Complementary life update

I wrote a little thing for my family newsletter that I thought might be of benefit to those on the other side of my family and any friends, which also includes a little bit on how we decided to go car-free:

Here’s what’s going down in Bloomington—
I (Joel) have been on furlough from my job since January, and was recently dreading going back to work in May (because I hate that job with a passion—it’s just sitting in a cavernous room with other lowlifes power dialing old people and trying to sell this stupid thing called insurance—I seriously wish it was illegal to do and the Feds would board the place up to save other job-hungry introverts from falling for its $14/hr dangling carrot) when they called me up to announce that my furlough had been extended to September! After I finished listening to the Hallelujah chorus I realized I probably should get back to work on my years-long job hunt which never seems to be over and never will be.

In the mean time, I got a totally unrelated, unpaid and inaccessible internship in bustling Indianapolis, Indiana! You see, all of last year I took an online course to earn a post-bac certificate in Geographic Information Science (GIS) to learn how to use software that you have never heard of it but it’s legit because they use it at the city planning department where I got my internship.

To alleviate the sting of the hour-each way commute from Bloomington to Indy (that’s really what people say here to shorten polysyllabic Indianapolis and it never means the state of Indiana or something that is independent or Indiana Jones) the cool planners at my internship gave me a parking pass at nearby Conseco Fieldhouse parking garage. It’s where the Pacers play (not in the parking garage of course).
The only problem is that the ―car we had recently bought in August decided to breakdown after a couple weeks of commuting. To my surprise we actually got a little bit of money from the carcass of the car. I guess people like to torture themselves and get crappy nonfunctioning cars to work again.

So we did something that has never been done before in the history of AMERICA: we decided to cut cars out of our life. It’s been going strong now for a couple of weeks and we found out that your body actually does not need to refuel at $4/gallon, put up with $250/month payments and endless repairs to live a happy and productive life. I have especially noticed that my personal barometer of road rage has gone down lately, and I have been less prone to checking mirrors every five seconds and signaling when I change directions!

Seriously, we have the bus, the zipcar, friends who think we are crazy and have hit rock bottom but will give us a lift. Well, they’re right on both counts but rock bottom is a pretty awesome place to be sometimes. No place to go but…But then the hard drive on my computer crashed. That really made me reexamine my priorities because I think I have snuck into the generation that would rather have an iPod (thanks Mom!) than a car (thanks for never giving me one, Mom). I mean sure, we have a laptop too but what about when I want to watch semi-legal live Blazer games on the computer and play Scrabble on the laptop? You can see that I have a problem.

OK, enough about me, I will attempt to talk about Alyssa. This portion will assuredly be edited for content. Alyssa is still going to school for a dual degree in Art History and Library Science but lately has been debating dropping the Art History part because it ain’t as fun and probably has less upside potential and will take longer and these Indiana winters are brutal (that’s my opinion) but then she won yet another scholarship for being in the dual degree program (the check came in the mail today) so ethically should she stay in or still drop it plus she needs to maybe do an internship this summer and she got one in Portland right away because she is awesome and Portland is awesome and we/she’d love to see family who are sorta awesome but she also tried to just see if she could get this really prestigious and good career-move internship in the big APPLE (New York, that is) at the Frick Art Reference Library (that’s seriously what it’s called, it’s not someone messing up our last name) and of course (did I mention she’s awesome) she got that internship too but how is she going to live in New York and wouldn’t money be involved in that and then there’s another factor…

Godzilla-sized migraines!!! which by my latest studies are caused by stress and folk’s it’s a ticking time bomb—the more I force Alyssa to be a brazen careerist and ignore her biological and maternal clock the more likely her brain will explode and that’s no place to be.

Other than that we have been busy not taking pictures, not making babies, not answering any questions we raised in this update, and not making trips to Italy or Australia or Camas or Eagle (and –gulp!—hopefully not offending anyone).