It's All Relative

I remember. Back in the early 90's, during the last recession. What I was doing.

I can remember.

I was in college. But I'd recently quit my job, to go travel up to Canada for the summer, with a "sort of" boyfriend and his girlfriend. I was hitching a ride up there and then planning on hitchhiking and taking a bus or something up towards Alaska to check it out.

I ended up just hanging out with my "sort of" boyfriend and his girlfriend and instead, taking a sailboat up to an island and fishing and smoking pot and writing for a month or so.

And then I came back to SF and school and couldn't get a job. Because California had an unemployment rate of 9.1%.

So I cashed out my 401k and lived off that for a while. And soon ran out of money and eventually found a job at Macy's in downtown San Francisco. At Christmas time. In the children's department. Which didn't have a department manager. Because he'd been recently fired for sexual harassment.

And one morning after dropping my new "semi-boyfriend" off at work at Nordstrom, where he worked in men's suits, I was driving past city hall towards my job at Macy's in the children's department - a truck ran a red light and crashed into the car I was driving and totaled it.

Which just so happened to be my "new" boyfriend's, ex girlfriend's car.

Luckily, she'd been the one to break up with him because he'd found her making out with my best friend's roommate a few weeks earlier, in front of our flat at a party we'd had. So she wasn't mad at all when she found out it was totaled and that I'd been driving it. And besides, I took care of getting her the cash from the settlement. A cop had seen the whole accident and so the insurance company cleared me of any wrong doing.

I had it towed to my new, "semi-boyfriend's" house. So he could have it as a symbol of their lost love.

And then I think I got evicted from the apartment I was living in at the time, for not being able to pay rent. And then my roommate lost her job so she decided to move to Seattle. So I moved in with my new "semi-boyfriend" in Oakland. Which is how I ended up in Oakland.

I remember back then, eating a lot of top ramen with 2 slices of american cheese and frozen corn kernels mixed in. And burritos. We were in a recession after all.

One night, I came home from my "new" cafe job, and found my "new" boyfriend doing you know what with some other girl, you know where. So I left and stayed with a friend and then moved out of the not so new now, "ex" boyfriend's place the next weekend, while he was working in men's suits at Nordtroms at the "half yearly sale" - without leaving a trace.

Now. In another recession. An unemployment rate in California at 10.1%.

And I have a job. And it pays. And I like it. And Morgan has a job, but it's sporadically stops paying, when it runs out of money. And it does this without notice. On the day, the paycheck is supposed to be directly deposited, it's not there.

Poof.

Mostly, we figure it out. What to do. How to keep it going for a while. While we wait. While we believe. And we ride bikes and make jokes. And go to soccer practice and eat bacon and drive less and do homework. And drink wine.

But sometimes when I think about it too much, like what happens if it stretches on longer this time and if it actually collapses and there is no severance, and how I should have cashed in the 401k months ago because we would have had more money even with the penalties and tax because the market is so much lower now and how I don't even like top ramen anymore, well, I feel like my head will explode.

Even on the bike ride home, the one that helps me sort through my day and think through it all, I just can't clear my head. And not even the hannah montana, jonas brothers concert that's playing when I arrive home, can help cheer me up.

So I go sit in the corner chair and tell everyone that dinner is a free for all and that they all must make their own items to eat. Each person must make their own is the only rule for the evening. And they have tamale pie and mac and cheese and apples and pears and broccoli and kimchee.

And I eat brie cheese smeared on tortilla chips shards. And frozen peas. And green tea.

Hell In A Handbasket

You know those moments when you have small epiphanies, when you all of a sudden come to a realization that it's not really going as it should.

You know, like a mini enlightenment. And you get that twinge of panic.

The plan, or rather lack thereof a plan is not working. And it's time to make a change and start going the right way again.

Do the right thing. Make things right. You see a little light of how it could or should be. You're in the light. It's clear.

And you imagine yourself getting up out of the gutter, the gutter of bakesale betty cookies and chicken pot pies and wine and burgers and too much butter on your potato.

The gutter that you've been rolling around in for the last few months of winter after "the binge" of cyclocross season has ended and you've decided to take a break from riding a lot, because you just finished racing bikes just about every single weekend for the last 5 months.

That gutter, the one that you've been rolling around in for the past few months, with your belly hanging out of your shirt only at your midriff because of the muffin top that keeps expanding a little bit more each day from eating thin mints and trader joes mini chocolate chip cookies as you slouch in your chair at work.

And burritos.

So yeah. I had my own little epiphany this morning as I was dropping the first kid off at school and was pulling out of the drop off lane and somehow managed to drive over 3 of the big orange cones that were lined up to mark off the lane for drop off.

I wasn't going fast. You can't go fast in drop off lane. In fact I even slowed down to about 5 mph after I ran over the 2nd cone, to try and get it to pop up higher when it bounced out from underneath the car.

And my 6th grader said, "jesus mom".

What. It's not like I did it on purpose.

But it didn't matter. I saw the disapproving looks from the ones who park and walk their kids in. And I thought to myself, I used to be one of them too - a walker inner. I wasn't always a drop off lane, cone runner over.

At least I commute by bike to work, I thought to myself.

But then, right there it all flashed before my eyes - just as I was watching that last cone pop up behind me in my rear view mirror. Not only do I now have a job in the bike industry and am commuting to work by bike, I'm actually riding less each week then I have in a long, long time.

And I have a muffin top.

And I thought about it all day, at work, as I was rubbing my muffin top and talking about bike stuff and watching them pull the airstream trailer that we're converting into the conference room, into the parking lot.

And then, later on, I only had 2 thin mints and sat up straight for a little bit at my desk while I watched some of my coworkers eat an entire box of thin mints in 5 minutes and another coworker eat an entire sleeve in 10 minutes.

Things are gonna change.