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Along about the beginning of this year, I decided I just needed to write. Write whatever. Take the chance of doing some stream of thought things…no editing. Just writing. I’ve found myself getting so bogged down in the process, in getting every word right the first time, that I spend more time with the “delete” and “backspace” keys than on the ones that are actually going to get my message across. Whatever that is.

And I also made the decision to go ahead and post the “self-analysis” things that I have been loath to put here for many moons. It doesn’t escape my notice that those kinds of posts could make me appear whiney, perpetually unhappy with my lot in life…maybe even certifiable. But I think they have value; they help me work the puzzle. And my life is a puzzle, these days.

There are a lot of emotions warring inside me. There is fear and the rejection of that fear. There is sadness and the resolve to overcome that sadness. There is discouragement being assaulted by daily pep talks. There is lingering exhaustion being trod upon by the almost desperate need to get off my ass and accomplish something. Something. I have no idea what.

Most of all, though, there is a feeling of complete aloneness. The certain knowledge that no one, NO ONE, has the time, patience or desire to hear me drone on about these things. Everyone has their own issues. Everyone has their own lives. No one needs to hear about MY issues, about MY lack of a life. I used to think that’s what friends were for. Absent friends (a state in which I have found myself for roughly EVER), I decided that’s what family was for. Don’t know where I dug up that notion, because my family has never been about tending to our own wounded. As a last resort, I made believe that’s what a mate was for. SO not true. And the discovery of that particular fact has probably been the most difficult to bear of all. But I have this blog, and I am not too proud to use it as my sounding board.

And then I lost my internet connection. Became utterly alone—away even from that scant remaining thread of a connection I made over eight years ago, quite by accident, and to which I have clung like a drowning rat. I wasn’t even aware of how attached I was to this soggy piece of wood until now. Nor was I aware of how small it had become. More like a wood chip than a plank, these days. Soggy and waterlogged and going down fast.

Well, my internet came back today. I would like to say it welcomed me back with open arms, asked where I had been, told me it had missed me. Not so much. But oh well.

I'll continue, as always...

Coming to terms.

Passion

They say life is a refining process. Theoretically, the older you get, the more you have learned. The more you can apply past experience; perhaps even use what you know to create a better life, going forward. “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.” I wish it was that simple.

Because I don’t feel like I’m getting better. I don’t feel like I’m becoming refined, or learning anything. I certainly don’t believe I’m becoming wise, which is supposed to be the reward for growing older. I feel like more like I’m…petrifying, like an ancient tree.

Maybe my case is atypical. God knows, I’ve been a couple of steps out of sync my entire life, as far back as I can remember. I wonder if I was born lacking a certain kind of emotional armor that comes as standard equipment on most people. It seems I have always felt things more deeply than most. And have lacked adequate filter to disguise my deep feelings. The double whammy. Feel too much and show too much. It hasn’t made my life easy.

I guess they call it “passion.” I have been told I am passionate…and it has not been meant as a compliment. More of an excoriation. “You’re too—fill in the blank.” Such is the lot of the passionate person living among those who are…not. This surfeit of feeling and depth of emotion are freakish, almost threatening, to those who do not possess them. We are taught to control our passion, mask it, sublimate it, beat it down.

Having come of age in the sixties and seventies, I feel like at least I was given a short reprieve. Passion was the order of the day for us hippie-types back then. Forty years ago, I felt a connection to a larger culture of passion; we wanted to feel, and we were allowed to feel. We wanted to see, and we were encouraged to see. Some of us thought it was real. We believed that the passion we felt would be accepted and encouraged. We could be who we were, and change the world. We didn’t know it was just a pop-culture fad. We didn’t know that, in ten years time, we would be hopelessly “out-of-style.” Invited to sit down, shut up, and get back in lock-step with the rest of the world toward...well, whatever we have now.

Over and over again, as the decades have passed, I’ve found my deep-feeling soul to be more of a curse than a blessing, at least when it comes to getting along with other people. In my heart, I feel right. I feel like this is who I am, and I feel no shame about it. Left to my own devices, I’m mostly happy with who I am. That’s probably why I am just as happy to spend so many hours alone. But as soon as I rub up against other people, I begin to get that “inconvenient freak” feeling. That certain knowledge that I am different, and that it makes other people uncomfortable. That the only way for me to make it peaceably through life is to either pretend to be like everyone else (and I suck at that sort of pretense) or actually BE like everyone else.

Thus, my perception of my 50+-year-old self as a fossilized tree. Once away from those brilliant years of my young adulthood, I have met with enough disillusion and disapproval over the years to douse my fire. Or at least turn it down so far that it is barely a pilot light. And it really does not make me happy. The only times I feel right anymore are when I forget myself and soar to some extreme of feeling that no one else around me—particularly not my contemporaries—seems to be able (or willing) to reach. And I always pay for it. Disapproving glances and raised eyebrows are the mildest of the consequences. Most often, I pay with a serious crash and burn, failure and alienation. I’m so fed up with dealing with the consequences that I hardly ever “show myself” anymore. I dial it down. I don’t allow myself to feel.

I suppose people like me need to learn to control their passion, or it will be the end of them. Perhaps this is why so many passionate, artistic types die young, or even kill themselves. If you allow yourself to burn so bright all the time, you’ll burn out all the faster. But I wonder…who really gets the better deal? Is living long the ultimate goal? Or is living completely, for however short a time, what we should be aiming for? Why add twenty or thirty boring years to an uninspired life? What are we really contributing to the Universe once we’ve learned to hide our light under a bushel? An interesting conundrum…

A Good Day For Running Away

I knew there would have to be a grieving process involved when it came to my separation from the restaurant. I almost don’t like to call it “grieving,” given what I know others—and myself as well—have experienced upon the loss of a beloved person. But grieving seems to be the pop-culture word for it; I can’t think of another off-hand.

Oddly enough, the week I spent with my sister seems to have tipped me down toward the well of grief. Perhaps it’s because I had thought that throwing my efforts into helping someone else do something would be fun. Affirming and somehow cathartic. I didn’t know how badly I needed to experience a little success at something. Now I know. And I didn’t get that at all, last week. Quite the opposite, in fact.

So, since coming home Sunday night, I find myself constantly on the verge of tears. The week of frustration at my sister’s house has amped up the volume on that little voice in the back of my head that constantly taunts, “You can’t do ANYTHING right!” I thought I had been doing a pretty good job telling that little voice to f*** off. But it looks like the only time that voice quiets is when I am actively doing nothing. So maybe it’s true. The only thing I can do right is NOTHING.

I’m going to take today and just…do nothing. I’m going to get in the car and go over the hill to do it…but I have no plan, no objective. Well, that’s I lie. I do have an objective: To run away from the pain.

Home Improvement NFS--Wrap-up

At 9:00 last night, I walked through my own front door. I wanted to kneel down and kiss the tile in the entryway—the tile my husband installed a few years back without pissing, moaning, whining and non-stop know-it-all commentary. Oh my goodness. In future, the closest I will get to gifting someone with help on a home improvement project will be a $50 Home Depot gift card.

I left you on Thursday morning, looking forward to day four of (non)work on The Project (my sister’s downstairs bathroom.) In the previous three days, we had managed to purchase, cut and prime a bunch of beadboard paneling. My personal frustration was mounting, as I am not the kind of person who sidles up to a project and meekly taps away at it for a few hours every day…for weeks on end. I dive into it and do it until it’s done.

I’ll admit, I’ve had some projects sit around unfinished when I reached a point that exceeded my personal expertise. But if I start, I always finish eventually, and usually in less than a year. Sister and her husband…not so much. Particularly on this project. This bathroom remodel has been in the works for easily five years. Many months ago, my sister ripped down all the old wallpaper and some of the fixtures, in preparation for the update.

Then she made the mistake that so many DIY-ers make, fatal to any project—she designed the space to include many projects that totally exceeded her (and her husband’s) personal ability (or desire) to complete. And swore to god that she was not gonna hire somebody to do them. This is DIY, folks… and if “Y” don’t have a clue how to proceed, it shouldn’t be part of the project. Like, if you hate working with electricity, you probably shouldn’t design paneling that will require you to move every electrical box in the room. In fact, if you don’t know how to use the pneumatic nail gun that’s been sitting in your garage for ten years, maybe you shouldn’t plan on installing paneling at all. Ya think?

But, bound and determined that she was going to have it her way or not at all, my sister made plans that had no basis in the reality of what she and her husband could accomplish on their own. And so rather than having it her way, the project had fallen down on the side of “not at all” for years. Finally, as a combined anniversary/birthday gift (for the couple who has everything) husband and I offered to help. I don’t know what we were thinking; but I wasn’t expecting to step onto a passive/aggressive minefield.

We spent five days prepping the beadboard and painting the walls in this tiny bathroom. Excruciating, really…but my sister doesn’t seem to have the stamina for a brisker pace, and I personally could only stand to listen to my BIL’s haranguing for short periods. Besides, it wasn’t MY project, and I was doing my best to reduce myself to a mindless extra pair of hands. Not easy for a person like me, who is used to managing things… I swallowed my own thoughts, opinions and criticisms so much that I literally thought I was going to explode. Wouldn’t have been so hard if we had just done the thing, and gotten it over with in a couple of days. But day after day of inching the thing slowly forward, accompanied by the BIL’s yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda YADDA was a peculiar form of torture for me.

And yet, now that I’m home looking back on it, I believe I conducted myself in an acceptable manner. I kept the promise of helping my sister get a particular aspect of the project completed (we had promised to help her install the beadboard…little knowing exactly what that was going to entail.) And we are still on speaking terms. There was a time—not so long ago—when I would have made it through about a day of this, said something stupid, started a war, and fled home in tears. I have always sucked at situations that required me to hold my tongue, keep my peace, and really think about every word I let out of my mouth. From somewhere, I acquired that ability, last week. I won’t say I was always meek, gracious and amenable; but at least I didn’t say something really offensive or freak out and run away. I consider that a personal victory.

In the end, my husband had to swoop in, like the cavalry, mounted upon the dreaded nail gun. He “helped” the BIL nail up the paneling, which meant BIL mostly fluttered around the edges looking busy while the husband crawled around doing the work. Poor hubs walked like Quasimodo by the time we climbed into the van for the ride home last night. But our contract with the devil had been fulfilled. Hopefully this experience has taught us why the term is DIY (Do It Yourself)—not DIT (Do It Together.)

Home Improvement NFS--Installment Two

Today is Thursday. I have been here at my sister's house, attempting to address the task at hand, since Monday. In three days, mostly what we've managed to accomplish is an amassing of more materials that we have yet to employ. There has been a lot of shopping for paint, paneling, trim and peripherals (with side trips to thrift stores, craft stores and other assorted attention diverters, since we can't seem to leave the house without being drawn to our favorite retail therapy haunts like steel to a magnet.)

The first two days, mostly what we did was walk through the target work area umpteen times, discussing designs, plans and methods. Picture three adults (my sister, myself and the intrepid allergic-to-home-improvement husband) packed in to the bathroom like sardines in a can; sister and me mapping out our strategy, and BIL glued to our heels, regaling us with a constant stream of man-around-the-house advice. He had no plan to pick up a hammer or a paint brush, but he felt obliged to tell us exactly how we should proceed. Ad infinitum.

We finally did go out and purchase the wainscot paneling (probably the only major part of the project that has not been lying around my sister's house for years), which we then had to cut and prime. This was the only actual work we accomplished in the first two days; probably an investment of about six hours total. But for the entire time my sister and I were engaged in this labor, her husband yammered on about what we HAD TO do an how we HAD TO do it. Sister has developed a habit of pretending to listen to him while she...doesn't. I have not got that talent. He was driving me c-r-a-z-y. He hovered around us like a yellow jacket at a picnic. I so wanted to hit him with a shoe. But fear of the sting dissuaded me from action--I was in no way desirous of starting up a "family incident" (been there, done that...!)

By Tuesday evening, BIL was getting pissier and pissier, probably because he knew we were not really listening to him, and had no intention of acting on 95% of the advice he was spouting. Finally, even my sister got fed up with him, and then the fireworks went off. I thought about grabbing my shoe and joining in the battle, but on second thought decided that my other method of dealing with yellow jackets at picnics would probably be the wiser choice: Drop the chicken and run like hell!

Looks like it is time to sidle up to the Day Four of the job. Maybe we'll actually get some hammer-amd-nailing done today. Watch this space for the update...

Home Improvement Is Not For Sissies

After finally getting the holidays into boxes in the garage, I was feeling bored and peevish. The weather has turned foul; we are paying now for our pleasant and mostly dry December. There was the flash snow-dump, then three days of rain which effectively erased it; with the side-effect that much of the mid-Willamette Valley was underwater for a few days. Luckily, we (so far) inhabit a relatively flood-free zone. But my little outdoor spaces were sodden and uninviting. I was trapped indoors.

I'm sure that, had I given it some thought, I could have come up with a list of perfectly good projects around the house on which I could have embarked. Handicapped by my lingering allergy to lists, I was reduced to wandering from room to room, straightening a picture here, rearranging some pottery there. Then my sister's birthday came up, and a perfect opportunity to escape my confinement presented itself.

I had promised her on her anniversary last July that, being a free woman now, I would make the trip down to her place, spend a few days and help her on some home-improvement projects she has had pending for...oh, about five years or so. The main one being her second bathroom, which over the past decade has deteriorated to the point where, at one time, she had no sink, no (functional) toilet, no paint on the walls, no towel bars or toilet paper holder (which I guess you don't need if you have no sink or toilet...) They had managed to get the toilet functional again, but that was as far as it went.

My sister, in her peculiar way, long ago designed the re-do (in her head) and amassed most of the materials. Boxes of ceramic tiles, a new vanity, a light fixture, towel bars, even a granite sink are cached away in nooks and crannies all over her property. Year upon year, the pile of materials has grown and nothing, NOTHING else has happened. I can't pretend to know the reasoning behind this. Sister and her husband have been retired for three years, so it's not as if they don't have the TIME to address the thing. Twenty years ago, they performed a major remodel on their house, building an entire family room on to the back and updating their kitchen from seventies earth-tone dark to nineties light oak and tile. One would think that with such a massive project under their belts, a simple bathroom redo would be a no-brainer. The actual fact is, apparently the job so frustrated and overwhelmed my brother-in-law that he becomes nigh unto apoplectic at the thought of taking on another, no matter how small.

So my sister decided that the only way any of this is going to get done is if she does it herself. Or, rather, with help from someone other than her husband. So that is where I come in.

And this is why I find myself in the midst of a tempest. In a teacup, perhaps, but a tempest just the same.

As we have to leave for the Home Center to purchase more materials in a few minutes, I will pause here. More later, if I'm still alive to tell it...

Ten Minutes: (Caution: This is a Rant...)

Suddenly I have this urge to pack up and move away from the home we've been in for the past 10 1/2 years. I think it's a manifestation of the repressed feelings I have about closing the restaurant. I'm sometimes dismayed to realize there really aren't any good memories associated with the restaurant, to speak of. It is so odd how I have simply closed the door on that chapter of my life and feel no need to revisit it. There is nothing to revisit but heartache and struggle, so I don't go there.

Most of the time, I don't even notice that I'm "repressing" anything. But there are times when I am out and about in town, when people recognize me from the restaurant and have to go on about how much they miss us and all that...I don't need to hear it. I would like the rest of the world to participate in my closure of that particular experience. Of course, they don't know that. And it is unerringly the people who were the most annoying as "guests" at the cafe who now don't have sense enough to walk away and pretend they don't recognize me when we encounter each other at the grocery store or at another local eatery. I know...this sounds crotchety, bordering on looney tunes. But this is my ten minutes, and I'll use it as I see fit.

The demise of the restaurant isn't the only thing that inspires my desire to abandon my house. I have a "neighbor situation" as well.

Now, I am fully aware that my neighbors, to anyone else, would seem quiet and untroublesome. But I'll admit right here that I am not the neighborly sort. Living on a large, strangely shaped corner lot, we don't really have any true "next-door" neighbors; except the dead ones. If it wasn't for the cemetery, we'd probably have one more set of annoying live neighbors than we now have. I appreciate my dead neighbors more than I can say.

Still, the times are a-changin' in our little neighborhood. "Disneyland" (as I have called the left-hand backyard neighbors) mysteriously vaporized just before Christmas. My poplar trees--the ones shielding their amusement park from my bedroom window view--were late to completely lose their leaves this year. And when they were gone, about mid-December, I happened to glance out my window and notice that the jungle gym, the trampoline, the burning barrel and the chicken coop--unending sources of irritation, all--were gone. And the house was empty. Which you would think would be a good thing, no? But I, ever the optimist, cannot help but worry about the succeeding occupants. Especially since the house appears to be owned/managed by the LDS church, of which our former neighbors were members. I have nothing against the Mormon faith, but its adherents do tend to produce large broods of children as a matter of churchly duty. And, in this day and age, you can just about count on children to be undisciplined, loud, and inconsiderate. Not their fault, but annoying all the same. So I live with some trepidation that the devil I DON'T know might be even less tolerable than the one with which I had previously been forced to cope.

My other neighbors had not really bothered me overmuch until now. Until I began spending my days at home instead of working twelve-hour stints at the restaurant. And it has come to my attention that the hard-working father--who is never home because he works all the time--is the keeper of his son, his son's wife and their children. The son--who looks to be early twenties or so, does not work. Nor does the son's wife. But apparently someone in the household has made enough money to furnish the place with a state-of-the-art home entertainment system. So at any random time of the day or night, I may hear, or rather, feel, the pounding beat of Mexican rap, or Spanish language television, reverberating through my house. With all the windows closed. And these homes are not built all that close together. One pleasant December afternoon just after Christmas, I was sitting out on my side deck when they decided to crank the stereo and open all the doors and windows. I screamed over the fence (not meaning to be rude, really, but I figured screaming was the only method of communication they would hear over the music) for them to turn it down, please. Whereupon they made some derisive-sounding non-English comments and turned it UP.

I really don't want to get into bad-vibe competitions with my neighbors. But me being me, it's bound to happen. I've always been a shy, inward person. I have never been comfortable dealing with other human beings unless it was on my own terms. My experience at the restaurant did nothing to change this. For five years, I had to manage the input of a restaurant full of strangers on a daily basis. It was hard for me. I never got used to it...never got to the point where I could do it easily, much less enjoy it. so now that I'm out of that situation, I'm even thornier than I was before. If I want people around, I'll go looking for them. But if I don't, I don't want them impacting my space in any way, particularly negative ways. Which can all be summed up in three short words. I. Hate. Neighbors.

So my dream right now would be to chuck the house and go find a piece of property where my nearest neighbors are...far enough away that I don't have to see, hear or socialize with them unless I want to. Preferably a place with plenty of birds, animals and ancient trees to keep me company. I think I could be happy there.

I also know that, the real estate market being what it is, and with a $40,000 second mortgage strapped to our backs, leaving this house is an impossible dream. Better come up with an alternate plan...

The Real Danger of TMI

"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other." -- Ann Landers

This quote appeared on my Google home page this morning. I loved Ann Landers. I read her faithfully starting when I was about eleven years old. Eppie Lederer was a no-nonsense gal. Her down-to-earth sensibility and dry humor cut through the inflated drama of her readers’ concerns, re-prioritized their “it’s all about me!” perspectives and pointed them in the direction of common sense solutions to their problems. And I find her pronouncement on the dominant technology of her day succinct and prophetic.

I wonder what she would have thought about today’s technology? The technology that has chained any person under the age of thirty to a smart phone, iPad, laptop and/or MP3 player. Personal electronics have become as necessary as breathing to an entire generation. The obsessive dependence upon these things carries Landers’ assessment to a whole new level. Cel phone/text technology has proved that people would rather communicate with anyone rather than present company. And will slavishly employ these tools to save themselves from what must be a fate worse than death, since they will risk death to avoid it—being alone in the silent company of their own thoughts.

Human beings are complicated animals, prone to mystifying and contradictory behavior. We kill for pleasure while we prohibit “murder” on moral grounds. We enslave others while rigorously defending our own unqualified freedom. We crave community and reject it at the same time; how else to explain a pack of kids walking down the street with their noses glued to their phones instead of talking to each other? How else to explain the drive to accumulate hundreds of social media “friends,” yet not have one other person in the world who KNOWS you? I am stumped. I doubt that I’ll ever understand it.

Over the past hundred years, humans have run wild with the idea of creating technologies that will “shrink” the world. Information that once took weeks to cross the continent now travels in less than the blink of an eye. Images are instantaneous, and they are everywhere, accessible at any time. But I wonder if we’ve really done ourselves any favors. We’ve become media junkies. But I’m afraid our hunger for input has outstripped our ability to process it properly. It’s coming at us so fast that there’s no time to discern truth from lies, fact from fantasy. We select the information we choose to assimilate and construct our own individual versions of reality. As a result, the technology meant to draw the world together is actually pushing it apart.

Each of us has created our own unique sovereignty. The "facts" we adopt, the realities we create serve more to isolate us from one another than to connect us. Instead of 196 countries in the world, there are 7 billion. In many ways, we are infinitely farther from each other than we were before all this technology endeavored to bring us together. It’s true, and getting truer, that thing which Ann Landers identified half a century ago.

We would rather look at anything than each other.


Cross posted at Women On...

Snow Day

So we’ve had a major weather event here. The snow that was supposed to “sock” the Pacific Northwest Tuesday night, sneaked south of Seattle and north of Portland. And landed right in my back yard. At least twelve inches of it.

Lying in bed this morning, I watched it through the little square window above my bedroom fireplace. The one through which I can see the fifty-foot fir tree that stands guard over the cemetery. It was beautiful this morning, heavily frosted in white. I knew it had been snowing all night; knew there was bound to be a heap of it out there. I got up and looked out the front window. Wow! It was gorgeous. And it was wonderful beyond words not to have to worry about it.

I was reminded of our winter from hell three years ago, when the snow kept coming and coming. The year I had to shovel the walks (and the street!) around the restaurant every day for three weeks, because our good ole landlord was vacationing in Arizona. The year the last vestiges of snow didn’t disappear until almost April, and that same good ole landlord gave me a horrendous dressing down for “ruining” his sidewalks by putting rock salt out to melt the ice.

I wonder how long it will be before I stop seeing everything through the filter of what “it” was like when we had the restaurant. I looked out at the pristine, deep white stuff this morning and wondered if this would have been the day that the Old Town Café was closed by the weather. And immediately dismissed the thought. Who cares?

Because this morning there was no restaurant to worry about. No sidewalks to shovel. No employees to call in snowbound. No wondering how long or how much the weather event was going to mess with my sales numbers. No worries at all. I didn’t even have to fret about the husband, because he (wisely) chose to telecommute rather than risk the drive into Portland. Total bitchin’ Snow Day!

So I made soup, I baked cookies, and watched the antics of the weather-challenged birds through my kitchen window. And I allowed the snow to kick my butt around the block when I went out to tackle shoveling the driveway. Husband and I are now both in need of traction, but there are clear paths to the street behind both cars that will be leaving the house in the morning. (Mine is not one of them.) All that work when there’s every chance the snow will mostly melt on its own by morning…

We had been promised 50 degrees and rain by this afternoon—the better to make history of the Big Snow of 2012. Well, not so much. But out on the neighborhood streets tonight, steam is rising from the blanket of snow itself as the slightly rising temperatures slowly dispatch it. It looks for all the world like the Wicked Witch of the West disappearing from beneath her robes... “I’m melting! Melting! Oh, what a world! What a world!”

Yes, it is quite a world. And I’m getting to know it all over again.

Monday

(In view of the current circumstances, and taking into consideration my obvious lack of interesting things to say in any case, I've decided to take "Coming to Terms" in a different direction for a while. I'm going to fire off ten-to-fifteen minute stream-of-consciosness entries every day (or so) just so I can oil the works a bit. Might as well go back to using my scribbling as personal psycho-therapy, since it doesn't seem to be serving any other purpose these days...)

Woke up this morning in a peculiar state of mind. I’m getting signals from the Universe that rest time is over. Not that I have been lying around the house doing absolutely nothing…but after five years of never having a truly restful moment, that is what it has felt like. Now I have to motivate myself in the direction of earning a living…this month’s financial mini-crisis sealed that fate. I’m petrified, really. The concept of a job search scares the hell out of me on so many levels.

1.) I’m probably too old to get a job. In a job market like this one, someone my age would be fortunate to land ANY job. And I know I don’t want just ANY job. I also know I have no desire whatever to go anywhere near the field I have been in for the past five years.

2.) My resume is crap. It was crap six years ago, actually… One of the reasons I decided I needed to have my own business. I find it kind of ironic. I know I would be a better quality employee than any of the people I managed to scrape together to man my own business. But I also know that there would be no way to convince a potential employer of that. And I am lacking the self-confidence it would take to aggressively sell my skills to someone.

3.) About that self-confidence…hard to muster when your most recent experience was a spectacular, 60-month-long crash and burn at the thing you thought you should have in the bag. A job search without self-confidence is not an endeavor destined for success.

4.) I may actually BE too old to learn NEW tricks.

So I’m starting to try on the idea of getting the concession business up and running again. It’s probably my best bet for bringing in money…or at least creating cash flow. But I have to say, there are things about it that remind me waaaay too much of owning the café. The customer service part, for instance. I SOOOO hate customers. I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that at least they’re not likely to run to the internet and pen scathing reviews of a festival food booth. And even if they did, I don’t know of too many festival-goers who check "yelp" before choosing a place to eat at such events.

It’s been five months since we wrapped up our Scandinavian Festival, and I began my R & R in earnest. Seems like a long time. Or at least an adequate time. But I’m still feeling weak and bruised and timid. Especially when I’m feeling the barrel of that “you need the money” gun pressing at my temple. Kind of a crappy way to start a week.