The problem of low pay

It got cold suddenly. November came and went and it’s become clear that I am going to make it to the end of the year without having made any changes, without having moved out, without having made any more demands about how things should be, or what I want, or what I need. I just keep getting up and going to bed, with a day passing in between where I try not to talk to myself about what I am or am not doing, and how I feel the insufferable middle-aged feeling that my life is slipping away. Instead, I set up a chair and a lamp in our room to read under the loft extension's pitched roof and work through the four books I had started this year, but not completed. This marks the very end of the year for me, when I return to my original form, held up in a corner and rotating through different imaginary words, Danish architects, and Japanese novels about suicide and loss and love, with Japanese couples sitting across from each other never saying the things they need to say. It’s a nice respite from the constant demands of the TikTok therapists, and my phone battery, miraculously, now lasts more than a day.

I have this compulsion to complete all the books I start, like I need to give every story the benefit of the doubt and if I chose to start reading something, I obligated myself to also finish it. I think sometimes this is defendable, like when one decides to read an epic Russian novel: you should know that it will be long and tiresome at points, but the pay-off will be in the long, extended burn. The feeling you have at page 567 when the character who came in and out of the story somewhere 300 pages ago, returns, and you feel like you have lived another life. That is the benefit, but my compulsion to finish isn’t really that logical — it stems from a fear of being judged for not finishing something I’ve begun, that I might tell someone I was really enjoying a book and then when they ask about it sometime later, I’ll have to say I’ve abandoned it. It’s a ludicrous fear, it’s the fear of someone raised in an atmosphere of ethical hypervigilance and self-reflection. It’s the same feeling I have at mile twenty-three of a marathon where I keep running. I am too ashamed to stop because I would rather feel the way I feel than have to say to someone that I didn’t finish the race. A friend offers me a ride home last night and says, what does it matter if you miss your four and a half miles of running tonight, but it does matter to me. If I said I would do it and I don’t do it, the whole thing falls apart.

Growing up, we had two black labs that we kept in kennels at our house, two slabs of concrete with chainlink fence around them and little houses attached to the fence. One dog was called Midnight and the other was called Deacon. I don't remember much about them, but they weren't allowed in the house and we rarely interacted with them beyond feeding them: they just lived in their kennels. I think they were my father's acquisition when he thought he would go hunting with them, that he would train them, but somewhere along the way, that dream had not come true, taken over by small kids and the demands of work and every weekend sucked into some project, and we were left with the two dogs waiting in the backyard. Finally, at some point, my parents gave them both away, to different people. I don’t remember where Deacon went, but I remember Midnight went to a woman in a house that had many dogs from what I could tell sitting in the car outside when we dropped him off. I have a memory of her shouting at a dog in the house to shut up and I felt an uneasiness about it, that something was wrong and there was nothing I could do or say, that this feeling could only go inwards.

As a parent now, I wonder what my children will think about the choices that I made, am making while they are young. The explicit criticism starts to creep in as they get older and I feel immediately defensive: you don’t understand, you can’t understand, the same way my parents said the same thing to me and I blew it off as a lack of understanding, lack of experience like I had experience. Now, at this point, you’d expect I’d have more empathy, but I don’t — I’ve managed to maintain the position that I’ve been right all along, I was right then and I’m right now. I’ve always been right, no one understands the pressure. I say something like this even at the dinner table and immediately regret it, the way you often immediately regret the things you say as a parent. I am, of course, not right, there are any number of better ways to express your frustration, chiefly by not expressing one’s frustration at all. The kids rush off to school and what does it matter that you tell them again that they are three minutes late. I promise you, it doesn’t matter.