i willn't be a prisoner

i'll stick you in the gut with a shiv

I am constantly looking ahead to the future, usually between one and five days.  I suspect that I am not alone in this, as most people from the time their week starts on Monday morning are looking ahead to Friday evening, when you are allowed your scheduled visit to the prison yard.  It’s two blissful days of perceived freedom before Monday comes again and they lock you back up.  As Jaime said to me the other day, “this is no way to live.” 

There are 365 days per year and approximately 260 workdays.  Let’s imagine that your company gives you the four major holidays off, Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and the 4th of July.  Let us also assume that all four of these days fall on a week day.  Lastly let’s say that your company is generous and gives you fourteen days of paid vacation.  Between weekends, holidays, and vacation this comes to 123 days to pump iron, play basketball and instigate gang fights in the prison yard and 242 days per year locked up.

I meditated on these numbers as I sat staring at the padded taupe colored walls of my cubicle prison.  If I did this for ten years I will have spent 2,420 days waiting for the weekend.  That comes to over six straight years without a weekend break, of day to day general unhappiness.  When I think about it in those terms I question why I would subject myself to this.

There are some people, glass-half-full people who will make the best of this situation.  They will find the little things to enjoy, give meaning and motivation to their everyday life.    I am not one of those people, the glass is clearly half empty.  Instead of drafting a plot heavy escape plan involving a map tattooed on the left buttock of a cellmate, I would become complacent.  I would complain every day and wait impatiently for the forthcoming weekend, which will flash by me.

I wonder if our concept for prisons is all wrong.  Perhaps we should convert them into office buildings and instead of cells, inmates will sit in cubicles droopy eyed in front of piercing  computer screens. They will compose emails and submit invoice, and once an hour their boss will come in and give them a pep talk about their work performance and how to meet their goals.

At the end of the day the cubicle door will be opened and they will slowly file down the hallways back to their rooms.  There they will make their own dinner, do their own laundry, and if they’re lucky they will have just enough time to watch a soul sucking rerun of Two and a Half Men.

After decades of time served they will be released into freedom, having spent the best years of their lives slaving away for a faceless corporation, they can now enjoy their golden years.  They can watch all the Two and a Half Men they please and worry about whether or not medicare will cover the blood pressure medication they need thanks to their years spent in the corporate world.

I wonder if implementing this would cut down on prison overcrowding, or in the end would some lawyer get a judge to rule it cruel and unusual punishment.

* * * 

I almost catch myself longing for the life of an inmate when I realize that the differences between their life and mine are vast.

I don’t have to worry about getting stabbed in the gut with a shiv.

I don’t have to worry about dropping the soap in the shower.

Lastly, when inmates get their time in the prison yard they are closely watched by men in guard towers holding rifles.

My free time is mine to do as I please, it is not an illusion like the prison yard.  Weekends are only an illusion of my own perception.  Inmates are in prison for the long haul, death or parole are their only escape, I on the other hand am free to go at any time.

So why don’t I escape?  Like most, I’ve got bills to pay and vacations I want to take.  I’ve got to go with the highest paying job that will accept me just so that I can do these things.  Don’t I and others out there deserve to find work we love to do?  Work that makes us excited to get up in the morning, work that keeps us from always looking forward to the weekend?

We do, and I do.  I’ve been complacent and let the prison guards slowly construct a cell of padded walls around me.  Because I don’t want to look back in ten years and wonder what I’ve been doing with my life, I am planning an escape.  I’ve had someone bake me a series of cupcakes each containing another instrument to help me in my jailbreak.  On the outside I will find a job, one where I can be happy.  It may not be exactly what I want right away but few things are.  I will make it into what I want, and not spend my life looking forward to another day off in the future that will only end up a mild disappointment but rather looking to the next exciting day of work.  I proclaim, I will not be a prisoner!
posted by: brian snider

dr. green thumb

thyme and lavender.  impulse buys

Despite a reference in my previous garden post not easy getting green, I said that if the basil had not grown, that I would go to the grocery store and buy a starter plant and claim that I’d grown it from a seed myself, I have decided to be honest is all my gardening adventures.

For the sake of honesty I will admit that the latest additions to my garden were not grown from seeds but rather purchased as starters from Whole Foods.  On Saturday while doing a little shopping I came across a tempting layout outside the main entrance.  The stand held a variety of herbs and vegetables that were being advertised as two for $5.

After circling the stand twice I decided that rather than selecting starters for herbs or vegetables that I was already planning on planting from seeds, I would choose something else, lavender and thyme.  They were both healthy looking and smelled delicious, I immediately fell into the trap that grocery stores, including Whole Foods are betting that you will get caught in, the impulse buy.

I brought the plants home and set them on the table, they were beautiful looking.  I wondered why I wasn’t buying all my plants this way, certainly it was much easier, it satisfied my desire for immediate gratification, and it seemed to me that it was simpler to keep plants alive than to grow them.

When I put them next to my “first grow” my week old basil plant I realized why I wasn’t simply buying starters for everything in my garden.  Unlike the basil I hadn’t earned the satisfaction that comes from growing a plant from a tiny seed in the soil.  I will enjoy these herbs, fresh lavender teas, and thyme smothered on legs of lamb but they will not be the same as the basil used in a delicious pasta or the lettuce tossed in a summer salad.

chives growing from the head of this elephant

Speaking of the lettuce, it’s not yet begun to sprout.  Perhaps I’m being a tad impatient, since the basil has begun to grow I have become a junky to see my vegetables sprout and grow and flower and develop.  It’s possible that I’m simply being impatient but then the worried parent in me is concerned that I planted them too deep, or drowned them in too much water.

I will give it another week, maybe by next weeks update I will have little green sprouts just like the basil.

As for the rest of the garden, I was busy both Saturday and Sunday and did not buy the seeds necessary and have yet to plant everything I hoped to.  I suspect that I need to get these in the ground as soon as possible, we have had such beautiful weather of late that I don’t want my precious seeds to be missing out on the valuable yet elusive sunlight.
posted by: brian snider

your parents house

picture of me now, sailing my boat

Parents serve many purposes in your life.  They give birth to you, they raise you, they feed, clothe, and shelter you.  Hopefully they even provide support for you monetarily and emotionally.  (I suppose they do this because the law requires that they do these things, but also because you are their flesh and blood and someday most likely they will find themselves needing to be taken care of themselves and you will have to provide that.)  In your early to mid twenties you move out from underneath their umbrella of protection and begin a life of your own.  Then when you reach your late 20’s you somehow find yourself living in your parents house once again.

This wasn’t my dream, I don’t imagine that it’s anyones dream, yet it happens.  In November when Jaime and I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle we settled into the downstairs living area of my parents house.  At the time I felt like a failure having lived on my own for six years three of them all on our own in a foreign city.  There had been more than a few times in those years when it felt like everything we’d worked so hard at was about to crumble, yet we always managed to come through it intact.  This time however we had failed and it was all but necessary to take my parents up on their offer.

Since November four sets of my friends have found themselves in a similar situation.  This was not because we love our parents house so much, but because we were in need of a reboot.  We had all moved to other cities, took risks, had new experiences and in the end in order to return to, not our old life but another new life, we needed the support of our parents once again.

It can feel embarrassing to load all your possessions into their house.  This can feel even more embarrassing if you’re a couple and even more so if you’re a married couple.  I had been in a similar situation with Jaime eight years before and I couldn’t help being depressed that we had taken more than a few gigantic steps backwards.

Had I been fooling myself these past few years?  I thought that I was well equipped enough in life not to need to come crawling back to them.  I thought I was an adult but at 27 it turned out that really I was still a child.

Moving home could have gone two ways; the first was to become motivated to move out by getting a job immediately and saving up as much as possible.  I expected to be moved out by Christmas and not be freeloaders in a spare bedroom but able to pay for things ourselves and contribute to the family.  The second was to revert into adolescence.  This is where I expected that I would depend on my parents completely and quite possibly not move out until February.  I feel into that second path.

My parents seemed to enjoy having us home, we’d been away for three years and in that time all their children had moved away as well.  Their enjoyment in having us back aided my transition into adult adolescence.  I didn’t have to cook for myself, didn’t have to do my own laundry, or go grocery shopping.  I was living rent free and had no responsibilities.

It was not quite as I expected things would go.  I got a job by Thanksgiving and in early December Jaime and I found a house very close to my parents.  Due of a series of reasons we still didn’t end up moving out until mid January.  Like a Harry Potter charm, I was unable to see that I was under a spell until I had moved out and was on my own again.  It was at this moment I understood the traps and convenience of being allowed to return to your parents house.

I suspect my reaction was not typical.  In seeing just how many of my friends were finding themselves in the same situation I was relieved but anticipated that reverting into that adolescent state as I did is just either not possible or not an option for others.  I imagine that what most feel is thankful for being allowed to return but immense pressure to get back out into the real world and be an adult again.

It seems to me that this might be a trend of late twenty somethings who need to right their ship and in order to do so they return home to the helping hands of their parents in the hopes that together you can get upright and sailing again.

To all my friends out there navigating this predicament, once you get through the choppy waters, it’s smooth sailing ahead.
posted by: brian snider

not easy getting green

infant basil

This would be a great title for a blog about money, I’ve decided to waste it on a post about my garden.  The picture at the top of the blog is the beginnings of a basil plant, the seeds were planted the day I posted how does your garden grow?

My first foray into growing herbs from seeds was an absolute failure.  I planted basil, rosemary, and chives.  For weeks the pots sat empty, just these barren dirt wastelands.  I was so perplexed by the lack of growth that I left the empty pots outside for months just incase they were taking an especially long time to grow.

I thought I’d done everything properly, I tended to them daily, supplied them with plenty of water and copious amounts of LA sun.  In the end the seeds yielded nothing and I eventually used the dirt in the pots for a lemon tree which never grew any lemons.

As I planted these basil seeds I was filled with skepticism and expected that after a month without so much as a sprout I would go to the PCC and buy those basil starters I’d seen in the produce section.  I would quietly pant them and let people believe that I’d grown them myself.

You can see there was no need, amazingly the seeds have sprouted and now I have what hopefully will be a beautiful basil plant.  Of course that all hinges on me not murdering these fragile sprouts in their most formative years.

three kinds of lettuce I planted.

Concerning the rest of my garden; I’ve  managed to plant some starter strawberries supplied by my guru, as well as rosemary, and chives which are currently growing like green hair from an elephant shaped planter.  On what might have been the sunniest day we’ve had all year I panted three varieties of lettuce in one of the long planter boxes.  Despite my minor success with the basil I remain skeptical about the possibilities of the lettuce ending up in a summer salad and even more skeptical that that salad will include carrots, radishes or any of the other vegetables I plan on planting.

I still have much to do in my tiny garden, but as long as the dozens of other distractions don’t tear me away, I expect to finish planting everything by the weekend, and begin to wait.  Waiting for the green.
posted by brian snider

let's get engaged

let's get engaged....sure.

Jaime and I have talked endlessly about how best to tell the story of our engagement and subsequent marriage.  This included an ill fated performance at IO West theater in Los Angeles.  Much of the following blogs involving the year of our engagement are drawn from that performance and our discussions.

As if our first year in a new city wasn’t hard enough; as if money wasn’t tight enough, as if everyday life wasn’t taking enough out of us, Jaime and I decided to make our like even harder by getting engaged.

How did this whole thing begin?  As best as I can remember it was the middle of April on a beautiful warm day.  Both Jaime and I were off work early and we had an afternoon to burn, without much money we decided to stay in and...well do what you sometimes do when you’re at home and have no money.  Afterwards we found ourselves laying in bed together, I can remember looking out the window and watching the bird fly up and land on the roof.  Somehow and even now I cannot fully remember Jaime brought up the topic of marriage.

The previous October we attended my brothers wedding and when people 

would turn to us and ask when we would be getting married we laughed.  

Half jokingly we told them that when all our friends were divorced we 

would get married.

Truth be told I only entered this conversation with Jaime because I could sense that to attempt to blow off marriage talk would only instigate a fight and I was far too exposed and relaxed for a fight.  I humored her, we talked about who we would invite, family and close friends only, where we would do it, at my mom’s house with a pot luck dinner.  We decided when, mid May of 2009 perhaps the 16th.

I imagine that this is where female readers will close their eyes and slowly shake their head from side to side wondering exactly how men can be so oblivious.  I understood that we were getting married but what I took away from the conversation was that this would happen somewhere in the future like buying a new car or going to Europe.  That date we set was loose and not set in stone.

We went the rest of the night without discussing the wedding and Jaime did not rush to tell anyone, the following morning was the same and I was almost able to forget about the entire thing.  On her way home from work that evening I learned how wrong I was, she had spent the entire morning looking at engagement rings and had told everyone at work that she was engaged.

“Look,” I said “I don’t want every conversation to be about weddings now.”  As soon as I said it I wished that I could take it back.  

An argument ensued and it nearly ended in a break up.  We discussed things further that evening and I began to understand that our conversation the afternoon before had not been a bunch of loose ideas and dreams, it was for real and I was acting like a total asshole.  We talked not about wedding plans but rather about why it was that I didn’t want to get married.

I didn’t have a good answer, the best I could come up with was that I wanted to wait until I had the money to throw a big lavish wedding.  I didn’t really want that, I believed that expensive weddings were a waste of money.  Sure you had memories and memories are important but it is just a day and with the money saved you could do so much more.  What I think my real fear was, was telling my parents.  In our situation and at a time when everyone was warning of a second depression it did not seem to make much sense to be getting married and I really didn’t want to have to justify our decision.

I had some time to think about what I wanted to do, by the next day it was clear to me that I had no reason not to marry Jaime.  I loved her, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and that was reason enough.  I called her that afternoon and told her that when she picked me up from work that we would head out to the Glendale Mall and go to Zales to buy her engagement ring.

Through out the entire process of getting engaged and eventually married we did very little conventionally.  Picking out the ring was far from conventional, she’d seen it on their website and loved it.  Unable to afford anything expensive it was to our benefit that technically this was a promise ring and priced at less than $120.  Jaime pointed it out to me in the case, she tried it on and then I insisted that she leave while I purchased it.  I didn’t let her wear it out of the store, it went into the box and sat in my dresser drawer.

We were technically engaged, preparing and planning for a mid May wedding.  There were dresses to buy, invitations to send out, parents to tell.  I was also holding onto a ring and I knew that at some point I would need to get down on one knee and ask her to marry me.  I didn’t know when or where or how I was going to do it but I did know that I was going to make her sweat about it a little.

giving and receiving

check this record out you won't regret it

    I haven't had a new favorite band in quite some time, well really since Nirvana.  So it's been about eighteen years since there was a band in my life that had me impatiently waiting for their next album release.  It's been an equally long amount of time since I found a band so enjoyable to listen to an entire album from start to finish in one sitting as a pure singular experience for just enjoying.

LAKE was born (like so many bands on the k-records label) along the I-5 corridor but known mostly as an Olympia band.  Though I would not say that it is glaringly obvious there is no mistaking that their sound is a product of the region.  To date they have four records easily available on Amazon.com and itunes.  Their most recent release Giving and Receiving was released on Tuesday by k-records and was well worth the wait.

I am not a record reviewer and have nothing similar that would even qualify me as such, in writing this post I wanted only to share an incredible band and an incredible record with my fellow internauts.
I don't know if this is the right term to use but it seems to fit, LAKE is indie pop at its absolute best.  Not intending to turn anyone off if you either love or loathe, but picture them as what the Mamas and the Papas would have sounded like if they were from Olympia.

Giving and Receiving does not quite live up to their first K release Oh, the places we'll go but it is unquestionably better than anything else I've heard in the last eighteen years.  Hip swinging bass lines, simple and soft guitar riffs, subtle brass that fades in and out, foot tapping drum beats, and an omnipresent keyboard that swirls from 80's electronic synthesizer to an early 70's jazz organ to piano.  Their lyrics are soft and beautiful, the album is split between male and female voices occasionally both together.

The sounds form less of an urban sound scape than that of something natural, it belongs in the wilderness.  This is probably why they so strongly remind me of my second apartment in Los Angeles, warm summer evenings in Griffith park with my wife and dog.  If I was to create a camping playlist this would be it.

    I can't urge you strongly enough to check them out.  Their easy to find on itunes and amazon there are two spectacular songs available for free download at rcrdlbl.com.  If you find that you love them as much as I do then you may want to see them live, they are currently touring for the release of Giving and Receiving and if you live in the Seattle area they will be performing at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard on May 15th.  I'll be there for what is sure to be a truly memorable experience.

everyone wants to know

this was how i got to work in los angeles

Everyone wants to know, they ask with such incredulity that I might have just told them that I ride a dinosaur to work.  “Why would you move from California to Seattle?”  There are so many answers that I choose one.  “We’re from Seattle.”  This only confuses them further because then they want to know, “You mean you lived in Seattle before, then you moved to California, then decided to move back here?”  I get what they’re saying, to them it just doesn’t make sense that having lived in Seattle, then California that I would choose to move back.

Sometimes I take it a step further.  “We lived in Los Angeles.”  I will say, and those who have spent a significant amount of time there understand everyone else does not.  At this point I usually stop because they will either be people who don’t understand why anyone would leave Los Angeles or can’t understand and nothing that I can say will change their mind.

It’s been six months since the move and every time I show my ID’s or change an address we have to answer this question.  Every time I answer it I mentally list all the reasons why we left.

Reasons for leaving;

-traffic

-self centered people

-distance from home

-career changes

-constant sunny weather

-smog

-loneliness

-expensive... everything

I am surprised that by the time I get to this part of the list I stop thinking about all the things that drove me crazy and start thinking about all the things I loved and miss.  I begin to get confused, why did I leave Los Angeles?

I’ve mentioned in the blog before how when we were in LA I longed for Seattle and took joy in the things that connected me to this wonderful city.  My Seattle Mariners license plate was a badge of honor that I displayed with pride.  I simply wanted to be reminded of the city I left at twenty four, for the lonely, smoggy, self-centered urban war zone of Los Angeles.

Now in Seattle I take an equal amount of pride in my California license plate, my Intelligentsia coffee mug embossed with the bear flag, and I watch television shows and listen to music that remind me of the places I spent my mid twenties.

Am I destined to long to be living somewhere other than where I currently am?  Or can I not as the Ram Dass professes Be Here Now?  I remember back to May of 2010, Jaime and I were finally going on our honeymoon to Maui.  Because airline tickets were cheaper from Seattle to Maui than from LA, we decided to drive home and spend an extra week then fly to Maui from there.

In all our previous trips out of LA, just before we left I began to identify on a communal level with everything around me.  As much as I tried to reject the city I had slipped right into her consciousness without realizing it.  To my utter disbelief I began to miss the city.  When we would return I was stunned to find that I felt like I had returned home.  It wasn’t my real home, but I began to feel more comfortable in Los Angeles than Seattle.

In departing for our honeymoon I didn’t feel any of that, I wanted to get out of LA county as fast as possible, leave nothing but a trail of dust settling behind me.  In Maui, like so many before me, I didn’t want to leave.  Yes I wanted to stay there because it was such a freeing place with immeasurable beauty and life, but also because I knew that once we left that island we would have to return to LA.  Over and over I imagined leaving everything we owned there and never going back, making a new life anywhere else.

On our return trip home our car got stuck in a freak snow storm and we spent the night in a hotel at Mt. Shasta City.  I had been planning on driving straight through but this snowstorm halted all that, in the hotel room I felt relieved to not have to return to LA for one more night.  I no longer felt like I belonged there, it wasn’t welcoming.  I hated my job, Jaime hated her job, our best friends had moved to Brooklyn while we were away and our other friends would be leaving in the next year as well.  Things felt empty.

Not long after we returned I concluded that I was ready to leave Los Angeles.  I didn’t need to pack up immediately (our lease wasn’t up until November).  In my heart I knew that when Jaime finally came to me and suggested that we should move home, I would not disagree.  I didn’t have to wait long, by June Jaime was no longer interested in becoming a Hollywood actor and in August we began talking about moving.  By the end of August we had a location and date; Seattle, October 31st.

I suppose I don’t really have an answer for those who ask why I would leave LA.  I could tell them that it’s not really the paradise that it seems so many imagine.  I could tell them the horror stories about what it is like to fall on hard times in a foreign place where the city is virtually made up of only rich or poor.

On the other hand it has many redeeming qualities.  Six months later I miss the consistent warm weather, the beautiful Summer evenings, walking with Jaime and our dog Olive in Griffith park, I miss Los Feliz and Silverlake, I miss the feeling of being in the middle of all the hustle of Hollywood, I miss all the little surprises that a city like LA has waiting around every corner.  

What it really comes down to however is the fact that I don’t believe that you should live in a city when you don’t want to be there.  We are free creatures who have the choice to live and be wherever we want, there may be factors that draw you to specific places but the choice is still yours.  I remind myself constantly that what is possessing me is not genuine love for LA but rather a nostalgic memory of the best times I had there and the feeling of being somewhere other than where I am.  I believe I will return many times in my life and I will be able to visit all the places I love and I won’t be hampered by the reality of living there.  In the end I would rather be miserable in Seattle than miserable in Los Angeles.