Re-orienting

 Started a new job two weeks ago.

Oh, you maybe need some background?

Transitioned out of my gardening business when I realized that:

1. My energy level wasn't reliable enough, AND

2. If I wanted this to be lucrative, I could do it for sure, but I'd need to hire folks and up my game. But that's not what I wanted. Not this close to retirement.

So I transitioned my few remaining clients to an energetic millennial (our meet-cute was in the garden-center parking lot where she pulled up in a pickup while I was spraying hort oil on hemlock wooly adelgids. Aaron Sorkin, take notice.)

I decided that I'd like to retire in six years if at all possible, and to do that I'd need a job that paid reasonably.  So while working at the garden center, I started looking.

Initially I looked at local organizations that were involved in the community, or nonprofits passionate about rewilding landscapes or creating natural public spaces out of urban hellscapes. I replied to job postings; replied to them again; sent out letters of inquiry. Attended a workshop in Maine to speak personally to the staff there about jobs.

Crickets.

My local recruiter, upon hearing my minimum salary expectations (which, in hindsight, were insultingly low), balked as if I'd asked for a yacht as part of my signing bonus.

"My clients aren't paying that, really."

"Do your clients live in Massachusetts? Do your clients read what housing goes for?"

In the end I aw an opening for a company I'd worked for in Chicago. In Chicago, I worked for one of their clients; here, I'm working for them proper. So it's a new company to me. A colleague who still worked for the company but had transferred to work internally used the referral feature to get me noticed. And there we go.

The draw was that I'd work for the Boston office but from home.  Two weeks in, and I love not commuting. The pay is respectful, the benefits are great, the people are all very nice, and retiring in 6 is a real possibility. I just need to sock the dosh away.

The downside is that it's easy for people to forget that you need to be given work when you're new and nobody can see you, and they are also working from home, and it's a very busy season so everyone is in their own crisis, and you have no idea what's going on as you sit by yourself, alone at home, in your Steelcase task chair (that you chose because it was markedly cheaper than its colleagues because it's a nauseatingly bright orange that, in fact, has not conveyed Fun and Cheery so much as 1973, and not in a good way), with the odd video chat from London. It took almost a full week just to figure out where things are online, and I crammed all the compliance/training videos to stop the reminder emails from the automated system that now tracks every movement of my existence. (Fun fact: I may not accept a boat as a gift from a business partner. Or anybody. And I can forget that munitions deal with a state-owned Iranian oil company.)

Taking initiative, I sat through three hours of a recorded class. As I struggled to follow the presenter, my Communications Major heart screamed silently in impotent rage as I mentally composed my alternate curriculum (Lesson One: How To Explain Things, Particularly By Incorporating The Word "Because"; Lesson Two: How Not To Cram PowerPoint Slides With Ugly, Messy Graphics Nobody Can Follow).

Per a request, I populated  some templates with information. (Lesson Three: How Not to Make PowerPoint Templates So Crowded As To Be Chaotic, And So Fiddly As To Be User-Hostile, No Matter How Clever and Relevant It Makes The Marketing Department Feel)

Also, there's Technology. Lots and lots of Technology.

Back in The Early Days, tech support was a person who worked out of a small server room/office/TARDIS, and all you had to do for help was call their name and they'd fix whatever was wrong.

I'm no slouch. I can follow directions and problem solve with the best of them. Working from home for a massive international company means most things are very self-service and many are third-party. And with me for some reason, every single simple, unremarkable thing I need to set up in order to do my job has been riddled with problems, so much that I'm beginning to wonder whether it's all part of some secret evaluation process to find my breaking point.

First, it took Tech Support an hour to figure out why I couldn't print to my home printer. Then the work cell phone that was sent to me had a rebooting malfunction and had to be re-ordered, and because you can't open the back of the phone in the newer phones to access the battery, I couldn't pull the power and had to resort to leaving the phone unplugged, sound and vibration off, face-down on my desk to have the android equivalent of grand mal seizures until it ran out of juice. 

The shared cloud drive needed to be configured because I couldn't log into it, and the tech who got it running wasn't able to help me understand it because his accent made him unintelligible, and the awkwardness of asking him to repeat himself over and over got the better of me and I just gave up and thanked him for his help. Then the monitor I purchased won't appear as an option on my laptop.

For each of these issues, I email the third-party tech support, and a ticket is generated. I am pretty much in a committed relationship with India at this point, and I suspect there's a big sign on a wall in Chennai warning everyone about the American who insists the issues aren't user-related.

Today it was getting access to an online database I'll be maintaining. I'd assumed it was a login-permissions situation and voila!

 Ohhhhhh, no.

 First, I had to be given documented email approval by two people, then a person on The Database Team That Lives In Space sent me lengthy instructions that contained a link to a cloud app store for our company, where I'd have to select a particular application, then wait for an email notification that it had been downloaded. Once this happened, I had to open it, do some magic, and then reboot.

Rebooting entails closing a half-dozen apps, re-opening the company VPN (complete with verification code to my phone), then signing into the network, then launching the shared drive, email, and chat programs.

This done, I was then told I had to go to a cloud address, select a particular option, and then while in that "desktop environment," launch the program.

"And I have to do this EVERY TIME I want to access this database?" I asked, incredulous, although I didn't use caps because I'm pretending to be a calm, polite, patient person.  Remote work is good for that ruse.

Immediately after I'd gotten through this, another of the Gamesters of Triskelion emailed me with the NEW instructions for the revised database, which were basically, "Click this and it will download. You'll see the app icon, and all you have to do is click on it to open a selection of sites to access. But first you have to reboot."

I walk downstairs, grab a tangerine, breathe, and go back to my home office.  I start to follow these instructions, but they say, wait!  I first must set Internet Explorer as my default browser! And here are instructions for doing this!   I'm confused, because this browser is no longer supported.  While I'm puzzling over this, I realize it's already downloaded just fine and is happy using our company default browser.

I click on the app icon, the list of options appears, I select the correct one...

...and am brought to a database that has no content, and doesn't give my office as an option.

I reply to the email offer to do a call to walk me through it, saying yes please, when can this happen.

I then log off and go to babysit a friend's 4-year old, where we play some competitive Chutes and Ladders, and then I suggest Hair Salon, because it allows me to sit on my butt and relax while eleventy-five hair elastics and clips are artfully arranged in my hair. I play some music to complement the scene, and when the parents come home I warn them that their little girl might Sashay and Shante, and tell them they better WORK.

The Good Parts

 Now that I've gotten through my big projects, I can take some time to breathe, and took an honest-to-God break in Maine to hang out with a friend and her husband in their log home.  She loves to cook, so much time was spent eating and discussing operational logistics with the husband. Oh, and watching Jaws, because Shark Week. 

God, I love that movie. Robert Shaw gives me what Owen Meany would call THE SHIVERS.

About a month ago, once the invoices had been going out and the checks coming in for awhile, I ran a P&L out of curiosity.

What the..??!!??

I forwarded it to my CPA. "Should we re-evaluate my estimated quarterly tax payment?"

"Hey, that's great!" he responded. "Send me another one at the end of August and we'll figure it out."

I'd netted six times what I'd netted the same time last year.  On one hand, I could see making a LOT of money; on the other, without good help, I'd kill myself. 

The blessings and the curse of COVID.

I'd recently worked a more than 8-hour day in 90+ degree heat, trying to make up for a ton of rainy days, anxious that it was already July and I had clients whose yards were neglected.  I didn't think I was all that affected, but mid-weed I suddenly felt  lightheaded and my vision got a little patchy. I sat down on some stepping stones.  I was in an enclosed side-yard entrance, invisible to the outside world.

"Is this how they'll find me?" I mused.  Not wanting to lose time, I tried feebly to use my scuttle hoe from my sitting position.

 I'd already taken the SEO off my web site and stopped marketing myself. There were just too many frantic homeowners begging me to save them from being on intimate terms with their own property.  I worried that my regular maintenance clients wouldn't be enough, but with the wet weather it's all I can do to keep up, and there are projects that can be done for them.  

I like most of my maintenance clients - I show up, do some work, they pay me.

Recently a retired woman I'd done some minor work for got in touch to help with the "mess" her garden had become. I met her and we looked things over.  She told me what she wanted done.

"It all seems fine," I said. "Do you have any questions for me?"

"Yes. Cost."

I told her it would be straight time and materials, and gave her my rate.

She hesitated. "Maybe to start I'll just have you come for three hours."

I looked past her at the platform they'd had built for their new hot tub, and beyond that to the private boat dock.

"That's fine; we can start with three hours and take it from there."

Here's what will happen: I'll show up, do my three hours, she'll see how nice things are starting to look, and will want me to stay. But I won't be able to, because I'll have other things scheduled.  

Another periodic client is a retired litigation attorney who is hilarious. She sends me pictures of containers she's done with comments like, "When you come by to weed, see what you can do with these. With all the rain, the petunias look like shit."

Today was satisfying. I worked over 8 hours and got on track. I'd so far attempted The Yard of Lightheadedness twice and had had to curtail the visits due to thunderstorms, but today I got it all looking good. There is something very satisfying about having the time to do something right.

I don't wear headphones while I work; I find them too distracting. Instead, I just ride the stream of consciousness. Today's Greatest Hits were:

How do people stay married without hating each other?

Should I try a cross-country trip in the van?

Why can't Margaret Atwood end a story well?

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union..

Maybe Iiiiii didn't love you, quite as often as I should have...

What's this...oh. Poison ivy. Did I see jewel weed back there?

Am I lazy or just jaded?

Tomorrow I have another roster of clients with rain-soaked weeds to pull. For now, I need to address the stabbing pains in my legs, and find the bug spray.

Caste System

 A co-worker at the garden center and I were talking about the bloom leaving the gardening profession. Pun not intended.  She related one of her experiences:

"I was working for this ninety-something woman who had a huge estate. She was a southern-belle type, and had me in for tea from time to time when I was done on her property. On one of these occasions, she mentioned that she wanted to 'buy some of my time and give me to her daughter as a present.'  I felt like a piece of property."

Yup. While nothing quite so blunt has been my experience, I have found that for the most part people who hire gardeners think they do nothing but relax by some shrubbery until summoned to do something with little notice.

Working for other gardeners buffered me from the constant reminder that people who can't pick up the smallest hand tool think it's your birthright to jump to some dirty job they decided needs to be done tomorrow. Even the nicest clients frequently have no concept of Your Time, and think nothing of expecting you to drive twelve miles to install ten annuals that they decided to purchase that day.

I've gotten good at saying no. In fact, most of what I'm saying this year is no. No more large projects. No more big installs. No more yards that have been neglected for years that they suddenly need napalmed this month. I'm open to pretty much maintenance only.

My joint issues have kicked into overdrive, and I'm sore and stiff, and oh yeah, nobody wants to work right now, even though I'm willing to pay an insane hourly rate. I've been through two people already. The first was someone I knew through other activities, and while he seemed knowledgeable and smart when ensconced in the local version of Grey Gardens with his elderly mother, in the field he became a mansplaining, slo-mo nightmare. On the last job for which I used him he was so slow I had to return alone the following day and work an extra 5 hours. Oh yes, flat-fee job. So.

The other candidate had experience, but while she started strong, I suspect depression issues began to play out, and while I'm a sympathetic person, I just need my assistant to get the job done and not spend twenty minutes on something that I can do in about 75 seconds, and I should not be able to move three wheelbarrows of mulch in the time it takes them to mulch the bases of three rose bushes.

I finally connected with someone I'd been in the program with, and with whom I'd worked. He's no longer in the hort biz but is going to work with me on the last large job I have, hallelujah. Ex-marine, martial artist; sling me some mulch, bad boy.

Truth is, I don't like it any more. I work way too hard to be this tired and poor, and I'm losing the interest in detail that makes a good gardener. My joint issues are also front and center, and I'm getting very sore and stiff. A former colleague from Chicago wanted to pick my brain about starting a business and I said, "Don't do it alone. Have someone to bounce things off of, share the pain, share the work. Don't go to bed every night with your head spinning with every thing you have to get done, knowing all of it - every last thing -- is on you."

I have learned a lot. And as a business owner, I've gained a deeper appreciation for being an employee. At the garden center I bumped into a very problematic former employer, but I did thank her for everything I'd learned from her, and I apologized if I ever made her life hard. I think she was blindsided.

Some people love the notion of saving people, of fixing things for them. I like helping people, but, I don't know, there's too heavy a whiff of servitude, of toiling over the weeds while your client is vacationing on the Cape for a month. I raised my fees dramatically, but as another gardener said, "I won't work in this area. All these Yankees are tight-fisted and don't like to pay."  I could make large money if I were miraculously able to get a crew, really expand, and try for the high-end clients with large estates, but at my age, that holds zero appeal.  I just don't want to work that hard anymore. As it is I rarely see my sister, have little time for housework and my uncle, let alone my animals. I'm not complaining, although it sounds like it; I'm re-evaluating and learning from the experience.

I never thought I'd dream of a desk and being paid even if I go to the bathroom as a consummation devoutly to be wished, but there you go. It will be a big adjustment, but I think of it as my next adventure.

My most favorite job will be retirement.  

 

Tough Crowd

The professional gardening world appears comprised mostly of ex-Marines and middle-aged women, and it's unclear which group harbors the most rage.

The common thread seems to be psyches shaped by long-term emotional abuse, and a cheery but hostile defensiveness that we use to unsettle others. Passive aggressively.

On one side, we have young men chewed up and spat out of a military system of emotional sadism that promised them camaraderie and loyalty. I worked with one very muscular jiu-jitsu practitioner whose inscrutable stone face made me want to either hug him, or talk to him gently while I sloooowly took the garden shears from his hands.  In my last job, another ex-Marine was so furiously anal about how we restocked tools that I would not hang so much as a rake without his permission, while wondering how I could get him to smoke a LOT more weed.

On the other side is the 50-something mom who does heavy gardening all day (including heavy tarps, wheebarrows, and tools), who anxiously measures out portions of food in tiny plastic containers (her 10am yogurt break is like a one-woman Running of the Bulls, and God help anyone who gets in the way), and who goes to a cardio class afterwards. She also routinely runs in the morning, and discusses in detail a half-dozen low-cal dinners with chicken as the base ingredient, and she does NOT approve of my abstinence from meat, white or otherwise.

She will not pee outdoors. Ever.

Like me, she is the child of an alcoholic, and I empathize with the control issues; however, once I realized I could say "Screw you!" to those issues, I've spent the time since cultivating a liberating, almost taunting "so what?" approach to most everything. I have realized that there is rarely only one right way.   I realized it's a lot more fun to not constantly self-edit.

This attitude, and my clear disregard for whether others approve of me, drives this poor woman straight up the wall.

And if we're being honest here, I get a kick out of that.

The third middle-aged woman is emotionally needy and chronically depressed, so they hit it off like a house on fire. (My most sympathetic response to her lament about a recent ex was to say, "He's a fucking loser. Move on.")  At one point Needy Woman complained of a headache, and I looked up to see Apotheosis of Mom standing in front of her with a Tylenol and a glass of water.  It was horrifying.

The excuse I gave for my notice was family reasons, because there was no need to say, "I'm bored, I am NOT bonding with the team, and if I'm going to work this hard, it will be for real money for myself."

Nobody misses me.

And if we're being honest here, I'm fine with that.

Or maybe THIS plan....

Throughout the winter I have been exploring my options in an attempt to formulate some kind of strategy about my Next Step. My strategies generally prove maddeningly elusive and change as rapidly as those choose-your-ending books I loved as a teen.

I will move to Maine! I will have a small home on many acres, grow vegetables and keep bees. I will make soap and have an art and pottery studio in the barn. I will sell honey at the farmer's market. 

I began the job search. I had my sights set on a botanic garden and sent off my resume. I got a response (I'm moving to Maine!) that said they had no gardening positions open, but I might want to consider an educational assistant position (sounds a lot like a job that can't pay me to move to Maine). The job description detailed leading children through a kids' garden, talking about plants, feeding chickens, general upkeep. Nothing sounded scary or odd, and if  nothing else would afford me the opportunity to shape the next generation of tree-hugging vegetarians.

If I get a decent job offer from Maine, I'll move to Maine. If the pay is low, I could maybe buy a mobile home. Or rent in a depressed area.

They wanted me to send a resume for the position, so on the advice of a friend I created an entirely new resume, underscoring previous mentoring/educational experience. With youth.

The result was a stellar example of my ability not so much to teach children (although I can) but to create a narrative where teaching SAT classes twenty-five years ago, a few months of supervising teenage interns, and nine months of babysitting made me the love child of Mary Poppins and Mister Rogers.

"Instilled expectations of good behavior and a respect for nature through games and play, daily trips to parks and beaches, and by exploiting children’s natural love of routine, ritual, and expressive communication."

Yes. I actually wrote this. It was fun, this challenge to elevate instinct to skill, and mundane activities  to intentional education. This blurb was my respectable distillation of "We walked to the park! We threw rocks in the lake! We waved hello to the cottonwood trees! I taught them to pull up their shirts every time I yelled 'MARDI GRAS!' I trained them like I train puppies, because it was fun, they loved it, and because I could."

The visit to the street vendor of corn chichas almost made an appearance as, "Developed an appreciation of international cuisine and multicultural interpersonal interaction," but I couldn't quite bring myself.

I heard nothing, but was OK since the pay was super low.

I was in talks with landscapers who were very interested in hiring me, but they operated in southern Maine, which is not much cheaper than Massachusetts. Generally, any area in which a president summers (The Cape, Kennebunkport) is unlikely to present a wealth of cheap apartments or thrift stores, opting instead for four-figure weekly rentals and Consignment Boutiques.

In the end I met with a local landscaper who wants to hire me and is going to get back to me with a job offer once he figures out his crew for the season. I've offered him less than full-time so that I can build my own business.

And so it is that just as I'm waiting to hear from Local landscaper, I get a call from the head gardener at the botanic garden. The Educational Assistant botanic garden. This garden that never has gardener openings now has two openings for full-time seasonal gardeners. On one hand I was a little excited; on the other I was annoyed at this ping-ponging, and a bit sulky about the lack of response to the three hours of brilliant resume writing to reinvent myself as the gardening world's Maria von Trapp.

The Head Gardener was very nice and we got along well. I asked what the position paid, and the level of hemming and hawing made my stomach sink. This was not the response of someone unembarrassed by her answer.

"Interns make about $11 an hour; for regular we could go up to about $13. I mean, it's Maine."

Thirteen. Dollars. UP TO. The last time I'd made that little I'd only slept with two men in my life. I mean, I was a late bloomer, but still.

Shit, I can't afford to move to Maine on what they pay. I'll work here and buy a place in Maine. Then I'll eventually move to Maine.

So I'm here for now, which is fine, if not perfect. I see my aunt in the nursing home regularly, and my sister and I get together and have fun. I know the area, I'm getting my business stuff in order, and if I'm lucky, I'll make a real living this year.

I could just buy land in Maine and grow things and keep bees there. I could get one of those huge room-like tents for when I'm up there. 

I can poop in the woods.

Winter Work

As I make my way through my first winter as a gardener and not a student (or rather, as I make my way through the prospect of a winter with no income), and after no luck finding temporary work on my own, I turned to recruiters. Because it turns out that all my plans of catching up on educational reading in the off season are thwarted by an inability to sit still as long as I'm jobless. As one can imagine, my gardening pay did not provide for a substantial nest egg, which situation was amplified by unexpected dental work for both me and a cat to the tune of almost three thousand in unexpected bills. So any time not spent searching for jobs and sending out resumes was consumed with the preoccupation that I had to look for jobs and send out resumes.

Cue the recruiters.

Landing a good recruiter is tricky at my age, because many recruiters are staffed by people not long out of college who have about five minutes of work experience.  It's surreal to put on a suit and dress shoes and be evaluated by someone who can't make eye contact. As luck would have it, I connected with a recruiter close to my age with whom I could have a conversation undistracted by the anxiety that my evaluation was similar to that of a Tinder date.

(Sidenote: My history of online dating is a hot train wreck of Boschian carnage.) 

So I landed a gig that does not pay anywhere near what I'm worth (ah, temping), but will last for as long as I expect to be out of work, and the staff is nice. No busy phones, no unhappy people. Very little stress.

The best part: They tell me every day how smart I am, how happy they are that I'm there. I've told them I'm a gardener trying to make her way to Maine, and they tell me all the time how much they want to keep me. 

"I wish we could get someone like you," the woman I'm supporting tells me.

"Well, that's easy. Hire someone who's overqualified, pay them 50% more than you've budgeted for the position, and there you go."

I'm basically helping with the mess also known as their accounts payable. The backstory involves a former employee who let bills back up until a vendor's threat to cut service alerted the company that they had a situation.

To be fair, the issue is larger. For one, the accounting system is crap. Don't worry, I won't go into boring detail, but trust me it was not designed by accountants. Given that the basics of  accounting are unchanged since the days of Venetian seafaring merchants, and also given that accounting does not benefit from jazzy new approaches, there is no excuse for this. That I have to enter twelve invoices from one vendor as twenty-four separate transactions rather than as a single batch entry makes me want to hunt down the software provider and use Language.

Then there are the vendors who, rather than taking the time to put the correct PO on an invoice, slap a random or outdated PO number in the apparent assumption that we won't notice. I mentally craft communications where these vendors are notified that a $50 fee per incorrect number will be deducted to cover the additional administrative time.

(Thoughts like these make me realize how pointless modern life can be. The self-righteous indignation of the Purchase Order is the first sign of societal decay. You read it here.)

Another issue is that, despite being in a digital world, the processes at this office are heavily paper-oriented. One process goes something like this: a Purchase Order is generated and put into the accounting system, and an original paper version into a big binder. Incoming bills are then processed, during which they are stamped and  information found on the digitally-generated PO is handwritten on the front. (I've chosen to log this in purple marker as a statement about the triumph of art over bureaucracy.) The invoice is entered into the system against the PO number (which if you just type in creates an error message; you have to type the number and wait several seconds for the system to offer you a selection so that you can choose from the list. Which for a stack of twenty or so invoices is maddening.) Invoices are then created from these entries -- but these require two separate transactions. Of course. Then for each bill, one must go to the shelf of binders, find the PO printout, remove it from the 5-inch-wide binder, which entails hefting all the POs over the huge binder ring to get to the desired PO, and attach it to the bill so that the person approving it can see it. Once the bill is paid, the PO is re-inserted into the Unholy Cumbersome Binder.   

Wait, you ask. Can't the POs be scanned and saved to a network folder, where they can be easily reviewed by the approver?  Yessiree, Bub, they sure can. They can also be scanned into the accounting system for people like me who have to process bills that about half the time have incorrect POs on them.

But they aren't. Because change.

Most of what I know is from inference, because most communication starts with an assumption that you have had some prior informative conversation on the subject at hand with an extraterrestrial source.  

Take the office manager, who is one of the nicest women I've met, and one of my favorite people there. Unflappable, helpful. Also the worst communicator ever. A master of the seeming non sequitur, which is the result of spitting out the last sentence to a long internal conversation, or assuming that you live in her head.

"Did you get the things from the book?" she asked me on my fourth day.

"What 'things' exactly, and what book?" I asked.

"The PO Book."

"There's a PO book?"

"The ones in the room."

"Any particular room?"

Another time she said out of the blue, "I'll bet she took them from the folder before putting them into the other thing. Did she record them?"

I considered my many possible replies, and decided that "I don't know," was safest. I also consulted the Internet for symptoms of dementia.

It became my own personal pastime to decode her arcane statements. One day she asked, "What do you do when your printer has no words?"

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking the printer had run out of ink, and that's a good guess, so don't be too hard on yourself. What she meant was along the lines of, "When your printer has an error and has only icons and no display screen WITH WORDS, how do you know how to fix the problem?"

Then there is the filing. After looking in the umpteen places a document might be, I gave up.

"I've been looking for the Staples PO for this bill we got. I checked the books in the room and the new ones in A--'s office, but I can't find it. Do you know where else I might look?"

"Did you look under 'S'? A lot of people do that by mistake."

"I did actually, what with 'Staples' starting with -- you know. An S."

"It's a corporate charge account so it goes in the credit-card book."

You know how in school you and your friends whine about the dubious real-world utility of what you learn in a classroom? This is the first time I've had a working knowledge of the alphabet prove useless.

But I'm appreciated, it's an easy paycheck so far, they're going to put me in my own office to help with a special project, and things that would bother me if I were invested in the company as a permanent job are just things I'll be walking away from in a couple of months. 

If ever I am tempted to fall back on my mad office skills and get an office job where I'm not struggling financially, the rapidity with which my joints are seizing up is reminder enough that I do not want a desk job. It's frightening how quickly the aches and pains set in. It's fun to wear my cute blue boots and kicky skirts, sure, but I do miss my garden boots and mud gloves, and I feel naked without my pruners.

Pruners. Filed under P. Dammit.

Is that the Star of Bethlehem?

The news says that this year is the worst for the flu since the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009. Explains why the cold I caught a month ago has been about as ephemeral as a Cher farewell tour.

My Christmas present was a house to myself. My uncle, parents, and sister made their annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, also known as a casino in Connecticut, and the visiting relatives spent the day with their daughter and her family.

In our culture, the icon of loneliness is the person facing Christmas Day in solitude. To that I say: it's all about context. Besides, with  a house full of animals, I'm not exactly alone (ammiright, BabyJesusInAManger?)

I watched an on-demand movie ("Birdbox." Meh) and organized my bedroom, which included some tough love regarding clothing I'd bought while having a good day ("I can SO pull off a stretch zip-up magenta top with chartreuse spots!" "Black corduroy mini skirts are ME!") all the while thankful I thrift shop, so the experiments carried more chagrin than real financial regret.

I got my estate-planning documents in order and emailed copies to relevant people ("On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me..... a Durable Power of Attorneeeeeeeeey!")

I visited my 92-YO great-aunt ("Auntie, have you been naughty or nice?" "Naughty!" "THAT's my girl!"), and took a hike in a state park where, true to form, I spent a half-hour walking some really weird paths that seemed to just run behind houses, then through a cemetery, until I returned to the parking lot to realize the trail heads were ACROSS the street, so I walked there until the sun started to go down, which only made me more manic with desire to buy a house in Maine with some honest-to-God Nature right out my back door.

And I coughed. Constantly. Maybe because of my asthma, which in turn may be because of allergies or may be just another side-effect of the stupid B-list autoimmune disease I have that nobody ever heard of because nobody ever dies from it, they just get really, really annoying symptoms, or maybe because of the lingering Cher-cold, or all three.

Last night I coughed a nonstop cough so classically dry I was sure an olive would fly out of my mouth, which meant I could not keep my CPAP mask on, so it was a free-for-all to see whether the coughing, congestion, apnea, or the cats who thought it therapeutic to encircle me in a claustrophobic cartouche would deprive me of the most oxygen/sleep.

Before I go on to the next part, some background.

In my 30s I was sitting in the South End apartment of a friend, and, while she finished up some things, I passed the time by opening  a copy of Whitley Streiber's Communion. This was a big juicy book about his supposed experience with alien abduction. I figured it would be fluffy enough to pick up and put down with no regrets when it was time to leave. How deliciously, mindlessly sensational.

Twenty minutes into it I was in a pounding sweat. Whitley was describing in detail an event that had also happened to me when I was five.  Now, I have no memories of abduction, but I do have his memories of gray men in my room, of being touched on the forehead by a wand and being paralyzed, being terrified almost to the point of hysteria while these beings moved in and out of my line of vision, of feeling their touch (never intimate) without being able to move from it. Experiencing the kind of terror that, if you were dreaming, would cause you to wake up. Only I never did.

I have no recollection of being taken out of my room, but I do remember having this experience with minor variations several times in my childhood. I'd chalked it up to being a nightmare-prone kid, and forgot it as an adult. Until Whitley brought it all back down from the dusty mental attic, cold terror and all.

I'm not saying it was aliens, but how did he experience the exact same things? Is there some Jungian effect at work here? Some strange default the mind takes when our sleep paralysis doesn't quit?

I mention this episode because last night I managed to doze off, finally, but was woken abruptly by a low, very loud thrumming. The head of my bed is in a corner of the room, with a window directly to my left, and one at my feet to the right. We live by a wooded area.

I felt my whole body vibrate with the thrumming, and saw a blindingly bright light (like LED headlights) through both windows. And -- this is important -- the cats jerked to attention.

I could not move. I could move my eyes, but not my head or my limbs or open my mouth.

The first thought I had was, "They're back." This time I wasn't so much terrified as nervously curious, and hoped that if they were going to do anything particularly unpleasant to me they'd have the good manners to knock me out first. So, not unlike a visit to the endodontist.

And then the lights dimmed and suddenly it was morning and I was looking out not at a blinding light but at daylight with a very confused sense that something had just been erased like a badly edited film. If you've had surgery you know the feeling: "100, 99 98...hey, how'd I end up here and yes, I will have that ginger ale!"

What bothered me most? I still had the cough.  If they could manage interstellar travel, inflict paralysis at will, and erase memory, couldn't they have at least given me some advanced goddamn Space Robitussin?  Or would that have been the metaphorical butterfly wing-flap that tore the fabric of space and time?

Stupid aliens.