’t want to get up, but I’ll have to, because staying in bed will only lead to more shoulder pain, more grogginess, and a longer-feeling workday. I’ll be tired all day, and I will struggle to find enough mental clarity for my work, and the work will be grueling. No wonder I don’t want to go to bed! Meanwhile, if I snooze in my daybed, I won’t have to go to bed. It will stretch out the night and postpone the morning. I really can’t blame myself, but it’s not a helpful habit, and I should cut it out.
• The snow is mostly gone, but mounds and patches remain. From the upstairs bathroom window, which looks out on the woods behind the house, the ground is brown-and-white-splotched, like a pinto horse. On the other side of the house, where the sun hits strongest, the daffodils have started to come up!