Yes, I know. Statistically much safe than driving in cars. Still. I trust myself driving, because I assume everyone else is both drunk and actively texting. I’m right about 50% of the time.
When you fly, I’m not sure you really need to worry about airplane collisions so much. But I still didn’t personally drug test the pilots, and I didn’t watch the Quality Assurance process of the plane building. I sure as hell ain’t flying on a 737 Max. Ever. I don’t care when anybody says.
Whenever a whistleblower ends up dead halfway through testifying, it’s bad. If it was a movie, that would mean that he had worse things to say before they got to him.
Be safe, whistleblowers. Be safe.
Seriously. When news sources put “self-inflicted” in quotes when referring to a gunshot wound, it gives pause.
I NEVER believed in conspiracy theories before. Not even many actual conspiracies. I find that people are generally really bad at keeping secrets. But it turns out it doesn’t have to be super-secret to be a conspiracy, it just has to be people agreeing to what they’re denying and telling everyone else.
Nothing to see here. No Wuhan lab. Nottthhhhiiiinnnnnngggg to see.
So, I’m sitting here waiting for my connection. In a food court with an unfortunate mix of food smells (all good individually, but collectively just south of nauseous. Appreciating the ground.
And the elbow room as I’m writing. Elbow room. Sigh. So nice.
This week has been CRAZY TOWN. Without going into specifics, because, you know #tacky in case anyone de-identifies me, it’s been a bunch random things being thrown at me. All of which have the potential for harm (metaphorically, this isn’t trauma. Trauma is trauma, difficulty, aggravation, annoyance, and overwhelm are not trauma).
I’m madly attempting to support a team at my workplace through a crap ton of change. None of which I signed up for. All of which I’m attempting to mediate, resolve, get in front of. It is challenging my core warrior-self (the silent one, the “I don’t have to fight because I know the ground I stand on” one. The “you learn Karate so that you don’t have to use Karate” one.)
And I keep sacrificing my yoga time to handle things, which is counterproductive.
It’s that thing in your chest where you can’t breathe.
I have to write my way through it.
So far, to recap this week:
If you’re going through hell, put your lip gloss on, pretend to be psyched, and keep going.
Probably not a good choice for your LinkedIn though. BUT there’s something that comes after it that’s even more hopeful. Plus there’s something weirdly “destiny-esque” about his face.
I’m really focusing on calm and moving forward but I’m feeling that frenzy in your chest like:
I get overwhelmed so easily My anxiety creeps inside of me Makes it hard to breathe What’s come over me Feels like I’m somebody else
Royal and the Serpent
There’s always a thing right? Right now it’s a work thing. But it could be a different thing. It could be the late fee that I’m charged that I feel is unjust, but teecchhhnically I’m wrong. It could be the thing where I snapped at my daughter – my beautiful daughter – because I’m frustrated at work because no one is listening, and you’re like “Am I the idiot here?”
The flip side of being a recovering addict is all that continual self-searching and fearless moral inventory stuff. There’s a fine line between always examining your own motives, weaknesses, and ego, and questioning who and how you are in the world.
I would be so much better as a human if I could have more discipline in my efforts and less “what the F$#^” about it. But I’m 45 now, so maybe that’s just who I am. Not if you believe in neuroplasticity, of course. Not if you’ve rewired yourself several times before. But still.
Covid was tough man. Messed with my head. Am still crawling out of it.
You have to make yourself resilient though, right? What doesn’t kill you (like the at least 2 times you had Covid, one of which truly sucked), actually does make you stronger if you let it.
I’ve been searching for signs out there in the universe. It’s silly, maybe. Or maybe it’s how, coming home from a work trip, stressing beyond belief, the song on the speakers is “Everything is going to be alright” and my baggage carousel has one of those signs that says: “This is the sign you’ve been waiting for.”
There’s a path I’m supposed to take but I can’t see my way clear to see it. Yet. That’s what we teach our kids, right? You can’t do it YET or you don’t know that thing YET.
So. Boom. Interested in doing a cooking show? That’s what I felt like this morning!
Here’s what happened.
Also, BEST VIDEO EDITING EVER. If you’re like “Wow, it looks like that girl didn’t brush her hair this morning”, that would be 100% accurate. I was doing stuff around the house. I’m planning on dealing with the hair later. Don’t worry about it.
If you’re interested in the recipe (and why would you be?) here’s sort of what I did.
3 peppers garlic butter (a stick and a half) various canned things (okra, tomatoes, beans) chick broth (two of those big rectangle thingies) canned chicken (not a joke) hot sauce season salt other random spices
Quite the weekend. Learned a lot. So this weekend I:
Helped support the team through a crapstorm of system issues for the accuracy of student enrollment (fun!)
Nearly finished refinishing and chalk painting a desk and hutch for my husband.
Worked out each day (developing new habits, totally addicted to bullet journal, but that’s another story)
Got the kids school supplies from last Spring (!) fully organized along with their supplies for this fall (they were labor, I was management)
Rearranged a few furniture things to get a bookshelf into my “bedroom office”
Wrote on novel both days (woo hoo!)
Dyed my hair (honey blonde, a bit of a change – next step is to add deep red to the ends, though my husband made the comment “I think it’s great that you still want to do stuff like that at your age”)
Considered divorce (just kidding, but related to previous bullet)
Finished Lord of the Rings trilogy with the kids (pretty much the same way I remember it last time – people walking, things chasing them, a bigger evil chasing the evil away, and the evil people are conveniently ugly. Have had to explain to my kids that this does not mean evil people are actually ugly. Sometimes the reverse is true.)
Watched episodes of Chuck with the kids (remote in hand, we fast forward some parts). We do add dance breaks during the beginning credits which is uber fun.
Worked on performance reviews for work
Worked on a bunch of other stuff for work
Basically worked half of the weekend, because it improves my anxiety going into the new week
Listened to a great great Freakonomics podcast on Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal. Love this idea, except it assumes a certain critical mass of humans doing the right thing for it to work. BUT I will say that Amsterdam really approaches the economics of this from an incentive and de-incentive approach, which can work, but only if it’s excruciatingly well-designed.
Listened to a podcast on Meet Like a Boss from the folks at Radical Candor (who rock). Pleasantly surprised to find out I’m on-pointe with much of this, though still a few new techniques to try. Very interested in the concept of fusing movement (i.e. walks) with meaningful conversations. Thinking my way through how you would do that in pandemic era in Louisiana, whereby if I walk outside my door I start sweating.
I felt like I crushed it! (Keep in mind that I listened to the podcast while I was refinishing the furniture. I don’t have special time-extending powers.)
radical-candor-quadrants-1
Not really sure exactly what I was trying to crush – maybe the temptation of eating lots of sugar while reading my detective novel? Love those British procedurals. They have the most civilized police and criminals. They also make all these in-jokes about different accents and the persistent class system there, which makes me feel really good about the opportunities in the good old US of A.
My attitude has definitely improved since I have minimized my exposure to news, which is the absolutely worst. Every time someone tells me “Can you believe that so and so said?” I tune it out. Of course that person said that. Because we’ve lost our ability to have conversations or seek resolution.
Sometimes I think we’re living through the fall of Rome, witnessing the rapidly accelerating decline of a nation. We have forgotten simple things about human nature, simple things about how to treat each other, and I’m done with this. Head officially stuck in the sand. The lack of civility is killing me – also the willingness to be wrong. If you’re not wrong on a regular basis you’re ignoring learning opportunities, and you may be suffering from confirmation bias, as many smart people do.
So, approaching the week optimistically. Feeling productive. Glad to be back at home, in the house, kids back in the neighborhood. Feeling less vagabond, and more settled. But still, freedom comes with not owning things – that’s a post for another day.
-SDM
And, in case you’re interested… the opening credits for Chuck are the perfect family dance break!
So I’m kind of done with the pandemic. In a done done way. In a “I feel like putting my fingers in my ears and going “lalalalalala” kind of way. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything just went back to normal? But since that’s not going to happen, I have to find a better way to cope.
Because I might just lose my freaking mind if I have to remind one of my kids – yet again – that hand-washing is not an “optional add-on” to the bathroom experience, it is a “core part” of the bathroom experience, I have to do something. I’ve overdone the whole Incredibles 2 hand-washing scene (that stopped being funny 2 months ago).
When you can no longer change your circumstances, you can only change yourself.
This applies across a whole series of circumstances, from getting the wrong takeout order (I’ve never tried cheddar cheese on that before, and I’m lactose intolerant, but let’s call this a “low-cost cleanse”), to haircuts (micro-bangs will be back in style in a few weeks I’m sure!). It applies swimmingly to this s#@* show of a pandemic.
Welcome Jason Bourne.
Here are 5 things I thought of to help me recontextualize the everyday annoying as *%@# stuff that comes with the pandemic that we have to just freaking live with.
Never Leave Fingerprints As a Fugitive Assassin
Remember that scene in The Bourne Identity where he’s in a hotel room and the girl from Run Lola Run wakes up and he says that he’s wiped the entire room for fingerprints? Think like that. If you have children, recommend this to them as a key spy skill.
For myself, I like to think that, were I a government trained assassin, I would need to be washing down every object I touch anyways. Now we’re just doing it because we might pass along a deadly virus to someone with a compromised immune system, but maybe we’re doing it because we’re assassins who want to leave no trace behind. You too can leave no trace behind.
Communicate Virtually
In most of the Jason Bourne films, virtual communication is preferred. Looking back on them (forget the fourth one, who knows what that was about – mortgage payment?), the only time that the bad guys meet the good guy and gal in person is when a deadly fight happens. This is also true with the pandemic. You risk getting in the fight of your life (or getting someone else in danger – thank you very much Matt Damon for the death of Franka Potente’s character!) only when you meet physically with members not of your household or bubble.
Rock those phone calls, telemedicine, food delivery and Zoom calls. Because you’re a fugitive assassin, and it’s safer for everyone when you do.
Just Ask and Keep it Simple
Sometimes, just asking will get you the results that you want. Instead of counting the steps from the midpoint of the lobby, and then coming up with some sort of complex plan for breaking into a computer to get records for a dead man, pretend that you’re that dead man’s personal assistant, use some good old-fashioned charm, and ask for what you need.
We were recently out of state and needed to get my son into a doctor, but, even with telemedicine it got complicated. Instead of going to an emergency room, I ended up – after many other avenues of exploration – calling and getting a next-day appointment with a doctor my son had last seen when he was three. Sure it wasn’t an easy process, but the woman who made it happen despite a lot of steps, made it happen because I asked. Kindly. Maybe with a little charm.
Because a fugitive assassin is way more effective when they appeal to the better angels of civilians than bust out in a knife fight (though Matt Damon can do some wickedly deadly things with a pen, and full credit goes to him because this was long before John Wick, though I do love me some Keanu, but I digress). (84, by the way, for John Wick fans, because most folk forget to include the car explosions in the body count.)
Forget Who You Were Before Except for the Good Stuff
Much like Jason Bourne, I have difficulty remembering who I was before the pandemic. What I would like to do, also like Jason Bourne, is keep the good stuff only. Whatever your vices were before the pandemic, make it harder to keep those going, because you have a good heart, a heart of courage and kindness, and most of us struggle mightily to be good.
Whether it be overconsumption of something, or internet shopping, or gossiping, let that s*%# go. Keep only the best parts of yourself. What we feed grows. A little amnesia can be helpful in this. Forget the bad parts of yourself from before. Grow the parts that you always wanted to.
Travel Light But With Tools
For Jason Bourne, the tools of the trade are half a dozen extra passports, a loaded gun, and tens of thousands of dollars in various currencies. For us, our new tools of the trade are hand sanitizer, masks, soap, and Clorox wipes (though not all of those should be applied to your actual body – seriously).
Create your own “kit”, your “go bag” – the thing you need to grab before traveling anywhere out of the house. If you have children, potentially make those masks ninja masks (because why not?), or Harry Potter masks (thanks Mom!), or something else fun. For yourself, think of all the advantages of masks – no need for lipstick, and at least the mascne that’s being created is also being covered.
But whatever fugitive assassin lessons or strategies that you want to adopt, keep in mind the most important one – BE FLEXIBLE. When the landscape changes in the field, so too should your strategies. Every week we’re learning more about how much we don’t know about this virus, and we’re making better choices based on that information on how to keep our loved ones safe.
The best part is that the fugitive assassin is the good guy. So you get to be both a hero AND a badass.
So that’s a little dramatic. BUT, he’s always had a sense of things, like a connection to the universe that I wonder at. My mother has that too, in some ways. (In fact, my mother picked out my husband for me when I was 17, but that’s an entirely different story for a different time.)
So as soon as we start hearing about the virus in January in China, my husband looks at me and says, “Sasha, this isn’t good.” He shakes his head. “It’s not going to happen,” he says.
“What not’s going to happen?” I say.
“Italy, honey, we’re not going to end up going to Italy.”
So this is where I’m like: But for realz honey? It’s in China. We’re going to Italy.
What are the chances that Italy would be “Stop 2” in the pandemic?
What. Are. The. Chances. Indeed.
So now we’re the proud owners of two stays at luxury hotels in Sorrento and in Florence. If anyone would like to use our rooms, they are available between May 7 and May 19.
On the upside, we all have updated passports. On the downside, we had to go through the process of all getting updated passports, which involved a cruel and unusual visit to the post office (also another story for another time).
I contacted both hotels maybe 5 or 6 weeks ago, before Italy was – you know – shut down. I expressed sympathy for their plight, asked for a refund. Both hotels were like “Oh, it’s totally safe here, nothing to worry about, come on in, the weather’s fine, there’s room for one more on this elevator” whahahahahaha.
When you think about how many mothers and how many fathers. All the people worrying, all the families.
I almost feel bad trying to get a refund because of what the economy must be like there now. (Keep in mind these were really nice hotels, not like mom and pop places. The last time I stayed in a hostel in my late twenties I told myself I will never travel again internationally unless I can afford a nice hotel. We all have our priorities.)
I really hope folks are taking this seriously. It’s almost unthinkable, and that’s where we went wrong. Many of us Gen-Xers grew up on a steady diet of apocalypse – if it wasn’t zombies it was attractive vampires, or creepy children ghosts or haunted islands, all manner of things that go bump in the night. It wasn’t hard for me to believe that this is real, but keep in mind that I did have my small stockpile of hazmat suits from when Ebola came around. I trend towards the slightly paranoid, and always figured that I’d rather spend a couple hundred bucks to not have to need to worry about preparation.
In related news, I have a lot of canned goods, and the children don’t like the broccoli cheese soup, so I have a lot of broccoli cheese soup.
A lot.
So I’m from Cleveland, right, and many years ago I was driving in downtown during a snowstorm and the traffic lights were out and it was my first real taste of anarchy. And I knew then how close we are were to disaster at any moment. People were defying the four way stop thing All Over the Place. I would like to take a moment to say that, as a public service announcement, when a traffic light is out, the four way stop is NOT a suggestion. It is what you MUST do to avoid a big freaking accident.
Pretty good analogy here only you don’t even have to take turns. Just don’t go out in public. #FlattenTheCurve Tune in next time when I reflect on working from home (or what I like to call “The Introvert’s Paradise”).
So. Yesterday spent 4 hours (yes, 4 hours!) organizing school work for the kids for this week.
I hear tell of these schools that have multiple live Zoom sessions with students, and assignments that are due on certain days, that have work still evaluated and graded.
Well, that is not our school system here in Zachary. What we’re doing is we got packets sent home and some links to some great electronic resources. I want to pause for a moment here and state that:
I LOVE my kids’ teachers. I LOVE their school experience. They are AWESOME. The school system here in Zachary is THE BOMB.
This is an unprecedented, world-wide pandemic that no one was prepared for – I totally get it.
And also. There is precious little structure for this experience, so I’ve had to create it myself and I am NOT digging it. Lots of work. Lots of organization. Folks online (and everyone has their own take on this, I get it) have said that (1) if all the kids are behind, the teachers will take it into account at the beginning of next year, and (2) it’s only the last 9 weeks of school and most of those are preparing for the yearly exams.
Both of those are slightly horrifying to me. I don’t want my kids to fall behind. I don’t care if everyone is behind together. I don’t want them to be behind period. Also, I need to keep these kids academically busy. Their brains need the workout. And double also, if I don’t they’ll default to spending WAY too much time on electronics and their tiny little developing brains don’t need too much of that.
And if the last 9 weeks of school are really spent preparing for a standardized test, WHAT the WHAT. What a waste of educational time. Does that mean every year I can take my kid out 9 weeks early because they’re just preparing for a test? That doesn’t seem right, and I hope it’s not accurate.
Socially Distant Mom 