Statuses

Hit Em Where It Hurts

Sunshine, bathe me, lately life’s been crazy
Your Eyes, tell all, we outside with it, your call
Move me, Need Me, care about it, breath deep
You see, what I miss, holdin on to ya with a tight grip
Light Lit, no cap, heart spilled all over the Floor mat
Tongue out, I don’t know how to hold that
Nowadays I don’t really want to hold back

So I hit em where it hurts
So I hit em where it hurts, (Set sail, lighthouse, Search)

339 // I Don’t Want to Go Back

This morning is adhering a lot closer to plan than the last few have. I’m up before the sun, my favorite time of day as long as I get to spend it sipping coffee and reading in bed next to a sunny window rather than stumbling through the beginning of the workday routine, and from here things are only looking up. I have nowhere to be and nothing much at all I have to do.

These days, these not quite work days but not quite weekends, are quickly becoming a large source of peace and fulfillment for me. I’m concerned about how hard it’s going to be to return to a full-time work schedule after the turn of the new year, and even more so after the corona virus vaccine becomes widely available and distributed.

The pandemic has really put into focus what matters, and at the top of that list is time. It’s become clear how much of it I have been giving up, how much we’ve all been giving up. Forty hours—and often more!—a week spent doing what? I love my job, but it isn’t for me. I don’t do it because I love it; I do it to survive.

I have to give up my life in order to live? It’s all so contradictory, depressing, and, the longer the pandemic wears on, infuriating.

I want the pandemic to end, but I do hope life doesn’t just go back to normal after it’s safe to leave our homes and be within six feet of each other again. I don’t want to go back to working so many hours a week. I don’t want to go back to feeling guilty for staying home when I’m sick. I don’t want to go back to long meetings, and crowded offices, and impossible expectations.

Sadly, I suspect everything in the workplace will go back to the way it was and faster than I can adjust physically or emotionally. People are just too happy with what is familiar even if a little change, uncomfortable adjustment, and imagination is all it takes to give a world with a little more balance, peace, and, most importantly, time.

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Sever the Sightlines

[S]haming has social meaning. It characteristically results in a desire to sever the sightlines between the self and the other. We talk about wanting to hide our faces and the characteristic look of shame—the head bowed, the eyes lowered. But that’s not the only way of achieving such separation. Rather than hide, one can instead do away with the onlooker. ‘He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world,’ as Erik Erikson famously put it (1963, 227).

— Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

Civilization Is Relative

The Invention of Race // Throughline Podcast

“[Franz] Boaz introduced ideas into American life that shape how we think about the world to this day. Race is a construct, culture is relative, Western civilization is not inherently greater. History is not linear, and neither is human progress.”

338 // A Minor Mistake

Yesterday I was grateful for modern medicine, today I loath the entire American health care industry.

Long story short, I made a minor mistake that resulted in needing my medication replaced, not refilled, but my insurance provider refused. They admitted that the mistake was both understandable and commonplace, but instead of having a simple and compassionate solution ready; I was directed back and forth from department to department and between them and the drug company again and again and again.

The process was stressful and disappointing at every level. I was left feeling incompetent, completely alone, and terrified of what a missed dose might mean.

The worst part of any illness isn’t the illness itself but dealing with pharmacies, drug companies, insurance providers, and all their bureaucratic roadblocks and the problem is infinitely worse that illness and consequently the bureaucratic roadblocks are chronic.

The good news is that within this cruel and capitalist system there are a few good people and between my doctor and the nurse ambassador with the drug company I’ve been reassured I will probably be okay and that I am not, in fact, the world’s number one failure.

So, so much for a day that belonged to me. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening trying to destress and salvage some self-esteem. Ordering a pizza with my favorite toppings, watching old episodes of Veep, and knowing I still have tomorrow to myself helps a lot. Today wasn’t a good one, but it’s already in the past and soon it will join every other bad day I’ve ever had as a distant and dim memory, something to laugh about or repress forever.

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337 // The Good News

The only good thing about having to work during a pandemic is at least the schedule is light. The first half of the week was hard, but in order to minimize the number of people in the office, everyone’s time is split and Wednesday has become my new Friday. I only have to get through midday and the second half is all mine. Hours to fill as I please, or as my energy or anxieties will allow, though there is more hope for me this week than in many weeks past.

To be honest, I’ve been reluctant to write here lately. For so long now there has been nothing but bad news and worse news. This year, my year, like the year many of you are having too, has turned out to be one of the worst in recent, if not complete, memory and for many more reasons than the collective COVID one.

It’s no secret chronic illness has been kicking my ass and with nowhere to go and nothing to do but work and wallow, there hasn’t been much worth sharing or saying, until today. Today I feel good. I have been feeling good, and I want to share the good news with you now.

Some weeks ago I started a new medication and treatment plan and for the first time in many, many months pain, fatigue, and distress are no longer defining every waking moment of my life. For the first time in many, many months, I recognize myself in the mirror.

What’s funny is, this year has been so hard on me that even speaking that good news scares me. I’m worried I’m wrong or that the improvement was only temporary, a tease, another trick of 2020, but some time has passed now, enough to allow a sense of optimism to creep in.

I can imagine a life that is more than work and sleep again. I’ve been reading constantly and thinking more and more of writing again. I’m excited at the prospect of making something of this last month, even if all I do is spend it preparing for the new year. My expectations aren’t high. Being able to do anything at all is progress. I’m happy and hopeful again, and that is everything.

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Controlling Experience

Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance””

— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays