Category: Meet Afthead

51 is not my Favorite Birthday

On By aftheadIn Meet Afthead, parenting, Rants, travel, Uncategorized, Work1 Comment
Who took this vacation picture? Was someone else here? We’ll never know.

Last year I was on the cusp of my life changing. Sure, I was turning 50, but I was about to take a year off to live my dream and write my first novel. Kamala Harris had jumped into the presidential race and was going to be our first female president. That meant I was going to come back to work inspired about working for a female commander in chief and having ample career opportunities to pick from. The self-improvement goals were numerous. I was going to get fit again and eat better. I was going to spend my daughter’s junior year being present, not be such a bitch at home, spend more time with my folks, and be a better friend. It was going to be glorious.

A year later, I’m feeling kind of (using an out of date gen-z word here) meh. I’m proud of my book, but a smidge disappointed in my early reader’s feedback. Now that I’m done writing, what do I do next? Do I take the terrifying step to polish it and try to publish, write the next book, or just quit knowing that the publishing world is cruel? The country is a hot pile of steaming shit for so many reasons, but personally I have zero future job opportunities: there is no work in electric vehicle charging, climate change, or green careers because Harris didn’t get elected. My ex-colleagues are all fired, quit, soon to be fired, or scared. My network is decimated. During our family summer vacation I refused to let my family take any pictures of me because I look like a chubby bridge troll with a permanent scowl and wiry hairs growing out of my mole. Someday we’ll look back on our nine days together and wonder if I was there. (Honestly, did the semaglutide botox fervor have to hit now? Many of my friends look better than they did in their 20s, but I’m terrified of a med spa injecting stuff into my body and face. Sigh.)

Poor me.

Yes. I know things could be worse. I know people are starving in Gaza. Shit’s about to get real in the United States as support benefits are crumbled by the Big Beautiful Bill. I saw the impact this administration is having even on the privileged as we toured colleges this summer: less emphasis on services, less emphasis on equity, less emphasis on choices, less emphasis on diversity, and the University of Delaware didn’t even mention that President Joe Biden was an alum. Meanwhile, I feel guilty because we are a rich white family so my kid will be okay even if we have to pay more tuition. Heck, she may be better off, because international students aren’t interested in attending school in a country where they might be being swept off the streets by ICE agents. (We toured Tufts right after Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested by a plainclothes agent off the street in Boston. Unsurprisingly, it was the worst tour we’ve been on. They were probably distracted.)

I know I’m a whiney old lady. I have had a year off. I have enjoyed quality time with my family and friends. I have delighted being available for my kid before she goes off to college next year. Having my mom and husband read my book (and enjoy it) has been a highpoint of my life. Financially we are doing okay, even without my year of salary, because somehow the chaos since election day hasn’t impacted our investments – see rich white family note above.

Tomorrow I will suck it up and be grateful again, but today is my birthday. Today I get to be frustrated at myself for my lack of willpower and becoming a dumpy old lady. Today I get to be aggravated because in less than a year I’ve gone from being a very successful career woman, who did things like meet Secretaries of Energy and Transportation and accepted invitations to the White House, to a worthless 51 year old woman. Today I get to be frustrated because there is so much work to do with my book, and my dozen this year (so far) for short stories, writing conferences, and jobs don’t give me any hope that I can write more than drivel, so what’s the point anyway?

Tomorrow I will celebrate my birthday with friends. Next week I will celebrate with my family. Today I miss the hope of turning 50.

Why this Election Matters to Me

On By aftheadIn Meet Afthead, politics, Rants, Tiny Knit Presidential Election, Uncategorized1 Comment

January 2021 things were still strange in my world. I was working at home. My daughter’s school delayed their winter start, trying to figure out executing in-person and remote school, so we were both home. She was in sixth grade.

I’m a bit of a political junkie and January 6th, 2021 provided an excellent opportunity to witness something I’d never seen before. The counting of the electoral college votes. I had a light day of meetings and lots of busy work, so I decided to sit with my computer and kiddo to watch the process as an impromptu civics lesson.

MSNBC coverage of the simple process that was supposed to happen to certify the 2020 election

I knew shenanigans were planned for the floor. Republicans were going to protest the count and try to avoid certifying the results. A potentially additional lesson on how the foundation of our government, the peaceful transition of power, would be tested.

I can’t believe how badly we bombed our national test. I remember flashes from watching the news broadcast with my daughter. I remember the interns, young women in suits, protecting the electoral college votes and whisking them away from the mob storming the capital. In my memory the votes were in wooden chests that invoked the history and importance of their contents. My memory is not wrong. I remember watching a gurney rolled out of the capital building and my daughter asking me, “Did someone die?” With the sheet pulled up over the body, I could only respond, “I think so.” My memory is not wrong. Windows were broken in our capitol and men wearing dead animals on their heads walked the floor of the House and Senate. As a lover of dystopian novels, reality stretched the bounds of my imagination that day while I watched a mob vandalize and disrespect our capitol, our country, and our system of government. I watched start to finish. It was not a “day of love” and those people were not “patriots”.

Image of my television showing the January 6th riot. One man holds Trump flags while another holds a Confederate flag in the United States Capitol.

It was a civics lesson that would continue. I remember the day last year when my daughter came home from her AP US History class ebullient about the importance of the peaceful transfer of power. Her knowledge had finally caught up with her experiences and she went on and on about how January 6th was the antithesis of the principles that make our country special. In two years she’ll cast her first ballot, and she can’t wait. Already she’s a highly informed voter.

My first election in 1992 I was a single issue voter. Straight democrat to protect abortion rights. When I was in my late teens and twenties unwanted pregnancies weren’t about a late term abortions to save the life of the mother. They weren’t about fetal abnormalities or ectopic pregnancies. They were about boyfriends who already broke up with you, and you didn’t want their baby. They were about being on the precipice of starting your own life and knowing your newly hatched dreams wouldn’t be possible with a child. They were about your parents, who wouldn’t understand. They were about getting loans from your friends for the $300 procedure, because if you couldn’t afford an abortion how were you going to afford a kid? They were about not wanting to be a mother and not wanting to join your life to a partner. That precious potential of young women was the most important thing in my world, and I voted to protect myself and my friends.

Now that protection is gone. Thank goodness pharmaceutical abortions were developed since my first election in 1992. When Dobbs took away our constitutional right I immediately ordered abortion medication. Not because I was pregnant. Not because anyone I knew was pregnant. But because I have had friends show up on my doorstep, needing help, and I wanted to make sure that help was available in the future. While mine and other woman’s rights to bodily autonomy are protected in my state, and hopefully will soon be in our constitution, I don’t trust that my country will continue to protect my right to choice.

My memory is not wrong. In high school I was told that abortion rights were protected by Roe and would never go away. Now I am told that January 6th wasn’t a riot incited by a Trump supporting mob. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees have revoked my rights as a human being. Trump’s followers desecrated our capitol and the ideals of our country.

I want to be able to remember how in 2024, we rejected violence and authoritarian control. I want to remember sitting next to my daughter and watching as we elect our first woman president. I want to remember what it’s like to have a leader who has lived in a female body with female vulnerabilities for 60 years and how that changed our country for the better. I want us to remember how to celebrate our differences and learn from each other again. I’m ready to remember the first moments of a Harris presidency.

Happy Birthday to Me

On By aftheadIn Designing Your Life, Meet Afthead, Uncategorized, writing3 Comments

For my 50th birthday I am giving myself a gift. The biggest gift (monetarily) I will ever give or receive. (Well unless I get all philosophical and consider the gift of life to my kid, but that’s outside the scope of this post.) I am quitting my job to take a year off to write my book. Goodbye annual salary, hello priceless time.

I started this book in 2013, eleven years ago. Since then I’ve raised my kid to driving age, started and finished a master’s degree, got promoted, grew my team to twenty-three people, visited the White House and increased our team’s portfolio to $10M dollars. But do you know what I haven’t done? I haven’t written my book. I published an essay, a satire piece, and a short story, and was racing into 2020 on a high of acceptances. But then my writing started suffering. It suffered because, for me, a global pandemic and a creative mindset did not go hand in hand. It also suffered because of my master’s capstone completion in November of 2020 and my subsequent brain-fry hangover. It suffered because I took an “opportunity” to do a second role at the same place I already had a job. But about a year ago, I was down to one job, my degree was a memory in a frame, I survived COVID, and the creativity dam broke and I really, really, really wanted to start writing again.

Only an idiot would quit their lucrative high-paying career as a 50-year-old woman. I don’t have a single friend who can’t tell a horror story about a middle-aged woman getting forced out for being too old. I myself was recently informed, by a younger male colleague, that I wasn’t “hungry enough” to do my job effectively. If I quit now, I might never work again. This is conventional wisdom and even my six page list of contacts isn’t enough to make me consider that I’m not murdering my future job prospects with this move.

In 2016 I had a plan. I would get my Master’s degree, as required for female upward mobility at my company, then I would work for a year as required for tuition reimbursement by my company, and then I would apply for a year long sabbatical to finish my book. I would get a break, accomplish my dreams, and go back to work. It was a perfect plan destroyed by COVID-19 and bureaucracy. By the time I wanted to write again the leave policy had changed and the sabbatical requirement had changed to require relevancy to the mission of my workplace. My novel is not relevant.

Why not wait until retirement? What’s another 15 years of work? Can’t your dreams wait? Couldn’t you just find time to write? Your kid’s going to college soon, you’ll have plenty of time to write then. Just give it a couple more years. The fiscally conservative engineering voices in my head have plenty of reasons for me not do this. My heart has a different perspective.

As a fan of Stephen King’s On Writing, I am a believer in the ideal reader. Each writer has a person they are writing for, and my book is being written for my mom. In the past few years, I have made a remarkable discovery. My parents are not getting younger, and a couple of health scares with my dad has been a terrifying reminder that they are not immortal. So if I want my ideal reader to read my book, I best write it while she’s still alive, don’t you think?

I also have an obligation to my daughter. She’s getting ready to go off into the world as a new adult, and has said things to me and my husband like, “I don’t want to hate my job like you two do.” Now she’s a pessimist, but I do complain a lot about my job, and while I want her to learn responsibility and stick-to-itiveness, I feel like I’ve gone above and beyond in modeling that behavior. I also want her to see that you only have one life and dreams are not worthless. She was the one, when I told her my plan, said, “Well mom, when you sell your book, you’ll make up that lost salary, right?” She voiced the dream I am afraid to even ponder, because that engineer brain in my head knows all the statistics about the impossibility of publication. While she is living with me, I want her to see the joy, the pain, the price, and (hopefully) the payback of dreams.

Tomorrow this little egg of a dream will be hatched. I will tell my boss. The next day I will tell my team. I will begin the process of transition. I have a list of tasks and the people I think can take them over. Tomorrow people other than my trusted family and friends will know. People will be hurt. People will be angry. People won’t understand. People will mock and eye roll and smirk. People will be glad. People will see opportunity. People might be inspired. Tomorrow this won’t just be about me, but will be about everyone else. I’m writing this today so that I can remember why I’m doing this before everyone else has an opinion. Why it’s important to me. Why I want and deserve this gift.

I am an unconventional prepper

On By aftheadIn Meet Afthead6 Comments

Ah, this writing class I’m taking…  It’s a treasure trove of reading and writing enlightenment.  The homework for our last class was titled Funhouse Mirror and again was from The 3 a.m. Epiphany:  write a caricature of some aspect of yourself.  Blow it up.  Take it to the extreme.

At first I thought I’d take some part of Johanna which is exceptionally vulnerable and see how I felt when I pushed that to the extreme: no one likes me;  I am not actually good at anything I think I am good at; I am selfish.  But those ideas sucked and made me want to cry, so I went another direction.  Below, I present to you, the first – perhaps of many – meet Afthead in the funhouse mirror posts.  Enjoy!

Johanna is a prepper, but her version of the apocalypse appears to differ from those typically found in literature.  In her end-of-the-world scenario the killer bug, aliens, nuclear fallout, or zombies will only be thwarted by soft colorful hand-knit items.  Heads of her family and friends will be covered in zombie proof alpaca toques.  No body part of her child will be exposed to epic flus; instead they will be covered with garments knit from hand-painted yarn produced via sustainable practices high in the Andes, which have known germicide properties.  Aliens will be repelled by the soft glow of angora halos radiating from shawls wrapped around her shoulders.  Pile on enough woolens and radiation has no chance of reaching human flesh.

Anticipating the end of the world, Johanna knows that saving humanity will invariably be hampered by a lack of crafting resources.  Scarcity is common in apocalyptic scenarios.  She knows yarn must be hoarded and protected.  Today she is building best practices by keeping her yarn stash safe from invading caterpillars – well known to eat through woolens.  Her basement stash is displayed in a glass front cabinet for protection and ease in project planning.  However, while glass protects against moths, it is vulnerable to a quick alien smash and grab, so in nooks and crannies of her basement lurk larger stashes of more securely organized knitting raw materials.


High in the dark corner of a closet is the sweater yarn protected by five gallon Ziploc bags.  In these giants of the sandwich bag world lurk yarn quantities large enough to cover an adult torso in stitches.  There are two, or three, okay maybe five such bags on the top shelf.  On the bottom shelf?  An opaque Rubbermaid container of blanket yarn: quantities similar to sweater yarn, but with more color variation.

Most preppers would stop there.  Yarn stored in three discreet locations with the big quantities hidden away for protection, but not Johanna.  No.  Hidden in the storage shelving under the stairs lurks two more large Rubbermaid containers.  These hold the auction yarn.  Yarn that was purchased for a tenth of its value, and while it might have limited use as yarn today – certainly it won’t smell like cigarette smoke anymore someday – everyone knows that aliens hate nicotine, so when the invasion comes she’ll be ready with jewel toned garments which will repel even the biggest eyed anal probe wielding creatures from another planet.  One can never be too prepared.

2012 Sweaters
All set for the end of the world.