Commuting

My bias against driving started in high school. Mr. Elwood, my European history teacher, said the two biggest wastes of time are driving places and sleeping. I disagree about sleeping, but I am 100% with him on driving. I started my training program a few weeks ago, and I am now commuting to south Bellevue five days a week.

I hate commuting.

It sucks.

I was reading The Enlightened Cyclist by Bike Snob NYC where Eben Weiss discusses the perils and inherent dangers of daily commutes. We are taking our lives into our hands when we travel from one place to another. I feel this when I am trying to merge on to 520 at 8:34 a.m. A friend of mine does a similar commute to Redmond. When I told her where and when I go, she immediately felt sorry for me. "I carpool with my husband so we pass all of the crazy traffic waiting to get on the highway."

Of the ten people in my training class, I live the second closest to the training location, and I bitch the most about the drive. On my drive home, I pass a sign that tells how many minutes it is to Everett. I've already been in the car for forty minutes, and I am one exit away from home when I see the sign. I think about the two people in my class who live near Everett who have 77 more minutes to go. I can't imagine.

Until I started commuting, I had also been incredibly naive about the traffic in Seattle. I know it was bad, but I didn't realize how much time it can shave off a person's life. I spend almost two hours each day driving less than nine miles. During non-rush hour times, the same drive takes about twenty-five minutes. And this is a reverse commute. The people coming in from the suburbs into the city are parked on the highway. The traffic I am in moves slowly, but at least it moves. Today, I was crawling, which means my car was moving forward, but my speedometer was reading 0 miles per hour.

I never did like driving, even schlepping my kids around. I had a short radius of how far I would drive my kids for an activity. One summer when Claire Adele was five and the Boy two, I signed Claire Adele up for a half day class at the Pacific Science Center in the summer. I would drive her down there around 9:00, and I would pick her up around noon. In rush hour, it took about a half and hour to get there and about twenty minutes to get home. Round trip, that was about 110 minutes with a toddler in the car. Instead of driving home, I'd find a park nearby for the Boy and I to hang out at, and then I'd get Claire Adele.

I hated it. If I only had one kid, it might have been fine, but with two, it was a disaster. Claire Adele has a friend who is an only child. This mother would sign her daughter up for classes on Mountlake Terrace (10.9 miles) after school and on Mercer Island (12.7 miles) in the summer. This woman wanted her daughter to have a friend in the class. Even though I was a stay-at-home mom, I couldn't afford the drive time to get Claire Adele back and forth. This mother agreed to take on the heavy lifting of the carpooling. Her daughter was going anyway--what was the big deal of bringing along another kiddo?

Which brings me to my theory about how far families are willing to drive their kids around based on the number of children in the family:

I am looking forward to starting my real job, which I can commute to by public transportation. There will be a three-quarters mile walk from the bus tunnel to the office, but I don't think I'll mind the exercise.

The team that I am going to join allows people to work from home one or two days a week to avoid the commute. I can see why people would want to re-claim those extra hours.

As I was driving, I thought about the people in my class who I have gotten to know over the past two weeks. A few weeks ago, I took a webinar where I was in the classroom, but the other students were streaming the class over the internet. I missed interacting with the other students. Here, I talk to people over break and during lunch. We work on group projects, all of which would have been missed had this class been taught online.

Social scientists and economists evaluate decision-making of citizens consumers. Why do I do this drive even though I loathe it so? Even though I hate it, I do it anyway. One might argue that the more I hate the drive means the more I like the class, as I am willing to put up with something I hate to do something I enjoy or get benefit from.

I am so glad the training ends in July. I think I can survive it until then.

Les Ballets De Trockodero

This weekend, Jack bought tickets for us to see Les Ballets de Trockadero de Monte Carlo at Meany Hall at UW. The company is an all-male comic ballet. All of the dancers are professionally trained, and they each have a fake male and female persona. All of the men learn to dance en pointe, which is unheard of in professional dance. While women dancers dance en pointe, they have been dancing in toe shoes since they were ten or twelve. These men had to learn after their dance training. One of the dancers from the Pacific Northwest Ballet used to dance there. I want to ask him how he liked Trockadero and was it hard to learn at a relatively late stage in his career.

The first act as a spoof of Swan Lake. Men with hairy chests and drag queen make-up wear white tutus and dance en pointe. These guys camp around the stage to Tchaikovsky. As the evening progressed, the program became more serious. There were still jokes and gags, like an extra dancer on the stage sat eating an apple while watching the pas de Deux.

After the Swan Lake satire, they tackled some other major ballets with lead prima ballerina roles. One guy was Esmerelda a version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the other was Kitri from Don Quixote. At times, I forgot these were men on stage. They were amazing.

The whole ballet was provacative and at times I was confused. First, I didn't have a problem with men taking on women's roles. I am supportive of the rights of the transgendered. What it begged in my mind was the whole question of gender equity. Why did I think it was so great than a man could do what a woman could do? For centuries, men have been upstaging women left and right. Why are they taking one of hte few things in the world where women are on equal footing, or even are better? Why, men, why? Maybe I wouldn't be so bitter if we had a woman president, more women in congress, more women in leadership positions everywhere.

I asked Jack about it. I want to be happy for these guys. I really do.

"Maybe the whole idea is to turn all gender norms on their heads," he said. "Maybe men can be prima ballerinas and women can do men things."

Maybe, but then why wasn't I watching a women's rugby team, or an all female contruction crew?

I can't be mad at these guys, though, and throw rocks at them and call them anti-feminist. These are men in tutus and blue eyeshadow, for pete's sake. What could make a man more vulnerable than dressing up as not only a chick, but a learning all of the chick dance moves? Any guy can put on a skirt. It takes some real cojones to spend years learning how to dance en pointe when no other men do. But why don't men learn pointe? What's the reason not to? Because women do? That is kind of bullshit, too. Is pointe women's work? Maybe then women's work will become less genderized and just become work. Where does it say that men can't raise kids, do laundry and cook a fabluous meal? No place.

I am still confused, but I welcome it. There are times when we need more discussion and debate, more conversations that are filled with gray than absolutes. How often do we get that, and how refreshing to find it from men in tights with false eyelashes.

Seattle's Future Displaced People

As those of you who live in the Seattle region know, the housing market here is out of control. My friend Carla moved out of town four years ago and moved back to Seattle this winter. She and her husband sold their house when they left and bought a new one this spring. When they moved back, there were seven or eight houses on the market in Northeast Seattle. Total. To compare, when we moved to Seattle in August 2004, we saw at least thirty houses in one weekend. There were more available, but we ruled them out because they were either too smaller or too expensive. Carla and her husband bid on a handful of houses, and each house had twenty competing bids. Finally, they got a house. They paid significantly more for a home that was smaller than their previous place and in worse condition. But they got a house.

And that's is not even the rental market, which is just as bad.

My husband and I own a house that has significantly increased in value since we bought it in 2004. We should be happy, right?

If I needed to move to another part of the country where real estate prices are much less than Seattle, I'd be in excellent shape. Other than that, it's not all that great. First, my house is where I live. If I want to tap into that money, I would need to sell the house and then I would need to find a new place to live, which, if Carla's story is an indicator, would be a nightmare. I could sell my house, not find anyplace else to live nearby and then pay more for a house in a worse location in worse condition.

Why is the market out of control? Two hundred and fifty people a day are moving into King County. Amazon is hiring a bazillion people and they need a place to live. Having lots of good, high-paying jobs is a good problem to have, isn't it? It is better than the alternative of having a depressed economy, no jobs and people leaving, right?

There are upsides and downsides to everything. In one sense, I am a winner in this scenario. We bought a house years ago when the housing market was robust but not out of control. But this does have a negative impact on me. The volatile housing market means my kids might not be able to afford to live here, and it will be expensive to move my parents or in-laws out here (from Ohio and Atlanta, respectively) if they can't live independently.

Right now, (knock on wood) three out of four of my parents/in-laws are healthy. My dad is an able-bodied man of sound mind in his seventies. He has lots of mileage left, but you never know if he might have a heart attack or stroke and need to move to an assisted living situation. My in-laws are also healthy; the odds of all three of them dying quietly in their sleep without needing some kind of elder care is pretty small. They will likely need to live near family, and right now Jack and I are the prime candidates out of all of our siblings who could take in our folks. Years ago, we assumed Jacks' sister was going to take Jack's parents and Jack and I would take mine. Last month, we visited Jack's sister and her family. Jack's sister has a son with a disability. When I returned from the trip, I realized Jack's sister doesn't have the bandwidth to care for elderly parents and a child with special needs. Which leaves us, and yet Seattle is too expensive for us to afford a second place for them to live.

It is great that Jack and I can live here, but it is sad to think our kids and parents might not be able to live here with us. My parents and kids are displaced before they are even thinking of moving here.

Friday!!!

When I got off the 74 bus downtown this morning, and I was walking up the massive hill to where my training was held, I thought, "Thank God it's Friday!" I don't think I've had that thought since I quit my job before Claire-Adele was born.

I finished my first full-time week of training this afternoon. This was the first week of nine-to-five* that I have completed in ages. When I ran for School Board, that was a 24/7 gig, so there was no celebration of the end of the week because it was one continuous flow of work. There were breaks here and there, but weekends were just as busy as weekdays, sometimes more so.

My friend Mary sent me a meme with a smiling woman that read "That moment when you realize that being a stay-at-home-mom means you never actually leave work." When I was** a stay-at-home-mom, I was always a stay-at-home-mom. Weekends meant the kids were home. While it might have been a break for them, it wasn't a break for me. To be honest, sometimes I looked forward to Mondays.

This week was a hard week, but a good week. My brain was crammed full of information. I thought it would be overload, but the opposite happened. It was like I was taking an SQL and Business Intelligence immersion class. The more I was there, the more everything made sense. I was feeling better when I left on this afternoon, but my brain was ready for a break.

Jack seems to be okay with me working so far. I thought this would be a bigger adjustment for him than me. He is used to me picking up all of the slack around the house and with the kids. This week, Jack shuttled kids to and from various lessons and appointments. This evening, Claire-Adele had to be someplace by 6:00 p.m. I told Jack I'd be home in time to take her.

"No," he said. "I need to take her. I told people at work I have to drive Claire-Adele and I need to leave by 5:00." Jack now has a legitimate reason to say no to extra work, and he is using it.

I even had good luck with buses today. The 74 buses run twenty minutes apart in the afternoon. I thought I was going to miss the 4:11, but it was running a few minutes late. I saw it coming and ran to catch it. Evan, my physical therapist, would have been proud of me! When I got off the bus in my neighborhood, I was smiling. I survived.

Maybe even thrived.


* Some days this week were 8:00 to 4:00. Same difference.
** That was the first time I used "was" in a sentence with "stay-at-home-mom."

Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time

Earlier this week, I was at training for my new job. At lunch, I headed to the mall and stopped at a Panera where I waited in line for ten minutes behind a flock of moms with their toddler children. This was ironic since I was returning to the workforce after years of being a mom and then I was surrounded by stay-at-home moms getting kids' meals.

I watched one of the moms in particular. She had short dark hair like me, was wearing jeans, sneakers and a shirt that was not "Dry Clean Only." Her daughter was about three years old. She seemed like a regular mom, like the hundreds I've known since Claire Adele was born.

"You can pick out a cookie, but not the one with the candy," said the mom to her daughter. "What do you want to eat for lunch? Here are your choices....  You want to say hi to Hannah? You can go say hi but come right back." The girl tripped and fell, and the mom waited a second to see if her daughter was okay before jumping in for the rescue. The mom gave the girl her hand and helped her up.

The woman was constantly teaching her kid in the ten minutes I saw her even though it looked like a low-key interaction. The mother didn't seem to be pedantic, fussy or high-strung. She wasn't teaching her kid to read, to math, draw or play the piano. Instead, she was teaching her daughter to navigate the world.

It took me getting a day job and watching someone else do exactly what I did for so many years to realize how much work is involved in being a mother, how it is a constant flow of nurturing. At times, the flow of motherhood is a gentle trickle and other times it is catching the violent end of a firehose. I remember the crises and the tantrums where I was drinking from the firehose, but I forgot how much goes into the other 98.9% of managing the tiny everyday drops the come so slowly that we don't even notice what we are instilling in our kids.

I think about the Boy and Claire-Adele. When I was running for School Board two years ago, we had something new in our family: money for dinner. I would give each kid twenty bucks and tell them to walk to Kidd Valley and get something to eat. What did they have to learn in the course of their lives to be able to do this? They needed to know how to

-- Determine when they are hungry without throwing a tantrum,*
-- How to safely cross the street,

-- Read a menu to decide what they want to eat,

-- Stand in line at a fast food place,
-- Communicate so they can place their order,
-- Calculate how much the food will cost, pay and get change,
-- Say please and thank you to the people serving their food,
-- Wait patiently while their food was being prepared, and
-- Have decent table manners so as not to offend everyone in the establishment.

I never sat down with my kids and had a "How to Navigate a Restaurant" lesson, but along the way, they figured it out over through repetition and my guidance. That is pretty amazing, not only for the kids but for the moms of the world.

Now that my kids are older, they need me less in their grille. They are out and about on their own, as they should be. I have other friends with disabled kids who are as old as mine, but their kids still need help navigating the world. My kids still need help, just less than they did when they were toddlers.

Moms need better PR. Here is slogan with enough gravitas to be worthy of a bank ("We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it.") or the armed services ("The few. The Proud. The Marines.") Here it is: "Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time." Imagine James Earl Jones or Catherine Zeta-Jones saying it. Moms would become the most respected job in the world,

I wish every mother a Happy Mother's Day!

* We are still working with the Boy on this one.

Beer v. Clean Water

I was at Alpental yesterday afternoon. The Boy was skiing—he wanted to hit the last day of the season. It was a warm and sunny afternoon. All of the other area ski resorts were closed, and Alpental was packed.

“I’ve never seen lift lines here so long,” he said as he examined the crowds.

I was hoping for a quiet afternoon to look out at the mountain and get some work done. I brought along my laptop and planned to catch up on some writing and balancing the checkbook. I was met with a party on the patio, lots of people eating and drinking, as the B-52’s Rock Lobster played on the outdoor speakers. Since I wasn't skiing myself, I didn't feel like I earned a beer or would be fully welcomed in this impromptu Margaritaville celebrating the last day of the ski season. This environment inspired people watching, not heads-down work.

I noticed a large number of people drinking beer. I saw a bearded man with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other dancing with a toddler. The toddler was drinking something, and I hoped it wasn’t beer. The toddler was stumbling around, but most toddlers do. Maybe two hundred years ago, people would let toddlers drink beer instead of risking water-borne diseases like dysentery and cholera.

Hundreds of years ago, most water wasn’t safe to drink. Instead, people would drink beer, wine, and spirits which were at times safer than drinking water. This got me wondering: Did clean water make our world smarter because people weren’t drunk all of the time? Did society’s collective cognitive abilities increase with clean water? Would Alexander Graham Bell have invented the telephone if he were hammered all of the time? Would Thomas Edison have invented the light bulb if he drank every night? Maybe they were drunks, but I doubt it. Ernest Hemingway drank excessively, and that didn’t seem to limit his talents. Writers seem to be the categorical exception to the drunks aren't geniuses rule. 

Claire Adele is a strong student of U.S History, and we often hear obscure facts about our country’s past during dinner. I’ll ask her to correlate the timing of invention of clean water with the timing of major industrial and economic developments. Having studied history myself, I know there are other causes of the Industrial Revolution(s). Still, this idea of the collective sobering up creating technological advances could make an interesting thesis for a paper.

Time Traveling, or Brigadoon?

I started my Apprenti training for my new job two weeks ago. The schedule has been kind of light, as I am in a class by myself. Ha! Seriously, my position is a one-off, where I am not part of a larger cohort of a dozen people all taking the same classes. I am fine being a solo student--it just means my class schedule has gaps in it here and there.

Last week and this week, I dipped my toes into Business Intelligence and using relational databases. I had poked around relational databases on my own while I was looking for a job, but I lacked the context of how and why a company would use the information aside from tracking sales and marketing data, and cataloging Brittany Spears albums. I would do exercises on my own and sometimes the system would crash. Now when I am in a class, and the system crashes, I either learn

• what I did wrong, or 
• learn that I did nothing wrong and the system has a glitch. 

The classes keep me from getting stuck in an infinite glitch limbo, which is good.

Last night, the Apprenti program had a reception for the new apprentices. I was talking to one of the program sponsors about my career prior to this program. Before I was a stay-at-home-mom, I worked in consulting where we would use proprietary software to create our flat file databases and do the analysis. The strategic marketing consulting firm I worked for had two programmers who designed the number crunching tools, which then the analysts like me would use to program to crunch the numbers.

"That's not transferable," said one of the leaders of the organization. I had never thought of it that way. When I was working in a small and nimble firm, we didn't have time to wait for Tableau to be invented. If we wanted to do that kind of analysis, the firm created its own program to do exactly what it needed -- no more or no less.

Now, I feel like I entered a time machine, flying from 2000 when my daughter was born to 2017. I look at the tools now and think of useful they would have been back when I started working in 1991. Even looking at my volunteer work and the number crunching I did -- it would have been useful to have some of these business information tools available then.

The inverse side of time travel is the coma. I try not to think of myself as if I were in a Brigadoon like sleep for seventeen years and am waking up in a brand new world.

Dear Rain

Dear Rain,

I thought I was clear the other day when I broke up with you, but apparently, you didn't get the message. When I said we could hang out once a week or so, I didn't mean right away. I meant give me a few weeks to compose myself, and then we could see where we stand.

You must be familiar with the expression "Into each life a little rain must fall." You missed the part about "a little," not a lot. I'll admit you did a lovely job with our neighbor's rhododendrons. They are spectacular.

(Sorry the focus is a little off. It was raining when I took the picture this morning.)

You did a great job with the rhodies, but look at what you did to the other flowering trees. You worked so hard to give them gorgeous blooms, and then you knock them all off like a preschooler who builds a cool Lego set and then smashes it five minutes later.

Don't think there is sunshine in the background. A streetlight is reflecting off the wet pavement, creating the illusion that there is sunshine there. If you need further proof, you can the headlights of the car in the background also reflecting off the wet pavement. Cars that drive in sunshine don't need headlights.

And when you leave, take the clouds with you. They need to go, too.

Sincerely,
Lauren

Dear Rain

Dear Rain,

I want to start seeing other weather. It isn't you. It's me. Thank you so much for the awesome cherry blossoms this spring. They were awesome, but it is time for us to go our own ways. I am feeling suffocated by your daily presence and could use a little space, like 'til November. Breaking the 122-inch record this year is something to be proud of, but do you need to be such an overachiever? We certainly don't need to go back to 2005 when you skipped winter entirely. That wasn't cool, either. There are times when being average is good. Think about that in the future.

We can still be friends, maybe see each other once a week or so. In the meantime, if you see the sun, let him know I am available.

All the best,
Lauren

Testing, Testing -- 1, 2, 3

My family and I got back from Whistler last night. This morning, I flipped the calendar to May and was reminded that my daughter has an AP exam Friday, the SAT Saturday, and two AP exams next week.

What was I thinking by letting her go to Whistler this weekend? Jack had planned this trip early last week. This was not something that had been on our calendar for weeks or months, as our Spring Break trip to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. If it had been, perhaps I would have looked at the calendar more closely then kiboshed it.

When I ran for School Board, high stakes tests were a major topic, but tests like the SAT and the AP exams are out of bounds for local jurisdictions. One school board can't ban these tests because practically every college looks at them for incoming freshman. I was in favor of moderate testing of students to help close the opportunity gap. Years ago, I was at a fundraiser for educational causes. The sponsoring organization gave the principal of Garfield High School an award for his work. They showed a video of the principal walking around the school, talking about his accomplishments. One of the highlights was a program that taught sophomores to read. I was appalled, not at the program, but at the idea that these kids could so easily have slipped through the cracks by making it to tenth grade unable read. If we need tests for elementary students to make sure they can read so a district can provide the right services to kids to get them up to speed, then I am for it.

Should I have kept my daughter home so she could cram for these tests? She knows how to read and is reasonably accomplished academically. She is a diligent student and has been studying hard in all of her classes. If anything, Jack and I think at times she studies too much. When I asked her last week if she wanted to go on the trip, she didn't vex. She said yes immediately. The Boy said Claire Adele had a major case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Maybe she did.

Did we do the right thing by letting her take a break? When the Boy was in second grade, he qualified for the district's gifted program. A parent asked me what we did to prepare him for the test. I was a little naive about the question and said "I took him to the Varsity for breakfast before the test. He had pancakes and bacon." Taking it easy before the exam served the Boy well.

While I firmly believe in the power of cramming for tests, maybe bringing my daughter along for a ski weekend might have been a good idea. Maybe she needed space to relax after working so hard this year. In twenty years, she'll remember this weekend, not how well she did on the AP exams, unless she bombs the tests so badly she doesn't get into any of her dream colleges. I don't want her life filled with regret. Or, maybe she'll realize she can have a happy, productive life without getting into a competitive college. Jack and I rode the ski lift this weekend with a guy who was about my age who is a helicopter ski guide in the winter and an EMT in the summer. He seemed happy with his lifestyle.

"I see all of my friends who have been working hard at jobs for twenty years," the helicopter ski guide said. "What does it get them?"

Maybe I am being selfish. If we don't take family trips like these now, we may never have the chance again. In sixteen months, Claire Adele will be off at college. There are less than seventy more weekends before she leaves, and many of those are already booked with camp, sports and other events. 

In the end, it isn't my life--it's Claire Adele's. She often puts school work before friends and activities.  Maybe a trip to Canada was the only way to make her not spend the entire weekend cramming. For the rest of her life, she will have choices to make between work and play. I hope for her own sake, she chooses wisely.