231 // Being Careful Again

According to reports, a cold front has moved in and though we’ve found some small relief from the oppressive heat, the clouds and cool mist blowing through these suburbs are sapping my energy all the same. It’s only 9:00 AM and I already need a nap.

At least the wildfire smoke has lifted. It’s nice to see the blue sky and to have safe air to breathe again. There were days there when my nose would not stop running, nor would my throat stop itching. I was miserable but I imagine those with asthma, other respiratory conditions, and long covid were feeling it worse than me.

I’m paying close attention to the news of vaccine boosters becoming available in the coming weeks to months. I check my email hoping for advice from my doctors or instructions to make appoints as they become available. As someone who has a chronic autoimmune condition and who is taking multiple medications to keep my system suppressed, losing vaccine efficacy could mean severe illness or reactivation of my symptoms. I have no doubt that I should have a booster, it’s only a matter of when.

For now, I’m doing my best to get back into a habit of wearing a mask, sanitizing, and washing my hands at regular intervals. For the most part, I have kept these habits, but with the school year starting up, social distancing is now nearly impossible. I’m no longer working sequestered in my tiny corner of an office. I’m out with my coworkers, with kids, and visiting schools and parents. I have to start being careful again.

We’ve had our first tornado warnings of the season this afternoon. Most years tornados touch down in the early summer, but it seems we’ve had fewer storms and longer stretches of blistering heat instead. I spent nearly 20 minutes in a high school hallway packed with kids waiting for the warning to clear. The threat of tornados passed, but the heavy rain, high winds, and large hail stuck around through the hour at least. Luckily, beyond soaked clothing and backpacks, the kids fared well and made it home fine.

I’m a bit shaken up, but not from fear. These storms have always awakened a strange excitement in me. I’ve never been able to describe exactly why I feel this way, but just seeing the thunderheads marching over the mountains and rolling east over the plains brings me to life. I swear I can sense the static linking the ground with the clouds, and I have a strong urge to get outside and feel the volatile air on my skin. I want the cool rain running down my arms and the hail beating my back. I want to touch lightning.

230 // 19th Year

Monday may have marked the first official day the students returned for the new school year, but due to a “phase-in” program we are running this year, today is the first day that all the students have ridden the bus together.

I got a chance to meet some new—or, new to me anyway—high schoolers with some unique challenges and absolutely delightful dispositions. I am grateful for my years of experience and the knowledge that a student’s description on paper rarely bears much resemblance to the student you meet in person. A child’s worst behavior is what you receive in hand but they will always strive to show you the best of themselves every day.

Stress levels continue to decline, but the long working hours are wearing on me. The only thing saving my sense of stability is knowing that the breaks are also getting longer. There will be more time for reading and writing and an easier time of motivating myself and staying focused.

I’m enjoying the chance to get some words down and some pages read, but I admit I’m anxious to get home. Today also marks the 19th year since my wife and I first chose each other and we have chosen each other again and again, every day since.

We’ve only been married for just over 2 years, so in a way this anniversary is even more meaningful than the one that marks our wedding. It marks all the time I wish we could have been married but legally couldn’t. It’s a reminder of how we found the courage to be ourselves, to love each other, and to build a life while being hated, over sexualized, and alienated.

We’ve come so far. Humanity has come even further and rather than lamenting the time lost, I’m grateful to live the dream so many before us fought for but never saw.

All We Can Offer Anymore

I used to enjoy waking up to watch the news in the morning but between the past presidency and the pandemic, I’ve been feeling rather pessimistic about both the current state of our world and our collective future.

It isn’t just the news stations. It’s social media too. I log into Facebook and Twitter and I see so much pain and anger. Everywhere I look the world is burning, flooding, and fighting. People are sick. People are tired. People are lost and afraid, but nowhere are people at all willing to put petty differences aside to save the whole of humanity.

Sure we could change, but we won’t. We are a historically stubborn species and once we have decided on a course, almost nothing will move us. I don’t really blame us. We have our language and our reasoning, but deep down there is hardly any difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom.

We want power, status, and wealth: things we think promise survival. We are wrong by instinct. We are driven to our destruction by our very biology.

So, it would seem that the human species is experiencing its last death throes and we are bringing the entirety of life on this planet with us. Facing such mortality, all I have found to be grateful for is knowing that I will not live to see the worst of it, only this awful beginning.

I’m grateful too for the bubble of happiness around me. The cushion of love and support I have is such a privilege and I wonder to what end I could put it to use for a greater good. I may be disappointed and depressed by the state of the world, but I still care, and I want to help.

No one of us can save the whole of it or stop what is now an inevitability. We have failed ourselves and each other, but there is no undoing or redoing. All we can do now is focus our personal privilege and small actions on easing suffering where we can. This is the work we have now. This is all we can offer one another anymore.

228 // Me-Ness

Today marks the first day of the new school year and we are beginning with just as much uncertainty as we had this time in 2020.

The pandemic continues to rage on and, as predicted, we are back to wearing masks and worrying over distances, particles, disinfectants, and breakthrough cases. I find comfort in knowing I’m vaccinated, but I’m also taking medications that suppress my immune system and there may be some chance that I am no longer protected against the virus. I’m hoping for a booster, but that determination will come from my medical team. I don’t get to decide.

Other than the pandemic and the stress that comes from being overworked in a place that is severely short-staffed, I’m doing ok. I’m happy. I’m feeling healthier—both mentally and physically—than I have in the last year. I have energy for more than just work and sleep and I am finally finding that sense of self and security that only comes with time and a maturing mind.

It’s amazing how rapidly the self-realizations are coming. It turns out I am made of both the me as I have always been and the me I am becoming anew every day.

It turns out there is a wide spectrum of “me-ness” I can be. It is not a matter of being more or less as with a gradient. It’s being different according to what day of the week it is, my mood, my memories, how much or how little pain I am in, how much and what kind of food I’ve eaten, how much I’ve slept, the weight work stress and of home strain, who I spoke to, what I have read, and if or how much I have written.

There are many me’s I can be and I can choose or I can let myself be swept away and surprised by which me might show up. Some days I like to have control, I like to choose, but some days, most days, it feels good to just be.

227 // The Problem

The Sunday blues have me feeling low, and my worries for the coming week are carrying me away. I’m having a hard time feeling the solid ground beneath my feet and putting one in front of the other is taking more energy than I have to give.

It’s all these little to do piling up. Some from home but more from work, and every time I check one off it seems two more getting added to the bottom. Prioritizing is difficult, but that is nothing new. I’ve always struggled to know where to begin and how exactly to end. I choose instead to do it all at once, moving from task to task as my mind wanders and my panic rises.

There will have to be a better way. I’m realizing that my goals can’t be met the way that I’ve been trying to meet them. The problem is with me, but not because of me. It’s just the way my mind works.

It comes down to personal flaws and obstacles that I’m only now coming to understand. It’s all the ways I turn out to be different and the false assumptions that I was the same. This ignorance may have hindered me. This ignorance has kept me from finding what works for me by not being able to see what doesn’t.

225 // Passive Healing

Happy Friday the 13th! Most people consider these days unlucky, but as someone who was born on a 13th, I’m fascinated by them. This year only has one such Friday, and this is it. We won’t see another until next May.

I’ve celebrated many a Friday the 13th in the past getting new tattoos when many shops offer deals and special “flash” for as low as $13 or $21, but not this year. I recently had my knees done and plan for more work in just a few short months so the urge isn’t strong and with Covid making appointment slots scarce I’d rather wait but I thought I’d at least share some of my past pieces with you:

This is one of the last easy and early Fridays I will have for the foreseeable future, and I am taking full advantage. I have just a few minor tasks today before I head back home and spend the rest of the afternoon writing. It’s been a long time since I could sit down and devote time to settling, organizing, and expressing my thoughts. It’s been some time since I felt like myself enough to even try.

But time is passing and with it, a kind of passive healing that allows for unconscious processing. I’m working through it even when I don’t know it, even when I’m working on other things, even when I think I’m stuck.

My hope is that there will be more time for active healing soon, but for now, I’m comforted by the idea that my mind and body know what to do. We never really stop taking care of ourselves. It’s instinct. Even at our most destructive, we are only ever trying to fill the voids and heal the wounds.

Looking ahead to the coming weeks, I see a lot of unknowns coming my way and unknowns always make me anxious. I’ve been practicing the art of mindfulness and staying in the present. Each day only has room for itself and I’ve long had a bad habit of overfilling them with the worries of years past and weeks to come. When you let each day be its own and save tomorrow for tomorrow and let the past stay passed, time lightens up. You lighten up and, suddenly, the load gets easier to carry.

How Description Leads to Understanding

Describing something with accuracy forces you to learn more about it. In this way, description can be a tool for learning.

Accurate description requires the following:

  1. Observation
  2. Curiosity about what you are witnessing
  3. Suspending assumptions about cause and effect

It can be difficult to stick with describing something completely and accurately. It’s hard to overcome the tendency to draw conclusions based on partial information or to leave assumptions unexplored.

— How Description Leads to Understanding // Farnam Street

Runaway Self-Hatred

“A degree of regret may sometimes be helpful: it can help us to take stock of errors and avoid the worst of the pitfalls next time. But runaway self-hatred serves no useful purpose whatsoever; it is, in its masochistic way, an indulgence we can’t afford.

We may be foolish, but this doesn’t single us out as particularly awful or unusual, it only confirms that we belong to the human race, a fact for which we deserve limitless sympathy and compassion.”