Final week of “summer”

There’s that “end of summer” feeling in the air, which is very incongruous in Los Angeles - for us, summer weather continues for three more months. But yet, kids are back in school in just a week, so summer is, in fact, over. We’re currently experiencing The Big Bake - once the pacific marine layer at last burns off by mid-late July, now it’s just hot, hot, hot from sun up to sun down. High eighties to triple digits or at least mid-90s every day. Personally, I like the heat, except for it makes my necessary hikes impossible, and for me is a harbinger of my event coming up, with attendant anxiety. But I love the warm evenings and smell of the baked earth. Also getting to use the pool, and actually swim in the ocean, which we did yesterday. I do love summer even though my relationship with it is complicated.

I got through my anxious week of price increases and cut-offs ok - my numbers are still lagging, of course, but people are still signing up. I know better than to hope for some last minute miracle - with my high prices and the hotel sold out, there’s not going to be some last minute rush; there never is these days - but if people continue to trickle in even at half the rate of last year, I’ll have just enough to pay everyone. Then I live off of the weekend ticket sales, and the price increase on Feb 1, and I continue to kick the can of despair down the road until next spring and summer. And we may be living in a very different world by then, with the midterms over and the whole political landscape changed. But barring any emergencies, I’ll survive this year. It’s sad that I’m reduced from thriving to barely surviving, but here we are. 

Last week of camp, which involves me making lunches every day, a day off for a water park trip with friends, and a field trip to Disneyland on Friday for the boys. Then next week two days at home before school starts. They both have book reports due upon starting school, a fiction and non-fiction book each. Bobby is finishing up his second report; Theo is only halfway through his second book. I’m going to have to up his reading time from 45 minutes to an hour each night just to maybe get it done in time. I realized our current schedule, apart from being an hour later in the morning, is very similar to where we’ll be when they’re in school - 1/2 hour to get ready in the morning, drop off, pick up around four, make them start homework at 5. I keep feeling like there’s this huge change coming but not really. At least getting up earlier allows for me to get back to my old exercise classes. 

The only real change this year is Theo starting middle school and having to try harder. I feel like he really coasted these last two years and I’m worried he’s going to struggle to keep up. He’s a smart kid and I know he can do it, but he’s not used to working hard, as evidenced by how long it’s taking him to get through this book. I do have a fear that he’s not going to do well. Bobby seems to naturally apply himself so I never had to worry about him much - another way we’re similar. I’m going to have to pay close attention to Theo this year to make sure he’s not slacking. I feel like if he starts off well in 7th grade that’s a good sign that he’s got the skills to continue to do well. 

Penultimate camp week

It’s the boys’ second to last week of camp, and already I’m feeling a strange nostalgia for it. All of the kids at the camp are so little - they follow giant Bobby around like little ducklings - and my kids are so big. I don’t know if they’ll both want to try to be CITs there next year; it’s impossible to know what they’ll be like by next spring. I do think they enjoy having somewhere to go and getting to play with other kids, even little ones. But the day is coming when these sweet little no-frills summer camps are in the rear window, and I’m sad about that.

This also means school is coming up fast. I ordered Bobby a new backpack, Theo gets a haircut tomorrow, and I need to go through his pants to get rid of the ones that are too small that he insists on still wearing. Gone are the days of big expensive school supply lists, thank god, but I do still need to make sure I at least send them to school with some basics like pens and pencils and notebooks. Theo has an orientation two weeks from today and then they start Wednesday the 12th. I still have zero plan for how to pick them up, now that they get out together; I want them to walk somewhere away from the school so I’m not stuck in crazy school pickup traffic with nowhere to pull over, but I don’t know where that is yet. We’ll figure it out in those first weeks I’m sure. I also still want to explore them taking the bus home, but that can wait. 

This is an important and stressful week for my event. My price increase is Friday night, which means I should be getting a decent bump of people; also the refund cut off is the same day which means I’ll be getting lots of refund requests, too. I’ve already had three today and it’s not even noon. I’m simultaneously trying to re-sell canceled hotel rooms so I’m not on the hook to pay for them, and I have no idea how that’s going to go. 

Although it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen in the next month, I do know that it’s too late to try to change what is going to happen. My numbers are dismal - I’m thinking I’m going to lose more than another 100 people, maybe even up to 200 this year, which puts me into “barely break even/lose a little money” territory, which is horrifying. It’s always possible it won’t be that dire, but if I do get a big bump of people at the end, that would be really surprising since that hasn’t happened in many years, not since before the pandemic. I’ll be ok this year only because I had a small surplus going into this year and a big tax return (although all of that will be taken up by this garage wall repair, which is currently inexplicably stalled), but by this time next year I’ll really be feeling it, especially if this trend continues. This is why I have to get a HELOC and use it for living expenses just to survive whatever this is, until or unless I can scale the event down to save money (which contractually I can’t do next year). 

The thought that always haunts me, though, is what if this whole idea is just played out? What if people are just not interested in what I have to offer, this particular brand? I can think of a million reasons why my attendance is plummeting, and I still think it’s almost entirely financial, but I also worry that it’s something else, something I can’t fix, which is that people just don’t care about this anymore and they’ve moved on, either to other newer events or away from dancing entirely. I went through a similar valley back in the early 2000s, when my numbers hovered around 550-600 for a couple of years and I was close to quitting and went into a massive depression over it. But then for no apparent reason my numbers started ticking up by 2005, 2006, and things started to look up. Will that happen again? Is this really all just Trump, and once he’s gone (or lame ducked) people will feel like spending money again? Who knows. I just know I’m in a pit right now and there’s nothing I can do to save myself and it’s really, really scary. 

Despite all this, though, I’ve mostly been able to maintain a positive attitude - I still have to put on the best damned show I can for those lovely people who are showing up, and I intend to do that, and just hope for a better future. My friends assure me that my brand is solid and this is just a blip we’re all experiencing - and they could be right, although they’re biased and just trying to cheer me up. Over the weekend I told myself to just try to be in denial - there’s nothing I can do to fix it, so why not just pretend I’m independently wealthy and running this for fun, so any dips in attendance don’t affect me personally but are just something to be observed? Sometimes this works. Denial can be powerful at times. 

Happy birthday to meee

Despite my self-proclaimed ambiguity regarding my birthday, I ended up really leaning into it this year and thoroughly enjoying it. Sometimes joy is just a choice, you know? 

I promised myself I wouldn’t do any real work just for the day - I would answer customer service emails, but no big spreadsheet marathons or lengthy tasks. Then I took a new Pilates class to make up for the one I have to miss on my summer schedule, ran home unexpectedly to move all the boxes of trophies left on the stairs into the house so they wouldn’t melt or get stolen, then headed to the local bar that does food deliveries for another run at supplying groceries for neighborhood folks afraid of deportation. I will probably just do this every Friday that I can from now on, because why not? 

The H really pulled it out this year, I have to give him credit. He sent me a beautiful bouquet, we all went to dinner at my favorite place, and he even had the kids get me cards and presents (this isn’t something we typically do - I realize I need to up my game in this area). I asked for a good knife set, and he got me that. It was a great day. Spontaneously after dinner I made everyone watch one of my favorite movies, Blood Simple. Theo wandered off after a few minutes and the H kept yawning and falling asleep - not stimulating enough for him, I think - but I think Bobby liked it.

I feel like I had more texts/messages/FB posts than usual. Considering how rarely I text people on their birthday, it was really sweet. It made me feel loved and appreciated. I guess I needed that, and I guess I put myself in the mindset to receive it, too. Earlier in the week, my bandleader asked if I wanted it noted on tonight’s gig advertisement that we’d be celebrating both our birthdays (his is the 14th) and I said I didn’t want to be a bother (making the venue re-do their artwork to include me) and he said “don’t minimize yourself. You deserve to be celebrated.” Makes me tear up a little, thinking of that. It’s weird to think that even people like me who (I think) don’t really have an issue with self-esteem still have these little moments of not being ok asking to be put forward. It might also be a woman thing, and/or a middle aged woman thing. Everything about society teaches us, even now, that young women are to be elevated and celebrated and older women just need to step aside and let other people have their moment. In some ways I agree with this - older people not stepping aside in government is a huge part of our problem in this country - but maybe on a personal level, I might need to rethink this strategy.

Midsummer

It’s my “birthday week”, but I’m ambivalent about it. I’m looking forward to celebrating on Friday (like last year, dinner at El Coyote followed by cake at home), but otherwise, I don’t feel the need to make a big deal about it. I guess these mid-life birthdays just sort of lose their magic. Honestly if the day went by with no acknowledgement - and that was normal somehow and not something I should take personally - I really wouldn’t care. 

So, at (almost) 54, here are the stats:

Still bleeding regularly. WHY.

The heaviest I’ve ever been, outside of pregnancy 

Other than my sometimes debilitating arthritic toe pain on my left foot, still able to do anything physically - lift weights, long hikes, etc. 

Not on any medications 

No real menopause stuff other than bad sleep and brittle nails (slightly)

I’m the mother of a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. I remember years ago doing the math and wondering what it would be like to be going through menopause with two boys going through puberty…but a) I’m not in menopause, and b) Theo is not going though puberty, yet. Honestly, it’s been fine. I often wonder if my life with girls would be different; you hear so much about the drama of girls at these ages. I suppose there were some ugly moments when I was at that age, but, of course, all of that was cut short when I moved in with my sister at fourteen. So I don’t really have a road map for life in an intact family as a teenager.

We had an idyllic family day yesterday, the type that I used to dream about but only got to have during the pandemic because of the H’s (until now) 24/7 work schedule. We all had a free day so I posited that we make a pool day of it, and I got out all the cushions and scrubbed the bird poop off the table and chairs while the H scrubbed the rat pee and poop off of the grill and burnt it off, as well, before cooking anything. We splashed around and hung out in the hot tub and watched the World Cup on a phone, while making steaks (for them), cherry tomato/basil/mozzarella bites, grilled corn, chips and dip and watermelon. It was such a nice time that I’m encouraged to try to do this every free Saturday - and there are a few - until summer is done. 

As Bobby’s about to start high school, college is being pushed to the forefront of my mind. There’s a lot I still have to investigate and learn about, of course, but I feel like we’re in a decent position - I’m able to save about $10,000 a year for him (I currently have $25,000 saved, and we have four, technically eight, years of savings to go); and so far he’s been a straight A student. We’re not going to be able to afford some fancy private school with room and board of course, but surely we can come up with something suitable in California’s system, even if it’s two years of cheap community college and then transfer out somewhere impressive, and living at home. I also have the fantasy of him going to a Santa Barbara-area school and living in one of the spare apartments belonging to a dance friend of mine for cheap. So many possibilities, it’s exciting. I love to think about how (hopefully) much easier these kids’ young adult lives will be than mine - working a minimum wage job and living in slums and just trying to stay afloat, wanting a future but not having the slightest idea how to get there, all my friends off at college leaving me completely isolated. You know what happens when you’re a young girl looking for guidance and comfort at that age, lost and struggling and with no support? Some predatory man steps in and takes over, which is exactly what happened to me in the form of my New School film teacher, eleven years older and incredibly toxic and controlling. 

This is the thing I couldn’t see when I was a young adult but I see now, which is that young people still need a ton of support and guidance; I think us Gen Xers were sold the line that the minute you turn eighteen you’re automatically autonomous, whereas we now know this is far from the truth. So it’s easy for us to harrumph about kids today still living at home in their twenties and not living an independent adult life while we had to suffer and struggle…but I don’t want my kids to struggle, not unnecessarily anyway. And I’m pretty sure if I’d gone to college and had friends and was studying something I was passionate about, my life would have been dramatically better. Those post-high school years were some of the worst of my life. I don’t want that for them. 

Thankfully, these kids have loving and engaged parents, and although I’m struggling financially at the moment, it’s not so bad that I can’t put money away for them. Their lives are going to be very different. And just imagine what the world could be like by 2030 - our Trump nightmare over, things looking up…? Maybe? Lindsey Graham died suddenly last night, so anything is possible.

First day of camp

It was a weekend. I’m soooo glad it’s behind us and I don’t have to think about it anymore. This 4th of July was like childbirth - the only way out is through. And once it’s over it’s best just to put it out of your mind. 

Friday I drove down to ICSA, the International Cultic Studies Association. I don’t know why driving to San Diego always says it will take 2 1/2 hours and yet always takes 4 hours and why I never remember this, but the delay caused me to miss about half of what I was going to participate in, and that was a huge bummer. I arrived frazzled and frustrated, but thankfully the first person I saw was my friend I was going to see, and she was equally frazzled for her own reasons, so I didn’t feel out of place. As I had suspected, the conference itself was really for clinicians - the talks I went to were very technical and over my head, and all the questions asked were “what do I do when a client says they…” or “how can I help a client who…”. Still, everyone was friendly and welcoming, and I sat in on a group talk with the organizers and felt very at home there, as it was obvious that even though most people there were therapists they were also survivors. I had a moment where I felt like these are the only people who really understand me. And that felt good.

I had a nice dinner with my friend and three other people, and the conversation was fun and interesting, and then I headed home. I can’t say I would go to this again, but the opportunity will probably never arise again, anyway, since my friend said as much as it moves every year it had never been on the west coast before. I’m glad I went, but the driving just about killed me (about seven hours in one day). Then the next day we all piled in the car for another three hour drive to Lompoc to our friends’ for the 4th. It was a long, exhausting day. I’m glad somebody took it upon themselves to have a party with like-minded people so we wouldn’t have to be surrounded by MAGAs in a high school parking lot, but the day itself was full of sadness and anxiety for me. Anxiety because of the fireworks (as always) being torture for someone like me with auditory sensitivity, and sadness for the state of things. I just wanted it to be over. And over it was.

Today was the first day in a month of getting us all out of bed and out of the house early in the morning; I am completely discombobulated and out of it, but I have to say it’s glorious to have the house to myself for the first time since mid-June. Being on a schedule is just better - I hate being off my routines, I haven’t been able to do my exercise classes, everything’s a wreck. I hope the kids like - or at least tolerate - this camp for one more summer. I worry that Bobby is going to be glued to his phone and the camp counselors will complain about it; I worry that one or both of them will come home and say they don’t want to go anymore when they have five weeks paid for. But at the same time I think they crave the structure, too - they want to be with other kids and actively play, not just sit on devices. So my guess is they’ll be ok with camp. Not sure about next summer, but thankfully I don’t have to worry about that yet. It’s weird to think of the day when summer camps will no longer be in our lives, after all these years - but that day is right around the corner. 

Feral summer

I’m getting a peek at what future summers with teenaged boys will look like. My job is to make sure they get up at some point, brush their teeth twice a day, shower occasionally, have some food, and see sunlight once in a while. Mind you, I’m being especially lax because there’s only a few more days of feral summer before their rec center camp kicks in - there’s no way I’d be like this if it were the whole summer. But still - I don’t know how to entertain kids this age, day after day, without spending a shit ton of money I don’t have. On Friday the cleaning lady came so I spent $100 on a couple of hours at a trampoline park and lunch out; it was a fun day for them, but I sure can’t do that all the time. 

Both kids have reading assignments for school so I did at least acquire all four books and have been making them get off screens for a half hour each day to read. That’s something…right?

This week I continue my old video digitizing (I’m in the process of getting all of my 2002-2010 event videos online, which will take a couple of weeks of constant work) and general event work. While my numbers are still dismal, so far I have not had a flood of refunds, and today is the last day for cheap refund fees so you’d think I’d be getting a lot of requests. I got them mostly in the beginning of the month, apparently. 2028 and 2029 hotel contracts are signed, which means the event will happen through Bobby’s senior year in high school. Crazy! What a different world we’ll be living in by then. Assuming our US institutions hold and biology does its job, Trump will be gone either by being voted out or natural causes. It’s crazy to think about since we’re so in the weeds right now; what a truly awful time. I try to think about the generation who, like my grandmother, survived the Great Depression only to be plunged into WWII - she couldn’t catch a break for about fifteen years. Since we’re going on ten years since that orange turd descended the escalator and blew up our country and the world, we’re right behind those days. 

Right now I’m entertaining myself with low key planning yet another western road trip - preferably a cheap, short one - over Christmas break since we have no plans. I’ve always wanted to go to Nevada’s Valley of Fire state park, and that’s best done not in summer. So I’m trying to arrange some hidden gems around that general area - may dip into St George, UT for a couple of hikes; but I’m also trying to avoid real winter weather, which is tough. I don’t want to be stuck in a snowstorm or driving on icy roads. I wanted to head to some remote places further north in Nevada like Cathedral Gorge state park, but it may be just too cold. Everything outside of Las Vegas, apparently, is very remote and isolated. Which I like, but not in the dead of winter. I’ll figure it out. 

I’m spending the day Friday at the International Cultic Studies Association conference in San Diego, dipping my toe back into that world for a minute. This conference is held in a different country every year, and with it being so close this year, made me think I need to go check it out even if just for the day. I imagine it’ll mostly be pretty clinical and over my head, but hey, it’ll make a nice day trip if nothing else. Then for the 4th our friends are again hosting a “gathering” of like-minded folks who don’t feel like celebrating but want to do something. I cannot believe this is where our country is at on its 250th birthday. It’s so fucking depressing I can hardly stand it. 

Oahu

We returned from a week on Oahu late Sunday night and have been a hot mess ever since. Mainly, our sleep is all dysregulated - I keep canceling things I was supposed to do before noon, and our mealtimes are all over the place. Yesterday Bobby slept in until 1:30. So, he’s basically me at fourteen.

Our trip was good, but not without a few stressful snafus - due to World Cup traffic, we barely made it to the airport on time when we left LA, then when we arrived and were just getting into our Turo car, the H realized in a panic that he’d left his phone somewhere and insisted on driving us all out of the parking area to a loading zone and leaving me and Theo there while he used Bobby and his “find my” feature to run all around the airport trying to find his phone - this would have been stressful enough, but he left me in a Nissan Rogue which has a completely incomprehensible gear shift - it might as well have been a manual stick shift. So of course when the security officer came by seconds later and said we had to move the car, I spent probably fifteen minutes while he was glaring at me trying to figure out how to move up the seat and how to get the car out of park, then didn’t know where to go or what to do so I just pulled into a parking garage where I got stuck not being able to reverse the car for another fifteen minutes until I finally figured it out. Mind you this was well after midnight (3 AM our time); I was exhausted and starving and had already had a few stressful incidents that day, and was furious with him for once again leaving his phone somewhere (he’s done this several times - thank you, adhd) and then panicking and abandoning me in a dangerous situation in a car I can’t drive (which he could barely drive, either, so he knew it was problematic). It was well over an hour before the phone was found on the plane and brought out; by then he was relieved and laughing it off but I was seething. This was the beginning of our vacation. It didn’t bode well. I let him have it, and he saw how serious this was to me and apologized for putting us in that situation. And then I had to just get past it. Ah, marriage.

Thankfully the trip looked up after that and there were no more disasters. There was snorkeling and swimming and hiking Diamond Head and an emotional visit to Pearl Harbor. All the things I hadn’t done there yet. I wouldn’t stay in Waikiki again, but we did it once, mainly because it was all my points could afford. I split it with two nights on the north shore which was a lot nicer. Tons of traffic and parking issues which isn’t what you want on a Hawaiian vacation, but hey, it’s overrun by tourists and we’re part of the problem. 

I’ve come home convinced I look fat in all the pictures and I MUST lose weight before my event in two months. We’ll see how long my resolve lasts this time. So far getting up late as hell the last three days and only having a couple of low calorie meals a day has been helpful. 

It’s weird front-loading the summer with a trip right away; I can’t believe we’re back and yet have the whole summer ahead of us with not even so much as a weekend away for at least three months. I sure do miss the cabin already. Temps in the desert are high 90s to low 100s. 

We have two feral weeks before the kids start summer camp - this one and the next. I’m struggling to think of lunch foods and how to get them out of the house. I’ve been working on event stuff round the clock since we got back and am only just now coming up for air; everything hit when I returned and requires a lot of time and focus. The hotel sent me contracts for 2028 and 2029 to review, and so far they look fair. It’s good to know they still want me and that I still have a future there, assuming my attendance doesn’t completely collapse by then. Will it turn around once Trump is gone and people feel more optimistic about their finances? Perhaps. Right now I’m on track to lose another 100 people, although it could get even worse and I just don’t know it yet. It’s a terrible reality to have to live with. I just keep telling myself that somehow it’ll all work out even if it means a few years of austerity. At least the house is paid for.