The unbearable sameness of research parks

"I'm dirty; it's okay to jump me," I say as we cross paths with the man and the black Lab. He looks at me astonished and I realize what I have said.

I was of course referring to his dog, who moments before he had warned against doing any such thing.

Idgie was on her leash, having been a rather bad dog, by which I mean having been fully true to her doggy nature. Leaping two four-foot orange plastic landscape fences in a single bound, she'd gone exploring in the almost-like-a-real-pond retention pond and would not return.

Not in dog mode but humanly foolish, I'd panicked when she disappeared from sight. Could she drown there? I am of course forgetting that she can easily swim across medium sized lakes, though her lack of any Lab-like genes makes her indifferent to the act. Eventually we reconnected, after I'd mucked through the swamp on the one day I hadn't bothered to wear my beloved Farm-N-Fleet rubber boots, and I'd clamped on the lead.

"I'm dirty; it's okay." That's my motto for today. Last night I listened to gorgeous orator human being Cornel West remind us that this business of life is all about funk, to get into it and be it.

I'd been planning to walk with Idgie through the Innovation Research Park just down the street from where I live. If I'm looking for jobs, why not start where I already am, I reasoned. A mile and a half down the road and I don't have a clue what's there, though the buzz words "research" and "innovation" are always glued to any statements about the place. Got some experience with both of those, I figured.

But somewhere near the intersection of Innovation and Discovery, I realized I did not want to get out of the car into the field of building with no distinguishing characteristics after building with no distinguishing characteristics. And hardly a business name to be seen on the identical doors until you get to GE Medical, which not only claims itself but has some design chutzpah and a piece of sculpture in front.

I haven't seen a GE ad in awhile, but since they all start with "black belt in six sigma," I'm out of the running anyway. Later, I'll look at the research park website to see what's behind all those blank building faces. But I don't think I could work there. Something about the place sucks your soul out of you.

The place we walked instead is slotted to become another "innovation incubator," another research park. I've seen the plans for the first building. Part of a university, it's not as bad as the ones across the street, but not a thing about it deserves the name "innovation." I wonder how much more discovery would happen in a place that challenges you to the words it claims.

Hate to see that land eaten up by our faith in marketing promises. Most of the research park buildings are lightly occupied as it is, full of empty spaces. And I'm thinking the real innovation comes when you get dirty, when you are into the full catastrophe funk of life, not the tidy bland and sameness.

Anyway, I'm dirty but I'm good at lots of stuff. When you get a chance, employers in real places with names and windows and all, you really oughta jump.

Woof!

Among the leaves

Still operating with the assumption that at the end of my half-time April, I'll be full-time unemployed, today was not a great day. In the second week of being off work, I filed for unemployment, a surprisingly smooth and easy task to accomplish. Then I spent half the day trying to correct a small mistake, not so smooth and easy a task to accomplish.

The lack of routine was welcome the first week. Now I know how deeply I'm caught up in identifying with my job. Without it, I'm a little sad this second week, at sea.

Or fallen. Pema Chodron says "To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest,” not exactly my favorite way to wake up.

Stopping in the office, I find a letter offering me my position at half time. A bit of delayed mail, it feels like a crummy joke. The one that followed saying "oops: they didn't really approve that" is even more delayed. It hasn't come yet.

I print jobs that will be posted soon at the state site. As a "terminal" employee, I'm not entitled to the forewarning, but a kind colleague passes his earlier notices along, alerting me. There are a few to apply for. Good.

But the sadness won't dislodge.

I take Idgie to the dog park.

The March wind is blowing hard. A big box elder branch cracks, breaks, falls to the ground. At the edge of the rutted road an Asian couple gleans in the brush that's been bulldozed there, stripping free supporting stalks to hold their beans and culling bigger wood for fire.

We head into the woods, Idgie on the heels of a squirrel. I lie down in the dry oak leaves. My hair must be lost in them, so close are the colors. New adder's tongue thrusts through the dead leaves nearby, sharp, green and gray and speckled. I cross my hands on my chest: the princess pose my sister called it, the one we'd take at night awaiting princes. Then I put them at my side, the corpse pose, the next one to take.

But not for awhile.

Idgie returns and kisses me. This is unusual. She's not an affectionate dog. But then, she's not used to me lying in the leaves, watching the branches wave above, wondering whether I'm closer to a princess or a corpse.

I decide it's a stupid question and brush off the leaves clinging to my sweater.

We spend two hours there. The dogs are mad with spring delight, humping each other and peeing on anyone foolish enough to sit in a chair in the place where people gather there. Idgie has perfected the leg-lift style of micturation and follows suit, proud of herself.

We head home for dinner. Then she naps and I steel myself to work, editing papers or applying for jobs.

Maybe. This fully awake business needs recuperative naps now and then. And when you wake, chances are the moon and stars will call you.

Eating babies

On a wild romp along Underwood Creek, Idgie disappears into the platoons of dried teasel soldiers who stand guard between the grade school and the business college. When she doesn't respond to my shouts and whistles I come hunting, only to find her finishing off the last bit of some small animal's tasty baby. Judging by the look of the burrow she is poking, it must have been a bunny baby.

A little early for bunnies, but then the timing of most everything seems off these days.

I am a little disgusted and a little proud. She's a good rodent and rabbit hunter, one of the jobs she's chosen as her calling, herding cattle, is not available to her.

But eating other critters' babies, that seems. . . unseemly. Of course, I am not opposed to eating a bit of baby cow or sheep now and then, so there! I can't really scold the dog for her pleasure.

And the night before I'd indulged in a little baby eating myself. The baby dragon has not yet sprouted wings or learned to breathe fire, but his lungs are working up to it. Fretting with a snuffy nose, he squalled his discomfort between fits of uneasy, sweaty, upright dozing on the chest of my daughter, Liz, who was babysitting him, or on mine.

Three months old, he is fat and brown and adorable. Something about the texture and density of baby flesh makes us need to touch it, squeeze it, kiss it,  hold it. We say "I'm going to eat you up," and we mean it, in some metaphorical way. We want to take their baby deliciousness into ourselves.

Thought shift: be like a dog--follow what moves. In Nairobi, WTF stands for Where's the Food? Price inflation makes it harder and harder to buy food. The land is tired and produces less. There's drought and speculation driving costs higher and higher: people raise biofuels instead of human fuels. Babies starve or grow into cheap labor, if there's anyone doing the hiring, any jobs to be had.

Whatever work I do, it can't involve eating other human babies, in any sense of the word. That much I know. WTF: Who's This Feed? That's a good test. My family, of course. But in all the jobs I've ever had was the prospect of doing good for other people's children, too. And not just the children of the parents at the top of the food-chain.

Too much talk. There are branches to drag and things to sniff in the air. My Sunday pack to meet.

Move! Now!!!

Redemption

In the dog park woods, our paths cross, and we nod or sniff a greeting depending on our kind and inclinations. Jack Russell nips the lab pups, who have gotten out of some line they don't yet know they're supposed to follow.

"She a old lady," one boy says to the other.

She not deaf yet, though, I think.

"But she fine," says the older man.

Snap! I hope the boys learn as fast as the pups seem to. And I am grateful.

I haven't written because I haven't been very dog-like, alas. Just grind and more grind. Human stuff.

Between then and now, the job I thought was gone was given back at half time, and then on Monday snatched away again. So for two months more I work at this job I love. But perhaps with less enthusiasm. You will excuse me for having no taste for this maybe game.

So I'm back here again, trying to live my life as a dog.  The wild winds of March and the solar flares might have something to do with it. Working with medical students who are daring to write risky things might have something to do with it.

Outside, it is fine indeed. If a little scary.

Sniff and nod, sniff and nod.

They both mean yes. I have no idea what the question is. Does it matter?

Woof!

Slippery out there

It's not so easy to live life as a dog in winter, when the lack of four legs and ice-cutting claws slows a body down.

Still, it is sunny, over 30 degrees, most of the newish snow is still pristine, and outside calls. We head to the dog park, where neither of us needs to be on a leash unless a stray sheriff shows up, hiding on his lunch break, as sometimes happens. It's not an official dog park, which makes it all the more fun.

Idgie meets her friend Sara, a saucy little black lab-basset hound mix with a pink bow collar, and they commence to run wild whackado circles around each other. As a dog, you must greet anyone who comes in your path, and so I do, exchanging big smiles and small talk with the other parka-clad owners, so glad of the chance to play outside and pretend we are called there by duty.

We walk a couple miles on hills and slippery half-packed snow. Which is a little like walking on half-wet sand dunes. I'm feeling pretty proud of myself. A couple months out of a knee and ankle injury, it's a fair workout that tests my proprioception, which is finally returning.

But while I'm feeling happy from exercise and a dose of Vitamin D, smug about getting my hiking game back on, a breezy young couple jogs past me on the woodland trail.

On snowshoes. And they are MOVING. And talking. And not breathing hard in the least.

Dogs do not suffer shame or envy, for the most part, unless balls, attention, or food objects are involved. But people: hoooboyhowdy, do we. I shake it off and remember that once, I too was young and sprightly.

Okay. Never was I that sprightly.

I return to the moment, which is where I belong. We hop into the car, Idgie lured by some nice aged Wisconsin brick cheese, me by a bottle of prescription Advil that awaits me at home.

Content now that we're back, Idgie sleeps. But I am in the human condition and I must think about tomorrow. There are jobs to apply for tonight. I will have to cement my ever increasing butt to the seat of this chair and commune with this screen until it's done.

But first, maybe, a teensy little nap.

Woof!

Cognitive dissonance

I don't think dogs experience cognitive dissonance. One of two conflicting ideas pushes the other out. There is no room for ambivalence. Pick one, go for one. But I'm full of it. Ambivalence, that is.

(Does it seem strange to talk about dogs and work? I don't think so. Even the fluffy breeds make play their careers. But mine is a working dog, Australian Shepherd and Heeler, and she must work. It's in her genes. Since I have failed to provide her with a herd of cattle to drive, she has settled for herding geese and ducks, patrolling the yard, hunting small game and pointing at other birds. She makes do. So do I.)

Since the job hasn't ended yet, today was a work day. We don't know exactly what the "plan" will be for shrinking the program, but it's pretty certain I'll be gone March 6. The cuts will likely follow the simple rules of seniority. Simplicity is the easiest kind of fairness, and that trumps almost everything in the making of hard decisions.

And simplicity is, of course, how a dog operates. Bad smell? Roll in it. Squirrel moving? Chase it. People to cut? Last hired, first fired.

The cognitive dissonance comes from spending two days at the main office planning and training. Getting certified in performing tasks we won't be performing, getting bugs out of new computer programs we won't be using, checking calendars for dates we won't be meeting.

Tomorrow we're back out in the field as if nothing had happened. Five days work in three days, the usual.

It's kind of nuts, really, this sitting around a table, swords over our heads, acting as if all is well.  I struggle with the swords and the pretense. I'm not good at that.

But then my dogself rises. This work we're doing is what's here, now, all this busy planning/training/pretending. I step into it, I fill the moment and the work, with all of me. And it returns the favor.

Woof!

Time flies. As long as I'm working, the sick-stomach-feel stays at bay. All approach, no avoidance.

Which is why we love it, those of us who love it. Yes?

Unease

I wake too early. Already I violate my resolve to live my life as a dog. Idgie would yawn, stretch, and go to the front door. And if I didn't follow soon enough, well. . . Woof! Woof!!! WOOF!!!!! Until I obeyed her command and her really sensible desire to go outside now.

Instead, I lie in bed and pick at the scab of worry. Just two months to find another job. Oh yeah. Last time it took me 18 months. Just two months until I have to enter the purgatory of unemployment. Visits to the Office of Workforce Development, where former machinists serve as job counselors and flip back and forth between competence and mental illness. Just two months until the not quite enough monthly check becomes $300 a week.

The sounds of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me suddenly arise from the radio. Normally, Roy Blount Junior's voice is exactly what I want to hear first thing in the morning. Sorry, Mrs. Junior, but it's true. I think your husband is hot.  But now the scabs are bleeding and I have to worry about the damn sheets and the stock market and being too fat and. . .

"Mom," I hear, as the door cracks open. "Can I use George's car to go to work?" It's Liz, my daughter.

"Sure," I say. "But how'd you get here?" She's in college across town and doesn't stay here often. I must have been asleep when she arrived.

And instantly I relax. Muscles soften. Happiness starts moving through me, starting. . . where? The head? The heart? The liver? Who knows? Who cares? Some doggie place in us that says my pack is here and all is well, all manner of things will be well. Go outside now!

Woof!

Someone on the radio makes a joke about 2012. That's right: the world is coming to an end this year! Between my unemployment and what little's left of my savings, I can last that long. Yippee!

Stretch. Up. Outside!

Oh wait. Better put some clothes on first.