Crossroads are always befuddling

It seems like the new year is upon us and we can not avoid making some life changing decisions this year; they have been put off long enough. The short version is: save money to buy a house versus save money to go to graduate school, both complicated by health care and employment questions. As the old saying goes, as a door closes a window opens, but who really wants to be the one to close that door themselves?

Here's the breakdown of the options:

 (a) Buy a House - As all the newspapers, radio, and television broadcasts are apt to remind you, now is a great time to buy a house if you can afford to as prices are at record lows, interest rates are at record lows, and the selection is still pretty good to get into a good neighborhood. Everything says that now is the time to move, but realistically the soonest that will happen for us is in about 1-2 years since we need to save roughly $500 a month to afford a down payment. It is doable, although it will not be all that easy. It will mean bringing lunch to work daily for a year for both of us, not going out to eat - which we already rarely do, taking the bus/cycling/walking as many places as possible, and not incurring any large bills along the way. We've already begun to build our credit through the socially deplorable credit card system (that is worth a whole other entry about the decrepitude of credit cards) and through paying down my student loans. While setting a decent financial standing for ourselves is a good start, it will still be a stretch to get into the areas that we'd want to buy in, especially considering that we are trying to avoid buying a second car. In order to avoid that additional purchase, we would need to move within the Seattle metropolitan area that is readily connected by transit and light rail to the downtown core. It's better for our health and pocket book to live somewhere that is not car dependent.

(b) Go to Graduate School - This is not necessarily in conflict with buying a house, but that is very dependent on where I can find a program that is a good fit. The public health progam at the University of Washington will definately be applied to, but the main problem there is that the faculty does not focus on what I would like to focus on, meaning that while I could go through the program and graduate and get into the field I long for, my field of expertise would be different than what I'm currently most interested in. Graduate School, like all post-secondary education, is an innately selfish thing to do - it is all about you. The programs that interest me most are on the otherside of the country, as the west only has a handful of accredited programs. This would mean a complete change in our lives that I'm not entirely sure we want to do. I've always said that the Seattle area is one area that if you don't leave when you are young you will never leave, and it feels like we are getting enough roots down here that moving will be more difficult than it would have been a few years ago. It is not impossible, but with all of my doctors here, most of our family here, and the hubby finally beginning to get some work experience, it doesn't feel like a good time to leave. Graduate school is something that I feel I must do, but the timing of it is less certain.

(c) Health Considerations - The past year we have been lucky in that I've been pretty healthy, except when it comes to side effects from the medication I was one. Now that that has been stopped, we get to choose between the other possible options - all with worse side effects, or not going on any and taking the chance of a relapse. Plus there is the whole family planning issue, as none of the approved medications are safe for pregnancy and require washout periods for the medication to leave your system before even starting. In addition, none of the other possible medications are approved by my insurance, meaning that we'd be paying much higher monthly just to received the meds. Health maintenance is expensive once you have a "pre-existing condition;" as a result I need to maintain health coverage through an employer while going to grad school because it will be near impossible for me to afford to self-insure for the two years it would take to get the degree. Most jobs grant insurance benefits at 30 hours a week. Being a full time student while working 30 hours a week sounds really taxing from my current perspective. The hubby is currently self-insured, meaning we also have to pay for his health coverage unless he gets a good full-time job with benefits. It is situations like this that make me long for nationalized health care. The stress of how we can manage to keep ourselves covered is enough to make us not want to pursue our passions.

(d) Career Considerations - As has probably become clear, neither the hubby or I are currently in the fields we would ultimately like to build a career in. We'd like to do something that is both creative and intellectually fulfilling; I'd like to travel more and feel like I'm working for a higher mission than just making profit. I can't pursue my interests without going back to school. He can't pursue his without drastically retooling his skills as the field of journalism has changed dramatically since he graduated from college.  We both can't leave our current situations at once, as we need an income to survive on. I'd have to say that the vast majority of people we know from our graduating classes are either unemployed or under-employed due to the current economic mess.  That does not inspire us to cut all safety nets of our current jobs to pursue a career, and yet we are both frustrated by our situations. 

Basically, one of these issues is going to have to be decided upon in the next few weeks in order to move forward. It just feels like we are stuck in a holding pattern, like our choices are few, which is not really the case. Maybe I'm just overthinking everything again. It makes me anxious to contemplate stepping out of my safe job in my safe community to do something selfish like go to school. I should be lucky that I am even in the position to make such decisions, especially as a woman in a first world country.  If only there was a way to have the path elucidated without such animosity and uncertainty - makes me feel like a wuss sometimes.

Time to Get Professional

After a thorough review of our photo inventory, it has been discovered that I don't have any professional demenour photos of myself. In otherwords, I'm always making a goofy face, holding the rabbit, or am with someone else. The only ones that are mildly passable in this regard are from the wedding, and I'm not going to use a wedding photo for a professional identifier. This simply will not do, especially if I plan on gearing up to promote myself. It may stem from lifelong self-image issues, but as the hubby loves to tell me, I have a pretty bad fake smile - or should I say forced smile. I don't like showing my teeth as it feels a bit too chimp like.

Proof that I never make normal faces, even for my husband

I've decided that I need more mental stimulization, which is one of the motivating factors of this blog, so I'm yet again scanning through available jobs of interest to see what kind of further training I would need to obtain one of them. So far the answer seems pretty self explanitory: masters in public health or social work. It is something that I have suspected and now known  for a few months now, but it still leaves me floundering a bit when I come to that conclusion. If only if didn't cost so much time and money to achieve. School was always easy and usually energizing for me, and now that I've been away for 5 years to the day tomorrow, it seems difficult to get the wheels turning again. At times I wish I had never stopped, even though I understand and still agree with the reasons. Several friends have recently graduated from graduate school with their advanced degrees and I can't help but feel a twinge of envy. 

Back in the summer of 2006 I was in Switzerland with the future hubby's family. We were up in the Alps hiking down from the Schilthorn (the famous revolving restaurant of James Bond movie fame) when we stopped at a cliff side meadow for a short break. I remember sitting on the edge of the cliff looking over, completely unafraid while getting scolded for doing something so potentially perilous. At times I wish the hestency that comes with getting older and having more responsibilities didn't exist. Had I never worked within the medical field I would potentially not have so much paranoia about medical costs or a fear of being without health insurance which keeps me from being truly ambitious. I've become very skiddish about certain things over time, or perhaps I was always this way - hyper rational and now at the point where its becoming a hinderance. Well, there's no use of pouting about it now.  I guess that I'll just have to make the hubby take some more professional photos of me.

And it feels like a rather blustery day

This time of year, when the rain is pouring and the wind is blowing, I have the songs from the original Winnie the Pooh movie stuck in my head near constantly. I can't help it - its like a jukebox up there. Especially while waiting for the bus after work standing infront of a Thai restaurant seeing the leaves and the rain blowing horizontal, it helps to have a happy innocent little jingle cycling through my mind to pass the time. I have many memories of childhood walking home from school in the rainy Octobers and Novembers of years gone by cleaning out the storm drains with my shoes as I went. I always liked wading into the giant puddles and then watching them disappear.

My parents have told stories of the practically annual Thanksgiving Day storms, where the turkeys were cook on barbeques, camp stoves, fire places, etc, just to make the meal go off as planned. I don't know if I would be that determined. I'd just eat some salad and some cold mashed potatoes, wrap up in a blanket, and take a nap. The power never stayed out long growing up, since we were close to a hospital and therefore one of the first grid squares to get fixed. For those few precise hours when we were reverted to the ninteenth century were always met with anticipation. A fire would be built, candles would get lit, and dad would break out the acoustic guitar to pass the time - a grand amusement for a young child. It always makes me think about a combination of the early settlers a la Little House on the Prarie and the roughly 1.6 billion people in the world who live without electricity daily.

Candle lit jail at the Kasbah of Chefchaouen, Sept 2011

The two times I've been to Africa so far have each had their moments without electricity. On this last trip to Morocco, we awoke in the small mountain town of Chefchaouen to find that all the power was out. We went into town to bide our time, which was not an issue for most things. We visited the Kasbah, which having been build before electricity came to the Rif Mountains, had adequate windows and skylights that seeing was not a problem. In the darker areas, such as the jail, the candles gave an eerie, almost haunted quality to the low ceiling and the chains. The only problem we faced was needing to get more cash for dinner - remedied by the US cash that I brought alone for back up as all the ATMs were down. Life goes on without electricity. Since multiple forms of power are utilized (gas, wood, coal, sunlight), their world doesn't stop with a brown out as it does in the US. Similarly, the power went down in Egypt and Ethiopia. You've never seen so many stars as in the Simien mountains at 10,000 ft with the power out. (Mental note - start packing a small flashlight when travelling... it would have made getting back to our room much easier and the night sounds less intimidating)

Winter in the Pacific Northwest almost always means stormy weather, which in turn means an acute sense of the hard life of the poor. No one wants to think about sleeping outside when it gets into the 30s (or lower) at night. We all feel better when emergency shelters for the night are able to open and when we give our token can of cranberry sauce to the holiday food drives. When it gets dark by 4pm, we prefer not to think about navigating the cold dark night alone. While waiting for the bus the other night a man came by asking for change. After one person told him "I'm sorry" instead of a direct no, he retorted "Don't be sorry, you're alive!" He continued to ramble about it as the person walked away, but it cause me to think: are we really sorry or do we just say that we are sorry to assuage our own guilt for choosing to not give the change from the bottom of our bags. I never carry cash and therefore almost never have any change, except for the odd penny or nickel I find on the ground. Perhaps this behavior has developed as a way to not feel the guilt of saying no since I have nothing to give.

9 to 5

I know that I'm not the only one out there, but I really am not a fan of the 9-5 work schedule. If I had my way there would be no such thing in the world of offices. The concept of everyone working basically the same hours doesn't work for anyone. That means if you need a doctors appointment, or need to have some work done at your house that you need to be around for you options consist of either taking time off of work to accomplish your tasks or trying to cramp it all into the weekends when few medical offices are open and the stores are crammed with people. The 9-5 slog also makes for worse traffic for everyone. Especially in a city with little transit, having 80% of the population on the roads at the same time makes little sense.

When you add into the mix families with children, you have an even bigger challenge of either having kids home alone while the parent's are still at work (since no K-12 school is in session beyond 5pm), having to pay for child care, or forced to only work part time at most in order to make sure that an adult is available for when the kids are out of school. There is no winning solution, other than perhaps changing the normal business hours. For me, my preferred schedule would to work only four days a week, but work 10 hour days - two on, one off, two on, two off, etc. I'm not one who likes routine, I hate being interrupted from my work flow for a meaningless mandatory 15 minute break, and I find I get the most done when there are not necessarily other people around. That schedule won't work too well in the future with kids, but if I shaved it down to 30-35 hours still only four days a week that would work.

Everyone on the roads at the same time means that everyone takes longer to get to their final destination, everyone wastes more fuel getting there, and everyone is crankier - which in turn makes you question why bother going through the routine at all. Some days there is nothing you can do to keep up, no matter what sort of job it is, while others you feel like you are just wasting your time (or the company's money) just waiting for the clock to say you can go. Sales, customer services, sanitation, health care, construction, gardening, you name it and the routine will not always serve you well. Mostly it just serves the almighty dollar.

I  remember hearing once the difference between East Coast and West Coast US work mentalities. East Coast: live to work. West Coast: work to live. I'd like to think that the West Coast mentality at least gives the option of escaping to a life where you don't need to work the standard schedule. These days of supposed economic leaness makes it even harder to escape. Employees who are underemployed can't look for something else because they are told that they should feel lucky that they even have a job. Employers are told they had better not hire more people or else they risk their profits. It's a no win cycle keeping both halves under-performing. What motivation is there to work hard and advance if companies are too timid to take risks with their profit margins, and what motivation is there to hire new talent if that talent is unwilling to risk moving up? Sometimes if feels as if the career path is more of a corn maze than a road map: you think you know where you are going until you get stuck in a dead end or in an endless loop. There is little help to get out of the maze if you don't know the right people, make the right connections. That's partly why the mentality in this country towards the poor is so horrid. We expect everyone to be  able to work hard and advance and if you fail at that its because you didn't try hard enough. Only we forget about how much networking is involved, how you need to know someone inside to even get an interview these days, and how the last hired is most often the first fired. There are many factors working against us and it takes more than your own bootstraps to keep afloat these days.

I suppose if we all just lived to work it wouldn't matter that we were caught in a maze of corporate bureaucracy. Maybe if we all were working at jobs that made us not mind the junk that comes with it - office politics, gossips, deadlines and surprise projects, we might then find that bridge in the middle that gives a vantage point, a place to regain your sense of direction.  All jobs are just another four letter word... the goal is to find something that elevates the experience above the mundane. I can't say that I've found that yet, but I'm relatively young still. I've got time to ride out this supposed recession. Lets just hope that is doesn't stunt my growth.

Let the Fall Duldrums Commence!

Let it be known - I hate fall. Really, honestly, in my eyes it is the season of death and decay. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I go from days of 14+ hours of sunshine to less than 8 in the dead of winter. I get to work before the sun is completely up and leave work well after it has set - and I only work the standard 8:30-5 schedule! At least with winter you have the holiday festivities of Christmas, Hannukah, New Year's, Valentines to living things up. Plus, the week before Christmas the days begin getting longer again.

My husband, on the other hand, loves fall. He loves the colors, the baseball, the crisp air. The darkness doesn't bother him. It never used to bother me either, until I moved south to where your day light hours don't vary throughout the year. Now that I've moved back it is all that I can seem to notice.

Autumn at Green Lake 2010

Yes, its the season of lots of delicious food (pies, roasts, apple cider and hot cocoa), but those inside tasties are just a distraction for the dreary gray world that is taking shape outside. It rains a lot, the storms seemingly getting worse and worse each year - or maybe I'm just getting more affected by it. We've spent many weekends trying to make me not loathe fall. Trips to the local pumpkin farms, trips the the arboretum to see the colors, trips to the store to get all bundled up and cozy. While mildly diverting, the distraction never lasts. I'm once again stuff with the heat slowly being sucked out of me day by day just as the sun is getting sucked out the the sky.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I am always cold, even in summer I keep a jacket handy and gloves nearby. Or maybe its the mold the sprouts on everything up here during our three damp monthes that wrecks havoc with my nose. Or maybe its all in my head - the diminishing sunlight bringing on the supposed Seasonal Affective Disorder that is much mocked up here. (Of course you're sad without the sun, suck it up like the rest of us!) I'd like to think that it's none of these more obvoius reasons, but just that out of the four seasons to choose from, I like this one the least. There's nothing wrong with not liking it, it's just that this happens to by the hubby's favorite season. This clash is where the problem lies. It's one of those things that doesn't bother you when you are just dating, but now that we're stuck with each other we must find a way to adapt. I try to be more chipper about the ever dying daylight. He tries to contain his enthusiasm to a managable level.

This year I'm trying to be more upbeat about it, but lets face it - Seattle is known for its horrible, soggy, cold fall and winter. This is the reason that people like to mock us for our rain and suicide rates. This is the season that drives people away from here. Having been born and raised here, I should be able to take it. I just miss those 70-80 degree autumns on particularly soggy days. At least there is always an excuse to get a new coat! Now if only I could find som golashes...

La Bandera de la Muerta

While in Spain I learned the stories of several Bandoleros, or Bandits, who are present in the 19th and early 20th centuries in primarily Andalucia. While they were usually men driven to crime be sheer poverty, they were also noblemen fleeing the law due to crimes of passion, such as the famous José Ulloa "El Tragabuches", who was a bull fighter, but after killing his wife and her lover turned to a life of crime as he saw no other option. There was the Jose Maria Hinojosa "El Tempranillo"(the Early Bird, so named because he began his life of crime at age 13), the most famous bandit, was known for daring daylight holdups which eventually led the King to grant him a royal pardon in exchange for him agreement to work for the state as the chief catcher of other bandoleros. The bandoleros were highwaymen, smugglers, robbers and contraband runners, so prevelant that the Civil Guard was formed to round them up.

Interest in the bandoleros became romantacized as time went on, with numerous books, movies, operas, even cartoons and comic books chronicling the life of these real life bandits. It became such a crazy that when english tourists would come to Andalucia to see the other sights (Sevilla, Cordoba, Granada), they would pay to get themselves "held up" by a bandolero and his gang. To me this sounds akin to going to Mexico right now and paying to get caught up in the drug cartel. There is even a hotel in Malaga Province that names its name after the Bandits, Hotel Bandolero, and they even have silvery statues of a bandolero and a maiden in their establishment.

Oddly enough, none of the men in our group had interest in seeing the bandolero museum, so the females went in and had a grand old time. It did get me thinking though: if we were in England and there was a Robin Hood Museum, the men would have gone. In the states if there was an Al Capone or Bonnie and Clyde museum they probably would have visited. Why do the spanish versions seem so much less manly? Could it be that they have be romanticised to the point of no longer being viewed as masculine?


Now, I have a pencant for visiting cheesy museums, and this one was actually very well done considering that there was not that much in the way of artifacts that could be put in such a museum. You had your usual wax figures portraying a scene, dioramas of the civil guard raiding a bandit hide out, reproduction weapons on display, and literally hundreds of books and graphic novels telling the tales. There was even a romanticized female bandit novel on display, La Bandera de la Muerta - the female bandit of death. The soundtrack was what you would expect, the haunting spanish guitar playing bits of Bizet's Carmen.


While I don't necessarily condone robbery and banditry, I do find it fascinating how with a little detachment from the situation something as brutish as being a bandit turns into a sex symbol, a persona to make the women swoon and the men want to either join them or hunt them down. I gues the girl always likes the idea of the bad boy, even if the reality is nothing that she would actually want. 

How Much is it Worth to You?

I recently spent a little over a week in Morocco, a country that I have wanted to visit since I was about ten. It was pretty much everything I had hoped for and anticipated, and of course a whole lot more, as one is never completely prepared for travel. We arrived in Marrakech midafternoon, and it was not nearly as hot as I had anticipated, only about 32 degrees celcius if that. Luckily the air was dry and our Riad was lovely. We had a memorable and refreshing first cup of scaldingly hot mint tea (which became an addiction), nibbled on almond cookies, and waited for the rest of our party to arrive from another part of the country. Once the whole gang was assembled and we were properly refreshed, we headed out to the infamous Marrakech Night Market held nightly in the Djemma El Fna, as it has for hundreds of years. It is one of the only world hertage sites to be purely an activity instead of a building. Nightly performances from storytellers, gypsies, roving henna artists, and monkey wranglers. It can be pretty overwhelming, especially for the stray American unaccustomed to barganing and defending your choices in dining and shopping. The food stalls are full of people with menus proclaiming to give you a life changing experience; when we finally just picked one there was applause for the salesman who finally got our group of five to take a seat.

Marrakech Night Market

The rule of life here is bargaining. Nothing has a fixed price - it is all what it is worth to you the buyer. The seller will of course begin with some outrageous fee, expecting you to at the least halve the offer if not more, assuming that their take will be somewhere around 60% of the original asking price. Many a salesman will of course try to get as much for their wares as they can, but that is no different that fixed price places in the states who mark up their wares for a larger profit. At one point in the trip the shop keeper kept lower the price for me as I kept trying to leave the store, mainly because I didn't have any bills small enough to bargain with. I never want to bargain hard for something cheap, then hand over large bills expecting change. It just makes it all feel so trivial, especially when you factor in the exchange rate. (The dirham was 1/8 the worth of the US dollar at the time we were there.)  You can find real deals everywhere, but you can also see the human touch in everything. There is hand painting, carving, weaving, guilding, on everything. From stair risers to ceiling beams, there is nothing mass produced. Even the daily orange juice is fresh squeezed. We saw no McDonalds or Starbucks; the most commercialized products we saw were bottled water and yoghurt. Everything changed when we got back into Europe. It was sad to leave a place that puts such a high value on craftsmen and individual attention to detail instead of cheaply made, mass produced generic wares.

 Morocco felt like a very personal country, where everyone wants to hear your story, and if you by something all the better, but they at least want to talk with you. They really see the human as an individual of worth instead of just another customer - which is not necessarily what you would expect entering in to a bargaining culture. The offer of a cup of tea is not a scam to get you to buy more. They have been operating in the arena of cross cultural communication for centuries, and its high time we in the west trust a little in the decency of human beings. Everywhere we went shopkeepers proudly discussed the great things Morocco has to offer, lamenting the lack of tourism and the brain drain they have for the upper crust of educated society. You get the sense that this is a country of people with lots to offer but still trying to find ways to market it to an arab afraid western world. So in the end, how much is that rug, or platter, or scarf really worth? Worth the hassel of bargaining to get a fair price, knowing that your piece is very likely the only one exactly like it, or worth the convience of not bargaining to get a mass produced clone? How much is the livelihood of a master artesan worth? Or the continuation of centuries of tradition?