Living Three Lives Simultaneously Pt. 2

Look Mum I’m writing on a weekly schedule again! Hahaha. I expect this will last all of today.

So last week I talked about how my new job is like…bewilderingly good and I can’t really get over myself about it. I have a bunch of Feels on the matter but that generally continues to be the case. 

This week I’d like to focus on my second professional life: my experience as an entrepreneur/small business owner.

When asked how I felt about starting Queen ofStrawbs I responded, “My only regret is that I didn’t start sooner.” Everything that’s happened about becoming a small food business owner in one of the coolest foodie scenes in the country has been positive. The margins are huge but I’m staying in the black on my hobby. There is literally nothing more I could ask for.

A lot of folks have asked if I will be selling my jam at farmer’s markets. I usually respond that I’m struggling to keep up with my friend requests and then usually get a puzzled look in return. It recently occurred to me that the average person does not regularly communicate with 1000 people on any platform. If 30% of my “friend” base on Facebook were to buy 1 jar of jam each, that’s still 300 jars of jam for me to make and distribute. This is not including people I work with, people I attend synagogue with and other tenants at the share kitchen I rent. If I were able to produce adequate supply for all of those people, yeah—maybe I’d consider taking my jams to a farmer’s market. In the meantime, my side hustle is intense enough as is.

And then there’s this guy:

This guy has bought close to 20% of every jam I have made to date. He freaking loves my jam. He loves my jam enough that I think everyone in his life is getting a jar for Christmas. And if they all like my jam, that’s another whole network I just acquired. Like, damn yo. Slow down.

I’m loving all the things my friends are doing with the jam. A common recipe is yogurt with muesli/granola and jam on top. Some friends introduced me to the wonders of hollowing out one of those crappy little croissant from the supermarket, filling it with jam and microwaving it for 15 seconds:

That one was actual heaven. It was so good I forgot I was the one who made the jam.

The same couple made a mixed drink and called it a Sara Jewlep and it looks as follows:

The recipe:

• Bourbon
• Mint
• Queen of Strawbs "Get Stuff Done" jam

Another friend made shortbread cookies:

And like…I’m completely in love with every single photo I get. Everything looks phenomenal and the fact that something I made with my hands is bringing people joy is literally the best feeling I have ever felt in my life.

Getting space at a share kitchen is quadruple-fold the best thing I’ve ever done, especially to keep a project like this going. Things that are awesome about industrial kitchens:

• I pay my landlady money and I get a shelf in a walk in freezer to keep my fruits.
• There are ladles and scoopers of multiple sizes. It turns out that ladles come in 3 oz and 4 oz varieties, which is super helpful when you need to fill a jam jar to 7.75oz.
•  INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH NINJA BLENDER
• Dish washing machine that washes and sanitizes in 3 minutes <<<makes all the rent I pay 1000% worth it.
• 6 burner gas range
• A Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer for the Gods (rando internet person for scale).
• Stainless steel surfaces that can just be wiped down and sprayed with bleach.
• A mop and floors that are easy to mop.
• Did I mention I don’t have to wash my dishes by hand? I don’t have to wash my dishes by hand.
• Walk in freezer that freezes blueberries to marbles in 1 hour (I timed it).
• INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH NINJA BLENDER. No more hand processing, ever.
• Bose sound system with a Tupac Pandora station. Tupac has become my mandatory soundtrack. Biggie can join too.

I invited some friends to help me this weekend where I attempted some very aggressive goals: three flavors and processing 60 lb fruit. Let me just say that it absolutely wouldn’t have happened without them and I owe them much but all I have is gratitude and jam so I paid them in that. I’m going to name the couple AdventureTeacher and King of Pomegranates (or KPom). I call him the King because he singlehandedly processed 50 lb of pomegranates. We all got our talents.

I really liked AdventureTeacher’s remarks upon the kitchen: “This place isn’t fancy. It isn’t huge. It just has the best stuff in it. It’s like they went with absolutely no frills and just went straight for quality.” This warmed the depths of my utilitarian heart. That’s exactly what I love about my kitchen.

I emphasized to my friends that just because I was setting crazy expectations for myself, I did not set the same for them and they were free to go when they needed. They stayed 8 hours, for which I am eternally grateful. It turns out I was starved for friendship and companionship and hanging out all day made me feel much more sane. (That goes for all the other friends I’ve had seen in meatspace in the past 5 days or so. The sanity benefit of spending time physically present with friends and family is absolutely irreplaceable)

I, however, did not give myself a break and I worked for nearly 13 hours straight. The issue with jam is that once ya pop the fun don’t stop. If you have jam on the stove, you need to see that jam through to a jar/can until it’s sealed. I successfully met my goal and here is a glimpse of the final products:

I’m really excited about the flavors. I used the blueberries I froze during my first couple days at the kitchen. There are three flavors:

·      Blueberry, white nectarine, ginger

·      Blueberry, pomegranate, vanilla and fresh sage

·      Pomegranate, mint (spearmint) and cumin

The final flavor is hands-down my favorite. It’s also my first jelly! (Jelly does not have fruit pulp. Jam has some, preserves, like “Get Stuff Done” and "Summer Jam" have whole fruit pieces.)

I have not fully decided on flavor names but I think the blue/nect/ginger will be called “Morning, Darling” and the pom jelly will have Moroccan in the name. I definitely leaned into my deep memory of Moroccan food of my childhood to put that flavor combo together. It will work excellently on meats, particularly white meat like chicken breast or pork.

It turns out I have a word that’s in my head but it’s not a word, it’s a hand motion. It’s the motion of opening a lever 90°. I use this word/motion to describe how I pair savory components with the overwhelming/overpowering aspects of fruit. With pomegranates, the overwhelming attribute is the sour, so the compliment I chose was cumin. I don’t know if this is a real thing or I’m just weirdly good at identifying these pairs. ::shrugville::

The real treasure of working in a shared kitchen with other food entrepreneurs is the people. The people who work in my kitchen are the most wonderful, generous and lovely people I’ve ever met in a professional setting. Working together in the setup we do, it is common for folks to share resources, share tips/suggestions/opinions about vendors and most importantly: SHARE FOOD. And the other chefs in my kitchen are amazing. They make little macrons, lumpias, all manner of baked goods…it’s just basically heaven TBH.

One instance that really summed it up was when I worked in the kitchen this weekend and some of my dishes (I’d left them soaking) disappeared. I asked the guy from the other company what happened and he just shrugged and was like “Eh, we’re all in here together. We help each other out. Welcome to kitchen life.”

It’s an interesting juxtaposition of drilling life, which I’m learning more and more about. First of all, within the context of drilling I am hired as oversight and management. I liked the way one trainer put it: "we’re the professionals, [the drillers] are the experts.” They carry two 100lb sacks of cement on their shoulders, I carry a clipboard and nitrile gloves. Drillers, so far as I’ve met them, tend to use crude language but are generally not rude. Not that kitchen folks have prim mouths—I certainly do not, in either context--- it’s just that working in a kitchen seems softer, in a way. They’re both kinda harsh work conditions with lots of physical exertion. Overall I didn’t get very close with any of the drillers or my work colleagues. I parted ways for the week with a firm handshake. I hope that was the right thing to do. Corporate interactions are so confusing, esp in a white collar version of a blue collar job. Light Blue Collar, I guess. Like my arts high school motto “Fight high school fight, for the blue and the liiight blue.” You would think so many artists in one place would choose better spirit colors.

Kitchen folks are also more up in each others’ lives than I expected going in. Everyone seems to know everyone else’s business. I don’t mean like business plan kind of business, more like who’s going out with whom type thing. One time there was a drug phone found in the doorway and that rippled through the tenant like a gossip wave. We have our own Facebook group. I think this is a side effect of having a small business: your personal life and your professional life don’t really get the luxury of separating. It’s all you, all the time. I like it for that very reason. As long as I make good jam and I want to keep being there, I’m allowed to be exactly who I am.

Being in control of my own business, being a little bit my own boss has been a great experience for my sense of myself as a leader. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to keep doing this because my day job requires a lot of logistics so having a logistics heavy hobby is pushing my limits. I am struggling with my demand. Freakin’ everyone wants my jam. And I don’t really know how to alert people in a kind and fair way to let them know my jam is on sale before it sells out. Hopefully having a bigger supply this time will buy me some more time. My last batch, after distribution to my GoFundMe backers sold out after one day of my announcing publicly that jam was for sale. 3.5 gallons of jam completely gone in 3 days.

I am definitely going to finish out my contract (and complete the jam from the stored fruit I made in August) but I am probably going to put this experiment on hold until I can get a more reliable travel schedule. Being that I was 100 mi south of home on Friday and I’m on a flight to somewhere 800 mi north on Tuesday, it might be a good minute before I have a “predictable” schedule.

But, as Tupac says, “That’s just the way it is”

Living Three Lives Simultaneously Pt. 1

As my wise friend Good Panda commented on my life: it appears that I am living three lives simultaneously. In case I’ve never mentioned, I straight up do not understand the concept of being bored. I can’t remember many times in my life when I was bored, and when that happened I probably went and did something else. #HighFunctioningAnxiety

I did block out this post in advance but I have a feeling that this is going to take a moment anyway. More tends to happen in three weeks of my life than does for many people in months. My plan is to visit each “life” I lead and then do some meta-analysis and State of The Brain (spoiler: it’s filled with poo and lies) at the end. If there is a part you feel would be relevant or interesting, you can jump to that part. I am not fancy enough to know how to do those hyperlink jump-tos so you’ll have to scroll and look for the bolded sections for now. Or teach me? That could work. Or I very well might just write separate posts since my days are absurdly long and I can only manage so much writing in a night. (Edit: this is what I'm doing, more posts to follow)

Life One: Sara the Geologist

Let me just start off by saying that actually working in the position I have now (woohoo, got employed!) is like…a million times easier and better than pretty much every other job I’ve had in my life. It’s like working, but on easy mode. Even though I’m out in the field this week, I’m only doing what I would consider “actual work” about 3 hours out of the 11. The rest is oversight and safety management.

So that’s one thing: the hours are long. They usually involve doing skilled labor that either involves thinking a lot or management/logistics/planning skills. One of the weirdest things I’ve had to do so far was research pee and poop for a day. Turns out sewers are dangerous on top of being gross? Who knew.

While taking lunch is required (yay, legalities) we have to make up our time and bill 8 hours each day. This means that my days are typically 9 hours long in the office. So far the field days have been “short” in that they’re only 11 or so hours. It’s only Tuesday and I’ve put in 23 hours, including transit to my site. PartnerPenguin has commented that it’s exactly what I wanted, several hours more per week than I wanted it.

One type of mindset shift that has been hard is the concept of  “staying billable.” In academia there is a disproportionate burden placed on the shoulders of the professors to bring in grants enough to support the lab running. In environmental consulting people are a lot more…open about talking about money. It feels like the veil around actually living in a capitalist society has finally been pulled back. Instead of this mysterious thing shrouded in shame and misery, it’s a shared burden. There is this concept called utilization-everyone needs to try to make as many of their 40 hours a week billed to a cost code. It is impersonal in some ways, but it also spreads the responsibility of staying in business on everyone, not just one professor. Obviously I am a mere peon and my manager shields us well from pressure Up Above so I have little idea what that’s like. But the firm I joined is quite large so the supply chain is long and the contracts are large. I’m working on several DoD contracts and they’re pretty cushy.

Definitely one thing I can get behind is that I’m finally not the only woman in the whole office who cusses. My manager (loosely, she just makes sure I have work to do, she doesn’t actually supervise me) dropped the f bomb at our “get to know you” lunch. I have never felt such automatic comradery.

Yeah, that’s another thing I’m not used to. I’m not managed. Like, at all. I’m not micromanaged. My “manager” has even commented that it’s OK if I contact her less. Holy shit working in academia/government was a horrendous nightmare compared to how work gets done in industry. I’m assumed to be competent. I’m allowed to ask questions. No one gets judgey or annoyed when I ask too many questions. And then I’m encouraged to ask more questions to clarify. A supervisor on one project called me on Thursday last week because I hadn’t checked in all week on a thing due on Friday. It wasn’t a long conversation, just said what I’d accomplished and what I predicted I could accomplish by the deadline. She said I did the hard part and thanked me. And then we hung up after 15 minutes. Like…that’s it.

Related to that project: Did you know that there is a poisonous newt in Idaho? Along with rattlesnakes, bears and wolves they are the deadliest animals in the state. If I ever go there I might have to make up a newt based nickname.

Another friend who pivoted from academia to industry put it this way:
“I thought I would miss the rush of doing original research, of seeing things that nobody had ever seen before and figuring out puzzles that nobody had ever figured out yet.  Part of me does, but I found that part offset very quickly when I realized that my employer thought that what I was doing was inherently and obviously valuable, and paid me without me ever having to justify my work by writing grant proposals.  I hope that you find the experience equally rewarding.”

The hardest shift for me has definitely been the shift from Poverty Mindset to Safety Consultant Mindset. I feel like this might be difficult to describe but I will try:

The site I’m working at right now is investigating an emerging contaminant that is currently ubiquitous. It’s the thing that makes Teflon nonstick. It’s in sunscreen. It’s in GoreTex. It’s in anything that’s possibly waterproof. Because of its ubiquity combined with low testing limits, there are bananas absurd preparation methods for this field season. Someone in the field made the uncomfortable observation that we have more of this stuff in our bloodstream than we’re testing for so to some extent we can’t actually be blank slates for sample prep.

What has this meant for your regular, average, everyday Sara? Well, the requirement on clothing is that everything is natural fibers, eg. cotton, wool, linen (ha! Noooope). Ha! 100% cotton does not exist for women with curves, so Target would have me believe. I have since learned that field folk prefer Duluth or Carthartt but fuck spending that much money on clothes before I got my first paycheck. I only had one-ish pair of acceptable pants at the beginning of this whole thing so I bought 3 more pairs of pants, 4 new bras (they are terrible, I hate cheap bras with a burning passion), several new pairs of panties and a set of wool long undergarments. The kicker: I had to wash them 6 times before I went into the field. The worse kicker: my Laundromat is 5 blocks from my house. And I have had pitifully little time to go do this sort of chore so we’ve paid for fluff’n’fold.

Now how does this affect poverty brain?

New clothes are a dreadful necessity that must be avoided at all costs. Buy clothes at thrift stores, discount stores, Walmart, Target, or just wash your current clothes cunningly to disguise the lack of diversity in wardrobe.

Counterpoint:

I absolutely refuse to risk exposure so I need to commit to making sure the breakthrough time on my clothing is as long as possible. This means new clothing. And I need my boobs to have some sort of support too, so I need more than 2 bras total.

This battle in my brain keeps coming up because I have been trained that only the cheapest option in any situation is ever acceptable, no matter the time cost. My “manager” actually told me in an email that my time is more valuable than trying to get a truck on Sunday so I didn’t have to pay for Saturday. I almost cried. I have very very rarely been told by an employer or manager that my time or skills are valuable.

Somewhat to satisfy my poverty brain, but also to satisfy making sure all of my food needs were met adequately: I have become the Hobo Queen of the Quality Inn this week. I brought a rice cooker, a slow cooker and the room has a microwave. This was my dinner tonight:

and this was how I rigged all the dishes I’ve been doing:

I have been preparing all three meals a day in my room. Though…I did discover that the hotel has biscuits and gravy at breakfast.  Yum. I think I’m still going to make myself oatmeal. PartnerPenguin has been perfecting the art of slow cooker oatmeal. Here’s his/our recipe:

3/4c (or 1/2c) steel cut oats

3/4c (or 1/2c) milk

3/4c (or 1/2c) water

Raisins

Strawberries

Cinnamon

Poppy or flax seeds

Put all ingredients in a Pyrex bowl thing. Place in a slow cooker with water enough to meet the sides of the Pyrex but not overflow it. Cook on high for 6-8 hrs. It creates enough of a double-boiler to cook the oatmeal well but keeps the great texture of the steel cut so eating isn’t too tedious.

So yeah. That for breakfast, sliced meats and cheese with pickles, veg and fruit for lunch and meat of some sort for dinner. I think I’m going to expand my meatsies prep and go full 50’s housewife and get into microwave cooking. We’ll see.

Anyway. All this prep has been an absurd amount of time commitment.

The final thing that’s difficult about my new job is how normal everyone is. People have functional families. They certainly encounter challenges but from what I’ve heard they are all very tame. I actually thought such a thing was fiction but multiple people have talked about events transpiring that I imagine can only happen with functional families. They certainly encounter challenges but from what I’ve heard they are all very tame. I caught myself mid-story today because I realized I was so poor when I lived in a house with a gas leak for a month I kept my head down and was just thankful for having a roof over my head instead of being concerned about dying from the accumulated natural gas in my bedroom. They just don’t seem to have stories like that. And I don’t know yet how to temper my life to seem more normal than it has been. More on this topic later.

To some extent it is nice that a lot of people are much more normal than me-in regard to anxiety at least-because they set the standard for what kinds of actions and levels of chill should be approached in a given situation. But it’s pretty mind-boggling. Though in some cases I am grateful to listening to my AnxietyBrain: it has prevented me from being phone-less for a week.

Overall I am loving the job and loving the work. I get to do weird research. I get to read policy documentation. I get to do Quality Checks and tell people where they fucked up, but like…they asked me to point it out and also I’m nice about it? I get to be outside and I got a <safety mullet> for my hat. Thanks to this job I have rad long underwear that I’ve avoided buying for my whole life.

Ok. I think I need to shower and make my food for tomorrow, despite that I definitely have more to say. I think I’ll make this LiveJournal-esque and say that I’ll come back tomorrow and talk about my other “lives.”

P.S. Here are some photos from the field:

Me, in field gear. Minus Safety Mullet (just bought it today, this was taken yesterday)

No babies in buckets. Needs to be stated, I guess.

Tren fren. It's a special freight line that branches off the national line...for some reason?

Volunteer melons! Because watermelons like composted sewage? Anyway they're fuzzy. I'll let you know if we try to eat them how they taste.

Yeah, this is just insanity pants cheap. Oatmeal costs at least $1.00/lb by us.

And because I’m feeling silly and un-original tonight, y’all are getting one of the best videos on the Internet. 

Breaking up with Unemployment

Starting this piece, I have no idea whether it’s going to be multiple entries or just a brain dump all at once. Or it could just be really short? We’ll go on this ride together.

The past couple of weeks have been a literal whirlwind of events and emotions which pretty much any Jew could tell you is just what happens in Elul.  Some of the events that have transpired in, let’s be generous and say-the past month:

·      I met one of my favorite authors and she signed the final book of her trilogy with “Hey Sara, you rock” with a picture of a rock 

·      I saw the total solar eclipse.

·      I got invited to a family reunion by some folks I met on the train en route to the eclipse. Yes. I’m going.

·      I got to see my Brother, who live in the Great North. We had pizza (I customized mine without nightshades), it was epic.

·      I house sat for nearly 3 weeks and got to hang out with some really cool animals.

·      I got to take the dog on lots of hikes 

·      I was offered a job that is PG track and in the Key Route City (at least part time).

·      PartnerPenguin lost his job.

·      My new job offered me to put my name in a hat to do relief work for hurricane damage. I accepted this offer, I do not know yet whether I’ll be chosen.

·      I am not singing in the choir with my synagogue this High Holy Day season due to scheduling conflicts.

·      I bought a new phone and got a new phone number.

·      I cut 16” of hair off.

·      I tried oysters and snails.

·      We got PartnerPenguin’s dad’s old van so I have a car to commute to work.

In short: the routine for my life I had about 4 weeks ago is no longer a routine I have. Much of my emotional struggle right focuses around the grief of routine loss, in some way or another. Humans are creatures of habit and boy oh boy is it uncomfortable when our habits all change permanently and irrevocably. But that’s how we get stronger.

While I am experiencing a lot of change, I am also celebrating a milestone of steadfastness in my life:

I have lived in the Golden State for 10 years. Happy decade to me!!

My decadal celebration and my embarking on a new professional journey are very related in my mind. Ten years ago I left the home I grew up in and all the people I ever knew and cared about. 98% of people in my life stopped talking to me, including most of my biological family. Some of that was my doing, some of it wasn’t. The 2% of people who continued to talk to me did so mostly to use me for my emotional labor of helping them process their emotions. Almost no one helped me process my own life’s implosion. In fact, I was actually lectured by the people I lived with for being honest to my therapist at the time for “telling lies” about them. So my processing of the trauma in my life had to go completely underground and I pretend it wasn’t happening. This…did not help.

This has left an indelible mark on how I perceive human interactions to happen. My emotion brain is convinced that no matter how much people appear to care about me, there will always be an event that they abruptly stop interacting with me and cut me out of their life with no remorse or regret. This is incredibly painful to admit. But I have built into the framework of every relationship I’ve formed that things will end, they will probably be my fault, and I will be alone again. It’s left me believing that unconditional love doesn’t exist.

So I have worked a lot to figure out the conditions under which love does exist. This has actually been very helpful to figure out boundaries. I have had some really good role models like Mama Bear who once told me which behaviors I was doing were unacceptable instead of just cutting me out of her life without explanation. That was one of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had, but also one of the most productive. It allowed me to see that, provided I tried to change my behavior (which I am capable of doing) I would not be cut off from the support I receive.

I usually don’t bring up this particularly cynical view of the world but I feel that it’s become increasingly relevant with impending enormous changes in my life. I fear that I will lose most of my friends with a changing schedule.

I have started to share this set of fears with some of my friends IRL and also electronically. Many have been like “don’t be an idiot, we’re here for you.” Which is exactly what I needed to hear. And what I will continue to need to hear. There are a couple reasons why I don’t full believe everyone when they say it, but I really need to hear it as often as people are willing to say it.

Reason 1 why I think my social world is ending: Time

This past year I have spent an EXTRAORDINARY amount of time focusing on relationships. I had the time. I had the space. I had the spoons. I had the resources. It was one of the most amazing years of luxury and privilege I’ve had in my life. Unlike previous years where I had this amount of resources (like when I was a child) I was actually able to appreciate my privilege. I knew I would have a meal over my head and a roof to eat. Wait, strike that. Reverse it. :P

The thing is, I set out an extremely rigorous set of goals for myself to stay in touch with people. I wrote my PeopleKeeper experiment and then committed to it. I would say that it was an 80% success. I entered all of the people from the weekly, bi-weekly and monthly lists into my calendar and have generally stuck to the schedule I set myself. The quarterly people…not so much because I didn’t actually put them in my calendar. Lesson learned. I live and love by my cellular communicator.

Even though this isn’t 80% of the people on the list, I call it 80% successful because this intentional friendship thing has deepened and strengthened relationships like no other experiment I’ve ever tried in my life. Opportunities have opened like never before and there I was to accept them. I’ve travelled thousands of miles, laughed, cried and held my friends all over the country and had positive experiences I could never have even dreamed possible.

The first reality of this new job is that it is going to take a lot of TIME. My first week is in a training location that is 1 hour from Key Route City, if there’s no traffic. And there’s almost guaranteed to be traffic. So my options then become: try to drive for 2 hours each direction each day or try to find a spot to crash closer to the training location. We’ll see. The van should be big enough for a sleeping pad, worst comes to worst.

Anyway, this is just the first week and I’m only going to bill 40 hours worked. Assuming I don’t get chosen to do hurricane relief, I plan to have 40-hour weeks while I’m in the office. 16 of my billing hours will be in a place 1 hour away from Key Route City. Again, estimated without traffic which can double driving times If I commute both days, which puts my time spent at work+commute to 44 hours, with no traffic.

In the field, however, things will be different. From all the networking I’ve done, I have set the expectation that field work for entry level geologists can often involve 12 hour days. Fieldwork might also involve travel so this will effectively mean a week or two off the grid at least every quarter. Hurricane relief work could be several months long, depending if I’m chosen and which project I’m chosen to participate in.

Keep in mind: this is what I want. I very knowingly signed up for this. This job is exactly what I asked for. This is exactly how I continue on my professional path forward as a Professional Geologist.

I will be signing up for the Geologist in Training (the pre-test to the license that’s $450) in November so I can take it in Spring 2018. Eventually I’ll need to study for it.

I still plan on making jam with Queen of Strawbs and keeping my space in the community kitchen I’ve rented at least until December. I committed to three months to see if the business goes anywhere, I’m hardly someone who backs down from her commitments easily. Or breaks contracts…lol. I haven’t made a website yet but maybe that might be a thing to do so I can handle customer flow online without having to keep that in my cognitive load. But I haven’t even figured out when the next batch of jam is to be made so I’ll get there when I get there.

Oh! I made a new flavor too! I’m excited to see if it scales. It’s blueberry based and is a really nice compliment to my strawberry jam which is very much like “HELLO HOW ARE YOU WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCOMPLISH TODAY.” The blueberry jam is much more “Good morning dear. Have some peaceful contemplation with your breakfast. You are wonderful.”

The other thing that could happen is that I’m being considered to give a presentation in the UK in October. If that happens, that will also eat about 3-5 hours/week. It may not happen because I just don’t know if I can make that kind of time commitment.

But all of this boils down to the very real issue that I just will not continue to have the time for all of my relationships. I do not know how I’m going to handle this. I am still working on it.

Reason 2 why I think my social world is ending: Location

As briefly mentioned in my previous point: I accepted working part time in a location that is quite far from my primary residence in Key Route City. I am already looking into getting a part-time residence up in that area, maybe with someone who wants to AirBnB their place on weekends but would be ok with me bunking there twice a week.

This cuts the amount of time I can physically see my friends by 2/7ths. Reduction of in-person time with friends is an issue a lot of people experience in their mid-late 20s. Somehow in the past year I have actually increased the amount of casual social interactions I’ve had. PartnerPenguin and I go to a gaming group once a week where we play board games and schmooze. We also have a weekly “Family dinner” where we have dinner once a week with at least one friend. Sometimes we have dinner with the Bears instead.

I need to also keep Date Night with PartnerPenguin because the two of us need to actually see each other for our relationship to work out. Date night is not often an actual date, just a time in our schedule where we can spend together and talk and make food sometimes.

If I live in a different part of the area 2/7 nights a week I will lose a lot of the casual and low maintenance ways that I interact with many of my friends.

Also having a distant location will put a strain on my ability to commit to certain things and see certain people. Obviously my answer will be to go be gregarious and make oodles of new friends. But that is also time consuming. I will live.

Reason 3 why I think my social world is ending: Mental Illness

Hey! Now it’s time to talk about something uncomfortable! Yaaay. :{

A big thing that I have discovered from the way that I’ve interacted over the past year is that a lot of my friends are very happy to hear from me—but they are also incapable of “picking up the phone”, so to speak. Automating my reaching out has helped me with my own depression and anxiety (it has generally helped, no system is perfect) and interacting with people has helped even more. Having the opt-in of figuring out how to not feel alone when I’ve feel alone has been magnificent.

It turns out that mental illness is concurrent with a lot of other things I like in my friends: like intelligence and interesting personalities. I haven’t done a survey but like….a lot of my friends have some kind of mental illness, or have struggled with one over the course of our friendship. (Cue Chili Peppers) They have certainly been there through my struggles with my mental illnesses as well so no one is perfect or blameless here.

However: My being the one to pick up the phone, open the FB messenger, send that text, is often how our relationship continues. I am afraid of losing most of these relationships. If your internal wiring prevents you from doing things you love like contacting your friends, I can’t help you change that. And if I’m not initiating contact all the time, I will probably lose your friendship as a casualty.

I feel these relationships have come very far in my setting boundaries around emotional labor and I don’t want that to change. This has been a big deal for me, to even know I could set those kinds of boundaries.

This change is really really really distressing to me. I grieve losing friendships almost more harshly than I grieve the dead. I feel helpless that I can’t change the situation. I feel angry and upset that precious relationships will be lost.

I don’t know if there is any way to solve this problem.

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Anyway, to close out I’ll share this song because it’s just so preposterous in is heteronormative machismo.  But so catchy! "The Man" by The Killers

And I feel like no summer (farewell, my favorite season) is complete without this song and eating LOTS of grilled peaches. This video is so preposterous and 90's!! "Peaches" by The Presidents of the United States of America