Amy Middleton Loves New York

I’m looking around at houses which it turns out I can’t buy unless I have a W2 job. That’s one thing I wish I’d known before I moved to California. Sorry freelance life. Till we meet again.

But I still need a house so that I can have chickens. And I need chickens so I can feel like my life has meaning. You can see where this is going. I was chatting with Matt Cope the other day about house hunting and he told me:

Houses are like marriage. Don’t settle. The commitment is long, the price can be high. But if you love it (him) you will love every minute of it. And if you don’t the opposite happens.

Funny comparison to give to a girl who said goodbye to her twenties and is still single. I’m kind of the queen of not settling. I’m quite good at not committing; my problem is rarely that I don’t look before I leap. It’s that I look too long.

The beauty part about the internet is it makes it even easier to look. I can search a real estate site and quickly get the MLS or address of a property. Plug it into google, zoom in on the satellite map view, and a house that looked interesting is often removed from the list in the time it takes to see the actual size of the backyard.

Same story with my hunt for a W2 job.

Dear “fast growing retail company”:
You may be looking for an “energetic, proactive Web and Marketing Director who can make a positive impact,” but I just googled you and you don’t even have a website, and your average customer rating on city search is one star. I’m not going to pretend that anything I’d do for your marketing could save you from your lousy fulfillment and customer service. Good luck with that.

I appreciate being able to avoid rat holes by not committing to the “wrong” one, but I wonder if my reluctance to leap is getting me any farther. In my current frame of mind, I can see passing on life in its entirety: “The idea of choices and experience sounds good, but I looked into it and I’m not convinced it’s for me. I’m going to search for something that won’t involve dental work, msn adcenter, or Rod Stewart.”

There’s a lot of goodness in life and experiences that are missed if we insist on turning everything into a Dealbreakers Game, which I often do. And I realize that in the choices I’m trying to make right now, the stakes may be too high, but I wonder if it’s time to do the dumb things I gotta do. Touch the puppet head. And run with the consequences.

 lots of updating needs to happen, but i just came across this little gem in a chat history from august 2006. it deserves better:

so anyway, i just found out this past weekened that at the family reunion
my grandpa had gathered everyone together for a toast or program of some sort
and said something about it being his 50th anniversary
a few of my aunts and uncles corrected him, whispering “Sixtieth!”
and he got mad and said that he had said 60th
and everyone let it go, except him.
and he decided to put it to a VOTE
and everyone voted that he had said 50th, and not 60th
and he got mad
and left
how BIZARRE.

Yesterday while riding the 1 train from 18th Street to my transfer at 42nd, I had an idea for a project. It was a momentary stroke of genius that would surely lead to greatness if carried out. This idea was succeeded by a thought. “You don’t need any more projects. You need to follow through with the projects you have.” The thought was right. I am the illegitimate parent of too many project ideas to count. These projects, scattered across the universe, denied the nurture and attention they require, have little chance of survival. Maybe I could track them down and gather them together. I could put them in a repository. A graveyard. At least they’d be accounted for. And I would be their groundskeeper/webmaster, maintaining Amy’s Eternal Resting Place of Abandoned Projects and adding to it periodically.

But…they are not dead yet. Each has been brought to the same emergency ward, and each is crying out to me. I am their physician, capable of restoring their lives with proper care and attention. With my assistance, they could recover, thrive, and reach their potential. But there are so many of them. And their desperate cries pain me. I who created them am responsible for the consequences of their neglect, and yet I don’t know where to start, whom to save. I am overwhelmed by the task and, poor physician that I am, seek instead to be distracted. I pursue other pleasures, parent other projects, in part to forget my debt to those already born. Having the ability and obligation to do good, I passively elect to nothing. How can I live with myself? No more projects. I am too careless to be trusted with such precious and vulnerable creatures.

Life is so funny and it’s going mission-fast right now. Everything I do leads to more I could be doing. Emails needing responses are slipping to page 2 of my inbox the day after they were received. I’ve never been one to complain about email, but I just can’t keep up.

 Wednesday I unsubscribed from every newsletter that came in, which was a tough decision because I like to spend a few minutes learning every day. Investing basics, words of the day, fly lady, web design, email alerts in all forms–I kissed these daily reminders goodbye. When nonessentials pile up, they take more time than I can reasonably give to them and they become clutter. And I need to let clutter go.

I still don’t think I’m accomplishing enough to justify the amount of time I require to work on “my stuff.” I probably extend the information gathering stage far longer than is needed. I am encouraged, though, by an observation I recently read in a documentary book by  Barry Hampe on the learning process: Good problem solvers spent a lot of time just playing with whatever it was they were doing. I like that, and it rings true to my experience- which is probably why I like it.

I need to devote more time than makes sense to the essentials for the next six months, and I have more “essentials” than I probably should right now. They are all working together and I don’t know how to let any of them go. As for anything that is not related to my church calling, documentary, bike trip, or pursuit thereof (which admittedly covers an awful lot of territory)…I’m unsubscribing.

it’s been so long since i last posted that i couldn’t remember the URL to sign in, and once i found the path through the file directory on my hard drive, i couldn’t remember the password. “under african skies” made for lovely background music during my search.

it’s 12:42pm on the day after christmas, the weekend kind of stressed me out, and i don’t want to go back to work tomorrow. i don’t want to do laundry now. i don’t want to face the postponed decisions that i always imagine i will take care of when i finally have some free time. i don’t want to remove the monkeys from my back.

i’ll give myself an A for productivity for remembering how to post. and i’ll go back to the accumulation and destroy it, and hopefully get enough clarity that i can fill the final moments of the evening singing “at the end of a perfect day,” or, since i don’t know the words, doing something else that doesn’t involve watching youtube videos.

Once upon a time there was a young republican named Jared who was frequently concerned with social issues. One day he said to his friend Amy, “fat people cause global warming.” “I thought republicans caused global warming,” she replied. He sent her a link to a nyt article about obesity, For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monsters.

“Research suggests that the stigma of being fat leads to more eating, not less. And if reducing the stigma suggests a solution, that’s not working either,” declared the article. “So should people just not know they are obese?” Amy asked. “Well,” he said, “we should change the definition so that fewer people fall in the category.”

Amy was a big fan of this idea and suggested he use it as his platform when he runs for President. That’s when she realized Jared’s facetious anti-obesity campaign was a perfect analogy to express her understanding of Satan’s plan, which thus far seemed to only make sense in the context of her own brain.

Obesity is defined as an abnormally high, unhealthy amount of body fat, and is usually indicated as having a Body Mass Index in excess of 30. Clearly, increasing the accepted BMI level to 45 will not improve anyone’s health. It will not “force” people to exercise, make better food choices, or take more responsibility for their physical wellness. It will, however, keep more people from being obese by definition.

Satan told the Lord, “I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it.” Growing up, I’ve been taught that for Satan to accomplish his mission, his plan was to use “force” to take away our agency. But I have not yet found canonical evidence supporting that interpretation.

What makes sense to me is that Satan’s attempt to keep us from being lost was like Jared’s attempt to keep us from being overweight: redemption through lower standards. The existence of agency means that there is both a law given and the freedom to follow the law. Under Satan’s plan as I understand it, he would remove the law, thereby destroying our ability to obey it (agency). His elimination of our agency would not be accomplished by forcing us to make correct decisions, but by removing any element of “correctness” or “incorrectness” from our actions.

Lehi teaches Jacob that without opposition (right and wrong being opposing forces), “righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad.”

“…And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God.”

God’s plan for us–the Plan of Happiness–allows for happiness and righteousness just as it allows for punishment and misery. There cannot be the opportunity for righteousness without the opportunity for sin, so “forced righteousness” is itself a contradiction of terms.  Of course, Satan’s plan to redeem us by taking away our chance to either succeed or fail would not have “worked;” we would never have grown to become more like God. It would be a false victory if it could even have been considered a victory at all. Much like changing the definition of obesity to keep fewer people from falling into the category.

there are certain things in life we’ve never experienced that, however trivial, bring us a sense of pride. they are the inadvertent non-decisions which help us in “I Never” games and let us differentiate ourselves from “those kinds of people.” it’s a cultural shorthand, really–our lack of experience quickly defines us, and we love it.

well, pride and prejudice is on as i type this. by the end of the evening, i’ll know who Mr. Darcy is. farewell, sweet ignorance and easy out. i now am woman, with no “I never” to save me from the stereotype.

Rationally, I think:

“If my roommate really needed an outlet for her agression towards me, she wouldn’t post it ambiguously on her blog and just call me ‘you.’”

She has more important you’s to rage against. Deeper meanings behind her one-phrase statements than a jab at my lingo ideas. And yet, unassured as I can sometimes be, I fret.

I have this problem that everytime I see people wearing turtlenecks, I think they are trying to hide something.

I recognize that turtlenecks are acceptable pieces in a winter wardrobe, and while I don’t think they’re especially flattering in the first place, I also don’t really care how people dress.

And yet, when it comes down to it, it’s probably best I don’t see you in a turtleneck.

I got back from lunch and Andy and Joe were both silent, looking down in the same direction — i couldn’t figure out what it was. Then,

Joe: “you mean to tell me that when this lights up, it’s your brain powering it?”
Andy: “yep.”