lissmo . dot . com

I never really mind working a day or two during the holidays. It’s always a slow time - no one is terribly motivated to work very hard, and there are enough people on vacation that there aren’t any pressing deadlines to attend to and new crises are rare. It’s a good time to clear away the cobwebs, get things a little organized and see what’s piled up over the last year. Or maybe years.

Yesterday’s task for me was cleaning out my forbiddingly huge email archives - well over 700MB worth of email I’d saved. Some of it for reference, some to read later, and some…well, who knows? After going through most of it, I can honestly say that I have no idea why it was saved. A good bit was probably accidentally marked as read or mis-filed, but there were a great many things saved that really just should not have been.

What was interesting (in the academic sense, at least) were the number of “cool” or “interesting” links that had come my way in the last four years or so that are simply gone. Not just redesigned, reorganized or outdated, but gone. Companies that were doing great work or had something interesting to say…gone.

Tracking the subject lines and contents of my email archives was like walking through a history of the internet economy over the last four years - from the heyday of the late 90’s (lots of job postings with high salaries and perks galore, news of start-ups and tons of new ideas) through the really difficult times over the last few years (lots of resumes and advice on career-switching, thoughts on doing more with less, and very few job postings) to today. Things seem to have stabilized a bit - the high-flying days are well over, and that’s as it should be, but there are job postings again, with decent to good (though not insanely great) salaries and solid but not extravagant benefits.

While there was a part of me that was tempted to save it all for nostalgia’s sake, the realist in me was cutting ruthlessly and taking mental notes about what not to save going forward. I’ve cut the archive down to under 500MB, which still seems like too much, but - as Samuel Clemens would say - I haven’t the time to make it smaller.

The holidays were very good to us this year. I got the one thing I really wanted - a job for my husband that he seems to love and that seems to love him back. (Didn’t mention that here, did I? Apparently complaining about his continued umployment here did the karmic trick - he was working again within the week.)

Of course, I also got a new camera, a bunch of books, a computer game, some lovely new pots for my kitchen, and a pile of CDs and DVDs - among other things - so I’d have to say that the holidays were awfully good to me.

J. made out pretty well himself on the gift front this year - a few new sweaters, a new leather jacket (to replace the one he’s been wearing that’s stained and torn), a new video card for his computer, computer games (and fancy new headphones which are probably as much a gift to me as they are to him) and a bunch of other things that I can’t think of right now. I think he’d agree with me that the best gift of all is the new job, though.

The nicest part of the holiday week was the chance to spend time with both of our families. Monday night we had J’s parents and sister over for Hannukah dinner and celebration. Because scheduling was a bit of a feat on that one, we were both working up until an hour before they arrived, which meant that we were big on the prepared foods from Whole Foods instead of dinner-from-scratch, but no one seemed to mind a bit. It definitely took a good bit of the stress off, at any rate, so I thought it was a great idea.

Skipping over the Christmas Eve stress (courtesy of my little brother and his family), we ended up having a generally lovely Christmas with my parents and the aforementioned brother and family (minus one cranky two-year-old) at our house.

My niece is just old enough at thirteen months that she has no idea what’s actually going on but is game for the unwrapping, the piles of wrapping paper, and - most especially - pulling bows off of boxes and sticking them to her head. There really is nothing like having little ones around at the holidays to remind us that it’s all supposed to be fun and not just another excuse to get stressed about how much we don’t have time to do and how very not perfect we are.

Well, in truth, the holidays were lovely other than the part where my husband had apparently poisoned himself on some poorly cooked sausages the day before, so he spent most of Christmas day - and into today - as sick as I’ve ever seen him. He’s almost well enough now to admit that accidentally poisoning yourself is actually a little bit funny, but not quite well enough that I can laugh at him outright.

Our office building management has regular “fun” activities - a costume contest at Halloween, an ice cream social in August, that kind of thing. Best of all, though, are the book fairs.

Twice since we’ve moved in, they’ve filled the lobby with books for sale at ridiculous prices (70-80% off) - everything from the predictable technical books to biographies, romances and Clifford the Big Red Dog. It reminds me of nothing so much as the much-anticipated Scholastic book fairs we had in elementary school, when I would get to take a few dollars to school and buy books.

I remember how endless the possibilities seemed. I had all this money - maybe a whole five dollars - and I could spend it all on books—any books I wanted. It was like going to the library, only better, because I could keep these books. I’d be able to take them home and put my little Ex Libris bookplates in the front and write my name in them and they would be mine. I didn’t have to wait for Christmas or my birthday, they would be mine today. (And they’d be read and re-read before the week was out, typically.)

I loved book fair days with a passion that has apparently never quite died, because when I pulled into the parking garage this morning and saw the balloons and the big “Book Fair Today” banner, I felt that still-familiar little jolt of excitement, even though I can - and do - buy myself pretty much any book I want, whenever I want to. Today is special; it’s Book Fair Day.

It’s almost the end of the year - smack in the middle of the holiday season - and this is not a resolution. This is not one of a list of goals for the New Year that I’ll think about a lot for a few days, then occasionally throughout the year, only to recycle in slightly worn-out form next year.

No, this is not one of those. This is big. I’m going to make some changes and start taking it seriously. It’s my health. More than that, it’s my life - whether I want to have one at all, let alone a vital and active one. And I do.

What does that mean? Lots of doctor’s visits. The drugs I’ve been taking aren’t working. I can’t take the more potent drugs until my body is healthy enough to withstand them. I can’t get my body healthy unless my mind is on board with the whole thing. My adrenal is nonfunctioning, my ovaries are doing nothing, my metabolism is shot. I’m exhausted and sick and miserable, and it’s going to be a long, tough road to change all that, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Baby steps. This is the first.

August 22nd was a long time ago, and I wish that I could say that the end is in sight—it’s been a difficult fall around here. There have been some encouraging possibilities, but so far, nothing that’s panned out. We’ve both been trying to stay positive - it still hasn’t been all that long, especially as compared to some of the year-long horror stories we’ve heard about. The unemployment that J’s getting isn’t nearly enough (No one could actually survive on the amount he gets, and he’s getting the maximum, but let’s not go there…), but if I’m careful with the budget, we’ll be fine.

In the Not So Fine department, I’m probably not dealing all that well with the holiday season this year; I really thought that I was - we were - beyond the years of scrimping and scraping, trying to pull together enough money to have a decently filled-out holiday. I keep looking around - in the figurative sense at least - and thinking that this is not the life I had planned, not the life I signed up for.