the hunker down years

When I was a kid, not sure how old, I think the summer between 3rd and 4th grades before we moved overseas, I was visiting my great grandparents’ house in Wells, Nevada. I loved that house and still have dreams that take place there from time to time. I remember the eat-in kitchen so well (the nerve center of any home, right?), and how the main bedroom had doors to both it and the living area (or maybe it was another room...my memory is fuzzy all these decades later). The house was sort of circular in that way. During this one particular visit, with my brother and some of my maternal cousins there as well, I took a break on the couch in the living room. At one point, my face turned toward the back of the couch, I could hear someone at the doorway wondering out loud if I was asleep. I stayed quiet and still for some reason, pretending to be asleep, I’m not really sure why. Did I want them to try to wake me up? Did I really want to be left alone? Either way, the end result was that I missed out on dessert and, insatiable sweet tooth that I was and still am, this experience/memory haunted me for years. Why didn’t they at least check to see if I was truly asleep, whispering in my ear that dessert was ready. Just in case.

I’d kind of forgotten about this memory until recently because it just seems like such a perfect metaphor for middle age reflection, looking back on the potential of your younger self. I've spent most of my adult life mostly happily moving from one opportunity to another, embracing the hummingbird analogy before Liz Gilbert described it as such. Somewhere along the way, I think it was probably during grad school, I felt like I was finally finding my focus. I wanted to make more and better art. I wanted to show and maybe even sell my art. I wanted to help others develop their own creative practice. I wanted to teach. And I've already written on this blog about all the things other than teaching that I've done over the past 15+ years since grad school and my postgrad teaching fellowship ended.

I've been at my current day job nearly five years, the longest I've ever stayed in one role. The past year has been pretty stressful for various reasons. Concurrent with all this, I started contemplating just what was it I wanted to be when I grew up, and that lead me back to teaching. My goal out of grad school was to teach at the college level (hence pursuing the MFA, terminal degree for studio art), a dream I mostly abandoned after two years of applying to full-time gigs (I turned down a couple of adjunct opportunities because the pay was less than the cost of the part-time childcare needed to make the schedule work, which is a topic for a whole 'nother blog post). I started to wonder, now that I’ve been around elementary, middle, and high school kids because of my own growing children, if maybe teaching at the middle or high school level was what I wanted to do, after all.

At the beginning of the last school year I started volunteering every Monday morning in my daughter's 5th grade art class. I explored local single subject credential programs as well with an eye on teaching high or middle school art, in that order. To be honest, I wasn't super confident I'd still have a job after February, but when my role survived three rounds of layoffs, the April deadline for application materials, which would have required volunteer hours at a middle or high school, something I didn't have already, were simply too much for me to squeeze in on top of a full-time job and everything else. I decided to shelve the idea until this summer and hunker down a bit longer, counting my blessings that I still had a job that I've enjoyed enough to hang around this long.

But then my daughter's art teacher told me about a program to increase the number of art teachers in the county, teaching while pursuing the Career Technical Education credential. At last, I thought, I'm about to benefit from this thing I've heard about before: serendipity! I was accepted into the program, with a couple of weeks of professional development this summer and the program beginning in the fall, with the one significant caveat that in order to actually enroll in the program, you have to have a CTE gig lined up by the end of summer. If it sounds tricky to find a teaching job before you have the necessary credential, it is! I found ONE qualifying position in Alameda County. I applied, interviewed, and visited the school site to give a demo lesson over the span of just three business days. I then waited to hear back. And then I waited a week longer than I was originally told. And during this time, I started to secretly wish for rejection. Sure, part of this was fear—it would be a big transition and a big paycut and I was nervous about both—but part of this was legitimate hesitation that, while potentially a way to get back to teaching, this particular role wasn't really what I wanted to teach, and probably not worth such a significant life change. And I'll never know if I would have been offered the position since I withdrew my application at that time. Because what I've only recently come to understand about myself, and perhaps this is the downside of the lovely hummingbird analogy described above, is that I have a really hard time saying no when personally asked to do something, even if that thing isn't quite what I want, because I'm either seduced by the potential that opportunity represents (I'll do this thing I don't really want to do because maybe it'll lead to something I do want to do!) and/or I don't want to let someone down. (I missed out on dessert once, I'm not going to miss out on it again!) I also had to honestly reckon with the fact that part of what was seductive about pursuing this opportunity was, wow, what a great story it would be to find my way back to teaching after 15 years! I was so excited to finally prove to all my doubters that I wasn't actually a lost pigeon after all, to prove to them as much as to myself that the hummingbird approach works, that there is a pot of success at the end of the rainbow of failures.

Alas.

So here I am, early summer break, recommitting to my day job. I was honest with my manager at the time when I felt the transition was something I might actually pursue since there was a lot of potential movement internally as well and I was having a hard time faking it. But to be honest, I'm not sure I’d do that again. I thought they might fight to keep me; they did not. I felt rushed to make a decision because, frankly, they seemed eager to develop a transition plan. And I get it. In my performance review a few weeks later, which I wish was more than a 30-minute Zoom meeting that I could reference because now I’ve forgotten the exact language used, the sort of “if I can be honest with you” feedback, after otherwise mostly positive feedback, was that I should really think about what I want from this role in the near and not so near future because at times I seem a bit noncommittal, a bit wishy-washy about projects and potential opportunities that have come my way over the past few months. I should probably consider being a little more like a jackhammer (those were not the words/analogy used, of course, but in keeping with the typically rambling themes of this blog post).

This feedback had me shook for weeks. On the one hand, I feel like I’ve been working so hard for so much of my life, getting my first real job the summer between junior and senior years of high school, working three jobs my first year after high school, while attending community college full-time, barely able to pay my minimal expenses, and continuing to work 20-32 hours a week during the 5 ½ years it took me to finish my bachelor's degree. I worked throughout grad school, first in retail until I was eligible for more creatively aligned, campus-based roles like teaching assistant, studio monitor, and other opportunities more tied to my longer term goals post-MFA. I worked for two non-profit arts organizations simultaneously between college and grad school and took a really similar job to these after grad school, after my micro biz that I’d worked so hard to start and grow fizzled after I took a break with the arrival of baby #2. I accepted my current day job after failing to monetize any of the projects, podcast included, that I worked on between my former day job and this one. It was initially part-time and delightfully unrelated to anything I’d done before, allowing me time and mental energy to continue to push creative projects forward (until the pandemic started just six months later and I transitioned to full-time about a year after that). In short, I thought I'd made it pretty clear that yes, I'd like dessert, even if it means waking me up...if you get my meaning.

Anyway it’s just weird to feel like Sisphyus pushing that boulder up the hill for nearly three decades (it's a tired but apt metaphor), albeit in an at times haphazard way, only to be told you seem a little like a tumbleweed leaving your fate up to chance and circumstance. Not even a hummingbird, an actually super focused and incredibly hard working bird that eats WHILE FLAPPING ITS WINGS for crying out loud, who honestly isn’t that much different than a jackhammer if you really think about it (and a jackhammer isn’t even a bird so maybe not the greatest analogy after all, Liz!). 

On the other hand, she (my manager...and maybe Liz, too) was not entirely wrong, either. Has nothing changed since that time I pretended to be asleep on the couch? Am I just waiting for someone to notice me and care enough to nudge me awake, to present me with some delectable opportunity to devour? Did I not learn my lesson that if you wait for someone to tell you dessert is ready, to nudge you awake, you might miss out? Or is it just hard to talk about future interests and goals—where do you see yourself in 3, 5, 10 years—when you'd rather just be making stuff. 

In my newsletter update from late June I briefly wondered, if you remove the idea of passion central to Gilbert's hummingbird/jackhammer thesis, are folks like me more like tumbleweeds. And maybe the tumbleweed has gotten a bad rap as an essentially dead plant rolling around wherever the wind takes it. Maybe there is some beauty in the way that, unafraid of change, it lacks roots, frees itself from attachments, and opens itself up to opportunities to move and keep moving, slowly breaking down so that its seeds can be released as it moves. Maybe, if I’m a tumbleweed, I just haven’t yet come to rest so that my spores may germinate. Maybe I’m taking this tumbleweed metaphor too far (just be grateful I didn't use the word moist).

All metaphors aside, the events of the past couple of months jarred another memory, this one of Another Mother Runner’s Dimity McDowell’s post from September 2013, which I read when my own kids were just 5 and 7 months, when I reopened my Etsy shop thinking business would slowly pick back up just in time for baby #2 to start part-time daycare in February of the next year (that did not happen…I ended up being a full-time stay-at-home parent for longer than I’d planned and eventually got a “real job” I was never very satisfied with right around when baby #2 turned 2...it was not an easy time). That line that Dimity’s mother says to her has stuck with me all these years as it had stuck with her then: This is not the easiest time of your life. Put another way, these are perhaps, for many of us working parent (creative?) types, the hunker down years.

Many days I find success in focusing on the positive aspects of my current role: decent pay, autonomy and flexibility, the ability to work from home in my backyard office/studio surrounded by foliage and critters, working with truly great people, occasional travel, and, while in tech, for a company that I do believe in, especially, not surprisingly, the more niche creative things folks are doing with our products. But some days, I'm not gonna lie, I feel like Katy Caboose, defiantly striving for greater creative fulfillment and ready to fling myself off my rails and high into the trees at any moment. "Head in the sky," indeed.

land of fire and ice and soup and bread

Last week the family and I went to Iceland! It was, in a nutshell, amazing. We opted to stay in Reykjavik and did day trips from there (versus driving the Ring Road, which would have required a few more days - maybe an extra week - that we didn't have). Here's a slide show that condenses the week into 50 images over about a minute and 15 seconds. And here's what we did:

We flew to Iceland from Oakland via Seattle on Saturday evening, arriving in Keflavik at 9:15 am on Sunday. I wasn't very impressed with Icelandair, provided with just one beverage for the entire flight, and no free food, not even a bag of pretzels. On the other hand, the country on the whole seems pretty kid-friendly/centered, with the 11yo the only member of our family to receive a snack box and a little goody bag including a sleep mask and a small puffin stuffie. Everywhere we went her ticket price was less expensive than the adults or, in many cases, free.

There are a handful of rental car companies located at the airport, but most are a short drive away. Not unusual, but the way you find the rental car shuttle was unclear and chaotic, with tired travelers milling about near the exit and drivers coming in holding up signs with the rental car companies listed. So it took awhile to get our rental car after landing but we enjoyed hot coffee/chocolate while we waited (it was cold and windy!). 

From there we drove straight to our Airbnb in Reykjavik, our host allowing us to check in early. After settling in and freshening up, we walked 15-20 minutes into town and saw all the key sights, sharing a couple of sandwiches from Plantan Kaffihús on the way: Hallgrímskirkja (and up the tower for the views!) the Leifr Eiricsson statue out front, on down to the harbor to see the Sun Voyager sculpture and the Harpa concert hall. We walked back to the Airbnb via a grocery store to pick up breakfast and lunch items for the week. I could have easily fallen asleep at that point, but we rallied for dinner at Loving Hut. I didn't make it to the midnight sunset that night but I was awake again around 1 am and took a quick video of the light outside and - the weirdest part - the birds chirping.

On Monday we did the Golden Circle day trip, albeit in a sort of noncircular way since we had lunch reservations at Friðheimar, a restaurant in a greenhouse where they grow tomatoes year-round. The all you can eat tomato soup and bread there was probably my favorite meal of the week. The tomato soup was brothy (as opposed to creamy) and a bit sweet. The bread was amazing and there was coffee included after. Otherwise, we spent time at Þingvellir National Park (free that day because it was Iceland's National Day!), Geysir Geothermal Area, and Gullfoss. After a quick detour at Secret Lagoon (I'll write more about this later), we made our way back to Reykjavik via Kerið Volcanic Crater and a late dinner of veggie burgers at a hot dog joint in Selfoss (the sun may set at midnight but, as we quickly learned, most of the restaurants still close at 9 pm). 

It was about 10 pm!

On Tuesday, we headed to the South Coast, stopping first for a quick pic, Oaklanders that we are, next to the Hella sign. From there we continued to Hvolsvöllur to check out the Lava Center. We ate PB&J sandwiches on the way to Sólheimajökull, hiking to but not on the glacier (you need the right gear and a guide for that and in general we opted for things we could do on our own to manage expenses and maximize what we could see in a week). Thank goodness there was a Hungarian street food vendor there in the parking lot because it was another late dinner of pizza back in Hvolsvöllur after a visit to the Reynisfjara black sand beach and Skógafoss on the drive back. I would have liked to check out one more waterfall (Seljalandsfoss, the one you can walk behind!) and the old plane crash but we ran out of time.

On Wednesday we'd booked tickets to the Blue Lagoon. Our plan to drive a bit less that midweek/mid-trip day was somewhat thwarted by the detour caused by damage to the road to Blue Lagoon due to the recent eruptions near the fishing town of Grindavik. We drove over relatively recently cooled lava and steam to get there, which was pretty wild. The Blue Lagoon caters more to non-Icelandic visitors and is pricey but I felt was totally worth it. And if anyone in your group is squeamish about the customary communal shower sans swimsuit, I would recommend it over a more traditional/local lagoon like Secret Lagoon or really any of the pools. But if you're OK showering with strangers, you'll have a lot more options for a warm soak during your time in Iceland. More PB&J sammies on the drive back to Reykjavik, where we spent the rest of the day searching for cats and secondhand Icelandic sweaters and popped into plant-based Mama for dinner before walking back to our Airbnb.

On Thursday we headed north to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula (we'd changed our itinerary a bit due to the rain all week...it was mostly dry up north on Thursday!). A bit more driving than I'd like before the first stop (and again at the end of the day), but in the end all that driving was worth it. We did a little hiking around Kirkjufell mountain and waterfall (yes, we had PB&J sandwiches for lunch; no, we did not climb all the way to the top of the mountain) before moving on to the Vatnshellir lava cave via a brief pit stop at the Snæfellsjökull National Park visitor center. After the cave, we hiked to and just inside the Rauðfeldsgjá Gorge, then backtracked a bit to Hellnar Church and an early dinner (more soup & bread!) in Arnarstapi. Final stops on this part of the itinerary included Búðakirkja (Black Church) and the seal colony at Ytri Tunga beach. 

I was pretty tired of driving by this point in the week but Friday being my son's 16th birthday we gave him the option of having a final full chill day in Reykjavik (museums! more cats! more food options!) or stick with the plan and head to the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar) by ferry. He opted for the latter and I think he made a fine choice. It's about one hour, 45 minutes of driving to the ferry and since we hadn't made advance reservations, while there was no problem getting seats we did have to wait until the literal last minute to know if we'd be able to take our car there and back. Hard for me to imagine now my original idea of renting bikes to explore the island. It's not very big but it is hilly and was pretty cold and crazy windy that day. I was very happy we had the car, after all! After a quick snack at Vigtin Bakery we drove to the first of two spots for a brief hike and attempt to see puffins. No luck at the first stop, though the views were amazing, but we did spot puffins from a distance (and some flying pretty close to us) at the second spot. From there we made our way around the island to the Eldheimar Volcano Museum to learn about the 1973 eruption that added to but also buried part of the island and then hiked the Eldfell volcano we'd just learned about. After that we had dinner at Gott before taking the 7:30 pm ferry back to the mainland.

On Saturday, we had a few hours in Reykjavik before we needed to head to the airport so we squeezed in one museum (the Saga Museum), explored nearby Þúfa, and had lunch (more soup & bread!) at the plant-based restaurant at the Nordic House on the University of Iceland campus. Returning the rental car went much more quickly and smoothly than getting it a week earlier so we had plenty of time at the airport to check out the duty free shopping and buy some sandwiches for the flight to Seattle. The first flight was uneventful; I read several chapters of Alicia Kennedy's No Meat Required and watched Bullet Train, which I enjoyed, then tried to watch Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, which I did not enjoy, and fell asleep for a couple of hours instead. We had a nearly 4-hour layover in Seattle which, due to delays, extended to over six hours in the Seattle airport. We could have flown almost all the way back to Iceland in that time! We did get a meal voucher out of the ordeal, however, and enjoyed a second dinner at P.F. Chang's. We were all so tired by the time we finally got home around 2:30 am but managed to get a few more hours of sleep so jet lag hasn't been too awful this week. Yesterday was the first day I didn't wake up at 4:30 am and feel dead tired by 5 pm.

In summary, Iceland is a truly magical place and I highly recommend a visit if you can swing it. This was definitely a bucket list trip, as they say. One thing we briefly considered after reading about it is planning a trip to mainland Europe with a one or two-day layover in Reykjavik. I'm glad we devoted this trip to Iceland only but that's an option if you ever find yourself in that situation, content with visiting the capital city and maybe one day trip. We created a pretty detailed itinerary for this trip, inspired in part by a combination of Rick Steves, one of Neal's coworkers who'd done the ring road a few years ago, and, just for fun, an AI-generated itinerary, combining all of those and our own research into a schedule that we mostly stuck to, adjusting for weather and not getting to one or two things each 11-12 hour day. We all wore hiking boots every day and had our rain layers for, well, rain, but also waterfalls, hiking into ravines, that sort of thing. It's a very active, rugged place and while we were pretty well-prepared for everything we did, I was a little skeptical a couple of times, coddled American that I am, I guess, about the safety of some attractions, like the stairs to the top of Skógafoss, or the hike into the Rauðfeldsgjá ravine, scrambling over wet and slippery rocks with huge chunks of ice dangling precariously overhead (okay, maybe not all that precariously...I'm sure they melt slowly over time but what if a chunk broke off and fell on your head?? It could happen!). But that's part of why it's all so magical and it was refreshing to get out of our comfort zone a bit.

happy MTBirthday to me

My one-year mountain biking anniversary came and went a couple of weeks ago. 

At Six Sigma Champs; final race of the 2023-24 season.

I started this post on the one-year anniversary but am just now getting back to finishing it. One year ago on May 23rd I went on my very first mountain bike ride with my son's head coach and a few other team moms for a moms' ride. I didn't even own a chamois! We met at the pump track in Oakland's Joaquin Miller Park, practiced some basic bike handling and MTB skills (level pedals, anyone?), and rode down Bayview and back. 

Then in June, I joined my son on a birthday ride at his request. My son, as I've mentioned a few times over the course of my newsletter, now a rising high school junior, fell in love with all things biking after riding the trails at Wente during a summer camp between 8th and 9th grades. He came home wanting to ride our local trails but we collectively knew nothing about mountain biking, here or elsewhere. Fast-forward a few months, he started high school, where he discovered there was, conveniently, a mountain biking club/team! A total lifesaver/game-changer. We all learned a lot that year!

Kudos to Coach Jen for having the foresight to properly document this moment before helping me back up to Sunset trail in JMP

Anyway, during my 3rd ride a week or so after my son's birthday ride, I crashed for the first, but definitely not last, time. But I kept going. I've since become a NICA Level 1 coach and try to make up for my lack of MTB skills and speed in other ways: helping with fundraising, setting up a swag order for t-shirts to match our jerseys, and putting together an end-of-year team photo/collage. Need a sweep? I got you! Picking up mountain biking has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life so far. Every ride challenges me physically and mentally in a way no other physical activity has and I see in myself and our student athletes how that carries over into other areas of life, even to areas where the potential risk is less physical but maybe equally scary.

When my son was a toddler I took him to Music Together classes. The philosophy there seemed to revolve around the idea of modeling. You don't force your toddler to participate, you model participation, and eventually they see how much fun all the adults are having and want to join in themselves. Before you know it, they're sitting in your lap singing along, shaking a tambourine. Not only did it work for Music Together classes, but I remember thinking then and a few years later with my daughter, what a great overall approach to parenting. Not that we should strive to be perfect role models, but what better way to teach your kids to do something or behave a certain way than to model that behavior yourself, right?

In this case, I like to think my son was modeling for me how transformative something as challenging, but also super fun, as mountain biking could be. Every Sunday adventure ride his first year I'd find things to do during the three or so hours they'd ride - hiking, shopping, eating - but part of me wondered what it would be like to join them on their climb up Mount Tam. And then I did! And it's been such a joy and honor to ride with the team over the past year.

At our final preride of the season I took a silly little tumble sideways down a hill and aggravated an earlier shoulder/clavicle injury. I took a two-week break - and honestly I was exhausted in all the ways after a particularly busy April & May - but yesterday I went for a spontaneous solo ride and had so much fun. I still feel a bit like I don't belong here, but I'm kind of used to this feeling and I've learned to embrace what it means, harking back to a newsletter update where I pondered how well creative advice might work for an MTB newbie like myself (or anyone new to really any activity). I'll re-list them here:

1. Accept that you are a total amateur.
2. Don’t be embarrassed.
3. Have courage.
4. Start now.
5. [X] is not about understanding…or mastery. It’s about doing and experience.
6. Develop forms of practice.
7. Work, work, work.
8. Get lost.
9. Redefine success.
10. Keep going

These are phrases you see a lot if you think or read much about creativity, but I think they work equally well for more physical stuff. And turns out I'm not the only creative person into some form of cycling (Lisa Congdon and Austin Kleon, to name just a couple, plus Caroline Paul's recent NYTimes OpEd about her mother's bike-riding). So maybe there is something to this synergy between creativity and cycling. Looking forward to doubling down on both over the next school year.

In the meantime, happy summer to those who celebrate early, like Oakland's public school system, and may you find the joy in whatever you're up to over the next few months.