End of Lent … finally!

I was marginally successful trying to give up dairy for Lent.

After writing my last post on the first week, I had fewer issues, because I learned to check ingredients before eating, and I became a little more mindful about putting things in my coffee. That and I got used to drinking my coffee black when there wasn’t any soy milk around.

On a few occasions, I had to turn down homemade cookies, knowing they were made with butter, but then I realized I could eat many store-bought cookies made with things like palm oil. Not healthy, so it was not a good substitute, but I had found a loophole.

This week, however, I have slipped a lot. There was our church’s St. Patrick’s Day Dinner, which I helped organize, and everything seemed to have meat or dairy — soda bread contains sour cream and/or buttermilk, our green drinks were made with Irish cream or milk, and I baked my salmon in butter. Saints’ feasts that we observe, of course, don’t count during Lent, so I was excused.

When a guest in others’ homes or eating out in a restaurant with few or no vegetarian/vegan options, I eat whatever is offered, so I have had cheese in pasta and other dishes a few times, especially this weekend with Shane’s family in Albany. The willpower seems to diminish exponentially in proportion to the distance of the backsliding.

A non-dairy Lent off to a rough start

Lent is fairly new to me. The first time I did it was in the small town where I lived in Mexico, when I was teaching English at a private Catholic school, and I realized that everyone was giving up something, even the elementary school students. I figured I had to try it once I found out that fifth-grader Sofia was giving up chile sauce for 40 days. A Mexican giving up chile sauce — that is a big freakin’ deal, folks.

Giving in to peer pressure, then, just as I had taken to crossing myself every time I passed a church (because even hooligans would cross themselves while passing the churches in their pimped-up cars, and I felt completely weird not doing it), I decided to give up cookies.

This was a big deal for me, because I had gotten addicted to several different types of cookies that could be bought at any corner store — especially Polvorones, which were like shortbread with an orangey twist, and Príncipe, which were buttery sandwich cookies with chocolate cream in the middle. Of course, giving up cookies only meant that I chose to eat Mantecadas, little buttery muffins, and other sweet bread products, so the exercise turned out to be easier than I expected.

In the past couple of years, I have given up other things for Lent that were not so easy to give up — Facebook games one year, when I was particularly addicted to a few of those, and last year I gave up online shopping. Some of those Facebook games were given up forever, and I definitely shop less online now (but especially after losing my full-time job). Lenten resolutions, I have found, can tend to be a bit like New Year’s Resolutions Part 2, as our priest had said on Ash Wednesday last week. But I do try to focus on being more mindful of my behavior and to take a stab at abstaining from bad habits.

This year I have been thinking and reading more about the point of Lent, and how giving up something or adding something doesn’t always get us to the place we are trying to go — being a better person and being closer to God (whatever God is for you — I have to confess that most people who call themselves Christians would find my concept of God totally wacko — more like the Force in Star Wars than the God of the Old and New Testaments).

I decided this year that being closer to God means giving up something that causes harm to animals — milk products, because I learned in the past couple of years that calves are often slaughtered as a byproduct of milk production, as cows are of course constantly impregnated to ensure that they continue producing milk. I also learned that milk is actually quite bad for humans, very fattening as well as leaching out calcium rather than providing calcium for bones, and it accelerates cancer growth as all animal proteins have been shown to do. (Just yesterday, a friend of mine said there have been studies showing that teenagers who drink a lot of milk regularly have more acne than those who don’t. And here I am in my mid-30s still wondering what to do with my skin….)

Anyway, I learned all these things a while ago, and we succeeded in substituting non-GMO soy milk (unfortified with calcium) for milk in our coffee, tea, cereal and cooking, and we have reduced our consumption of cheese and ice cream, but we have not been able to cut those things out completely.

Recently, I noticed how much butter I use. I love it on toast, love to cook with it, and of course I simply have to bake with butter — I would never use margarine or oil in a pie crust or cookies. In Chicago we would substitute half of the butter with applesauce, when we had an apple tree in our backyard and made tons of applesauce, but we still used the butter. It’s just so tasty! And it makes everything so flaky and rich!

When I realized that I had not even cut down on my use of butter, I figured I’d have to give it up now, or at least try for 40 days.

And here we are, about a week into Lent, and I have not been able to avoid dairy completely yet. The first day, Ash Wednesday, we actually had leftover pizza, and I figured I’d give up one of my Sundays during Lent so that we could finish it (since Sundays don’t actually count in the 40 days of Lent). Then, the next day was Valentine’s Day, and after dinner at a Thai restaurant we stopped in a café for dessert, and we just had to share the molten chocolate cake, which most likely had dairy in it, but in any case I had completely forgotten about going dairy-free and had automatically put milk in my coffee when it was brought out. So there went another Sunday.

On Sunday then, we finally looked at the ingredients on the Portuguese raisin rolls we had been eating for breakfast for the past three days — popular in our household because they have all-natural ingredients and no preservatives — and discovered that they were made with both milk and butter. There went the remaining three Sundays of Lent.

Monday, I went to brunch with a friend, and I focused so much about ordering my usual farm fresh eggs but with extra potatoes instead of sausage (Oh yeah, did I mention I’m trying not to eat any meat, either? Eggs are OK, though, for now….), that I hadn’t even thought about the fact that the toast would be buttered. And, once again, I automatically poured milk into my coffee.

Today, Tuesday, I was doing well most of the day with my non-dairy diet. But at dinner I ate some pretzels, and then we checked the ingredients — buttermilk solids.

It seems almost impossible to get away from dairy!

And I have other things I’ve resolved to do for Lent — try to eat for a week on a food-stamp budget and go to yoga class at least once a week — but neither of them have started yet. Now that I’ve blogged it, though, I may have no choice but to hold myself more accountable.

The flu, mardi gras pancakes, lower back pain

It was a hellish week. Finally caught the flu last weekend as my DH Shane was getting over it, but I don’t have a demanding full-time job and long commute, so I didn’t come down with complications (like Shane’s sinus infection). Being feverish sucks, though. Couldn’t do one of my stories because of that second bout of aches and soreness.

Shane recovering from the flu with Tigger

As I recovered, I had two nights of insomnia, and I have no idea why. One night I was up till 2 or 3 a.m., reading about Joan of Arc and Arminianism vs. Calvinism on Wikipedia before finally falling asleep on the futon. And then two nights later I was up all night, feeling  nervous, fluttery in my chest, for no apparent reason. I hadn’t even had any caffeine, but I was jittery like I had had a few cups of coffee before bed.

Partly it was because I had to write two articles before noon the next day. I stayed up late, till about midnight, writing one of them, and by the time I finished I felt shaky and tired. I had that feeling like an overtired child who gets all cranky and throws tantrums and can’t sleep. For a couple hours, I tried to sleep, but I figured I’d better do something constructive, so I got up and wrote the other article, which I had been planning to write in the morning. I finished at about 4 or 5 a.m. but still I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed with Shane when he had to get up, and I thought, well, finally I’ll be able to sleep, but I didn’t. I watched episodes of Stargate Universe, instead. Then I worked the rest of the day copy editing on the paper (as it was going to press that evening) and didn’t sleep till that night.

While I was lying in bed trying to sleep, the only thing I could guess was making me anxious was that stupid pancake supper I was helping to organize for church. I was having all kinds of anxieties about it flopping in a huge way, with nobody coming, or me losing it and yelling at people from my church who were trying to help but being bossy. I ended up writing a long email to my friend Ruth about my worries and how I wouldn’t be able to stand working for the church much longer, and she wrote me the sweetest reply, right away, and she said she loved me and not to fret, which made me cry.

Lucky me, the pancake supper turned out wonderfully, and it was the help of all those people who were also anxious about pulling it off who made it happen, who came early and set up and cooked bacon and sausages and pancakes on griddles and made fun conversation for those few hours beforehand.

Ruth at the mardi gras pancake dinner

One of the strange things I did that made me nervous was I mixed two traditions together, Shrove Tuesday pancake supper plus a mardi gras theme, with feather masks and beads and New Orleans jazz music and king cake. I wasn’t sure it would work, and I have the feeling others weren’t sure about it, either. The king cake turned out very well, though — it was tasty as well as fun to have everyone look for the baby Jesus (a whole almond) inside their slices, and the winner got to wear the crown I bought. As Shane said, always good to have activities. (Though probably a good idea not to make people run with pancakes and frying pans; I was concerned the floor would be slippery from people tracking in snow.)

In the end, it was probably the mimosas that made the dinner fun. We had a pretty good turnout, even though the previous night’s snowstorm kept many of the regular supper guests indoors, and we made almost twice as much in donations as we had at the last fellowship dinner. Success!

Father Shane serving mimosas

I think the busy day of baking (king cake and Valentine’s Day Bake Sale cookies) and setting up tables and cooking and cleaning up tired me out completely. As I was getting into bed, a sharp pain shot through my lower back. It messed up my plans to go cross-country skiing the next day, after all that glorious snow. So instead of playing in the sun and snow, I stayed home this afternoon trying (unsuccessfully) to find a comfortable position in which to sit or lie down and watching a documentary about Tribe Called Quest. But then Ruth had us over for a delicious Sunday dinner, and we had a wonderful time with her and her husband and their beautiful rescue dog, Charlie. What a blessing it is to have good friends!

Not the brightest idea I’ve ever had

Writing a blog about my search for a career/job has proven to be problematic in many ways.

It’s made me worry that I didn’t get a job because the prospective employers found this blog and read what I wrote about them. So I stopped mentioning the job interviews and positions I’d applied for.

Then, complaining about aspects of my current part-time position as a reporter for a local news site and free print weekly has alerted superiors to warn me not air my opinions so freely, lest I compromise my mission to report on events and situations fairly.

Also, it’s never a good idea to complain about one’s employer on a public site.

Maybe my problem is that the blog is public. I should probably be journaling about all this stuff and then writing a book about it later, after I am no longer employed at a place I’m complaining about. Or I should make this thing private and unsearchable and only give out the web address to close friends and family via email, not broadcasting it over facebook, which is full of “friends” who are not really my friends anyway. (Hi, those of you reading this and wondering if I meant you!)

Whatever the case, I am finding it hard to write about anything related to my job search, or rather, lack of a job search, or my current position.

I suppose I can say that I may have wriggled my way out of covering the village government, simply by not covering it adequately, though that was not intentional. My heart’s not in it, of course, so there’s that, but I also don’t have the stomach for the quarreling.

My husband came down with the flu on Monday, so he’s been home since Tuesday on. He finally went to the doctor today — one day shy of health insurance coverage, mind you, because our doctor doesn’t work Fridays, and he’s been feeling miserable enough to self pay. I have been trying my best to take care of him.

Now writing that sentence: “I have been trying my best to take care of him,” makes me realize that I have been trying to do that since he started his full-time job at the end of November.

That has been a difficulty for a while between us. I have high expectations of myself, and I have been putting a lot of pressure on myself to be a good stay-at-home spouse, just like Shane was to me for the four years that I worked full-time as a teacher. I want to make delicious dinners with leftovers so he can bring a lunch to work, keep the house clean, do the dishes and the laundry regularly, but then again, I don’t really want to do any of that at all. At the end of the day, when none of that has been done, I feel like I’ve failed him and myself.

I’m also rather a workaholic, so even though I’m technically part-time at the paper, I have made it so that I work on stuff for the paper pretty much a lot of the time. That way I don’t have to do housewife-y stuff, either.

On top of that, I have taken on lots of responsibility at this church. This church! I am in charge of hall rentals, and now I am trying to organize a pancake supper that is happening NEXT WEEK!

One has to understand something about my past to comprehend the anxiety with which I face this freaking pancake supper. I can remember, in my entire 36 years of life, only one or two gatherings that I organized that were successful. I think they were while I was in grad school, so it wasn’t difficult to impress the other grad students I’d invited, who were equally as or perhaps a little nerdier than I was.

OK, so this is at CHURCH for God’s sake, so what am I worrying about? Well, I still want it to be FUN.

In my search for the right formula to create said FUN, I may have tried a little too hard. I bought a bunch of Mardi Gras masks and beads — I mean, come on, Pancake Day is fine and all, but let’s spice things up a little — and I’m thinking about holding a pancake race (which I’ve learned actually happens at pancake suppers in the UK). Shane and a few friends at church are asking me, “Who’s going to run in a pancake relay race?! It’s a bunch of old people who can’t run!” And I’m saying, “The kids?” while I’m thinking, “I want to run in a pancake relay race! And I want to watch a bunch of people making fools of themselves running in a pancake relay race!”

Did I mention there will be mimosas? Everyone is excited about the mimosas. Maybe with mimosas people will wear Mardi Gras masks and beads and run around flipping pancakes. Maybe it will be fun.

Copy editor and reporter and … photographer?

I could say I have been busy with work, getting more responsibilities at the paper, which is sort of true, but since it is only part-time, there’s no real excuse for my long hiatus from writing.

There was that whole job interview thing — I finally heard back that I didn’t get the job, weeks after the second interview I mentioned previously. It was fine not getting the position, especially after worrying that I’d have to interact with that horrible professor, but I did feel like maybe they had somehow seen my blog post about them (and that I didn’t really want the job). I don’t know how they would have, but I stressed out about it anyway. That paranoia led me not to want to write about much else on this blog. And so a couple of other job interviews have come and gone without so much as a … tweet.

I still do enjoy working for the paper, and staying there is now made easier by the fact that my husband has secured a full-time job (with benefits!) in the city. The whole idea of giving the Ailes operation a hard time is extremely satisfying, which unfortunately allows me and my colleagues to put up with a lot of other stuff, like not being able to go full-time or get insurance benefits.

I remain eternally grateful for the opportunity to develop my skills there, though. I have, since my last posting, written a few more articles, one or two of which have had an impact (however small) on parts of the community.

One of my stories on the Garrison School Board meetings, for example, reportedly angered the teachers there, which was the desired effect. They were not present to hear the condescending tone of some the parents or to defend themselves, and so I felt it my duty to inform those not present of the general themes of the discussion. Unfortunately, I heard that the teachers felt the article was immensely critical of them, when in fact I had tried my best to report as “objectively” as possible.

I haven’t been writing as much for the paper as one might expect, given my “added,” somewhat editorial responsibilities at the paper. With the awesome digital SLR camera that I bought myself for my birthday in October, I have been taking much better pictures than I ever could with my old point-and-shoot, and my photos have been appearing a lot more in the paper than my writing has. My shots of the late-night flooding at high tide in lower Cold Spring (in my last post), for example, were some of the only ones that I have seen. When we need front-page photos now, the editor often asks me to get the shots.

The wonders of digital photography! Now any numbnut can take a hundred photos and find a good one somewhere in the mix. I DO want to learn more about photography, though, so that I don’t have to sort through a hundred photos to find one that is merely decent. I know there are several ways to do so that are free, through the Internet, perhaps through all of my artsy photographer friends, but it just means getting up and doing it….

Which brings me to the confessional part of my blog: Am I in a rut? Am I, as I type this entry while noon approaches, in bed, in my bathrobe, shirking my duties as the spouse who works part-time, avoiding the laundry, the dishes, the cleaning, the grocery shopping, the cooking, and contemplating what I’ll watch next on Netflix instant? Am I avoiding a job search that will land us in the city so that my husband doesn’t have to commute an hour and a half each way and so that I can continue working at this paper and take on village reporting duties? Am I also making no progress whatsoever on journaling or writing fiction/creative nonfiction/my first novel? Am I, perhaps, rather depressed? I’m afraid the answer is yes. But therapy will resume as soon as my health insurance kicks in next month.

A Visit From Hurricane Sandy

All photos taken at or before high tides around noon and midnight on Monday.

The second interview and the waiting game

Yesterday, I went to the second interview for the secretary job at the education graduate school from which I graduated five years ago and where I worked as secretary for a year. Now I am waiting to hear back about whether I get the job.

The panel who met with me (and at least one other candidate) consisted of the academic coordinator of the department, the manager for the program in which the secretary would be working, and a couple of other academic secretaries in the department. Everyone seemed nice and fun. They asked me questions like, “What was the best movie you’ve seen in the last two years?” and “If you could be anything for Halloween, what would you be?” A couple of them seemed like doctoral students in the process of writing dissertations, so they had that fun, self-deprecating but miserable vibe that many doctoral students have.

It occurred to me, however, that one of these secretaries might remember me from my studies through this department one semester six years ago, when the bilingual ed students did a semester with this particular department. I asked her yesterday, if she remembered me, because I had to take courses through the program. She said my name sounded familiar.

Those who have read about my travails during that time (on my blog from back then) might also recall the U.S. Open incident. My father was coming, from Taiwan, to visit New York to see a grand slam tennis tournament for the first time in his life, and we had bought tickets months ahead of time. Of course, it turned out that one of the days for which we had tickets was also the first day of school. So, in my naivete, I emailed the program to ask whether I could miss that day during my first student teaching assignment.

The secretary, who was sitting before me at this interview yesterday, might have seen the email that was forwarded to the she-devil professor of the department, who subsequently wrote me a vile message questioning my desire to be a teacher. (She wrote in the subject line, “Teaching or tennis?”)

Offended and infuriated, I calmed myself enough to attempt to explain my request. I had failed to mention that my father was in another country and also elderly, so this was not, in my opinion, like asking to be off the first day of school to go see a movie with a friend, for example. Naturally, after hearing how important the first day of school would be for a student teacher, I would now be present on the first day of school. But she did not have to be as condescending as she was. Her email follows below:

____ forwarded your email about your desire to see the U.S. Open, rather than the first day of school with children.

I imagine you do not realize the impression your question leaves with us about your interest in, and commitment to, becoming a teacher.

Perhaps your commitment is truly solid and you do not realize the significance the first day of schools holds for both teachers and children. If you told your cooperating teacher that you couldn’t come to the first day of school because you were going to the U.S. Open, you would probably be immediately asked to leave the placement.

As a program, we cannot afford to jeopardize our reputation with the public schools and with the teachers who donate their time to be cooperating teachers; if you are wavering in your commitments, or if teaching is perhaps too restrictive of a life-style, we should discuss this ASAP.

Ew. And for the record, my cooperating teacher that semester would not have asked me to leave the placement if I had asked to be absent; she wouldn’t have cared, just like she wouldn’t have cared if I had shown up in jeans like she did every day, even though this professor told us never to do so. In fact, that teacher probably shouldn’t have been a cooperating teacher in the program, because she scared the children into behaving, and I probably learned some bad habits. Or maybe the program assigned me to her to get back at me somehow.

Anyway, so why am I applying to work in a department where this horrible, condescending person teaches? Because I checked — I’d be working in a different program and not with that loca. Otherwise, you can forget it.

But, there are chances that I’d have to work with her. And that scares me. If she found out it was that girl coming to work for the department, she’d probably make my life hell; no doubt she’d think, “So she couldn’t cut it after all, and that’s why she’s just a secretary now,” and that teaching was “too restrictive of a lifestyle” for me.

Maybe I shouldn’t get the job.