Half Changed World

Sorry about the lack of posting, but between the change of jobs and a quick trip to Boston for my graduate school reunion, I just haven’t had the time.

The trip started on a low note when a) we got stuck in a huge line at security and had to race across the airport with the boys in order to catch our plane and b) N threw up all over himself in mid-flight.  This is the second time he’s puked on an airplane — last time, we figured it was because he had been crying his head off for an hour, but this time was without any warning, and he didn’t even seem particularly upset by it.

The reunion was ok — fun, but not spectacular.  I was disappointed that more of my classmates didn’t come.  I’m not sure whether my class did a particularly bad job of staying connected or what.   It was sort of fun telling people that I was starting my new job on Monday.

One of the highlights of the trip was meeting the one and only Phantom Scribbler and the Scribbler-Blue family.  Both Phantom and Mr. Blue were really lovely — generous to us, patient with the kids.  It really didn’t feel like meeting someone new, but more like getting together with old friends.  It helped that D and LG hit it off very nicely (even if they both jumped the gun every time they raced cars against each other).  It’s been a good 10 years since the last time I went to the Museum of Science, and I had forgotten how well designed the interative exhibits are.  The kids had a great time and stayed cheerful until the end, even though they were clearly exhausted.  (N. was so wiped that he fell asleep in his car seat on the floor of the totally packed Green Line train as soon as we left the Science Park station.)

On the bus to the airport, D was making up a song about how much he loved JetBlue.  Individual televisions with cartoons and chocolate cookies — what more could a 5 year old ask for from an airline?  On the other hand, I’m not staying at the Radisson in Cambridge again — the shuttle bus only ran about half the time, so T wound up hiking back and forth on Memorial Drive with D on his shoulders and N in the stroller more than once.  Yes, the man gets double bonus parenting points.

In the airport waiting for our flight home, we saw as impressive a double rainbow as I’ve ever seen — the main arc was absolutely glowing, and you could see the full spectrum on the secondary arc as well.

Work today was pretty quiet — my new boss wasn’t in the office.  But I got my computer account set up, and started figuring out the important things like where I print to, and how to adjust the temperature in my office.

I’m totally overwhelmed by the amount of charitable solicitations I receive.  It’s probably the majority of my "junk mail" — but in some ways it’s harder to deal with than the commercial solicitations, which I have no hesitations about sorting directly into the trash can.  I toss all of the charitable solicitations into a pile, and then every few months I sort through them and try to figure out which ones I want to respond to.  (I don’t give money in response to phone calls, no matter how good the cause.)  And because I respond to them, even occasionally, they just keep coming.

We’re thinking about cutting down dramatically on the number of different organizations that we give to, while keeping the total dollars about the same.  We talked to a financial planner last week, and among other things, she suggested that we might want to give appreciated stock instead of cash.  But that only makes sense if we’re going to give essentially our entire annual pool of money to one organization, instead of dividing it among the 20 or 30 good causes that we’ve supported in the past.

I’m open to suggestions on:

• how to pick a single organization to support out of a number of worthy causes
• how to get organizations to stop sending us so much mail — often 5 or more letters from the same organization in a given year.

I’ve got one week to go before I leave my job.  I’m going to miss the people I work with, but I’ll admit that it’s with great delight that I’ve been deleting, unread, all the emails about the training on the new financial management system that’s going to be rolled out this summer.

In general, the news this week has made it easy to walk away from my job without regret.  From the Secretary of HUD bragging about illegally denying a contract on the basis of the CEO’s political choices (via Brad DeLong), to Agriculture Department politicos being instructed to work positive references to Iraq into all their speeches (via the NYTimes), it’s pretty appalling.  I can’t tell you how demoralizing all this crap is to federal workers.  I guess that I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t been asked to cross any lines that would have made me unable to face myself in the mirror.

Last week, Danigirl at Postcards from the Mothership did a meme that’s a checklist of things that you might own or have done.  The claim is that if you answer yes to 40 or more of them, you’re "spoiled."

I’m not going to show my answers, but I came embarassingly close to being officially spoiled, which sort of surprised me.   I think both the fairly high score and my surprise have a lot to do with the attitude toward spending that I inherited from my parents — travel is always worth spending money on, but god forbid you should buy clothing that isn’t on sale. 

The list of items is also sort of weird, and not terribly well thought out.  Why on earth should going to New York and visiting the Statue of Liberty count as separate items?  And the list mixes things that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (having a second home, owning a boat, having a college education without student loans), with things that are far less expensive (we don’t have a TV or DVD player in our bedroom, but that’s a matter of preference, not cost).

I was curious to see where the list came from, so I tried following the chain of links back to the start, but ran into a dead end with a friends-only livejournal.  As others have pointed out, the list is both very American-centric and apparently aimed at a young audience (is having a queen sized bed really a big deal when two or more people are sleeping in it on a regular basis?).

As some of you guessed, the stuff going on that I couldn’t talk about is that I’m changing jobs.  I’ve accepted a job offer from the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) to work on workforce development issues, mostly focusing on issues of job quality and public and private supports for low-income workers.  I’ll be leaving my current job in 3 weeks and starting at CLASP almost immediately thereafter.

I’m very excited.  It will be a chance to work on a much broader set of issues than I’ve been working on, and to write under my own name. And I won’t have to argue for policies that I think are misguided. 

But I’m also more than a little nervous.  After nearly 10 years, I can do my current job in cruise control mode.  I know exactly what is expected of me, and I’m good at it.  The idea of facing a totally empty desk and trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing is sort of intimidating.  I was a very different person the last time I started a new job.

I also have a lot of good friends at my current job who I’ll miss.  I spent most of today walking around the office and telling people so that they’d hear from me before my boss sent out a group email.  It was emotionally draining.  It doesn’t help matters that I’m the third fairly senior person in my office to leave since January.  I know the series of departures makes morale even worse, and I truly feel badly about that.

I’m taking a pay cut, which is always a little scary, but I think we’ll be able to get by.  My guess is that I’ll probably wind up working a bit more hours than I currently do, but I’ll have more flexibility in when I work them (e.g. if I take a morning off to do something kid-related, I can make it up working from home later, rather than using annual leave).  I won’t be the only one in the office with young kids, which is encouraging.

I’m not sure what this change will mean for the blog.  I started writing this blog in part because I was so frustrated with what I was writing all day.  Maybe without the pent-up frustration, I’ll spend more of my free time exercising, or watching TV.  Or maybe I’ll use this blog as a space to try out ideas that I’m thinking of turning into more polished pieces.  I’ll have to see how it goes.  I’ll keep all of you posted in any case.

My apologies for the light posting.  I’ve got lots of stuff going on right now that I can’t blog about, and no energy left for putting together coherent posts on other subjects.  Don’t worry, everyone’s healthy, no disasters have struck.  Hopefully, I’ll be back in gear by next week. 

Meanwhile, check out MomsRising.org!

Sorry for the light posting — between Passover, a crazy workweek, and a visit from my mother-in-law, something had to give, and this blog was it.

Overall, we’ve had a very mellow and pleasant Passover.  While it always makes me a little sad not to see my parents and siblings over Passover, I must admit that there’s something nice about not schlepping anywhere.  And we didn’t host our own seder either — went to a friend’s one night, and the shul’s community seder the second.  So relatively little stress.

It also simplifies things that I’ve decided that it doesn’t make any sense for me to make myself (and my family crazy) to avoid kitniyot for Passover (beans, corn, rice) given that I don’t keep kosher, don’t have separate Passover dishes, etc.  Not that I require absolute consistency in my religious practice — I don’t eat pork, but I do eat shellfish, even though both are equally treif.  (My logic is that no one was ever martyred for refusing to eat shrimp.)  But it’s not particularly meaningful to me to avoid rice and tofu.  I’m fairly sure that whatever the ancient Hebrews ate on their way out of Egypt, it looked more like pita bread or tortillas than modern matzah, but I haven’t quite been ready to follow that argument to its logical end.

Phantom Scribbler linked to a sermon by a reform Rabbi on the real meaning of Passover: "When we badger ourselves or one another about a drop of corn syrup in a Coca-Cola, but fail to work for freedom, we are in violation of Passover."  Or, as another teacher once put it:

   Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
       only a day for a man to humble himself?
       Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
       and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
       Is that what you call a fast,
       a day acceptable to the LORD ?

    Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
       to loose the chains of injustice
       and untie the cords of the yoke,
       to set the oppressed free
       and break every yoke?

Saturday morning, D woke up and asked if it was Easter.  We said, no, it’s tomorrow, but we don’t really celebrate Easter.  He insisted that we had to have an Easter egg hunt.  Ok…  We assumed that he had figured out that this often involved chocolate, so we told him that if it was really important to him, we could dye some eggs, and then he and N could look for them on Sunday. This sounded like a great plan to him, so off we went to pick up some dye.  (Mostly we dyed hard boiled eggs, but I blew a few, and used the insides to make matzoh balls, much to my own amusement.) Both boys had great fun dying eggs and finding them, and then we let them trade the eggs they had found for chocolate bunny pops left over from the Max and Ruby birthday party of two months ago.  And later we let them egg joust.

But somewhere in all of this, D wanted to know why we don’t celebrate Easter.  We sort of tiptoed around this one, not wanting to get into the details of the cruxifiction (remember, this is the kid who cried over March of the Penguins) but generally explaining that people believe lots of different things about God.  But he’s at the stage where he likes there to be RIGHT answers and WRONG answers, and wasn’t too convinced by our answers about uncertainty and tolerance.  Oh well, I figure we’ll have a lot more chances coming up…

A few more links:

• Susan at Crunchy Granola’s got a bunch of Passover posts up.
• For some thoughtful Jewish-Christian dialogue, see Sue at Inner Dorothy’s post about Christian Seders (via Phantom Scribbler).

Last week, in response to my post about the middle class, bj commented "I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot because we have just made the final step to enrolling our first child in private school" and asked what we were doing about school for our kids.

After an awful lot of agonizing back and forth, what we’re doing — at least for now — is enrolling D in the public school that we’re zoned for.   This is not without some real misgivings.  The test scores are lousy — it’s failing under both "No Child Left Behind" and the Virginia-specific standards.  Something like 70 percent of the students qualify for free lunches.  It’s on something like the 5th principal in 7 years. 

But, it’s literally three blocks from our front door, so we’ll be able to walk D to school and be part of the school community with ease.  The class sizes are very small, especially in the early grades.  The teachers and principal seem enthusiastic and committed.  The city has committed significant resources to the school.  We’ve talked to some parents we trust who are happy with their kids’ experiences.  And we can always try something different down the road if we’re not happy with it.

With private school tuitions in the area in the $20,000s and rising, I don’t see us trying that route unless we truly find ourselves out of other options.  If we’re not happy at this school, we can request a transfer into a different Alexandria school (because ours is a "focus" school, we could request a transfer even if it wasn’t failing under NCLB).  Moving is also a possibility, although not one that I’m thrilled at.

Fundamentally, I’m not worried about whether my kids are going to learn to read.  (D is probably going to be reading by the time he starts kindergarten in the fall.)  What I worry about is whether they’ll learn that school is something to be endured.

Today I’m catching up on the last of the books that I’ve been sent by publicists and have been feeling guilty for not getting around to.  It’s The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think about the Rest of Your Life, by Lee Eisenberg.

When I got the email asking if I’d be interested in the book, I said sure, because we’d been strugging with the question of how to think about our long-term finances.  As I’m sure I’ve said before, we’re doing fine on one income in the short-term, but I worry about the long-term impact.  And when I consider switching to a job that pays significantly less than I currently make, I don’t have any sense of how to evaluate the implicit tradeoffs that I’d be making, down the road as well as today.  Having read the book, I can’t say that I have any better of an answer than I started with.  And I’m not sure that I’d do any better going to a financial planner, because Eisenberg makes it clear that the types of places that are interested in serving people at my income scale generally don’t do a whole lot of individualized hand-holding.

The most interesting parts of the book are at the beginning, when Eisenberg talks to real people about what they think their "number" — the amount they need to live happily ever after — is.  Eisenberg had an article in New York magazine last fall that focuses on this aspect of the book.  Among other things, this section gave me a new operational definition of rich — if you have a concrete idea of the difference it would make to your quality of life to have $7 million instead of $3 million, you’re rich. 

Overall, I was underwhelmed by the book.  I’m surprised that it’s been on some of the best seller lists.  Eisenberg’s "completely different way to think about the rest of your life" turns out to be not all that different after all, unless it’s a new concept to you that the quality of your retirement will depend as much on whether you’re doing things that are meaningful to you than on the number of zeros at the end of your IRA balance.  To be fair, I’m at least 15 years too young to really be in Eisenberg’s target audience.

T is away at a role-playing game convention this weekend, selling his game.  Rather than leaving me to handle the boys on my own, he arranged with my parents for them to take the boys for the weekend, as his con is close to where they live.  So, I’ve got a rare weekend totally to myself.

I can’t say that I’ve been doing hugely exciting things.  I ran some long neglected errands, finished our taxes, painted the closet in the boys’ room in preparation to install an organizer, read a silly book, cooked a big pot of yellow split pea soup, watched TV.  Tomorrow night I’ve got dinner plans with friends, but mostly I’ve been enjoying the ability to do things without rushing or stressing about time and just to hang out.