A Better Friend

**I wrote this blog entry last Thursday on my computer...I couldn't post it because our internet was not working. It was my fault: when I plugged the DSL modem back into the phone jack once we were done working on the office re-do, I didn't realize that there's a difference between the "DSL" jack and the "phone" jack. Dave figured it out...and ta-da! I am now connected.**

Ever since we moved to Davis (back in the Fall of 2006), I’ve noticed that I haven’t spent as much time as usual with my close friends. For the most part I can blame that on being in a full-time graduate student—the time-consuming classes, lab work, studying, plus the level of stress that often makes my evenings a time to simply crash. But I can’t blame it all on being a student. In fact, most of my best friends are in graduate school right now, too, and they seem to make time for friends. So that’s no excuse. I finally realized that my asocial behavior was due to two huge life changes that coincided with entering graduate school.

The first big change was that Dave began working as an auditor for one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. We were so naïve when he landed this position; we didn’t understand the implications of working for this sort of an international company. Before his first interview we made a list of all the questions he would ask to ensure that this position would be the “right” fit for him. Our queries included:

“How much travel is to be expected?”

“Is this a family friendly company? Are allowances made for family events? Does this firm offer medical/dental/vision insurance for entire families?”

“How does this firm encourage work/life balance?”

“Is there a career guidance program within the firm? Are employees reimbursed for CPA classes/exams? Are employees given time to prepare for the exams?”

The answers were roughly as follows:

“Not much.”

“Of course! Of course! Of course!”

“All of our offices are equipped with an exercise room for employee use—we encourage all our employees to stay fit. We also promote doing volunteer work, such as Habitat for Humanity, which is something family members can participate in, too.”

“Each new hire is assigned to a “mentor” employee who will help them during their first year. There are annual reviews which help employees climb the corporate ladder. If you pass the exams, you will be reimbursed in full for the cost of the CPA prep classes and exam fees. Yes, there is adequate time for exam preparation.”

Well, those are canned answers, likely drafted by some outside contractor whose job it was to help the firm sound well-rounded and likable. This is what the interviewer SHOULD have said if he were truthful:

“You should expect to travel a crap-load of the time. You should warn your wife and children that you will only get to see them on weekends for the first part of every year because we’ll make be sure to schedule you away on business trips for at least 5-8 weeks running. This will bother your wife, but that’s okay with us. You’re an exception to the rule, having a wife at home. Most of our employees are single, eager, and straight out of college. They don’t have a care in the world except for work. So traveling all the time for them isn’t an issue.”

“We don’t have to encourage work/life balance: we make sure our employees work so much that they don’t have a life outside of their jobs…so there’s balanced needed!”

“Our mentors encourage you to work too much so they can justify why they, too, work so much. Your first year is the least strenuous in terms of hours worked. The second year there will be more demands on you (and more hours expected out of you), and it gets even worse the third year. Most people don’t stick around after that—since we’ve sucked the life blood out of them. Employees don’t get to work less so that they can study for their CPA exams. We just say that so people will come work for us. But we really do reimburse people for their exam expenses.”

So what is all this have to do with why we’ve become asocial? Because Dave’s job is plain ol’ depressing. He comes home sooooooooooo late every night that by the time he walks in the door all he wants to do is eat and then fall asleep. Literally. There’s no time for exercise (he adores playing indoor and outdoor soccer) and no time for hobbies. You know how on tv shows the cheerful dad character will come home from work while it is still light outside and have time to help little Jimmy with his homework before taking the dog on a walk or mowing the lawn? None of those dads must work for Dave’s firm! Not having him around makes me feel lowsy. Not being able to cook dinner for him also makes me feel lowsy (If he works more than 10 straight ours he’s entitled to $16 in dinner money…so he just brings food home most nights).

This “lack of Dave” during the week compounds itself on the weekends. I get VERY selfish with Dave by the time the weekend rolls around. I don’t want to share his attention with anyone else. And all he wants to do is work on the house. We’ve actually declined hanging out with friends on the weekend because we didn’t want to waste any of our “together time” on other people. How lame is that? It is pretty obvious that something needs to change.

Dave and I already looked a 2008 calendar and have chosen a date for him to leave his firm, with or without another job lined up. His happiness, his health, our happiness as a married couple, and our desire to be more social are so much more important than a regular paycheck (at least for a little while…). This date is something to work towards (he needs to find another job; in fact he’s already working with a recruiter) and it is something to look forward to. After we made the decision we both breathed a huge sigh of relief and smiled.

I would just like to point out that I’m writing this blog entry at 10pm on a Thursday night…and Dave’s still at work. He didn’t get home until 11:45pm on Tuesday night…Grrrr!

Moving on…the second big change since starting grad school is that I’m sorta bored. I’m one of those born multi-taskers. If I don’t have at least a few activities to juggle then my efficiency in my single task plummets. In high school I worked at Alden Lane Nursery, baby sat, had a paper route, was active in several school clubs, and participated in too many church activities (youth elder, youth deacon, youth group leader, pastor-seeking committee, lay reader, etc.). And that was all on top of regular schoolwork, having a steady boyfriend and a HUGE group of friends that I hung out with constantly. But I really thrived—mentally, academically, socially.

Towards the end of college my interest in chemistry and my grades vastly improved when I began baby sitting at the church every week, was a nanny, worked at an in-home childcare center, was a geriatric caregiver for a handicapped old lady, was the president of a club, and took a lot of advanced classes and labs. It was hectic but I really did thrive. Somehow I use my time much more efficiently when I know there’s a limited time for a given task. I guess I need to create pressure for myself to get my work done. But not just “done,” done well and done happily.

During these times I forged really strong relationships with friends that I cherish more than anything (you know who you are!). We hung out at our schools, with our families, went on short trips, went on loooooooong trips. Lately I’ve had an ach in my heart for these people. (Isn’t it weird that being busy increases my efficiency and makes me more social?)

For the last year and a half my only real task has been to take classes and work on some minor tasks in my lab. Blah! I think I’m bored. Luckily my grades haven’t suffered but my interest in lab’s research isn’t as intense as others in my lab. (This makes me a little sad because this research is why I’m in grad school.) I’ve started baby sitting for Teo and Alex and that makes me really happy. I think I’m going to become more proactive in finding family to sit for in the evenings. I also offered to take a more active role in my graduate group (I’m currently one of the social chairs) to initiate some major changes in the way our program recruits, trains, and retains new students. All these things will keep me super busy and I expect my passion for chemistry to flare back up.

Even the few baby sitting gigs and officer duties I’ve acquired in the past month have made me crave my friends more. What a weird, complex thing my social needs are!

Anyway, I realize that being a good friend is a two way street: I need to not only accept invitations to be with friends but I also need to invite my friends to be with me. Part of me does get jealous when I hear my friends talk about all the stuff they’ve done together while I wasn’t there, and sometimes I feel out of the loop when I’m the last one to learn about major news. But that’s just life, I suppose: we can’t all be the first to know. All this being said, I don’t feel all the guilty about my recently asocial behavior. I come from a long line of asocial people (I’m sure you can figure out which side of my family…) and so does Dave. It is key that we are inherently asocial as opposed to anti-social. The prefix “a” means “without” while “anti” means “opposed to.” We just don’t need to have our friends around us all the time; to feel satisfied in life we don’t need to participate in purely social activities all the time. Some people just fall apart without direct contact with their social network—we’re just not programmed that way.

My friends are gems: I really don’t know what I’d do without them in my life, it’s true. We can go without seeing each other for months, but the moment we’re together again everything picks right back up. And that’s really something to cherish.