Returning to the Interwebs

It’s been so long since I’ve written, I barely know where to start. I don’t even know if I have an audience anymore.

We’re in Austin, Texas now, in a move that I wasn’t excited about, but took in stride. Turns out it’s ok, because Austin is a pretty cool place to be.

Not cool in the literal term. It’s the middle of September and it’s finally only 90 degrees with a breeze, and I’m sitting outside reveling in how cool it feels—something my 16-year-old self could never imagine saying. I love the breeze… even a hot breeze on hot days stirs the air enough to make you feel like you’re not parked in some sort of giant cosmic minivan with all the windows up in the middle of July. But today it’s a cool breeze, so it’s a double-plus—even if I did have to chase the lid on my to-go cup of hot tea halfway down the block when it blew off my table.

My friends are talking about apple festivals and turning leaves and cool breezes and crisp air. I miss the smell that the northwest gets—and even the northeast, though it’s a bit different—when the weather starts to turn and the air gets crisp. In Boise it’s the sharp smell of sage as the night dew evaporates in the still-warm-but-getting-chilly morning sun. In Post Falls it’s a less definable scent. Pine sap and wood smoke and the hint of colder weather to come. In New York it’s sweeter, maple and birch trees gearing for the winter, sugaring up, while a few neighbors with wood-burning furnaces throw on their first cords of Applewood or alder or cedar to stay warm in the evenings. Sometimes the smoke from the barbecue joint next to our apartment wafts into the courtyard. In the evenings I’ll stand on our patio and lift my nose to the air, sniffing in imitation of our dogs. I’ll close my eyes and imagine it’s autumn … and it usually works for about 15 seconds, until I start sweating even though I’m doing nothing but standing still.

Right now we’re sitting at a table outside a local coffee shop downtown, Sean and I. Right across from the famous Austin City Limits venue, which has a larger-than-live bronze statue of Willie Nelson in front of it. Stevie Ray Vaughan stands permanent sentry duty down by the river.

Sean is finishing up a paper for grad school across from me, and I’m here, tippy-typing on my little computer which almost matches his—but not quite. They’re like something from Star Trek, these computers. A laptop, and a tablet, with a pen and a mouse and a keyboard, so almost a legal pad, too—all less than half an inch thick, including the keyboard. Something my 16-year-old self could perhaps imagine but not believe would happen so soon. In the original version of Star Trek they still use pen and paper on the bridge, and that’s supposed to be centuries into the future. The writers could imagine space travel but not computers that everyone carried in their pockets.

Behind us one of those amphibious truck-slash-boat duck tour vehicles drives by, the driver’s voice loud but illegible in the seconds it takes to cross the intersection. Another one follows two hundred yards back. I can’t understand that driver, either. Briefly I think what I always think—that I’d be a damn fine tour guide and I should look into it someday—and then I turn my attention back to my tiny screen.

A bee—a real one, with the little fuzzy body and a stinger—comes to investigate our drinks. I’m sure our sodas smell tempting, but since they’re diet I don’t think the aspartame and ace-k will make good honey. We try to shoe the little guy away—I have a soft spot for real bees, and don’t want to hurt him if I can help it—but he’s persistent. It leads to a couple of minutes of me flapping my leather folio in his general direction, alternating with Sean flapping his hat. I’m not worried about being stung… honeybees don’t sting that often, and hardly ever when they’re in “sugar mode.” Regardless, our antics were probably entertaining for those eating a late lunch inside, looking out at the people on the patio.

The patio is half-full, tables full of young people and families interspersed with two older men, both sitting alone, nursing cups of iced tea, backs to the wall, facing out and watching the world go by. With the exception of the family, they are the only two not buried deep in an electronic device. Then the family gets up to go—a dad with two daughters, or maybe a daughter and her friend—and they don’t even walk three feet before a swarm of pigeons and grackles descend on the plates they left behind, and crumbs start flying in all directions in a scene of carbohydrate carnage. A waitress comes and fearlessly shoes them away, stacking plates on top of plates on top of plates, before pacing back to the heavy exterior door and hauling it open one-handed in a motion that speaks of coordination, natural balance, and lots of practice.

I like Austin a lot, as long as I don’t think about the dream home we left behind.  Over the years I’ve become very good at compartmentalizing. I suppose some people would call it “focusing on the now” instead. Sounds healthier that way, I think. We have a little apartment that is smaller than we’re used to but big enough for our needs, with a large patio facing the pool courtyard. Because we’re lazy, I’ve trained my dogs to go potty on the porch in two little boxes filled with rubber mulch that drain onto puppy pads underneath. We bought a cheap shoji screen to partition it off from the rest of the patio. It makes it feel smaller, but we’re not looking into potty boxes when we’re out relaxing. In the spring I planted Morning Glories in small boxes on the porch, and they wasted no time climbing the railings and exploding into a profusion of vines, leaves, and blossoms. They’re on their second round of blooms now. They’re annuals, but I have no idea how long they’ll continue to thrive in this climate.

Sean and I are still at the coffee shop, though as the sun shifted through the sky our little shady table became not-so-shady, so we moved. We’ve outlasted all the people who were here to begin with—even the two men who were watching the world go by. My writing is interspersed with texts from my sister and my friend. We’re lucky, us sisters. All of us tight, all of us friends, all of us happy to spend chunks of our days talking to each other, even it’s in bits and pieces throughout the day. A lot of families aren’t like that.

On Monday I start a new job. I’ve been jobless since November—although that’s not really the right term to use since I a) quit voluntarily (and quite happily), and b) haven’t really looked for anything recently. It was time, though, and in a sequence that stroked my ego I got two interviews off my first batch of 5 applications and a job offer off of one of the interviews. It normally doesn’t go that way. Job hunting is a soul-sucking endeavor that tries the self-confidence of even the most assured person.

I’m anxious. This last week, I was really, really anxious. Super stressed out, though it’s begun to fade a bit. Changes again. Lots of changes. I’ve been working from home for 5 years. The last almost-year I was a very part-time freelancer with plenty of time to focus on me, my husband, and creative pursuits—which of course I didn’t pursue as much as I should have because I had all the time in the world (right?). I’m super strong now. Lots of time in the gym with weights, which is nothing I’d ever thought I’d enjoy. Lots of time doing cardio, which I still don’t enjoy—a fact by which I’m utterly unsurprised. Now I’m in an office again, with a commute, around people in a cubicle. No ridiculously cute little pups to keep me company or a ready kitchen with snacks and leftovers.

It’s not all bad, though. The commute will probably be long because of traffic, but at least it’s really pretty. The company is something you’d find more of in Silicon Valley than Texas—foosball table and video games in the palatial break room, casual dress-code, company-sponsored happy hours once or twice a month. Open PTO and flexible schedules as long as you get your work done. The kind of place where the indigo highlights in my hair didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow and my boss competes in global moustache competitions when he’s not refereeing roller derby. I’ve haven’t made this little money-wise since 2009, but Texas is like that. No income tax, they argue. You don’t need as much money. Never mind that real estate values and rents in Austin are through the roof, so the actual cost of living isn’t that much different than anywhere else (besides D.C., San Francisco, and NYC of course). There’s a lot of chance for growth and raises, so I’m not too worried yet. And everyone from my old jobs is telling me that I shouldn’t be anxious, and how I broke the mold, and how great I am, and how lucky the new company is to have me, and how I need to be in an office instead of working from home so that I can spread my awesomeness around. Which is all kind of great to hear, but it inexplicably adds its own sort of new pressure, a new stress—kind of makes me feel like a fraud. What if I’m not great HERE? What if they expect greatness and I deliver averageness? All petty concerns, really. They’ve never had anyone in this role. They don’t really have any benchmark for what would be greatness and what would be averageness.  It should be easy for me to engineer greatness, with wide-open opportunity like that.

They send out emails to the whole company when someone new gets hired. Kind of an “introducing the newbie—and here are 6 random facts to know about her!” thing. They asked for a photo. I’m naturally photo averse, and the few that I have on my phone are generally me posing with Sean or a pup, and all but maybe 4 have sunglasses. None passed my “do I want 250 strangers to see this?” litmus test. So yesterday I put on makeup in the middle of the afternoon for no reason and walked around the apartment taking selfie after selfie after selfie looking for one I didn’t loathe. After grabbing a step stool from the kitchen and standing on it next to a window and determining which facial angle was flattering but didn’t make me look like I was trying as hard as a Kardashian, I have one that I actually really like—even if you can see lamp shades and pillows in the background. 250 strangers, here I come!

There’s talk of Sean getting a new job. More changes. Which is why I have my job—more financial flexibility as a couple. We’ll see what happens. If changing jobs is scary, quitting one before you have something lined up is terrifying. It’s probably the right thing to do, though. Short-term major changes resulting in long-term positive changes for a better life. And the number of positions that require an MBA are ridiculous. MBAs can be great, sure, but any person who went from being an Analyst to a Vice President in a large company in 7 years is not some pansy-ass idiot. He obviously knows what he’s doing, and his resume reflects it. And so far his MBA program is remedial for him, a parody of corporate life. Maybe it will be better next semester. More challenging. It’s a lot of money and time for what amounts to a key…in the end it will open more doors for him, regardless of whether he gets anything truly useful out of it or not. There’s always the networking this will give him, too.

The day still feels cool, even though my phone tells me it’s 91. It also tells me that it’s supposed to be 62 tonight, which fills me with an almost physical joy. It’s almost enough to change the butterflies of anxiety into little wings of excitement. The first touches of fall in Texas.