cast update

Had lunch with a friend today. Ordered squash soup. Managed to spill a whole spoonful on my cast, and now there is an orange stain right smack dab in the center of my cast. And there is squash caked into the fiberglass weave. This is triggering my non-existent OCD! I just tried to use a toothbrush to scrub it clean and that definitely did not work. Now I am paranoid I got my cast wet and the cotton layer under the cast isn't going to dry and my skin will get infected and eventually turn gangrenous and my hand will fall off!

UUUGHH. THIRTEEN DAYS TO GO. THIRTEEN DAYS IS FOREVER.

The friend I had lunch with told me that as a kid she broke her leg during the summer and she somehow managed to get poison ivy under her cast! I told her that sounded like pure hell, and she assured me it was pure hell.

And my coworker (who rides horses) told me she's broken 10+ bones over the course of her life. Once, she broke her left arm and her right wrist at the same time! I was very tempted to ask her how she went to the bathroom with both arms casted, but I definitely don't know her well enough for that. (I'm trying to curb the inappropriate questions at work.)

I am also trying to focus on what doesn't suck, so instead of obsessing over the squash stain, I am reminding myself that: 1. I do not currently have poison ivy under my cast, and 2. My left arm is totally fine. I am so grateful for these things, and also I would really, really like my cast off. NOW PLEASE. 

wrist update

The specialist says the wrist is broken. I am in a cast for 4 weeks. The cast is purple (my favorite color). This is a very small consolation.

A greater consolation: the cast, unlike the splint they gave me at urgent care, keeps my thumb and fingers free. So I can pinch things! It's glorious.

Also: I no longer have to shake anyone's hand, a custom I have never enjoyed. So many damp palms in the world.

In closing, my suggestion to you all is that, if you need to fall, make sure you keep your hands and arms out of the way.

pity the one-handed

I fractured my wrist yesterday. I slipped on some ice while walking my dog and landed on my right hand. As far as they can tell from the x-rays—and still I'm shocked how much the doctor at urgent care couldn't tell me—it's only a minor hairline fracture. But it still hurts like hell and my right hand is in a hard splint, which means I'm typing this one-handed. (And very, very, sloooowly.)

It's a huge bummer. So I just wanted to share with you, Dear Readers, some things that are very hard to do with one hand (especially your non-dominant hand) so you can appreciate how nice it is to have two:

• Squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush
• Flossing
• Putting your hair in a ponytail
• Putting on a bra that has hooks
• Tying your shoes
• Applying deodorant (one underarm is easy, the other is real hard)
• Applying eyeliner
• Cutting your fingernails
• Putting on earring that require backings
• Cooking anything more complicated than canned soup
• Twisting off the lid of a jar
• Picking up dog poop (don't miss this one, but sometimes it's required)
• Washing dishes (same as previous)

Props to Josh for waiting with me at urgent care for two hours and also assisting me with everything on this list. There's nothing like being injured to remind you to appreciate your spouse.

I am going to see an orthopedic hand and wrist specialist tomorrow, and I'm hoping they tell me it's miraculously cured. This seems to be an actual possibility, since no two doctors ever give me the same information about anything. I wish I had friends who are (medical) doctors, so they could explain to me how medicine, which is clearly an art, has somehow managed to pass itself off as a science. 

famous friends

Though I started it a decade ago, I am now finally almost finished (re)reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It is so, so good, and I have many Thoughts about it. But mostly I find myself thinking one very silly thought: how much I hope that that Hilary Mantel and Marilynne Robinson are friends.

They probably aren't, since Mantel has said she doesn't have many friends, but I can't help but wish it anyway. It's a wonderful time to be alive when there are two excellent writers obsessed with history and the reformation—and writing popular books about it! I like to imagine they have a whatsapp chat full of references to obscure early modern texts and jokes about various Cromwells.

In reality, they probably dislike each other. Don't we usually find people too similar to us to be grating? And I'm sure they aren't on whatsapp at all—they're too productive. But I will continue to hope they're friends. And that some day they invite me to have dinner with them, where I will be too awestruck to say anything.

some thoughts on job hunting

I just wrapped up a nine-month job search, and now that it's over I can say definitively that this has been the strangest job hunt of my life. And for someone my age I've done a fair amount of looking for work—not only because I've changed fields and moved, but also because even when I have a job I'm usually looking for the next one, or thinking about it.

In my previous experience, which includes a seven-month-long job search after graduate school, it is extremely unusual to get an in-person interview without being a serious contender for the job. The whole seven months I was looking for a job after grad school I probably submitted a hundred applications. In total I had four interviews and got two job offers. After college I had three interviews over about four months, and one offer. And a couple years ago I went on just two interviews before I got an offer. That's a pretty high success rate per interview, which is not just because I'm awesome. It's also because no one was going to waste their time (and mine!) interviewing multiple candidates who weren't a good fit. Historically, any time I got an interview (which was fairly rare!) I had a pretty good chance of getting the job.

This time around, however, I interviewed for nine positions before I got an offer. And some of those interview processes included multiple in-person meetings and a phone screening. Altogether I had 16 (!!!) separate interviews. That doesn't even include the multiple "assignments" I completed as part of these interviews. (All of which were ridiculous, btw—next time someone asks me to do an assignment I plan to bow out of consideration immediately.) Interviewing has basically been an unpaid part-time job for me during these last few months.

I've thought a lot about whether getting more interviews made this experience easier or harder—would I really rather have applied to the same number of jobs but gotten only a couple interviews in the same time frame? On the one hand, you've got the positive feedback of getting an interview every month or so, which can feel like progress when you're unemployed, and on the other hand, you've got radio silence, but at least you know that when you do get an interview you've got a good chance of getting the job. I've decided the second option is definitely better. Being rejected, especially after multiple interviews (and for jobs you are absolutely qualified for) makes it feel real personal. After a while you start dreading interviews because you're not sure they see you as a serious candidate and you don't want to spend hours getting invested in the job only to be rejected again. Getting no response to an application is a lot easier to brush off.

Also, infuriatingly, interviewers would often heavily imply that I was a finalist, asking about when I could start, whether I had any other pending offers, and otherwise openly trying to sell me on the position. I even had one interviewer reply to my post-interview thank you note telling me how impressed the hiring committee was and what a great colleague I would be. I had my references checked twice! And I got not a single job offer from any of these idiots!

And please note that I say all this as a weird person who kind of enjoys interviews. I like meeting people and learning about their work and talking about what I've done. I have a very healthy ego and rarely take rejection personally. Someone else would probably have had a meltdown about four months into this process.

I'm sure some of the strangeness of this job hunt can be chalked up to the fact that I now live in a much smaller job market with a single dominant employer, which no doubt creates all sorts of inefficiencies that would never exist in a larger city with more companies competing for labor. Whatever the reason, this was unlike anything I've experienced before, and, please please please, may I never experience anything like it ever again. 

Puppies and strangers

We got a puppy last weekend, and her name is Frederica. (We call her Freddy.) And yes, she is named after Nietzsche--I always said I would get a dog and name it after Nietzsche, because he thought women were dogs and so naming a dog in his honor seemed fitting.

Anyway, Freddy is an adorable black lab puppy. My parents got her a bright pink harness (yes dogs wear walking harnesses now, it's a thing), so even though she has a boy's name everyone knows she's a girl. We get stopped on the street all the time by people who want to meet Freddy; I don't know what it's like to have a baby but I'm pretty sure puppies draw a bigger crowd. I've talked to more strangers this week than I have in the past 6 months.

Today, Josh and I were walking with Freddy down a suburban street, and a young  African-American woman passed by. She said: "Hey! What an adorable black bitch!" When Josh and I hesitated (because she is a bitch, but how does one reply to that?), the woman laughed. "I mean me!" she said. "I would never call your dog a bitch. She's a cute puppy, though."

Getting a dog was worth it, if only for this one interaction. I'm still laughing.

it's simpler, in fact, not to want to be free

"But to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there are so many things they do not want to face. And not only the Negro thing which is simply the most obvious and perhaps the simplest example, but on the level of private life which is after all where we have to get to in order to write about anything and also the level we have to get to in order to live, it seems to me that the myth, the illusion, that this is a free country, for example, is disastrous. Let me point out to you that freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. One hasn't got to have an enormous military machine in order to be unfree when it's simpler to be asleep, when it's simpler to be apathetic, when it's simpler, in fact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important."

—James Baldwin, Notes for a Hypothetical Novel