Still Life, With Cats

It is December 1st, which means that once again, it is time to kick off Holidailies – the annual project where a bunch of people do their best to post daily blog entries for the entire month of December. Or in my case, where I start the month full of energy and enthusiasm and then fizzle out a few days in and instead spend my time reading all the blog entries everyone else manages to still keep writing, with far more clever turns of phrase and witty banter than I could ever produce. I say this, of course, with the knowledge that a significant number of the other Holidailies participants are posting pretty much the same sentiment. Who knows. Maybe one of these years we’ll all rub off on each other and find that writing mojo that has been slowly fading for far too long.

But I digress. Welcome to December, and to Holidailies. If you’re new here, I would recommend checking out the About page, except that I never got around to scribbling more than a paragraph or two there, so…yeah. Hi. I’m Jennifer. I live in a 100-year-old house in a city full of trees, with my husband and six cats. I knit, a lot. I bake when I am bored. Sometimes I do a lot of canning. I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you. I sing low alto in a women’s vocal ensemble. I recently made cheddar cheese. I like Brussel sprouts. I read really, really, really fast. I know all the songs in  “A Shoggoth on the Roof” by heart. I have no clue how to wear makeup. I prefer caramel over chocolate. You will pry the Oxford comma out of my cold, dead hands.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies

I went out for lunch today.

It sounds like such a small thing, I realize. People do it all the time – get up from their desks and gather with their coworkers and go through the endless discussion of ‘where shall we go?’ and ‘what sounds good today’. Why would I even mention something so mundane.

I haven’t been out to lunch in months, however. Not since the majority of my coworkers got laid off. Now it’s just me here, sitting in my cube, in a big maze of cubes of people who are in completely different departments than me. And so I eat my lunch by myself, in the break room. I do my work by myself. I enter the building and I leave and days will go by where I have not spoken to another person the entire time.  Oh sometimes I’ll trade an inane pleasantry with someone on the elevator, or murmur a quick ‘hi’ when passing someone down the hall, or share a nervous laugh when a door opens too quickly and someone – maybe me – is nearly hit by it. But otherwise, it’s just me, all by myself. I have nothing in common with anyone else here. We do not work together. I am just…here.

It wasn’t such a big thing, before this. The big company bought our little company, but we were all still in our same groups, in our same offices all around the country. There was never more than a handful of us in my old office, but we all liked each other, most of the time (and on days when deadlines were looming and tempers were frayed, we were all very good at keeping carefully out of each others’ way). The big company has all the usual Big Company processes and procedures, but we were isolated by our location.

Not so anymore. I work in a cube maze, where there is never any escape from the people who bathe in far too much perfume or cologne, or the people who like to stand up when they take phone calls, so as to make sure that their voices carry further, or the ones who put conference calls on speaker, or the ones who cluster together to have loud conversations right next to someone else’s cube; someone who might be trying very hard to listen to a conference call or get something urgent done; someone who really wishes that everyone would shut the hell up and go away. I work in a building where the prevailing belief is that the air conditioning should be cranked as high as it can possibly go, so that half of us huddle over space heaters, or don sweaters and fingerless gloves, even in the heat of summer. And I work in place where in a sea of people, I feel completely alone.

Today I went out for lunch because I was so very cold that the thought of going outside in the late summer heat was preferable to staying inside and shivering over my usual peanut butter sandwich in the break room. I walked a few blocks away and bought myself a slice of mediocre pizza (mainly because it was cheap and quick) and then sat outside and tried to soak in as much warmth as possible so as to make the rest of the afternoon more bearable.

I do not speak of a lot of things on this space. I deal with change by turning inward, and then working out how best to handle it on my own. I do not want, nor need, advice, no matter how helpful the giver thinks they might be. This situation I am in is not unique; I am not the only one who hates working in cube farms but has no choice; not the only one who wishes things were different; not the only one who swore they would never work for a Big Company again but then somehow ended up there anyway through no fault of their own. This is my normal now. And today I went out for lunch.

May is Bike Month. And ever since our office moved downtown, for the very first time I now work close enough to home that biking to work is a doable thing. I calculated out roughly about how many miles, total, it would be if I rode my bike at least 3 times a week, through the entire month of May. And then I took my bike in for a much-needed tune-up (since it hadn’t been touched in an embarrassingly large number of years) and I took a deep breath and signed up on the site, and then I got to it.

Most mornings it is still a struggle to not just hit the snooze button and get just a little bit more sleep (because biking to work means I have to get up at least half an hour earlier than I’ve been used to). I still get really nervous every time I approach an intersection and see a car waiting to turn, and wonder if they’ve seen me, or if I would have enough time to swerve if they didn’t. And I am nowhere near confident enough to try biking after dark, or in the rain (although luckily the second problem, at least, seems to be over for the foreseeable future). But Sacramento has a lot of other bike commuters, and this month there’s even more than usual – or maybe it’s just that now that I’m one of them, I’m actually paying more attention. So I remind myself, every morning, that I actually *like* the ride once I get out there, and I strap on my helmet and do my best to catch the eye of drivers at intersections so that I know they know I’m passing right in front of them, and I nod and smile at passing cyclists and pedestrians, and I catch myself starting to come up with reasons to bike somewhere instead of drive, and I dutifully tracking my miles on the website, with every round trip that I accomplish.

More than 50% of my goal ridden, and the month is barely half over. It’s that easy. What do you know.

So that whole write-a-letter-a-day thing in February? Um. Yeah. I think I managed to eek out about a dozen letters, and that included the trio of postcards I mailed out from Aruba to family members. But I did get a good handful of letters from other people, and I used up some of the stationary that’s been lurking in my cupboards for mumble-mumble years, so even if I didn’t exactly hit the letter (ha!) of the challenge, at least I gave it a try. And it was kind of fun.

And now is the point when you say ‘wait, Aruba?’. Because one reason I had a hard time doing the whole letter-a-day thing is that Richard and I went on a cruise for a week during February. To the southern Caribbean. Just us and a giant boat and a whole pile of extremely elderly people, and oh yeah, a total of 541 nerds, with concerts and performances by the likes of John Hodgeman, Wil Wheaton, Jonathon Coulton, Marian Call, and so on and so forth. I know, I know, most of you likely have no idea who any of those people are but trust me when I say it was a level of nerdy, geeky awesome beyond compare.

The cruise itself was the random idea of Jonathon Coulton, the singer/songwriter responsible for the ending credit songs on both Portal games, such classics as ‘Re: Your Brain’s’ and ‘Code Monkey’, and a host of other songs about math and science and giant squids and monkeys and crazed news anchors, and all sorts of things that warm the cockles of a geeky nerd’s heart. The first JoCo Crazy Cruise was in 2011, and we did not go because we found out about it too late, and also, cruises are kind of expensive. Then they announced that they were going to do it again, and we sat down and pondered and pondered and looked at the finances and pondered some more and eventually figured out that we could make this work. And after we finished doing a little giddy dance of joy, we signed up and have spent the better part of the past nine months eagerly waiting to go.

Of course, the first thing everyone else wanted to know was where we were going, and no amount of ‘On a boat! With lots of nerds! Nerds on a boat! Squee!’ seemed to satisfy them, because apparently non-nerds do not comprehend that Nerds On A Boat with Bonus Extra Nerdery was enough of a reason to get on a cruise ship, and we really didn’t care one bit where the boat was actually headed. And then there was the added fun of trying to explain who all the special performers were going to be. Okay, see, there’s Jonathon Coulton. Yes, he’s the guy that wrote that song about the zombies. And..uh…Wil Wheaton. He was in that movie, Stand By Me. And…uh…John Hodgeman. Do you watch The Daily Show? He’s an occasional correspondent. No. Okay. Um…You know that commercial? I’m a Mac and I’m a PC? He was the PC. No? And then it would all break down and we were right back to our starting point of Nerds! People just like us! Nerds! On a boat! With singing. And also a boat!

But preparing for the cruise – even reading stories about the first cruise, and hanging out on the forums, watching the excitement grow as everyone else – all these strangers from the internet that would soon become 541 of our new friends – wasn’t enough to remotely prepare us for how amazing the trip was. There were fezzes. There were mustaches. There was gaming, and cookies, and singing waiters with Baked Alaska. There were a whole lot of extremely confused elderly people who couldn’t quite figure out who we all were and why we were on their boat with them. There were random zombies, and karaoke, and fancy pants, and an event sign that turned into the most awesome Word Jumble game ever. I am still working out how best to summarize all of it, and even though I didn’t take very many pictures, I still need to go through them and get them all edited and uploaded. So eventually I will tell you all the rest of it – the thing about the dolphins, and about how we met our very first Sea Monkey, and how we made Jonathon Coulton giggle, and on and on. But this is what you’re going to get for now. A placeholder. Nerds! On a boat! I am still not quite sure how else to explain.