01.05.10

They just wanna, they just wanna

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:35 pm by jeci

So the general consensus seems to be that 2009 kind of sucked. I’m guessing that this has to do with many members of the general consensus losing their jobs. So, indeed, point taken.

We mostly managed to survive The Year of the Layoff, although we weren’t entirely unscathed. (Long story — some other time, maybe.) (We both still have our jobs. For now. Please bribe the Job Gods for us, would you?) So at first, I was slightly taken aback by all the “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, 2009!” Facebook statuses, etc. Anyway, even after being reminded for the umpteenth time that the economy is a total disaster, for whatever reason, I’m reluctant to write off 2009 entirely. For us, it was…an unusual year. On the one hand, we kind of kicked ass. We accomplished a lot and we are going to get big shiny gold stars from our financial planner. And! We bought a home!

But we kind of forgot to have fun.

Well. Renovating our home took many, grinding, soul-eating months. We fell off the map. We didn’t see our friends, it seemed, for ages. And then once the (saw)dust settled, it looked for a few months there like we were both going to lose our jobs and we set about on a kind of XXXtreme battening down of the hatches, and going for drinks or movies or burgers or coffees, or any of those things you typically do with your friends, was out of the question. Because LAWD would we be screwed in our new home if neither of us was working and we didn’t have a contingency plan and/or fund. At one point, we had a fight over three dollars. (It seemed like a lot of money at the time.)

(I’m not even going to talk to you about The Cough, which is now in its third month. It’s in the 97th percentile for its age and it’s almost sleeping through the night already! We think it might be able to sit up on its own soon.)

So my New Year’s resolution this year is to have fun. I’ve signed up for classes at the community centre, I’m accepting invitations, I’m blogging (hi!), I’m thinking about what might be a good fit for volunteering*, and, well, I dunno, I guess I’ll do whatever else seems fun. Fun is pretty easy to find, so this should prove an easy resolution to keep.

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*Yeah, listen. I hate volunteering. I know you’re not supposed to say (or think?) that, but it often feels an awful lot like work to me, complete with schedules and office politics. Except the office politics come with a more self-congratulatory crowd, with the kind of people who eye you haughtily across the lunch room over their spelt muffins, waiting for you to do something that they can sniff at. And do you know what I already do 40 hours a week? Deal with schedules and office politics and annoying people I have no choice but to be around. Except I get PAID to do it and it therefore makes some sense for me to feel obligated to show up.

So there’s that. But. I want a dog. And I cannot have a dog. I mean, technically, I can. But, no. We have enough going on here at Chez Hairball in terms of pet hair. So I want to volunteer somewhere** where I can scratch ribs and make tails thump and get snorgled by a wet puppy dog nose…and have that somehow translate into social good. Because, for reals, THAT would be fun.

**Can’t be the SPCA. Guess where my last volunteer position was. Yeah. And now guess how we ended up with the third cat. Yeah. So I want to work with lovey bubkins, but they can’t be on death row, or I fear that we will end up on a very special episode of Hoarders, the one where they find out where where all the pound puppies went.

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