This is week 124 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 861): Turn Around, Bright Eyes

All I know about this day was that I made a pro/con list to help me decide whether to take the job with my old company, and we started watching Frost Nixon, but ended up too tired to finish it, even though it was only 10PM. There are no other notes from the day, so I’m going to assume that Bonnie Tyler came by singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” until I told her to get the fuck off of my lawn.

Monday (Day 862): Guiltily Pushing All In

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that someone was in the house and lay there straining to hear the smallest noise over my paced breathing. It took me a while to piece together that the pillow next to me wasn’t #1GF!, and that #1GF! was probably the person prowling around in the kitchen. I got up to verify because there’s no sense in getting murdered over a hunch. It turned out to be #1GF!, who mouthed, “Sorry” when she saw me squinting at her.

I went back to bed and had a dream that I was in class, and a guy kept kicking my chair to intentionally annoy me. I turned around and broke his finger. He stopped kicking my chair almost immediately. I then had to go to a college function to meet a prospective employer. The businessman looking to hire me clapped me on the back and told me that I was lucky that he smoothed over the finger breaking incident with the dean. I rolled my eyes internally and smiled at him like he had done me a favor.

The morning was a typical blur of feeding and changing.

Once we were both alert, #1GF! and I discussed the job offer. Although it was good money and working in an interesting job with some really smart people that I already knew and liked, there were a couple of problems with it. First, there was risk involved. Despite having a good reputation at my old company, as the new guy, I could be the first laid off the next time the company emphatically announced that there wouldn’t be any layoffs. And mortgage companies don’t look fondly on that sort of thing.

The bigger problem for me was that I always said that if I went back to my old company, it would have to be for more money and a higher level than when I left. With this offer, I only had half the equation. No matter what my paycheck said, it would be difficult to shake the perception that I crawled back to the company. Perception is everything in business, and crawling is a career limiting move.

I felt that if I didn’t get a level boost before I got hired, I’d end up working my ass off behind the scenes again and be striving for a bump that would prove too difficult or time consuming for management to procure. It’s been a common theme for me. I work hard and smart, but I’m easy to ignore because I’m behind the scenes and don’t dedicate a lot of time and energy to self-promotion.

I once met with a mentor to find out why all my work couldn’t bring in a promotion, and I was told that even though I did a great job, my job, and I quote, “just wasn’t sexy enough” to attract the attention of management. If you want a phrase that makes you feel sick about the work you pour yourself into for a large portion of your waking hours, have someone in a tie use the word “sexy” to tell you that a good tie will trump hard work any day of the week, and all your work will never really amount to anything but more work. True or not, it was the most unfortunate conversation of my career.

I had the feeling that if I went back, I’d have to dedicate more energy to self-promotion than hard work to get anywhere, and I wasn’t sure that it was a route that I was willing to travel. Then again, no matter what my objections, the job was good money, and money talks.

About halfway through the day, I had oscillated more times between yes and no than a virgin on prom night. We were spinning over the same issues, and #1GF! finally got tired of talking about it.

“I can’t talk about this anymore,” she said. “We have to decide and get the call over with. It’s eating too much of our lives.”

“It’s a big decision.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You’re just trying to convince yourself that you want the job.”

“It’s a good job.”

“So decide.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think I’m tired of talking about all this.”

“But what do you think?”

“I can’t make this decision for you. It’s your decision.”

“But the answer will drastically change both of our lives.”

“Jon. Please. Just make a decision and call.”

I paused. If it was something I really wanted, the decision would’ve been easy. “I can’t take the job,” I said.

It wasn’t the answer #1GF! wanted. “Staying home is all about writing books for you, but taking care of the baby doesn’t seem to be at the top of your list of things you want to do with your life.”

“It’s at the top of yours?”

“Yes. It is.” #1GF! welled up.

“I’m going to work my ass off and be hard on myself anyway, and I think I can get a book published. We both know that busting my ass for the company isn’t going to do me any good beyond a paycheck. Quitting writing now is like every other project that I’ve left 90% complete. Plus, it’s not what I want to be. If I get really good at the job, in five years, I’ll be a really good corporate investigator. Sure, maybe they’ll relent and throw me a promotion to the level that I think I should be at already, but the more likely scenario is that I’ll work my ass off and end up with a ton more work from someone who’s getting a promotion for getting me to work harder. I’ve done that. I know the system. It’s not what I want. I’m switching industries and I know that I can do this. I just need time.”

We looked at each other. I felt horribly guilty for saying what I really wanted. “I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too. Just call. The sooner we get this behind us the better.”

I called and thanked the H.R. rep for the generous offer, but told her that I had to decline. I didn’t feel spite. I just didn’t think that it was the right move for me at that time. It didn’t feel good to make that call, but it felt good that the decision wasn’t looming overhead any longer. I wished the woman luck in getting someone into the position, and I meant it. She said that she hoped to get a copy of one of my books one day. Once I hung up that phone, my writing had a precisely defined opportunity cost.

As stupid as it sounds, had they offered me the title that I asked for, I’d be working for my old company right now, drinking coffee with old friends and elbow deep in interesting technology. Title has never been important to me if the money was right, but this was a situation where I needed a concession from the company to bring me back. I wanted to walk back in, not crawl. Justifiable or not, they asked me to crawl and just couldn’t do it.

It’s like that girlfriend you broke up with years ago. You see her a few years later and she’s lost a few pounds and gotten her teeth whitened, but before you take her home, remember that there was probably a good reason that you broke up with her the first time. Before you go back, you should know what those reasons are and figure out if you’ll get enough of what you need to start over. If you won’t, you’re starting off down the same dead end street, only to reacquaint yourself with lessons that you’ve already learned.

I set a lot of zeroes to the wind to follow a dream, and I was doing it a second time. If you ever feel panic that you’re running out of years, you know just how short it is. It’s too, too short. The further you get into it, the less money seems to fit as the answer. Sometimes, you have to do what’s right for you.

At some point, you’re going to have to bet on yourself even when it seems stupid. How big you make that bet is up to you. On this one, I had to push all in. I either have the cards or I don’t. Someday, I’ll look back on this time and think that it was either the greatest move I’ve made, or really, really dumb. No matter how it turns out, the big bets are the things that you remember, not the exact winnings.

We started roasting a chicken, and an appraiser came by in the afternoon to appraise our house for a refinance. We showed him all the improvements we’ve made in the last couple of years, and he spent a fair amount of the visit on his hands and knees examining the bathroom tile. He really seemed to like it, which was cool, but in a very strange way.

Once he left, we had roast chicken and vegetables. I tried to make chicken soup with the leftover carcass, but it came out terribly. The carcass is what I get rid of after I make chicken soup. I dumped the whole pot of bony chicken water down the drain.

After dinner, we walked up and down the hall with the baby to get her to fall asleep. She wasn’t crying as much as usual thanks to the colic medicine, but she was having a hard time falling asleep.

Tuesday (Day 863): Death To Telemarketers

I got up, showered, and started baby care. Before I knew it, it was noon. I cooked banana bread for #1GF!, and I thought it came out like garbage. #1GF! thought it was great. I can’t stand bananas, so I am probably a poor judge of banana related foodstuff.

#1GF! went out to take her mother to an appointment and I stayed home to take care of the baby. The baby fell asleep for a bit and I did some agent research. She woke up, I fed her, and then she smiled and laughed for a couple of hours before falling back to sleep. I sat at my desk and went back to looking up literary agents. Ten minutes later, the phone woke the baby up. I was expecting hours of screaming, but she went back to sleep fairly quickly and I returned to my research. It seemed as if the baby’s colic medicine had completely changed the way she was during the day. Yes, it seemed that way.

The phone rang again, and the baby woke up in an inconsolable fit. I walked her up and down the hall for a couple of hours to calm her down. #1GF! might’ve been right about not having the time to write when taking care of a baby. Maybe…if I had been doing any actual writing.

When #1GF! got home, she took the baby, who continued bawling for another couple of hours. It was a four hour scream fest even with the use of the colic medicine. She finally calmed down, but wouldn’t go to sleep. #1GF! played with her for a while, and I went back to looking up literary agents.

I took the baby back at 8PM, and put her to bed awake at 9PM. I felt bad. I didn’t know if we should stay with her until she fell asleep or put her down and let her fall asleep on her own. She fell asleep almost immediately, so I didn’t have to worry too much about it.

We watched Shark Tank and then Dragon’s Den, which are identical shows from opposite sides of the pond, which deal with people trying to sell their inventions to investors. I’m fascinated by people who can bring their ideas to market because most of my ideas go no further than the pile of scrap paper on my desk.

Wednesday (Day 864): Damn You, Software. Delete The Whole Bang

I was up at 5AM, but was waved off of the baby care by #1GF!. I lay in bed until 6:30AM. I drifted a little, but I’d wake up every time the baby would make a sound. I finally realized that laying in bed wasn’t doing me any good, and got up to have some breakfast while the baby fed.

I took the baby and sent #1GF! to bed for a couple of hours. I finished Approximately Heaven, but I have no idea how it could’ve been filed under humorous fiction. It was a drama, not a comedy. And it had no acknowledgments, which I found very strange for a debut novel.

I then finished the Idiot’s Guide To Getting Published. I didn’t like the long odds of getting published that it presented, but I did like that it congratulated authors who finally find their niche and get a book to market. It seemed like something to strive for. Let me say that again: I thought that being congratulated by a book was something to strive for. Man, that sounds pathetic.

#1GF! got up, and I hopped into the shower. Once I got out, I took over the baby care so that #1GF! could shower. By the time we were ready to tackle the day, the baby had fallen asleep.

I sat at my desk to work on something writing related. I looked up agent info, and then thought that it would be a good idea to either start my next book or get my blog caught up. I stared blankly at my desktop, without a single idea that would turn those good intentions into action. I stood up, walked down the hall, and thought of a thousand other things to write. I ran back to my desk, and as soon as my ass hit my chair, my ideas vanished. No one said that getting back to the writing was going to be easy.

The pages of my notebook were curling from the sheer volume of ink weighing down its pages over the last few weeks, so I set up a speech to text application with the idea that I would transcribe all the notes by voice rather than wearing my fingertips to bloody nubs on my keyboard. I was taking the first step to getting the Life of Riley back on track.

I put on the “Judy the Time-Life operator” headphones and took the bang out for a test run. The first thing that I noticed was that every time I said “thing”, the application typed “bang”. This happened over and over, no matter how I pre-cise-ly I e-nun-ci-a-ted. I finally laughed and said, “Oh my lord,” which it interpreted as “praise the lord,” which made me laugh even more.

The last things that it transcribed were “Damn you, software. What are you doing? Stop that.” I suspected that the software should be introduced to my robot. I took off the microphone and went into the living room to hang out with a human who often couldn’t understand my mumbling either.

A radio station had been running a contest where they would play rapid-fire snippets of songs, and if someone guessed all five, they won $1000. If they didn’t win, $100 was added to the prize money until someone guessed. Guesses were taken once an hour.

After a couple of weeks of listening on the hour, we heard someone finally guess the song scramble. The last song people had been missing turned out to be a Stevie Wonder song, and I felt a small amount of shame. The winner walked away with $8300.

I have no idea why #1GF! and I were so excited about it. Maybe it was because listening along was like rooting for a group. This is probably why people watch football and say “we won” even though the closest they came to participating was turning the television. Either that or the number of hours of baby scream time that we’ve logged has severely lowered the bar on what impresses us.

The baby woke up at about 3PM, so we all went out for a drive. I just wanted to go out because #1GF! and I didn’t seem to be on the same page, or in the same room, or in the same state of consciousness much during the week.

The air was cold and the leaves were starting to turn, but they hadn’t turned enough to be pretty. Mostly, they just made the world look like it was decaying.

We got some coffee and then went to a department store so that #1GF! could do some shopping. I opted to stay in the car with the baby. Eventually, the baby had a freakout, and I changed her to calm her down. In the process, I somehow managed to get crap on the outside of the dirty diaper, so I had to hold it until I could find somewhere to throw it away.

The baby stayed calm for a short time, but she started screaming again just as #1GF! returned. We headed for home with me still holding the diaper. I was going to throw the diaper in the store’s trash can when we drove by, but there were no trash cans. I was stuck holding a dirty diaper in one hand because there was no place else to put it.

We drove home for thirty minutes with the baby screaming loud enough that I thought that she would eventually split her car seat in half. We realized that she was probably hungry, and felt bad that we had kept her out so long. I crammed my free arm backward over the seat to hold her little hands. In my other hand, I was still pinching that dirty diaper between my fingers. The baby went through spurts of full-volume screaming as I tried to simultaneously distract her and keep that diaper from getting baby poo on the floor, dash, or center console. You don’t know how low you can really go until one of your main roles is acting as a shock absorber for a diaper. I was sure that we were going to hit a huge pothole and I was going to end up with a dislocated shoulder and crap in my lap. Or on the ceiling. Or in my hair. Luckily, no such pothole materialized.

#1GF! fed the baby when we got home, but the baby cried for a little while afterward anyway. I made fettuccine alfredo, and in the process, spilled a half cup of Parmesan all over the kitchen floor. Cleaning cheese from the cracks in your wood floor is not something you want to be doing when you’re cooking something that needs to be stirred constantly. I cleaned up the cheese with a vacuum, and realized that we had no extra vacuum bags.

I called to #1GF!. “Do we have vacuum bags? You can’t leave cheese in a vacuum bag, and that thing is full of cheese. We have no vacuum bags? We do? We don’t? Do we?”

“Slow down,” said #1GF! calmly.

“Don’t you want to eat?”

“Yes, but…” She waved toward the mess that was following me like a wake.

I stopped. “I don’t know why I’m rushing. I need to slow down. I just feel like I’m under the gun.” I then turned and threw a handful of salt, not into the pasta water, but into the alfredo. “Oh, COME ON NOW!” I said to the pan of slowly bubbling sauce. I grabbed a spoon and fished out as much of the salt as I could before it dissolved. I wasn’t entirely successful, but #1GF! was nice enough not to say anything about it.

After dinner, I wondered if I could get on TV as some sort of beard expert. #1GF! and I laughed about me sitting on the news in a suit going over the important points of beard growing during one of the news’s many fluff segments.

We watched I Love Lucy, and the end of The Blues Brothers, and I forgot how funny both were. We saw Lucy’s chocolate episode, which was one of #1GF!’s favorites. #1GF! couldn’t understand how I could quote The Blues Brothers after so many years, so I told her that I was on a mission from gahd. I don’t think she got it. She’s going to turn to me after reading this line and ask me to explain it.

Thursday (Day 865): Special Enlimpinators & Single Serving Comas

I was up around 5AM so that #1GF! could take her mother to an appointment. I was going to back to sleep for an hour once the baby was asleep, but wouldn’t waste the time. I got up and showered. “It’s 6AM, and we’re both showered,” I said, amazed. “It’s like we’re normal again.”

#1GF! was out the door by 6:30AM and it was still dark out. I sat at the counter eating a bowl of cereal. The baby was still asleep when I finished, so I emptied the dishwasher, and wasted an hour sitting in front of the TV. The baby kept waking up and falling back to sleep, so I had to keep checking on her. All I was really doing was waiting to feed her.

While I was surfing through the sea of crappy morning television, I saw a commercial for an asthma medicine called Advair. The first warning presented during the commercial was that this particular asthma medicine may increase the risk of asthma related death. What. The. Fuck. If you increase the risk of dying from the problem you’re trying to solve, how can that be sold as fucking medicine? Really, how does something like that make it past the F.D.A.? What’s next? Headache medicine that increases the risk of brain hemorrhage? Erectile dysfunction medication that includes special enlimpinators?

At 9:30AM, I gave up and found myself watching The Golden Girls. Yea, you read that right. If The Golden Girls is the only available source of entertainment, it’s time to move on. It had been four and a half hours since the baby had eaten, and she rarely went more than three hours without food. (I used to do something like this in TPS reports that I wasn’t sure people were actually reading. If you find this line, leave a comment with the sound that your favorite farm animal makes. If there’s enough comments, it should end up looking really confusing to a casual reader. Thanks for playing along.) Although I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, I woke her up. It was for the baby’s well-being, not to detour a life that was on the verge of becoming tolerant of The Golden Girls.

I fed the baby, and when I changed her, I found poop on her shirt. I couldn’t figure out how long it had been there, so I decided to chuck the clothes in the wash and give the baby a bath. I had never given the baby a bath by myself, but there was no way that I was going to let a brand new baby sit around with an unknown quantity of poop on her person. I took a step away from the baby, said “Okay”, and then stepped back to her. I did this several times as I worked out the logistics of getting the bath ready. The baby just stared at me.

I eventually got everything set up, and gave the baby a squirmy bath. It was a lot harder than I expected with only one set of new parent hands to both wash the baby and keep her from twisting herself into odd contortions.

I dressed her, cleaned up the bath supplies, and picked up around the house. I quickly learned that having one arm wrapped around a baby severely limits the speed of any activity.

By 10:30AM, the baby was cleaned, fed, and burped, and drifting off to sleep in her swing without incident. I looked down at her laying there with her thumb in her mouth and thought, “I love that kid.” I smiled to myself. Once she was asleep, I made a cup of tea, took out the garbage, and turned on the PC. I was trying to work out the outline of my next book in my head.

I checked my mail, and listened to an ancient demo that a friend had sent to me of a band that I was briefly a part of when I was in my twenties. I had one ear in headphones, and the other to a baby monitor. I had my past in one ear, and my future in the other. In between them, I was trying to work out the present.

#1GF! returned in the afternoon and brought her mother for a visit. I made the two of them lunch, fed the baby, and put all of them down for a nap. I sat down at my PC and organized my agent submissions into a spreadsheet to help figure out which queries were still outstanding. Very few were. I then rewrote my query letter to see if I could make it more effective. It’s hard to tell where you’re going wrong without feedback. You don’t know if your query letter is bad, your manuscript is bad, or if you’re simply sending the perfectly good queries to the wrong people.

#1GF! and her mother left in the late afternoon, and the baby had a fit soon after. I got her to fall asleep at 8PM. It was a four hour freakout. I sat in front of the TV and watched I Love Lucy again because I didn’t have the energy for anything else. I grabbed some dinner when #1GF! got home at 9PM, and we found ourselves watching I Love Lucy together. Although, it had been a long day, and neither of us were really watching it. It was simply background noise echoing through our individual comas.

Friday (Day 866): I’m A Cheap Cigar, I’m A Way Of Life…

I got up bleary and tried to take the baby from #1GF! so that she could go back to bed. She wasn’t having it. We compromised and everyone would go back to bed. #1GF! slept for an hour, and I stayed awake, listening to the baby.

It was noon before the cycle of eating and sleeping began to normalize. I showed #1GF! my query letter rewrite, and looked up more agents.

I let #1GF! hear one of the songs from the demo that I made with a band when I was barely scraping my teen years off of my oxblood Doc Martins. She sat there with the headphones on, listening to “TJS-510″…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“I feel like such an old lady,” #1GF! said. “I can’t understand a word he’s saying.”

“He’s saying ‘TJS-510′,” I told her.

“Why?”

“That’s the license plate. It’s about a car accident.”

As if perfectly timed, my favorite scream in the song broke in. Even though the demo is naive, that scream has always been the best moment in the song for me. #1GF! pulled the headphones away from her ears. “Oh, boy. I feel like I’m nine-hundred.” She handed the headphones back to me. “I like the music…” she offered as a consolation prize to counterbalance her eyes which said otherwise. I guess with all the screaming we hear all day, I didn’t think that the scream was so bad. I took the headphones back with a grin.

I jumped in the shower and made a quick lunch, and #1GF! did the same. My parents came over and we had tea and ate cookies while we waited for the baby to wake up. The conversation seemed oddly slow for a while. The baby eventually woke up, and her grandfather fed her. I tried to get the baby to laugh by jumping around, and it worked as predicted.

Once the baby went back to sleep, my parents headed out. I made enchiladas and #1GF! and I sat in front of the TV. #1GF! fell asleep, and I finished watching Frost Nixon, leaving me as the sole survivor. For being about an interview, the movie wasn’t that bad.

Saturday (Day 867): Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti

I got up, showered, and cleaned the house because we were having one of #1GF!’s coworkers over in the afternoon. Despite having regular conversations with the woman over a number of years at my old company, I had never met her in person. That’s what happens when you’re back office in a large corporation that has more buildings than most companies have floors.

I was supposed to make cookies, but the baby was sleeping and the kitchen was already clean. I set out an assortment of whatever sweets we had on hand. The couple brought over cranberry pistachio biscotti, which blew away any cookie that I would’ve made anyway. They stayed for a few hours and left just as the baby had a minor nutty. I’m not saying that caused the departure, but screaming generally isn’t one of those things that makes people want to hang out.

#1GF! fed the baby, and put her to bed by 6PM. I stupidly said, “Wow. It looks like we’re going to eat dinner and maybe even watch a movie tonight.” Once the food hit the plates, the baby burst out crying once again. The dinner was cold and clotted by the time we got her to sleep two hours later.

I quickly checked my e-mail, and threw Yes Man into the DVD player. To pile stupid on top of asinine, I accidentally woke up the baby because I wanted to make sure that she was breathing. What? She didn’t look like she was. She definitely was, and she was pretty vocal about just how little she appreciated the interruption from her paranoid father.

What I Learned

• There has finally been a situation where I cared about title more than money.
• I know the exact opportunity cost of my writing.
• Speech to text applications are pretty cool, but aren’t necessarily time savers.
• Check to see if you have extra vacuum bags before you vacuum up a mess of grated cheese.
• Some substances can increase the risk of killing someone with the problem that they’re trying to solve, and they can still be considered medicine.
• I can give a baby a bath on my own.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

Posted in Life of Riley