Here is something I would not have predicted: it seems EASIER to get the nudity over with EARLIER in the caregiver/client relationship. I would have thought that it would be more comfortable for two people to get to know each other a little first. It seemed clear to me, when I was sent to a new client, that the client might prefer not to strip down on our first session together, but might instead want to wait until I’m more familiar.

But actually, getting to know each other first seems to make it MORE awkward. With the clients who needed help with a shower the very first day we met, our roles are so clear: I am the caregiver, and I help with showers. That’s my job. I’m still just a generic, polite set of scrubs to them. Whereas if we wait, because the client feels shy with a stranger, it feels MORE awkward with time. Now we know each other, almost in a SOCIAL way. We’ve chatted, many times. Now it’s one person taking off clothes in front of another person.

I can only speak for myself, of course, and only from the caregiver role. Maybe the clients are feeling completely different about it. On the other hand, I’m thinking back to when I was in the hospital after my c-sections, and nurses saw me naked. There was a hurdle to get over, but then it was over. And I think it worked mostly because one nurse was almost interchangeable with another: I wasn’t there long enough to get to know anyone.

I had a good dream last night, where first I was able to use my new mad eldercare skillz to assist in an emergency situation, and then I got kissed by a guy I think is cute. But then I ruined my own dream, first by turning out not to have gloves on in the emergency situation (even though in the dream the first thing I said after “Can I help?” was “Okay, I’ll go put gloves on”), and then by thinking, “Wait. If this guy would cheat on his nice wife with so little apparent struggle, not even a series of tortured conversations about it first, then I’m not even interested in him anymore.”

I have a new coffee maker, a Black & Decker programmable one that was on sale at Target for $39.99. I love it and was going to say so in a post, but then I went to the site to get a photo/link, and the reviews were pretty bad: things like, “The coffee tastes/smells like plastic” and “It leaks.” I’m not having trouble with a plastic taste/smell, and it’s not leaking, but it made me nervous about recommending it. What if I happened to get a non-defective one, but in general this model is very prone to defects? Or what if I recommend it, and then a few weeks later it leaks all over the counter, but by then you’ve already bought one?

ANYWAY. I didn’t think I cared about it being programmable, and I wasn’t planning to use that feature, but I’ve programmed it pretty much every day since I bought it. It is pretty delightful to get out of the shower and smell fresh coffee brewing. And in the morning it’s like, “Urg, I have to make the coffee,” or there are other demands roiling around me that take priority. But in the evening it’s common for me to be puttering in the kitchen, and it doesn’t feel like too much of a burden to get the coffee set up for the next day while I’m there.

But this is a story of how dim I can be, especially before coffee. Because this morning the kids got up earlier than usual, and so I was up earlier than usual, and I went to the kitchen and the coffee maker hadn’t started yet. And I thought, “Aw, I have to wait ten minutes before it starts brewing.” To my credit, it didn’t take longer than a minute before I realized I could just hit the start button myself.

I have to get a new phone, which I’m not happy about because the ONLY REASON I need one is that you know the little thingie the charging cable plugs into? THAT broke. I hate when it’s something like that. But also Paul says my phone is about 7 years out of date anyway, so I think he’s glad of the excuse to replace it.

The only upside is that I got to choose a new phone case. I liked my old one a lot, but it had a couple of pieces broken off of it, and it won’t fit the new phone. I know some of you like to see people’s phone cases, so here’s the case I used to have:

(image from EBay.com)

And here are the two I ordered for my new phone:

(image from EBay.com)

(image from EBay.com)

I feel I should say, though, that there weren’t many OPTIONS. It’s an Android phone, and there just aren’t as many cases available for those. So these are not necessarily The Cases of My True Heart—more like, my favorites from what was available.

I want to talk next about yearbooks. I have to make a decision about them. For TWELVE CONSECUTIVE YEARS we will have at least one child in high school. High school yearbooks cost $60, and that’s with the early-ordering discount. Let’s not even address that craziness, because that’s an unchangeable feature of this decision. What I want to address is this: what should my yearbook strategy be? Here are some of the factors:

When I was in high school, ordering yearbooks was VERY VERY IMPORTANT to me, one of my favorite parts of the whole school year. I still have all four yearbooks, although I find I only really need the junior and senior ones; the freshman and sophomore ones live in the basement, but the junior and senior ones are on a bookshelf. Yearbooks are NOT very important to the two kids in high school right now. But THEIR yearbooks ARE important to ME. That is, I want those yearbooks for myself, to look up their friends and my friends’ kids and so forth.

When I was in high school, ordering yearbooks was up to me: if I wanted them, I could pay for them with my own money. But they were only $20-25 then, and I think the senior one was free.

Also, my parents didn’t care AT ALL about my yearbooks, whereas I DO get excited about my children’s yearbooks.

So those are some of the then/now issues.

Another issue: sometimes more than one child will be in school at once. For example, this year Rob and William are both in high school. When the little ones are in high school, some years there will be THREE in high school at once. Spending $180 on three copies of the same yearbook feels…not right.

It’s hard to figure out. I’d thought what I’d do is just buy a yearbook each year, and have it belong to the household. This plan results in 12 total yearbooks. But then no one gets to take their yearbooks with them when they leave home. And no one gets to have their friends sign their yearbooks.

Or I could decide to buy a yearbook for each child each year. That would be 20 total yearbooks, and they could have their friends sign them. But then they’d take the yearbooks with them when they left home, and I wouldn’t have any. I don’t ACTUALLY NEED any, but I do want them. But I don’t want them badly enough to make it 32 total yearbooks; I can always ask a child to scan a page for me if I really need it.

Wait, I think I’ve figured out what I should do. I think I should buy one yearbook for each of the 12 years we’ll have at least one kid in high school, and have those be Household Property. And then I think I should buy each kid their own senior yearbook. That would be 17 total yearbooks, and I’d have access to a set, but they’d have something for their friends to sign senior year.

I’d be interested to know what you’d do. I’d also be interested to know if you have your high school yearbooks, and if your experience is the same as mine: i.e., that you use the senior one a LOT to look people up, and the junior one SOME to look people up (people who graduated the year ahead, mostly), but that the freshman and sophomore ones are not as useful.

I’m not sure how long ago it was, but it was probably about 15-18 years ago, and here is what happened. I was driving along in my neighborhood, and the guy behind me was acting really aggressive: tailgating and also doing that thing where someone goes way to one side of the lane or the other, as if they want to communicate that they’re STRAINING to get around you. We came to an intersection with a red light, and we were the first two cars to arrive. As soon as we came to a stop, he jumped out of his car and took a step toward my car.

I froze. I was stuck. What could I do? The light was RED. Fortunately for me, all the guy did was grab his windshield wiper and flick it—apparently something was stuck in it. Then he got back into his own car.

Here is what this experience showed me, vividly: I have a LOT of trouble, a potentially DANGEROUS amount of trouble, separating my ACTUAL possible moves from my PRESUMED possible moves. James Bond does not have this problem. Is someone in his way when he is trying to drive fast through a tunnel? Pish, he can drive right up the side of the tunnel, no big. But there I was, at an intersection, frozen in place because of THE COLOR OF A LIGHT. There was NO ONE ELSE in the intersection! NO cars. I could have 100% safely driven away from the guy behind me, just by running the red light. But that idea did not even OCCUR to me until much, much later, so it’s lucky I didn’t need it.

It’s not even that I thought, “Oh, I can’t go because that would be illegal.” (If I HAD thought that, I would have quickly realized that NO POLICE OFFICER would fault me for doing it in a situation where a possibly dangerous person was approaching my car.) It was more as if the light’s redness rendered me physically incapable of movement.

Since that incident, I’ve worked to force my mind to understand that SOME restrictions are actual (if there is a cement wall, and you drive directly into it, it will stop you), and SOME restrictions are not (red lights do not actually disable your car). As I’m driving along, I think to myself things such as, “If a car came into my lane, I could DRIVE INTO THAT YARD. Cars DO work on grass, even though in normal circumstances you’re not supposed to do that.” “In a real emergency, I could TURN LEFT here, even though that would mean going the wrong way on a one-way street.”

I realize not everyone has to work at this. Where I get derailed and/or stuck, other minds quickly and easily see the possibilities. In some cases, this leads to people being jerks and breaking rules for their own convenience, like when someone drives in the shoulder to get around all the cars waiting their turn in a lane. But in general, I think being able to see possibilities like that is a huge gift, and it’s one I wish I had. Practicing it is good for my brain, I’m sure, the way doing crosswords and logic puzzles it, but it hasn’t led to any massive brain-restructuring: I still have the kind of brain that struggles with this.

All of this is to say that I had another mind-blowing “Wait, a red light DOESN’T ACTUALLY STOP ME” moment yesterday. I was with a client who’d been widowed after more than 40 years of marriage, which sounds like a nice long marriage to me. Then she mentioned that it was actually her second marriage, which began when she was older than I am now. Normally it seems to me that life is rather short, but the idea that I could potentially divorce Paul, marry someone else, and have a FORTY-YEAR marriage with that second person, it rocked me back on my heels.

Which is what led me back to the idea of actual vs. presumed possibilities. It occurred to me on the way home that, if I wanted to, I could ask Paul for a divorce, meet someone else, marry them instead, make my children someone else’s step-children. There are lots of things about that idea that I don’t want (like, all of them), but it’s mind-boggling to realize I LITERALLY COULD launch onto that path, if I wanted to and/or if circumstances changed unexpectedly.

Or I could wait until Paul left for work, then go to a sperm bank, fill out a bunch of paperwork, turn over a bunch of money, and try for another baby. I don’t want to do that, and it would likely end my marriage. But I LITERALLY COULD. (Or rather, I could launch onto that path: obviously the insemination might not work.)

Or we could move to a totally new state, somewhere we’ve never even been and have no reason to want to live. We could just GO. In, say, three months, the whole thing could be a done deal.

I could buy tickets for an international trip, without even asking Paul. I WOULDN’T, but I COULD. I could just go, and let him deal with it.

I have some money of my own. I could get it in cash, and throw it into the wind. Or I could rent a building and buy some merchandise and start a business. Or I could get a secret apartment.

I could have a fling. It wouldn’t be a GOOD idea, but it is LITERALLY POSSIBLE to do it. The red light is a STRONG SUGGESTION, but it’s not a cement wall.

I could take a hammer and put holes in the living room wall. Tons of holes. I’m not inclined to do that, but there’s nothing physically preventing me from doing it.

I could rip up a library book. Just rip out alllll the pages. I realize this is not the sort of thing James Bond would have on his list of Truly Shocking Possibilities.

I could walk out of the house naked. I’d likely be arrested after a short while, but there would be a period of time when I would be outdoors, naked, in public. Again, I have no inclination to do this, but it’s startling to realize it’s literally, actually, seriously a choice I am physically able to make.

I could go to the animal shelter today, right now, and bring home another cat. Or a DOG. We could have a dog by dinnertime tonight.

I could adopt a child. I could adopt a whole sibling group and change the structure of our family forever.

This whole line of thought reminds me of that stage many parents go through after having a new baby, when many of us have the highly-unpleasant realization that it is LITERALLY POSSIBLE for bad things to happen to the baby—which causes many of us to have a lot of trouble picking up knives, carrying the baby past railings/windows, carrying the baby up and down stairs, driving with the baby in the car, etc.

Or I remember going out for groceries while Paul watched the kids, and realizing I could just keep driving. Right past the grocery store, right out of the state. I didn’t REALLY want to, but it was boggling to realize I LITERALLY COULD. People DO.

There is a sense in which these thoughts are alarming: knowing I have the power to make decisions that would be destructive is…well, I’m going to stick with the word alarming. But it’s also exhilarating: there are LOTS more choices than I am currently considering, and it’s nice to know they’re available if I need/want them.

Do you remember awhile back we talked about things we don’t want but can’t get rid of because otherwise we will keep buying them? For example, I need to keep two headbands (one wide, one narrow) among my possessions forever, because otherwise I will think a headband will be cute on me and I will buy another one. I need to keep a couple of tank tops for the same reason: they are just never going to look right on me, but if I get rid of them, I will forget that they don’t look right on me and buy more.

I thought of another example: hair-removal lotion.

(image from Amazon.com)

If I don’t keep a container of Veet or Nair in the bathroom closet for ALL ETERNITY, I will keep purchasing it. Because for some reason, I periodically think, “Hey, instead of spending 30 seconds shaving my underarms, which is no big deal, why don’t I cover them with NASTY-smelling lotion and sit there in the bathroom with my elbows sticking out for 10 minutes, then try to get the stuff off in the shower, then find that not all the hair is removed, but then not be able to shave or use deodorant for a couple of days because the skin feels weird and irritated and sort of unpleasantly, stickily smooth? All for the huge, huge benefit of ‘lasting up to twice as long as shaving’? How about THAT great idea?” –Swistle, who is spending the day discreetly sniffing down the neckline of her shirt.

I liked the song Locked Away so much better when I thought the lyrics were “If I showed you my floors, would you still love me the same” instead of “If I showed you my flaws.” I laughed out loud with delight the first time I (mis)heard the song, thinking, “Now THIS is a love song I can identify with!” (If I were dating again, I would be very anxious about my dates meeting my floors.)

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It took me awhile to do this, but it’s working great: putting MOST of the beans for a batch of chili into the blender. I love chili, and the children don’t mind it but they don’t like the beans. So now I put about a can and a half of beans into the blender with some water (you can instead use the tomato base of the chili, if you want to), and then putting the remaining half-can of beans into the chili as themselves. The children pick around the intact beans, but they’re still eating the ground-up beans.

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I have recently been experimenting with fabric paint, and I heartily recommend it, especially if your child has an obsessive interest in something hard to find on t-shirts. (I’d wanted to try one of those kits where you can make an iron-on patch with your printer, but those are for inkjet printers and ours is a laser printer.) Multi-packs of boys’ white undershirts are on good back-to-school sales this time of year, so it’s a great time for low-cost experimentation; if a shirt totally fails, use the rest of it to practice painting or try out paint colors, or cut it up and use it as cleaning rags.

I laundered the shirts first, with no fabric softener (fabric softener can make the fabric more resistant to paint). I looked online for simple images, then printed them out and traced over them with a fat black Sharpie marker, to make them easier to see; then I put the paper inside the t-shirt. It doesn’t show through a LOT, but it shows through enough for rough tracing purposes. I printed out a second copy so I also had something to glance over at for reference.

Speaking of paper, put paper inside the shirt even if you’re NOT tracing: otherwise, the paint can seep through the front layer and right through to the back.

I’m using the Tulip fabric paints, basically by random chance (I found a couple in a clearance section, and then later sought out the same brand); I don’t know if they’re the best or not, but I’m happy with them so far. I bought the individual colors I wanted, but they also come in multi-packs like this one if you’re not sure where the creative muse will lead. I buy the “Slick” ones for outlines and lettering: it’s very similar to piping frosting onto a cake. I have the “Soft” ones for filling in the outlines (after the outlines dry): this is the kind of paint you squeeze out onto a piece of tinfoil or something, and then use with a paintbrush. I’ve also used the Slick ones for filling in outlines (using the tip to spread the color around) if what I want is a shiny look, like for eyes or sunglasses. One time I wanted to make a color lighter, so I mixed a Soft color with a Slick white, and that worked just fine and came out looking soft/matte, not slick/shiny.

It helps if you can make yourself feel shruggy about the whole thing. Things will happen: like, when I’m carefully piping an outline, sometimes there will be a sudden bubble of fabric paint, or my hand will shake a little. These things feel like they matter a LOT during the MAKING of the shirt—but once it’s made, and you’re looking at it from a distance, they matter little or none. Some mistakes can be covered over: hey, let’s put a flower here! Some mistakes are only obvious if someone knows what the original picture looked like. I recommend persevering: if it IS ruined, there’s little to lose by continuing, and you’re getting good practice, and maybe it’ll turn out not to be ruined after all.

The paint needs to dry for four hours. We have cats who like to walk on things, so I put cooling racks over the designs. Our cats don’t like the feeling of cooling racks on their paw-pads, and this also reminded other members of the household that they should NOT TOUCH the tempting, tempting paint. A cooling rack can also keep your hand up off the shirt if you accidentally paint it in such a way that you run out of places to rest your hand, not that I know this from doing it multiple times.

I’m getting bored with painting on white shirts, so I’m going to be keeping an EAGLE EYE on end-of-summer clearance sales. I remember in other years seeing solid-colored shirts for a dollar or two. I’m going to check Goodwill, too; a lot of times they have well-worn shirts for $3.00, but sometimes it’s shirts in really good shape for $1.50. I’m especially interested in finding some girl-cut t-shirts for Elizabeth.

Here is something I hate: when someone makes a mocking remark about how people complaining about the summer heat are the same ones who will be complaining about the winter cold—as if that’s a ridiculous, contradictory thing to do. No, I reject that attempted mockery: I feel absolutely non-ridiculous when I complain about BOTH of two different types of discomfort. It is in fact possible and reasonable to dislike being too hot AND to dislike being too cold, and to prefer to be somewhere in the middle where it is not “too” anything.

What is it the mockers think is so clever here? “Oh, you’re TOO COLD when the wind is blowing icily and the snow is halfway up the door? That’s not what you said when it was blisteringly hot and humid out! You irrational idiot! Snork, snork!” “Oh, you felt self-conscious when you turned out to be overdressed for that party? Well, then, you’re never happy, because I remember on another occasion you felt self-conscious when you were UNDERdressed for another event! I mean, make up your mind!” “Are you wishing it would stop raining because it’s been doing it for days and your basement is flooding? That’s not how you felt about rain when we had a drought last summer! Some people are just impossible to please!” “What? You’re too full? Just half an hour ago you were complaining about being hungry! What IS it with you and your irrational changeability?”

This is something I had already noticed, but working with elderly clients has made me notice EVEN HARDER that most pop music is for young people. I think this is part of why the music at a grocery store can be so depressing: hearing those yearning passionate lyrics (“I can be your hero, baby”) while looking around at all of us very ordinary people living very ordinary lives and no one really following us around begging us to please please baby please be theirs…well, it’s a poor fit, and a painful contrast.

I noticed it particularly while driving home from a visit with a client, hearing Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud.” Is my 86-year-old client going to identify with “And darling, I will be loving you until we’re 70”? Will that seem romantic to her? Will she sing it sentimentally to her 88-year-old husband? No. In fact, the song suddenly seems ridiculous. Wow, ALL THE WAY until SEVENTY??? And THEN what? Divorce, I assume, or death. Gosh, when you’re THAT old, does it even matter? This song is for people who can’t even IMAGINE an age like 70, people who were born when some of my clients were ALREADY 70.

I’ve heard that most music is written for young people because young people are the ones who buy music. But this seems like a bit of a CYCLE, doesn’t it? Music is written for young people because they’re the ones spending most of the money, but then pop music appeals less and less to older people, so then older people buy even less music and younger people buy even more, and there’s yet another set of data explaining why we might as well market only to younger people.

Besides, surely we do not market ALL the products for just the group who buys the MOST? Surely there is also money to be reaped from the groups who buy less, even if it’s LESS money. After all, you can still buy Prell and bluing and horehound candy and housedresses and bay rum aftershave and perm kits and handkerchiefs, even though The Young People don’t want to buy them. Let’s EXPLOIT those little pockets of money, marketers! I would love to hear more lyrics like Taylor Swift’s “I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22” or Paramore’s “‘Cause after all this time, I’m still into you”—and I’d love them even more if they were written/sung by, respectively, someone who was older than 23 and someone who had been in a long marriage. I would like to hear more songs by/for people who have CHILDREN or GRANDCHILDREN who are 22.

My friend Surely has pointed out that COUNTRY music is helping to market to this niche. I have actively tried to like country music, but I just DON’T. I like pop music, and some pop-alternative. Maybe the occasional country cross-over: I do love Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise,” though I liked it even better when Nelly got involved. And that’s not the type of lyrics that I’m talking about anyway. How many of us are going around in bikini tops lookin’ for the fast life in some guy’s truck? I need something with more of an “Old Navy crewneck”/minivan feel. “Yeah when I first saw her with that comfy tee on her / She was walking right down that grocery store aisle.”

I promise if someone tries to exploit this market, I will buy the songs. Well, some of the songs. Well, if they’re on SALE; will they be on SALE? *rummages through coin purse for exact change*

Two things:

One is that the new(ish) EBay dispute-resolution system is so rad. Long ago, in the early days of EBay, if you bought something and it arrived in crummy condition, you had to hash it out with the seller—and most EBay sellers do not have training in customer service. You could leave negative feedback if they didn’t do the right thing, but then they could leave YOU completely unfair negative feedback in retaliation. Even if they took a return on the item, many wouldn’t refund shipping either direction, so you could end up losing a chunk of money and not even ending up with an item, even though you were completely blameless. It was a poor system.

NOW, if you contact the seller, it has to be through EBay’s communication system, and EBay keeps a record of the whole conversation. If things don’t go well, you can call EBay in on it: they examine the conversation, see you being incredibly polite and reasonable and showing the issue clearly with photos, and they see the seller not responding, or being unreasonable, and they take your money back from the seller and give it to you, including shipping. It is the best thing ever.

Two is that I had it out with my supervisor about all the schedule changes and extra-shift requests. I said that I was not a flexible employee at this stage of my life, and that I considered this job my second/extra job—a way to fill a few extra hours. I said that after working for the company for a couple months, I could see what a juggling act the scheduling was, and I could understand that employee flexibility would be a huge asset for that. I said I understood if my relative lack of ability to work more/different hours meant she couldn’t use me in the schedule, but hoped she would be able to.

She answered back very gratifyingly, thanking me for telling her and saying she would try not to change my schedule anymore. Since that discussion less than a week ago, she’s asked three times if I can work extra shifts—including one text at 10:30 at night concerning 8:00 the next morning. And this is after I answered the first request by saying no, I already had too many hours this week, and didn’t want any more.

This may not work out. In the meantime, I am getting lots of practice at the valuable life skill of saying no. Pretty soon I might start getting practice at the valuable life skill of saying “Are you KIDDING me??”

I really would hate to give up the job because of this issue. It’s not as if it’s a problem with the WORK. But this may be a problem with The Way the Company Is Run, and that can affect EVERYTHING. I’m fearing that it may be the way ALL such companies are run, but it’s too early to panic about that.