PeopleKeeper 2-A Follow Up

Hey all,

I finally got a half-day off and thought it was time to write down some of the thoughts bouncing around in my mind. The technical term for this is idea saltation. It’s a term that I’ve just made up. ::Eddie Izzard voice:: And I’m backing it up with…this geology license I hope to get.

So here is my view for writing today:

This is actually my reality, I can't believe it sometimes.

 It’s cool and windy and mostly clear out, I’ve got a box of Girl Scout cookies and a lot of sunlight left so buckle up because I’m sure this will be a wild ride.

 

A recent photo of me, ready made for a by-line

In the past seven months (whoosh, that went by right quick) I have been working at a job I love with fascinating people whom I am happy to hang out with for a drink after work. My office works with other offices all over the country so I get to meet folks with very different backgrounds and skill sets than my own. My current work priorities for personal development on the job are:

• ·      Consistent demeanor-keeping the same quality and frequency of communication regardless of what’s happening in my personal or personal-professional life (eg. deadlines).
• ·      Learning how to actually talk to anyone- a misnomer that a lot of my friends have is that I can strike up a conversation with anyone. While this has proved true for most of the circles I have waltzed between in my life, it’s not the case across the board. Specifically: I have been learning how to interact with military personnel better. I have a lot of inherited trauma around military folks, through no fault of the people who passed it on, yet it still remains. It so happens that the branch of military my grandfather (who was an abusive ass) served is the same branch that I work with regularly for my job.
• ·     Communication!- Deadlines, expectations, duration of work, intensity of work, boundaries around topics that I feel OK talking about, boundaries when topics I don’t feel OK talking about.
• ·      Programming-I’m finally learning how to code in Python. Because it just seems like a better idea than doing everything manually. I’ve also become significantly more proficient in Microsoft Excel, which has eased some of my pain. And I mean literal pain, my ergo situation is ever-evolving and not close to being pain-free. Despite being an A+ couch potato, it seems being sedentary is not easy for me.

So that’s what I’m working on. It’s hard. I won’t pretend or assume it’s anything but hard.

In the past 7 months I’ve thought a lot about my relationships and how they are interwoven into my mental health. I work A Lot™, my availability in general has decreased, possibly a hundredfold from my availability when I was unemployed. During my unemployment I focused a lot on building relationships; strengthening, deepening, evaluating, asking a lot, giving back a lot, building my friends up, letting my friends support me.

Between personality and circumstance, I’ve always been in touch with A Lot™ of people. Once my therapist asked me to make a map so she could keep up with all the people I talked about. I got to several hundred people in visual format similar to a force directed diagram before I gave up. This was at least 3 years before Facebook. I remember people’s names, their faces, their stories, their joys, and their pain. Especially when I’m rested and focused like I was during my unemployment. Now that I’m fully employed, I don’t have the bandwidth that I used to and I’m noticing that I’m not as capable of managing all the relationships.

On top of my proving period (about 5 months of nearly back to back travel) being physically and emotionally challenging, I took on another challenge: get the first part of my geology licensure. The department of Professional Geologists in the Golden State are trying to mimic the process the Engineers have laid out. I’m certain it also behooves the geologists because it gets them more money. What this means for me, the SaraBe, is that I can take a $500 test now (3 years out of school) and then take another $500 test in 3 more years so that I can sign legal documents. The only study material available is not only boring: it’s badly written, incorrect more times than is acceptable, out of touch and really poor at explaining how to pivot one’s background in academia into industry. I am going to write a competing study guide and publish it when I have my license in 3-5 years. Testing for competence shouldn’t be an endurance test in masochism.

In order to achieve this goal of studying and taking my exam (which I took this morning) I have shifted around my life a lot. This shifting, as with all my shifts, has led me to evaluate my relationships, and check in with where I was a year(ish) ago when I wrote my PeopleKeeper post. I’m going to break out the types of relationships I’ve seen evolve in the past year, moving from negative to positive. Unsurprisingly, there will be a playlist for these categories so be sure to click on links for music. (In addition to my regular play list for the blog at large.)

Brief content warning: mention of rape and stalking. Click this if you want to skip that.

Contact Severed

Only a couple people from my original list (or people who weren’t on the list but existed regularly in my life) were people who I actively severed contact with.

One of them was accused of being a serial rapist. I was not close with this person, I had no direct involvement in these allegations and I did not follow what/if the resolution on this series of events was. I know this person was an active organizer whose parties I occasionally attended but it wasn’t difficult for me to fade from that scene when I was on the road 70% of the time. The whole affair was triggering for me as I was much more intimately involved in something similar when I was 13 so I noped out pretty hard pretty quick.

The other person was someone whose friendship had always been exhausting for me but over the past couple years it built up to the point where they were stalking me. This is someone who I cannot avoid completely because they attend my synagogue but the leadership of the shul took care of the situation in as much as they could. This was extremely difficult for me because there were weeks where I couldn’t attend services because I just had panic attacks. PartnerPenguin was amazing in taking care of me and making sure I left when I needed to leave and breathed as much as I could. Mega props to the current leadership body for listening to me, taking me seriously and treating the situation with gravity.

The Somebodies I Used To Know

This category is a little less cut and dry from my previous category and it’s probably the category I struggle the most with. These are not people who have acutely wronged me, just more…death by a thousand paper cuts. A lot of my biological relatives are in this category. People who have occasionally made my swear allegiance or loyalty but who have never actually been interested in me as a person.

An illustration of this kind of person was someone whom I hadn’t seen in months and we finally spend much of an evening together. They asked me how I was doing and I spent care and energy into responding how was drowning in work but they were important to me so I carved out an evening to spend with them. Throughout the evening they then asked me three more times how I was doing, closing out the evening with “we should catch up some time.” This was painful, but ultimately it made me realize that listening to me was not a priority for this person and there was nothing I could do about it.

Standard Partiers

I like to grow my friendships in predominately 1:1 settings, often revolving around food, often at my house. My relationship bonds strengthen best during long-ish periods of unstructured or semi-structured time together, so I try to create such spaces. Some people like to maintain their relationships through parties (usually >10 people), touching base periodically and superficially. I am happy to attend these parties but I’ve learned that I’m not going to bank on the friendships I cultivate in these spaces to be deep enough for strong emotional support unless I supplement them with other types of interactions.

Don't get me wrong. I love partying. I just don't expect to do most of my heavy lifting in my friendships in this context. 

Neutral

Several people who I had on my PeopleKeeper list interact with their relationships in a way that I had not understood previous to trying this experiment: their partner performs most of the friendship maintenance. I have seen several pairings of people who do this. The level of emotional labor expected by society, usually on women, to maintain relationships, plan free time and keep house to have friends over shines through when I have tried to maintain friendships with people whose partner does a lot of their emotional labor. I have trouble getting in touch with some of these people. One person appeared randomly back in my life after 3 years of no contact because they were in a relationship and just…didn’t keep in touch with any of their friends. Even with my best friends, I have sometimes given up on being friends with their spouses because they just don’t put any work into being my friend in return and assume their partner will maintain that bond. But usually when I show up in person they listen to me so they are neutral to me.

Everything’s Easy/The Simcha (Joy) Bringers

I have several communities right now that I participate in regularly given the locational availability and energy level.

The first is my weekly gaming group who meet the host’s home, and usually have 10 people or less per event. We have dinner together and there is always SaraSafe food (no nightshades) even if means the host makes a separate meal just for me. Sometimes it’s tacos (we gather on Tuesday, after all) and sometimes it’s sous-vide pork cheek or <three-stroke meat engine> that have cooked for at least 12 hours. Sometimes I participate in games like <Colors, Fucking Colors>, sometimes I don’t. And it’s always OK. Everyone sees each other weekly so we generally know what’s going on in each others lives. It’s friendship on easy mode.

One thing that’s great about this group is that the two people who host recently got married and I got to see for the first time a wedding that reflected something much closer to what I want in a wedding ceremony (we’ll have one someday, I swear). The bridal party was not split by bride and groom because everyone was everyone’s friend. The women wore dresses and the men wore suits and everyone was color matched and lovely in that formality. The vows were said in a “yes, and” fashion: the bridge said one line and the groom responded “I’ll do that and this additional thing”. The officient was a friend and he made no presumption of having God involved (which worked, for this crowd). After the bride and groom exchanged vows, the audience was invited to vow to support the couple. I really liked that.

I was so full of joy and love that I cried the whole night. In fact I cried so much that salt crystals formed on my eyes:

I cried myself some minerals!

Other communities I have in this category are my shul, my other regular gaming groups, and the friends I see rarely but spend time with intensely throughout the year. And of course, my travel buddies. In the past couple years I’ve brought my “states visited” count up to 23. Here are some photos from some of the more recent trips:

The great and powerful Mississippi River

....yes....

American Victoria Falls

Buddy, your soul is supposed to stay inside your body. So's your skeleton.

Crappy quality but I did see the Northern Lights

Just a pup in -10°F being OK with life.

With the national political situation, my job being as intense as it is and interfacing with my own and my friends mental illnesses it feels extraordinarily good to have good friends and celebrate happy events. It reminds me that there is balance and that this past year has been net good.

Found Family

The best thing about being a queer adult is that the concept of Found Family is understood and, while not ubiquitous, is prevalent. My little group of new family are the people whom I can be around, no matter how we’re feeling and it’s OK that we’re not entertaining or happy. We can just be. It’s extremely freeing to have multiple people with whom I can just be my complete self.

I had a lot of negative experiences growing up where I was told that we were having family time and that would mean we would “have fun, damnit.” I think sometimes when I reflect on the nuclear family I had growing up that none of us understood how to be there for each other in the ways we needed to be supported. Instead there was a lot of shame and at time coercion to “act like we liked each other” instead of genuinely liking each other.

The intentionality I’ve brought to my new family folks is that when you’re in my found family you’re in as your whole self. That’s hard and takes a lot of work on all parties involved, so there are only a few people who hold this place in my life. I think one of the most important conversations I ever had was with someone who holds me in found family status and they explained that I had committed a transgression serious enough to cut ties unless I made swift and lasting change to my behavior. Having this conversation allowed me to see that just because this category exists, it doesn’t mean that abuse or bad behavior has to be tolerated.

A surprise for me in this past year is how big of a difference having a found family has made on my spiritual life. I am regularly celebrating smaller Jewish holidays that I’ve never celebrated before because I have the support to do so. We have more conversation around Judaism than I’ve ever had voluntarily in my life. I like the amount of Judaism I’ve worked in and I feel supported to include more if it seems right to do so.

PartnerPenguin

I am happy to announce that PartnerPenguin and I have celebrated our first decade together! 10 whole years of being awesome! The best part about renewing for an 11^th season of this show is that we jumped the shark somewhere in…like…season 2? So there’s nowhere more ridiculous for us to go. We’re still two goofballs with odd senses of humor who make each other laugh every day. We’ve learned to have arguments without putting the foundation of our relationship at stake. We have established that we’re not going anywhere so it’s OK to try new things and get out of our comfort zone. I am proud of us. I was trying to only do two comparison photos but then I did 4. GIANT, PHOTO LADEL BLOG POST FOR ALL!

Casual then-shirts read Feztival (2002) and Vader was Framed

Even our casual now looks like we're about to drop an emo album

Fancy then-Rockin' that Moulin Rouge themed Prom

Yeah, basically still rockin' the same theme with no prompts

I do hope to have some sort of wedding, probably about 3 years from now on the 10^th anniversary of us being married. That seems like enough time to ease into the idea, save, plan and decide what we want the event to be. In the meantime I’ve started wearing a ring that I feel suits me on an everyday basis. I think it looks like it fell out of a mountain and happens to fit my finger. You can decide for youself:

I am really really excited about this

In closing today, I’ll just leave you with Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” or: “I am exactly as bisexual as I thought I was.

Real Urban Geologists Drink Tap

Dear Friends,

As you may have seen, the NYT has published some new kind of foolishness about a topic I hold near and dear to my heart: water access in America. “Unfiltered Fervor: The Rush to Get Off the Water Grid” is about how wealthy people are drinking untreated water.

Publishing this story gives this topic attention, fueling distrust of government by presenting the raw water movement on equal footing to scientific fact. Tacitly condoning consumption of unfiltered water that has not passed rigorous drinking standards gives this practice validity. Drinking water at a surface spring is more likely to seriously harm than to be beneficial to health.

Stick with a "look, don't drink" policy when going to unknown creeks.

American’s has some of the safest water because of our extensive processing of subsurface water. Ground water, both municipal and private wells, are monitored and tested at regular intervals to ensure safety.

By portraying “raw water” as a phenomenon by entrepreneurs selling an “off the grid” lifestyle this article also draws attention away from the misallocation of capital that desires to create a dangerous product for the rich rather than ensuring everyone in America can drink their tap water for today and tomorrow.

Rather than fund production of this one guy who admits to trespassing and stealing water could capital not flow to any of these issues? 

•       Incorporating desalinization for cities with changing water availability due to sea level rise.
•       Replacing lead water pipes in Flint, MI with steel water pipes.
•       Using publicly available data to target municipal treatment facilities for specific problems and hiring engineers, geologists and scientists to create more efficient treatment systems so toxins like hexavalent chromium didn’t exist in public water
•       Creating and sustaining public health non nonprofits that focus on community access to safe, clean water

We cannot claim to be a first world nation when people cannot access safe drinking water-- one of the things that we've done mostly right for a long time. Giving attention and money to any regressive, dangerous ideas is investing in the ruin of our nation.

The anti-municipal water movement that has united the anti-establishment fringe groups from both the left and right. However, the ‘establishment’ being protested with "Live water" is not the President, Congress, or Washington DC, but local civil servants in our communities, whose meetings are generally open to the public.

In California, the State Water Control Board regulates all of the municipal and county agencies that provide water directly to residents. Working with the state and federal EPA, the Water Board ensures the safety and access to water all Californians’ are entitled to. These water boards require an extensive, multi-month vetting process before hiring anyone.

My home city, Oakland, has established the aggressive goal of zero waste by 2020. They are using multiple tactics; educating restaurants and auto businesses on best management practices for preventing pollution, establishing an illegal dumping hotline, and disseminating freely available information about the difference between sanitary sewer vs storm drain systems.

By contrast, the interviewed entrepreneurs are rushing to get off the grid with their water consumption. As Mr. Singh says he is concerned about “drinking toilet water with birth control drugs” they would be much better served to participate in pre-existing programs by the Department of Toxic Substance Control to educate and promote cessation of improper pharmaceutical disposal.

We know from science and medicine that drinking “raw water” is a bad idea. Yet in the article, six proponents of untreated water are quoted before a medical professional advises against it. This narrative lends equal footing between the raw water movement and the medical and scientific communities, establishing false equivalency; science can be disregarded when it contradicts the emotions of the beholder.

Many Americas view scientists as lofty elites, whose conclusions are opinions, up for debate. Promoting raw water with this article lacks the integrity The New York Times stands for in its mission statement. If the NYT’s intention is to support science, scientists and scientific thought then the editors of this publication need to do better in ensuring articles like this do not work against that priority.

Sincerely,

Sara Be

A Geologist Who Drinks Tap

P.S. This song goes out to Flint, MI.

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”