Category: Life Page 2 of 13

The Big Move: Reno to Wendover

While Dawn and I were preparing for our move and in the process of moving, I recorded my observations in my private notes and in text updates to our loved ones. Though I did not post them to this site contemporaneously, I had intended to collect, edit, and post them here; here is one in the series.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 2:25 pm

Given how jangled and totally exhausted we are, we decided it was important to pace ourselves slowly today. We checked out as late as we could—right at checkout time, thanks to how much Boris liked the hole in the box spring he’d found. After checking out, we spent a couple hours reorganizing, getting supplies, and trying to calm our nerves.

We are just getting back on the road. Tonight we will probably only go as far as Wendover, Utah—just over the Nevada border—then more rest.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 3:44 pm

Gassing up in Sparks now. Thursday should be a little better. We realized we haven’t taken a day off in a long, long time.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 5:28 pm

We are in the middle of Nevada now (Rye Patch) at a gas station. Our destination is the Best Western Plus in Wendover, where we have a reservation we made today.

What I realized today is this: We have to take it slower than I’d initially hoped, in part because we got out later than expected (which is to be expected) but mostly because we’re exhausted from the move. (This seems to be a theme.) That puts us in Wisconsin Saturday rather than Friday, but it was probably always unrealistic to imagine I could drive 2100 miles in four days after months of

  • looking for a job while working full-time in a very stressful workplace;
  • packing up our place (while living in it);
  • securing movers and a lease while essentially locked down;
  • and the final push, packing the stuff we were still using, getting the place ready for the movers, supervising the move, and cleaning the old place probably more thoroughly than we needed to (but less thoroughly than I’d have preferred).

Thursday, April 16, 2020, 2:00 am

Had a better day today (Wednesday) than yesterday. The views in Nevada were beautiful. We are all getting along well—the cats are surprisingly adaptable.

Between 1:30 pm and 9:30 pm, we got 400 miles in. We settled in at the Best Western Plus in Wendover tonight and it is actually a real hotel, which is nice. Both hotels, at least, had decent front desk COVID precautions. I still have to figure out my mileage capability for the next few days, but I think I can drive more tomorrow than today. It’s all about figuring out how far I can get by sunset (and getting out earlier), since day driving is so much easier.

April 15 driving stats:

  • 1:24 pm to 9:26 pm (8 hours, 2 minutes)
  • 399 mi
  • 5:56 driving; 2:06 breaks

April 15 drive

The Big Move: It begins

While Dawn and I were preparing for our move and in the process of moving, I recorded my observations in my private notes and in text updates to our loved ones. Though I did not post them to this site contemporaneously, I had intended to collect, edit, and post them here; here is one in the series.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020, 2:20 am

Today (Monday) went as well as could be expected—all our stuff is on its way to Madison. The moving crew was fast and professional. We are doing our last cleanup tasks and getting on the road sometime tomorrow. Because I need rest—I pulled an all-nighter Sunday going into Monday, and am very sore from all the packing—I’ve decided to not rush out of here as early as possible. Also, since a three-day trip is unlikely, I will pace myself for four (knowing I can do a couple long days then a short day on Friday [it actually took five days]).

Tuesday, April 14, 2020, 2:21 pm

Just going to get the car now—just finished with the apartment.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 3:31 am

Today, Tuesday, we made it 223 miles between 8 pm and about 12:30 am. We got a late start after packing the car and cleaning the apartment, but (possibly foolishly) we pushed ahead to Reno anyway. Once we got past Sacramento, basically nothing was open thanks to the pandemic (including gas stations and gas station bathrooms), which meant we had to keep going.

The road conditions as we crossed the Sierra Nevada were not great: dark, cold, and a little slippery. I had planned to make it farther on the first day, so my initial research into pet-friendly places to stay was sketchy when it came to Reno. We settled on a La Quinta. I will just say this about this motel: we used a lot of Lysol wipes.

Super exhausted! We will have a good day of driving during the DAY tomorrow (Wednesday).

April 14 driving stats:

  • 7:50 pm to 12:39 am (4 hours, 49 minutes)
  • 218 mi
  • 3:58 driving; 0:51 breaks

April 14 drive

The Big Move: In great shape

While Dawn and I were preparing for our move and in the process of moving, I recorded my observations in my private notes and in text updates to our loved ones. Though I did not post them to this site contemporaneously, I had intended to collect, edit, and post them here; here is one in the series.

Tuesday, March 31, 2020, 2:24 pm

Everything is in great shape right now! We locked in the mover estimate last week, and just got the lease for the new place today—we will sign and send it in, and then we are on our way! Two weeks from today the movers will be here, and getting ready for the move will be my and Dawn’s only job for a couple weeks.

The only thing I haven’t checked in on is the rental minivan, but I will call the week before and make sure they will have it ready.

Thank goodness for transportation being an essential sector.

Wednesday, April 8, 2020, 8:01 am

Depending on how it turns out, our move across the country is either going to be a triumphant story of succeeding against the odds or a cautionary tale of ignorant hubris. But I suppose interesting stories tend to fall into one of those categories.

On the one hand, moving during a pandemic while deaths and cases are going up quickly seems like a bad idea. And yet we are, as my dad put it, “beyond the point of no return.”

I looked at it as arranging a number of individual transactions. Once I got the job offer on March 3rd (remember how different the world was then), I put my notice in at my job. Something not to forget is that we were planning on making the move even if I hadn’t gotten an offer yet, so to have gotten that is huge.

Daily new cases as of 3-20-2020

Changes

For the first two months of 2020, I was burning the candle at both ends, and then cutting the candle in half and burning both of those ends. I use this very specific, vivid, and slightly awkward yet humorous metaphor to describe my time engaging in an intense and focused job search while also working full time—and trying to find time to help plan a move for me, Dawn, the cats, and our stuff from San Francisco to Wisconsin.

And that effort paid off. On March 3rd, I got the call I wanted: a job offer from my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Starting April 22nd, I will be a Strategic Communications Specialist within UW-Madison’s office of University Communications. Dawn and I had been planning to move to Madison in April whether or not I got a job, but this makes it far more possible—especially now.

Because, of course, the context today, March 20th, is worlds away from the context of March 3rd and pretty much each of the individual days since. We’ve seen huge increases in COVID-19 infections and deaths worldwide, voluntary self-quarantines, the physical closing of non-essential businesses, most of the rest of us working from home (including my future co-workers at the UW), orders to shelter in place at the city and state levels, hospitals running out of supplies and having to make terrible no-win decisions. We live in a new world that is changing by the minute, and we have only vague ideas about our future course—aside from the almost certain fact that millions of people will die from COVID-19.

I don’t even know how to describe witnessing a pandemic unfold in real time. It makes you rethink everything you’ve valued and failed to value. It certainly reinforces my opinions of capitalism and plutocracy. I can’t help but think about, and worry about, our family and our friends, their health, the health of all their loved ones, and the tragic and profound losses we’re seeing worldwide in every facet of life.

My and Dawn’s continued health seems good as we take it slow and easy. I’m grateful (and lucky) that my soon-to-be new job is with a state university and not a more precarious organization. They made the offer, they need me and my skills as much as ever, and the hiring process continues to move forward.

There will be all kinds of unpredictable side effects of this crisis. One somewhat random one: right now, I’m not at all inclined toward comparison shopping. If a mover or an apartment rental company is willing to engage with us now, and the price point is reasonable, I want to give them our business and not waste anyone’s time. They need to make a living and we need to get there. So far they seem to very much want our business and that’s a relief. The possibility of not getting to move when we planned has been one of my immediate worries since this thing started.

I was hired to work to promote the Strategic Partnerships unit (which does federal, state, tribal, community, and business relations). Right now, it sounds like my team is doing crisis communications more than anything else, which I’d be happy to help with. I love jumping in and doing what’s most needed. No matter what, I am excited to work for my alma mater in a role that fits my strengths and in which I’ll be able to actively build meaningful connections between UW-Madison and the larger community.

For her part, Dawn will be leaving the VA and opening up a brand-new private psychotherapy and training practice, and will be available for tele-mental health referrals later on this spring.

In this last year, Dawn and I have been thinking and talking a lot about our lives and the direction we’re going. Losing my mom last February drove home the point that we want to prioritize family more than we have. We have also faced the fact that—even on one federal salary and one non-profit salary—we will simply never be able to have a better place to live in the Bay Area than our one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, under current conditions.

These are the main reasons we’re picking up these roots and moving them to Madison. (Back home to Madison, in my case—after 20 years.) We’d been incredibly excited about a new adventure and a different pace of life. We still are. Now we just have to wait a little longer for some of the things that we were excited about, and that’s okay.

So many of the things that were planned in the old world are going to suffer drastically. One of my good friends just lost his mom this week. The fact that he won’t get to gather with friends and relatives young and old, the way I and my family did last February, seems to me like it would compound the sense of loss. The associated expressions of love and connection and sense of closure (to the extent that it is attainable) will have to be deferred and/or happen some other way. One of Dawn’s former trainees was going to have a wedding this spring. It’s not going to happen the way they planned.

I’m grateful for many things in my life. Now I’m grateful for a whole new set of things I never realized I took for granted. Having a wedding with 80 guests. Having a celebration of life for my mom. Not being sick.

More to come.

epilogue, 18 1/2 years later

You can’t just start writing a novel. You have to plan it out.

Don’t you?

I mean, it just seems weird. You and the page. The blank, empty retina screen covered with little cat hairs. (The cats love the laptop keyboard; it’s so warm.)

There’s no structure, there’s no form. There are no people. You’re essentially creating a universe. You’re a god.

You’re God.

Maybe that’s why people like writing novels.

It feels tiresome to me. It feels like a lot of work. I have my own voice in my head, very strong. I guess I have my mom’s, now, too. But do I have a cacophony of characters clamoring to get out?

No, not really.

Where are they? There’s (pretty much) just me in there. Are there various parts of me? Heck yeah. But am I going to split them up into little caricatures? And how is it not just entirely arbitrary, what you write?

It wouldn’t be a terrible idea to read, like, a single page of the several writing books I own. So, yeah, long form fiction? I love reading it. Never really wanted to write it.

I did try to do National Novel Writing Month in November 2002. I got about 5,000 words in, which is farther than I had remembered, and it is sort of interesting. It’s also terrible, but it is an incomplete first novel, so of course it is.

I got 10% in, in 11 days out of a 30-day month, which means I was horribly behind the pace. The fact that I was doing this during November 2002, which was my fourth month in the Bay Area after moving here (soon to be “there”) without a job, tells me the venture was a bit of a half-assed attempt to avoid reality. I was dialing for dollars and really did not like it. I had very little energy left after canvassing at night, staying up too late (sometimes until sunrise), and then getting up (sometimes around dusk) to go canvass again.

I had also just left a young woman behind, and we were somewhat emotionally entwined at the time. She loved me in her way. She wanted to want to be with me. Maybe she only wanted to want to want to be with me. In any case, I was a source of stability. My feelings for her were strong, but I was also pretty emotionally immature and needy. (I might still be, but not like I was then.)

I used her middle name to name one of the main female characters in the story. I didn’t quite pattern the character after her, but close enough.

I never finished the story I wrote. It was a little cliched—what if the country split up into smaller countries? It’s been done. And it was kind of about the emotional journey of these two guys—one certainly a stand-in for me, but it’s difficult to remember after seventeen years.

Interesting, though, that I’m thinking about this. Sure, I’m going through old files and photos. I’m six weeks from leaving the place I’d been for just ten weeks… seventeen years ago. And everything is almost exactly the opposite!

Giving it away for free

Hi there. Happy 2020, a year that promises to be filled with a great deal of change. For the better, I fervently hope.

I am back, very nearly a year after losing my mom (see prior post).

That isn’t necessarily what I came here to write about, though.

I have mentioned previously on this site that I have cultivated a slightly lazy habit of commenting on articles on newspaper and other websites. I get a brief hit of gratification from responding to news with my own unique and well-thought-out opinion. But, eventually, it scrolls into the ether, and probably no one else goes deep enough into the comment thread to ever read it again, five minutes after I’ve written it. (Except when I go back through the links in my commenter profile to see how many likes I got. Yep, I do that. Another penny dropped in the slot, another tiny dopamine gumball.)

What is the point of giving it away for free like that without building it into something else? Sure, for a moment other people feel like they’re part of a community, or maybe they feel like they have another enemy to despise. But if I were to only expand those thoughts a little bit into reasonably cogent blog entries and tweets, there’d be a lot more content on this site and maybe a few more readers.

Do I care about having readers? In a broad sense, sure. My original audience was 80% my mom and 20% the people I left behind when I abruptly decided to leave Madison in 1999. My new #1 fan (2011 to present) got a bit of a glimpse into who I was by reading the archives of this site and luckily wanted more.

Anyway, here’s what you’ve all been missing.

In loving memory: Debbra M. Ream, 1954-2019

In memory: Debbra M. Ream, 1954-2019
Below is the obituary I wrote for my mom. It will be published in some form in Hartford, Wisconsin; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Monroe, Michigan, the three places she lived in her 64 years.

Haven’t been here in a while

As always, I have a couple draft posts floating around from six months ago, about politics and television, that aren’t really finished enough thoughts to publish.

But as the end of another year approaches, I feel the pull to be both more introspective and more extroverted that having a blog tends to create. I’m guessing that happens more frequently if you actually care about keeping it up to date. Publishing, I imagine, is self-reinforcing.

This year, things really changed for me in terms of work, one area that was very, very stable — some might say stagnant — from 2002 to the middle of 2016. On the one hand, I am doing many of the things I have been doing for the last dozen years in non-profit communications (which I like to think I’m good at). On the other hand, I am now at a new organization.

I get to do the things I like to do: manage projects, run websites, write, design, persuade, grow an organization. I’m excited about the resources I have and now all I have to do is let more people know about us and get them to care about what we’re doing. I feel great about what I’ve done so far and how integrated I already feel into the organization, and I’m excited about what I’ll be able to accomplish in 2018.

Thankfully, things have been good at home. Though we’ve had some family (including pet) health issues this year, Dawn and I wind up 2017 happy and healthy, and for that I am immensely grateful.

Really healthy and really overdue

Tonight (or, more accurately, very early this morning), I finally finished and posted the piece I started writing in January, which may appear below this one. A post every two months is pretty prolific for me these days, but I was particularly inspired today.

I am getting better and better at this “looking for a job” thing, which is increasingly becoming a “who am I and who do I want to become” thing, which feels really healthy and really overdue. Just like with anything else, the more I try to express who I am, the more I begin to understand myself. Until now, I have given myself scant permission to attempt to direct the course of my life as much as is possible (which I acknowledged earlier is seldom much and maybe less than we’d all like to think). I have always found it easy enough to define myself by the things that I do, or that I know how to do, or have done. Accomplishments and skills are easy for me. It’s a little harder for me to get up the courage on a regular basis to actually reveal what is important to me. Instead, I have allowed the things I’ve done — and for whom I’ve done them — to speak for themselves. The result is that, more frequently than I like, I have allowed myself to be defined by the goals and the mission statements crafted by others. It’s not that I’m not imaginative; it’s not that I’m lazy; it is not even that I haven’t sufficiently apprehended the importance of showing my values, dreams, and goals to the world. It is simply that I have been doing other things. (Also, frankly, I have been afraid of myself and my own personal power and the fact that maybe I could actually accomplish some of the things I want to, if I just put myself in position to do them.)

Having no job at all for a longer period than ever before as an adult — and we’re talking barely more than a month, to be clear — has been a gift so far, as I had hoped but not necessarily expected. It has helped me shed some of the ways others have defined me and allowed me to start defining myself so much more clearly. It’s also helped me start to prioritize what will really get me where I want to go. It’s cleared away the barriers to truly thinking about what I want out of life, what I want to accomplish, and which path I want to follow.

Soon I will articulate a few of these things, some of which I spent a lot of time thinking, talking, and writing about today, but not just this moment.

2016 is gone; 2017 is here

Like any other year, 2016 came and went. It didn’t linger beyond December 31st, thankfully. I was worried that it would, apparently, given the fact that I burst into tears while kissing Dawn at 12:00:02 am on January 1st.

Previously on gohlkusmaximus.com: 2011 was amazing. I met Dawn and we fell in love (basically instantaneously, but almost certainly before the octopus and the salmon landed on the table). In 2012 we moved in together, got engaged, and started planning our wedding. In 2013, we made our amazing wedding in Oakland and honeymoon in Kauai happen. 2014 was harder: Some family issues held over from the prior year, and Dawn and I each lost a co-worker, unexpectedly, to metastatic cancer and a heart attack (respectively). I had some nice work accomplishments, though. 2015 brought family illness and much related travel, work issues for Dawn (such as an office fly infestation) and for me (an entire department got laid off, including my best friend at work)—but also Dawn’s and my first cruise, to Alaska.

2016? Complicated. Family illness begat a death in the family and more travel. I got laid off in July, but I got a very enriching temporary gig from August through the election and beyond. The election campaign culminated in the most frightening presidential result in our lifetimes to date. Dawn realistically feared a Trump win early on, while my liberal optimism allowed me to be in less exhausting denial until Election Day. But we took two cruises that were mostly great (along the California coast, and to Hawaii). And at the end of the year we had a fun visit from family about which we had no ambivalence, refreshingly. Also, Dawn got new responsibilities at work that she sought (and the flies in her office were eradicated).

2017? Beyond the rightfully dreaded ascendance of Trump, I don’t know what it will bring. Personally, my part-time gig with The Next Generation in Oakland will end and result in a couple more nice portfolio pieces. I’ll find a new full-time occupation unless something goes dreadfully wrong. Our cats like me being home more often, for sure, though I have taken to working at the library to maximize my productivity.

The changing of the calendar provokes contemplation of the future but also the past. It is the marking of time that makes the passage of time most obvious. The more years we have, the better we have to be at subtraction.

There is a particular horror-inducing vision of the uncertainty of the future, and maybe more specifically death, that has been resident in my mind as long as I can remember. I will describe it to you now, though you might find it disturbing. It is merely an all-encompassing expanse of nothingness, devoid of all light, sound, and contact with others, in which I, being fully aware and conscious but not necessarily corporeal, am receding farther and farther away from everything else, everyone and everything I have ever known and loved.

I don’t think that’s an actual future I will experience. I hope not. I’ve generally always been able to repress that image and focus on reality and the present and doing my best. But life is finite and I have no clue what comes after it. Strangely enough, this very moment is finite, and what comes after it is quite frequently the next moment. I don’t really know everything about the moment I am currently in, much like any given moment in the past, or in the future. So it doesn’t really pay to be afraid of any of it, because I’m only going to know what I’m going to know, experience what I’m going to experience, control what I can control, which ain’t much and probably is less than I think.

This blog entry seems to be about overcoming fears: of the future and of the past, of failure and of success, of life and of death. Fears I have successfully conquered were my fear of falling in love with someone who would love me back, and relatedly my fear of being truly emotionally vulnerable (that is, admitting my human foibles to myself and others). I did this in part by working to understand (and/or convince myself) that it would be worth it. But I also did it by just jumping in and trying, and after surprisingly few hilarious and confusing failures, I found someone who was so right for me. So I guess those could inform how I approach my new life, the one that starts right this moment, the one that I have had all along, the one that I will have as long as it will have me.

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