What is it about the brain that allows us to do things that actively run counter our best interests? I know I am not alone in this. But lately it feels like everywhere I turn, I run into an obstacle. And that obstacle is me.
I keep waking up with headaches and jaw pain. This is, I am pretty sure, because I clench my teeth while I sleep. Luckily, I have a tool to prevent this from happening! An expensive tool, custom made for me at the dentist. For awhile it was packed away in a box, but it’s been on my nightstand for several weeks now. So why am I not using it??????
My feet hurt if I don’t wear shoes. This is just a fact. And yet sometimes I will simply… not put on my shoes! Or sometimes, I don’t want to wear shoes when other people are in the house, because I don’t want to explain to them that it’s okay for ME to wear shoes, but not for them. When probably they would be fine with it. Nope. Instead, I walk around in my socks and then my feet ache.
Exercise is essential for my mental health. I enjoy tiring my muscles out with strength training! I love being outside in the fresh air! I love the ache and exhaustion after I’ve worked hard. And yet I have not been exercising. Some of this is because my schedule is all over the place. But there are definitely some days where I could fit it in if I tried, and I talk myself out of it.
Alone time is essential for my mental health. As an introvert, I NEED time alone to recharge my batteries. And yet I have been going to parties and volunteering at events with lots of people and meeting friends for coffee and doing things at Carla’s school and hosting my husband’s family for Thanksgiving. It’s all good stuff, it’s all stuff I want to do. But it doesn’t have to happen all at once. I can postpone things! I can even say no! WHY AM I DOING THIS TO MYSELF?
If I don’t get immediate feedback, I expect the worst. Why is this? There is no reason for this! It’s not as though I usually get negative feedback, which might justify an expectation of negative feedback. No! I typically get positive feedback! And yet if I don’t hear anything, I worry and fret and angst and wonder what I can do to pre-emptively “fix” whatever it is I’ve done. WHY? I am wasting so much time and energy on pointless anxiety!
I know I’m fortunate in that none of these things are truly debilitating or dangerous. There are so many worse ways I could be acting against my best interests. But I really wish I knew how to get out of my own way.
Do you ever stand in your own way?
P.S. I always think the song “My Own Worst Enemy” is by Blink 182, but it’s by Lit.
I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here.
It’s Friday! We are chugging right along through November. Here are five things I’m thinking about today.
Falling Back: Changing the clocks has messed me up. I hate it so much. I mean, I guess I don’t mind driving to school in the daylight again. But give it a few weeks and we’ll be back to driving in the darkness. In the meantime, I am going to bed at a NEW normal time and waking up at the OLD normal time, which means I am getting less sleep than I was before. Plus I am still waking up each morning at three or four, full of existential dread. GOOD TIMES. My poor kid is so far on the exact same page. Why could she not have inherited her father’s ability to sleep anytime, anywhere? We are both wandering around, exhausted and cranky. She keeps draping herself over furniture and moaning about how tiiiiiiirrrrred she is. I cannot stop yawning. People keep talking about how maybe this will be the last year of Daylight Savings Time! And I keep thinking, yeah, sure, whatever. But I also think it’s kind of amazing that we all collectively (except Arizona and Hawaii, I think?) agreed to just move everything back or forth an hour twice a year. That’s BONKERS. I feel like there’s no agreement on ANYTHING AT ALL, and yet we all do this???? No thank you. I would like to abstain.
Flu Shot: I finally got my flu shot. I was at the pharmacy and thought to ask if they administer flu shots; this is a newish-to-me pharmacy, and I’d always gotten my flu shot at Walgreens. We no longer live within walking distance of a Walgreens, so I’ve been putting off the flu shot until I had a reason to be near one. Anyway, I realize this is a very long and circuitous way to the point that yes, the current pharmacy DOES offer flu shots. The pharmacist came around the counter which was the first difference between it and Walgreens; there, you wait until the pharmacist calls you back, and you go into a little room with a door. This pharmacist was a cheery woman who seemed impossibly young. She was much friendlier than the old pharmacist, whose entire body seemed weighted down with regret and drudgery. And then she gave me the shot right there in the middle of the pharmacy! There was another client, sitting behind me, while I stood at the checkout counter. It was a tiny bit alarming. She was very sweet, but then asked me what I did for work. I told her I work from home and she gasped and said, “Well why are you even getting a flu shot?!” That threw me, I’ll admit. My answer in the moment was that I have a young child, but also… shouldn’t everyone get a flu shot? You can get the flu at the grocery store. She then chatted with me for a few minutes about having kids (she has a baby). It was a very pleasant interaction but also kind of weird.
Flannel Time: We have reached the flannel sheets portion of the year. I don’t normally love flannel sheets, because I sleep hot. But our regular sheets are feeling a little chilly lately. I’m a little apprehensive though because our house heats very unevenly. The house will get colder and colder until you’re shivering even under the covers – I have been wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt to bed, when I much prefer a T-shirt – and then the furnace will decide it’s time to take action and it will WHOOSH to life and churn out an intense fog of heat so that you’re kicking off the covers and stripping off layers – and then it will turn off, exhausted by its efforts, and the cycle begins again. Will flannel sheets be pleasant or unbearable? Time will tell.
Forwarding: We continue to receive mail for the previous owners. It’s not quite at the level it was – at first, we got boxes and season tickets to sports games and multiple cases of wine in addition to catalogs and letters and paychecks and things. But we still get some mail. We have been here since September 1. Is it time to start writing “return to sender” on the mail we receive? Obviously the nice thing to do is to keep holding the mail for the previous owners, and texting them occasionally, and asking them what they’d like us to do with it. (They always come to pick it up, and have ignored my suggestion that we could drop it at their new house.) I keep thinking about how mortified I was to learn, from the people who bought our old house, that they’d been receiving mail for us. My husband had been so diligent about setting up mail forwarding and systematically going through all of our bills and regular mailings to make sure our address was changed. And yet some things slipped past the gate. I also keep thinking about how, at our old house, we continued to get mail for the previous owners even though we’d lived there for twelve years. Not a lot of mail, but one or two pieces a year even at the end. Is mail forwarding really that tough? Are we all really that unclear about ALL the places that have our address?
Fear of Friendliness: I saw one of our new neighbors outside and said hello and asked if she worked from home. When she said she was home most days, I said I was too and would she want to get a coffee sometime? She said sure. But now that I’ve made the overture, I don’t know what to do! Do I… have her over for coffee? I don’t actually know how to make coffee (although my husband could probably teach me). And if she comes for coffee, do I need to offer food as well? What do people eat? Do I live on this planet because I don’t feel like it. Do I suggest going for a walk? What if we have nothing to talk about? What’s a normal thing for people to do when they are trying to get to know other people? While I really, truly would love to get to know my new neighbors, I am kind of berating myself for suggesting anything. I know it wasn’t, like, set in stone or anything, and we could probably just never follow up. But… I want to follow up. Even if I also vehemently do NOT want to follow up.
That’s it for today, Internet. What are you thinking about on this fall Friday?
I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here.
One of the differences in my personality vs my husband’s is that I expect to figure things out as I go, and he prefers to know things in advance. Say we are going to a concert in the park. He will go online, map out the directions, look at parking. He will probably visit the park website to see if there is any information about parking. This is all fine and good and useful. I, on the other hand, would probably plug the park address into my navigator on the way to the concert and figure out parking when I get there. I trust that most things will be easy enough to figure out as you go along, and I think I’ve mainly been right about that. This is not to say that my husband’s methodology is wrong – and it has plenty of benefits. It’s just different.
When it was time to wire our down payment to the title company, I figured it would be pretty intuitive. Just go to the bank with the wiring instructions, and the money would be wired. Easy peasy lemon squeeze. My reasoning is that banks deal with this kind of thing all the time. Sending a wire may be an unusual occurrence for us, but this is something banks do all the time. There must be systems in place.
My husband was not willing to leave it at that and had me ask the title company agent what we should do. (He was in the hospital, so I was left to this task.) The title company agent told me that we needed to go in a day or two early, to make sure the money was wired on the date of closing, but that any teller should be able to make the wire transfer. This satisfied me, and since I was the one doing the actual wire transfer, I felt good about it.
This, my friends, is what is known as “foreshadowing.”
But. If a blog is good for anything, it is for sharing one’s most humiliating moments publicly and in perpetuity.
Two days before our closing, I went to the bank.
I need to pause for a moment and describe the bank to you. You walk in the door and are immediately greeted by a small welcome desk. I have been a patron at this bank for more than a decade and I don’t think I have ever seen a human at the welcome desk, but it is there just in case. The welcome desk is positioned in roughly the center of the bank. To the left are offices; to the right is a big upside-down-L-shaped bank of counters behind which the tellers stand. There are spaces for at least eight tellers; on this day there were two tellers in attendance which is neither here nor there but between that and the welcome desk, I’m guessing this branch may have staffing issues. In front of the tellers is a big open space for patrons to wait in a cordoned off multi-server queue. There is also a large desk in this area that has pens, deposit slips, and advertisements for various services the bank offers; this desk does not feature prominently in the story to follow, but I included it in the drawing so I feel like I need to describe it to you. I have included a rendering of the interior of the bank for your reference. It is not to scale.
Two days before the closing on our new house, I went to the bank. I stood in line to wait for a teller. One teller was, I think, counting money using a very loud machine. Thpthpthpthpthpthpthp went the bills as the machine organized them into neat stacks. The only other teller was helping a very elderly man who had visible hearing aids. He was having trouble communicating with the teller and kept asking her what she’d said. I felt bad for this poor guy who could hardly hear, especially with all the noise of the money counting machine, which would fall silent and then comically renew its thpthpthp efforts every time the teller began to speak.
When I’d arrived, it was just me and one other person. But as I waited for the elderly man ahead of me to finish his halting interaction with the teller, people filed in behind me. The second teller finished counting money and took her position at the drive through window. The elderly man finished his business and I was next.
I explained to the teller that I needed to wire money for a down payment on a house.
“Oh,” she said, “mumble mumble something.”
Aha. So it wasn’t that the elderly man was hard of hearing, it was that the teller did not know how to project her voice through the plexiglass window and across the counter. Or perhaps a lethal combination of both.
I asked her to repeat herself.
“I can’t help you with that,” she said, more loudly, and in that forced-calm way that makes it seem like it’s my fault for not being able to hear her. “You need to meet with a banker.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’d like to meet with a banker then.”
“You have to go sign in on the whiteboard,” she said.
“The whiteboard?”
She motioned toward the front of the bank. “The whiteboard. Right when you come in. At the front, by the door.”
Okay. I thanked her and went back to the front of the store and looked for the whiteboard.
Let’s all take a minute and ask ourselves what a whiteboard might look like. This is what I pictured:
I could not find a whiteboard near the front of the bank. I looked around, scanning the walls, scanning the welcome desk.
“Right there,” the teller called. She had been watching me and was now directing me across the heads of many people waiting for her.
I looked. I turned in a circle, panic building as I continued to not see a whiteboard. Or anything resembling a whiteboard. Or even a clipboard or a sign up sheet or a notepad. The teller pointed, which was, ironically, pointless, because she was all the way across the room. “Right there! Right in front of you! The whiteboard!”
Internet, I cannot even describe to you my bafflement. There was a desk and NOTHING ON IT. Where was this whiteboard that she could see and I could not? It was not on the desk, it was not on the floor. I was sure – SURE – that the teller thought it was there, because it was normally there, but maybe no one had put it out yet that morning? I could feel the eyes of all the people in the line, waiting for their banking needs to be addressed by this lone teller or perhaps waiting to find out how long we could keep up this hilarious prank.
“RIGHT THERE,” the teller yelled across the bank. Finally, in a fit of descriptive genius she said, “Leaning against the wall!”
I looked to my left. Against the wall indeed something leaned. Was it a whiteboard? Apparently, in this teller’s mind, it was. I will let you be the judge:
I will share my opinion: This is not a whiteboard. This is a fucking A-frame sign that my eyes dismissed as an advertisement.
The sign was leaning against the wall just to the left of the door. Leaning, out of eyeline, as though it had been closed up for the day. It was not standing on top of the welcome desk, which would not have transformed it into a whiteboard, but would possibly have caught my eye.
I have added an X to the diagram of the bank, indicating the location of the not-a-whiteboard:
“This?” I asked, gesturing to the sign that I had not even acknowledged because it bore so tenuous a relationship to the word “whiteboard” in my mind, my face by now aflame and my pulse rapid in my throat. The horde of bank patrons looked on as the teller said, in tones of my-god-I-thought-I’d-have-to-hit-you-over-the-head-with-it, “Yes.”
I like to think that I would have eventually noticed and examined the sign, had I not been so completely befuddled by the spotlight of the teller’s attention. But perhaps I really am that dumb; who’s to say.
“Oh I see,” I said, not sure whether I was speaking to her or the other patrons or myself, “I just scan it and then sign in that way?”
A woman materialized behind the welcome desk. She would have been much more welcome, to me at least, a few moments prior to this little drama.
“Hi,” she said smoothly. “If you just scan the QR code, you’ll be able to sign in. You’ll get a few questions and I can walk you through how to answer them.”
I was so flustered I could hardly see. My hands were trembling under the pressure of all those eyes. But I managed to open my camera and scan the QR code, like the tech-savvy millennial I pretend to be.
“It should pre-load a number in your text messages, and you just hit send,” the woman directed, her voice low and soothing as though I might at any moment startle and take flight or maybe bare my teeth at her and growl. She was there to avert another scene as much as she was to help.
I dutifully sent the text; I was so discombobulated that I honestly don’t know if I could have figured out what to do by myself.
I understand and value technology. I do. But just because a technological tool may make simplify or improve workflow for the staff of a company doesn’t mean it is useful or workable for its customers. If I hadn’t been so publicly floundering, I don’t know that I would have gotten any help. I might still be there, in that bank, looking for an invisible whiteboard.
“You’ll get a text,” the woman explained, “and you just need to answer ‘yes.'”
A few long seconds passed and I got a reply text with some ridiculously simple question, like “Do you have an appointment today? 1. Yes 2. No” and the woman, reading over my shoulder said, “Now, type in a 2 and hit send.” She walked me through the remaining questions, all equally basic – “What are you here to do? 1. Deposit 2. Set up account 3. Withdrawal 4. Other” and “What is your name?” and “Do you have an account here?” etc. I could feel the eyes of the remaining patrons on me, curious to learn just how much help I really needed or possibly feeling grateful they were safely on the other side of the crowd control stanchions and far away from this check-in process.
Finally, I reached the end of the text questions – the “sign in process” – and I got a text that said, “Thank you! A banker will be with you shortly!”
That’s when the calming woman said, “Great! Thank you for signing in. I can help you right now.”
Picture me blinking rapidly as though something had short-circuited in my brain.
I followed her back to her office. We sat down. I explained to her why I was there: we would be closing in two days, my title company advised me to come and set up the wire in advance.
“Oh, we can’t pre-schedule a wire transfer,” she said.
I stared at her. “But… we haven’t signed closing documents yet. I don’t want to wire the money until the date of closing.”
She nodded. “I understand. But the wire transfer occurs the same day we schedule it.” She left her office briefly to double check that this was true with a colleague.
When she returned, she smiled at me pityingly.
“You’ll have to come back in two days,” she said. “I’ll make an appointment for you, so you don’t have to go through that again.”
