Problem solved

Tuesday: It's very very hot today and unusually, I am not happy about the tropical heat because the pool is closed.

Yes, let that sink in for a moment. The pool is closed. THE POOL IS CLOSED.

It's the day after Memorial Day and I came home from work and folded laundry and put away groceries and put on a bathing suit and walked to the pool, only to learn that a pump malfunction had necessitated an early closure. I'm a little devastated.

Honestly, I wasn't even really looking forward to getting in the water, because overnight rain that persisted through the morning likely meant that the already-cold water would be even colder. But I was looking forward to BEING in the water. Getting in and being in? Two entirely different things.

So, here I am. Instead of swimming laps, I'm writing about not swimming laps.

*****
It's Wednesday now, and I'm still not swimming laps because the pool remains closed. It's supposed to re-open tomorrow. Hope springs eternal.

Pool status notwithstanding, it's swim team season--season of early Saturday mornings and Friday night pasta parties and weekly emails. And officiating, of course. I was born to wear a whistle and carry a clipboard. My authori-tay will not be questioned.

*****
Thursday, and the first world problems continue to pile up. Yes, the pool is open finally, but it's a terrible swimming day, and so I went walking instead. And then I yelled at my kids because they are both infected with an end-of-the-school-year laziness virus that I had to nip in the bud. I don't yell at my kids very often. I don't even really raise my voice to them. So on the rare occasions when I do need to read the proverbial riot act, it makes an impression. They're tiptoeing around me right now as though I might bite. And you never know. I might.

*****
Friday afternoon, and I'm finished with work and trying to decide if I should grocery shop or do swim team work or just hang around.

Do you see this? I can't even just hang around without stopping to write about it.

My husband and kids are better than I am at just hanging around. During the lovely few days when we had no FiOS, they started on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, which is about 80% finished. As a person with absolutely no spatial relations ability, I find jigsaw puzzles to be among the least fun things that a person can do. I'd no sooner choose to do a jigsaw puzzle than dig ditches or mine coal.

OK, I guess that's an exaggeration. But I'm really terrible at puzzles. The very sight of all of those tiny pieces, all of which look alike to me; and the very idea of trying to distinguish one from another and then trying to fit them together, just stresses me out. So as much as I'd like to have this mess off my dining room table, I'm not going to actually try to put the rest of it together.

Actually, it's not a mess at all. It looks rather nice. Nonetheless, I am ruling out puzzle-doing as an option for the rest of the afternoon. The house is clean, but it could always be cleaner. And I really should go grocery shopping. But the sun is out and the pool is open. I think I'll go swimming instead.

Freedom

It’s Friday afternoon, and Memorial Day weekend is here, and I have few problems that summer can’t solve. Few problems but not no problems. No problems is too much to ask for in a fallen world, especially a fallen world in which Verizon exists.

I worked from home today, and fortunately, I started quite early, because my FiOS went down at 2:45 PM and Verizon can’t fix it until Sunday. I finished almost a whole day, so I don’t have to take any PTO, but I started early for a reason, that reason being that I have a ton of work to do and I wanted to work a bit longer today so I’d have things under control on Tuesday; and so that I wouldn’t have to work during the holiday weekend.

When it became quite apparent that the WiFi was really and truly down for the count, I forced myself to do the thing that I hate to do almost more than any other task in life. I called Verizon, and the moment the chatbot come on the line to try to helpfully help me route my call to the helpfulest agent, I wished I hadn’t. For “security reasons” (“security” meaning “we want to make dealing with us as miserable as possible”) they insisted that they could not and would not speak to me until they could verify my identity with the owner of the account, that owner being my husband, who was of course at work. As was I, but I couldn’t do my work, because thanks Verizon. After they sent my husband a text message, and he forwarded it to me and I read them the number that established my identity, I asked the super helpful agent to add my number to the account so that we wouldn’t have to go through this process again. And he said “Of course—I’ll be happy to. I’ll just replace his number with yours.”

And I said “No, please don’t replace his number. Just add mine.”

I will spare you the rest of this conversation. But the upshot is that Verizon’s customer management system has room for only one phone number. Just one. It seems not to have occurred to this giant tech company that it might be possible to add a form field that would allow a service agent to store an additional phone number; nor that many of the households that their company serves might include more than one person. They’re sending a technician out on Sunday.

****

Saturday: I’m not good at being free. I know no better way to explain this, but I’ll try. No matter what I am doing, I always feel that I should be doing something else. No matter how I might like to sleep a little later or relax on the couch or take an afternoon off to just be a person, I can’t seem to do it. This is partly circumstance-related, because I’m a person with a demanding job and a family and responsibilities. But it’s much more a function of my nature. I’m wound pretty tightly. I know this about myself.

Every so often, though, the door opens a bit, and I let myself walk outside it and I look at my computer and walk right past it, and I walk right through the kitchen and don’t stop to prep dinner or wash a dish, and I walk right through the laundry room, ignoring the pile of folded laundry that needs to be put away, and then I walk right out the door to freedom. It’s Saturday, and it’s Memorial Day weekend, and I just finished swimming my first outdoor laps of 2019. The water was freezing, and it wasn’t fine once you got used to it, and an hour later, I’m still a little numb around the toes. It’s pretty glorious.

*****

So it’s Sunday, the day that Verizon is supposed to come, and of course they’re going to stretch their two-hour arrival window to its limit because they wouldn’t be Verizon if they didn’t suck. They’re supposed to arrive between 12 and 2, and it’s 12:59 now, and I’m guessing that my doorbell will ring at 1:57. Then I’ll wait around while the extremely polite technician analyzes the problem. And then he will either very politely explain why he can’t fix it today under any circumstances; or, he will tell me that he CAN fix it but the problem is our fault and not theirs and fixing it will cost us even more money than the ridiculous sum that we already hand over every month.

Truthfully, I don’t even care that much. Other than not being able to work at home until the FiOS is restored (well, that is kind of a pain), I don’t miss it. My son and I played Scrabble yesterday. Last night, we watched an old Star Wars movie on DVD. I can write without distractions. No one can play Fortnite. NO ONE CAN PLAY FORTNITE! And hockey season, at least as far as I care about it, is over. So I don’t need FiOS. I just want to get out of the house.

*****

It’s Monday now, Memorial Day. Verizon finally showed up at 2:05 and they were finished by 2:30 and I was out the door at 2:45. And it was a lovely rest of the day of sorting t-shirts for our annual 5K and swimming laps and reading books and celebrating a six-year-old’s birthday and going to sleep early and waking up even earlier. It’s 3 PM, and it’s time to go swimming again. Happy Memorial Day, and happy summer.

I'll tell you the truth and it's up to you to live with it

When I was young, I read Robert K. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra. Then, partly because I wanted to know more about Tsarist Russia and partly because I liked Massie's writing, I read Peter the Great. I spent a good part of a summer on those two books.

Both books are filled with examples of horrific cruelty and indifference to human suffering, but Peter the Great was especially hair-raising. In the introduction (or maybe the epilogue), Massie wrote something about how 17th century Russia was a time and place of hideous cruelty, exactly like every other time and place before or since. This made a deep impression on me, and I think about it every time I read or hear or see stories of unimaginable human suffering here or anywhere in the world. It's a fallen world. Most of us here in the 21st century industrialized West have escaped the worst of it, but no one gets out of this world without some suffering.

*****

I read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns when it was published, in 2007. I'd read The Kite Runner, like everyone else in the world, and I wondered if Hosseini's second novel would be as good as his first. And it was. It was better, actually. Maybe I like it better because it's a story about women, and because I find it moving that a man can imagine such a true and beautiful female friendship. But it's also just a really good book. It's filled with lovely writing and believable characters, and it uses but does not exploit the horror of life under Taliban rule--especially for women--to great effect. The reader--or at least this reader--comes away knowing that there but for the grace of God go any of us.

2007 was kind of a long time ago. A lot has changed since then. A lot has happened. Last week, I was looking for something to read, and I found A Thousand Splendid Suns sitting in my Kindle library, just waiting for me, so I read it again. I remembered the basic outline of the story, but I had forgotten a lot of detail and I had actually forgotten how it ended (tragic but happy) so I tore through it pretty quickly--it is a page-turner.

*****
A Thousand Splendid Suns is not as well-known as The Handmaid's Tale, another story about women suffering under a harsh theocracy. I didn't mention to anyone I know that I had been reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, because I was sure that someone would connect the theme of women's suffering and oppression at the hands of authoritarian, religious men to what is happening right now in Missouri and Alabama, and I just can't.

I am a pro-life person. But I don't believe--not for one hot second--that the Alabama legislature has ANY INTEREST AT ALL in protecting life. If they did, the abortion bill that they just passed would be accompanied by legislation ending the death penalty, and welcoming refugees and migrants, and strengthening social service supports for poor families so that women in crisis pregnancies will have reason to hope that bringing their babies into the world is a viable option over aborting them. This latest round of abortion bills has nothing to do with the sanctity of life and everything to do with reinforcing the divisions between right and left. They don't want to end legalized abortion, because then there's nothing left to fight about.

*****
On the other hand (yes, the other hand once again), let's discuss the current Handmaid hysteria over these ridiculous new laws. When I see long Facebook posts about back alleys and coat hangers, with invitations to our desperate sisters in Alabama and Louisiana and Missouri to join us in the civilized blue state world where abortion is still legal and "safe," hashtagged #undergroundrailroad2019, I'm frankly a little embarrassed to be a middle-aged college-educated white lady.

Underground railroad?

REALLY?

It's funny, feminist friends, how you should connect abortion to slavery in this manner. Funny, because the comparison is apt, though not, I suspect, in the way that you intended. Slavery and abortion do, in fact, have something in common--both represent the ultimate triumph of the strong over the weak. After all, what is weaker than an unborn child?

In every society in human history in which the weak are not acknowledged to possess human rights, slavery has been the result. Slavery and genocide. And abortion, like it or not, is genocide.

*****
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a story about a society--Afghanistan under the Taliban--in which the weak are not acknowledged as possessing human rights. The weak, of course, are the women. Lots of feminists would read this book and see parallels to the United States in 2019. And so would I, though not, I suspect, in the way they intended.

You should read the book, so I won't give away too much of the story. Just this part. One of the two female protagonists has two children, a girl and a boy. The woman's husband adores the boy, and he barely tolerates the girl. When food becomes scarce in war-torn Kabul, he forces his wife to place the girl in an orphanage. The woman has absolutely no right to protest or to protect her daughter, and she endures beatings and harassment when she goes to visit the child, because her husband refuses to accompany her, and unaccompanied women are fair game for Taliban thugs.

In a society that valued women, a little girl would be of equal value to a little boy, and a mother would have equal parenting rights with her husband.

Of course, in a society that valued women, a woman who actually wanted--really wanted--to destroy her own child would be a rare and hideously tragic figure, pitied as mentally ill or otherwise terribly damaged. In a society that really treasured life, draconian abortion statutes would not be necessary, because the great majority of women would naturally choose to give birth to their babies, and would naturally expect that their jobs and their families and their schools and their communities would do whatever was necessary to make that choice possible. In a society that really respected women, unwanted and unexpected pregnancy would be rare, because men who had sex with women would understand that sex often results in babies and they would either accept the responsibility that this implies, or they'd keep their pants zipped. In a society that really valued women and their awesome reproductive capacity, rape and incest would be rare, because every boy would be taught from childhood to treat girls with respect, and girls would never see their fathers leering at NFL cheerleaders or Hooters waitresses or Sports Illustrated swimsuit models or Playboy centerfolds and would thus never internalize the idea that girls are supposed to grow up and become sexual playthings for men and boys.

That's a long paragraph, right?

*****
Abortion is an appalling offense against the dignity of women and the dignity of all human life. But it's not the only one. So you know what, Alabama? And Georgia and Louisiana and Missouri and all of you other states that are so eager to establish a new vanguard of pro-life extremism? Figure out how to fix all of that. Figure out how to make it so that unwanted pregnancy is rare, and that families and children are so valued that women won't think twice about bringing life into the world. Because unless your proclaimed commitment to the sanctity of life is backed up by something other than take-that-Planned-Parenthood abortion laws, then all of the women wearing pussy hats and Handmaid garb and "Keep Your Laws off My Body" t-shirts will keep calling you woman-haters and tyrants and a new American Taliban. And you know what else? They won't be wrong.

And I will scoff--SCOFF, I tell you--every time you proclaim yourselves to be "pro-life."

You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

*Title and last paragraph: William Goldman, "The Princess Bride"

On Wednesday, I might wear pink. I might just wear pink

Thursday: I woke up this morning and I just couldn't. I know that could (and by association couldn't) is an auxiliary verb, usually accompanied by another verb. But I just couldn't. Anything, at all. Full stop.

Of course I did anyway. I did the things I had to do starting with the hardest, which was to get out of bed. It's 9 PM now and so I can stop. Until tomorrow.

*****
Friday: You know those little separator things that they have at the grocery store checkout line? And you get in line and the person ahead of you takes one and places it behind their order, and you always say thank you to that person? I used to wonder why people said thank you, because it seemed that that person was only making sure that they didn't inadvertently pay for your groceries. But saying thank you is what you do in that situation. So much is this ingrained in my code of etiquette that I would be slightly offended if the person behind me in the checkout line failed to say thank you when I placed the divider between our orders.

This morning, I felt so despairingly wretchedly awful. I wrote all about it. And then I erased it, sparing you my dark night of the soul. You don't have to thank me.

*****
Saturday: That was fun, wasn't it?

My son's senior prom was last night. He had a good time. Prom isn't what it was when I was young, and in many ways, that's a good thing. I grew up in the city, and only a handful of my classmates could drive. Most of us didn't learn to drive until college or even after. In the suburbs, though, kids drive at age 16 (age 16 and six months in Maryland). When I first moved here, it seemed that every May and June would bring terrible news of late-night car crashes that would kill high school seniors days before or after their high school graduations. And this still happens but maybe not as much as it did 20 years ago thanks in part to school-sponsored after-prom parties.

At Rockville High School, kids aren't even allowed to drive to the prom. They meet at the local rec center, where buses take them to the prom. It's a great equalizer. After the prom, the buses drop them off at the same rec center for the after-prom party.

I'll spare you all the details surrounding security and calls to parents when kids leave the party early. Just know that it's a huge volunteer effort, with over a hundred parents arriving at 6:30 or so to decorate and get the food set up, then work at the party itself from 11:30 to 3, and then clean up the rec center beginning at 3 AM. Senior parents are not supposed to be at the party, and I didn't feel like being part of the cheerful set-up crowd, so I volunteered for graveyard duty, and arrived at the rec center at 3 AM.

I'm not part of the in crowd at my son's high school. That's not a complaint or anything. They're all very lovely people, and I have made friends with a few band and swim team parents. But most of them have known each other since their children were in kindergarten. For safety reasons associated with my husband's police work, we had to move our children from our neighborhood high school to another nearby high school, so he started as a freshman surrounded by kids who had already been in school together for nine years. It's hard for introverted people to break into a new crowd, and we are introverted people.

Another senior parent was leading the clean-up crew. I know her to speak to. She's lived in this neighborhood for her whole life, and is always at the center of every crowd and every conversation. She's pretty and outgoing and stylish and has beautiful hair. And when she greeted me by name last night, and started the usual "can you believe our babies are graduating" conversation with me, I felt like the walliest of wallflowers, welcomed into the royal court by the reigning prom queen.


via GIPHY

It's all high school, isn't it?

Anyway, we were finished cleaning up by 4:30; and by 5:00, I was back in bed, where I stayed until 9:30. And everything seems almost fine again. Grool.

Rainy season

There are few things better than a pair of dry socks, especially after you've had wet socks on your feet for several hours.

*****

On Monday afternoon, I visited the headquarters of the Federal government agency that I work for. I normally work in a satellite office ten minutes from my house, but we had a meeting at headquarters, so I worked at my normal office in the morning, and then took Metro from Twinbrook to Union Station, exactly one mile from the building where the meeting was to take place.

A coworker, who has been on the contract with me for just a few months, also had to attend the meeting, so we traveled together. My coworker shares my Metro-riding philosophy: If it's not on the Red Line, it's dead to me. We agreed that we'd much prefer to walk the mile from Union Station than transfer to the Blue or Green Line to Federal Center. And we both knew that it was going to rain, and that it was in fact, raining. But we decided to proceed as planned.

It had nearly stopped raining when we got on the train in Rockville. But then it started again, and a steady, though not driving, rain was falling when we exited Union Station. For some inexplicable reason, my coworker had  worn high-heeled sandals, and she seemed considerably dismayed by the rain. I offered to take a taxi with her, but she wanted to stick with our original plan, so we walked through Columbus Circle and then around the Capitol building to Independence and our destination.

It was colder than it should be in May, but not freezing, and there was no wind, so the rain fell vertically, the way it's supposed to. I took some nice pictures of the Capitol building, which disappears behind overgrown spring foliage as you approach it, and then appears again through breaks in the trees. We had rain jackets and umbrellas; and despite wet socks and slightly wet pants from the knees down, a good time was had by me.

There it is! 

My coworker, unfortunately, did not like the brisk one-mile walk through the rain nearly as much as I did. But she was actually quite nice about the whole thing, and I felt a little guilty about how much I enjoyed what was obviously just a step up from the Bataan Death March for her.

****
So dry socks and hot soup--those are the two things that can fix everything. I arrived to our meeting with wet socks (the dry socks had to wait until I got home), but thanks to the cafeteria in the building (how I love office building cafeterias), we had the soup. In a few minutes we were both--wait for it--right as rain.

*****
It's Wednesday now. After days of rain and March-cold temperatures, it's finally sunny and dry and almost warm. I'm hoping that it will be a long time before I need dry socks and hot soup and a sturdy umbrella, all on the same day. Still, it's nice that they were all there when I needed them.

Rhetoric

It's 10:15 on Saturday night and I worked all day today. And I mean all day. ALLL day.

It's Saturday, for crying out loud, but it was actually a good day for me to work. I've been out of sorts, and having to work gave me a good excuse to not go out and enjoy the beautiful May weather. But still, it's Saturday, and now I'm completely exhausted, and my eyes are shot for the day. So I'm going to go and take out my contact lenses, and make some tea, and watch TV for a little while, and go to bed. I'm watching "Broadchurch" on Netflix. I'm obsessed with Olivia Colman's character.

*****
Now it's Sunday. I'm working again and I'm a little salty, wondering just who writes "work to ensure that risks are identified and mitigated," rather than "identify and mitigate risks." And that's not the worst of it. Oh, not even close.

*****

It's Wednesday evening and I'm sitting outside watching my son's baseball game, and freezing. It's May. Did I mention that? Why am I freezing in the middle of May?

I didn't wear my beloved sweater tonight because I don't want to wear it out. So the sweater is warm and comfortable at home while I sit shivering in an entirely inadequate nylon pullover. Poor planning on my part. Poor decision making.

I used to say that Maryland's climate was changing but now I think that it has already changed. This is probably the fourth consecutive year that we've had chilly gray March-like conditions in May, almost right up to Memorial Day weekend, when summer miraculously returns. I suppose I can live with the once-unseasonable chill, as long as we get the miracle. But I still wish that I had worn my sweater.

*****
It's Thursday now. I took a rare weekday day off and spent it shopping, another rare event. And strangely enough, it was lovely. And successful, too. I bought some things.

I'm sitting in church as I write this. My younger son's Confirmation is in 30 minutes or so, so we're just waiting for the procession to begin. I suppose I should be praying.

In fact, maybe I should pray for my few remaining brain cells. When my sons were getting dressed, I asked my older son if it was strictly necessary to drop his shorts and t-shirt on the floor or if it might have been possible for him to drop them in the laundry hamper five feet away. "That's a hypothetical question," I said. "Don't answer it." 

Even as I said this, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't remember the right word. And I always remember the right words. Remembering the right words is all I know how to do. Fast typing, compulsive housecleaning, and words. Take away any one of the three and I'm all but unemployable. 

Rhetorical question. That's what it was. A rhetorical question, not a hypothetical question. And there is always an upside because my son has grown in wisdom enough that he knew better than to correct me. 

*****

It's Friday night now, 9:30 PM. Today I wrote a really good nomination for an award that my company would like to win, so I think that my mental acuity has recovered a bit from yesterday's aphasia episode. Thanks, Holy Spirit. I'll stop blogging in church now. It's the least I can do.

Almost perfect

I was at work one day last week, and I happened to look over at the side of my cubicle where my handbag was hanging, and I spent a minute just looking at that handbag, thinking about how much I like it and how perfectly it suits my purposes.

It's a bag that I normally carry on the weekend or while traveling, and so I guess I associate it with freedom and leisure. But it also has a near-perfect combination of beauty and practicality that make carrying my daily necessities both easy and pleasing.

*****
When I was in Ireland in March, I bought an Aran sweater. It's not a traditional fisherman-style pullover sweater; it's a hooded cardigan with a zipper, cable-knit merino wool in a beautiful dark wine color. It is not only my favorite sweater, it's my favorite article of clothing of any type. When I put it on, I feel like a turtle, safe and comfortable in its neat and perfectly fitting shell. I wish I could wear that sweater every day; but soon it will be too warm, and I'll have to put it away until next fall.

*****
Here's how much I love this sweater. I'm actually happy that today is about 15 degrees colder than the weather forecast predicted, because I can wear it again. I'm wearing it right now. My son had a baseball game and I multi-tasked my way through it, writing several newsletter articles in record time. I thought for a moment that the game and the surrounding activity had helped me to concentrate, in some counter-intuitive distraction-as-a-tool-of-focus way. Then I realized that it was probably the sweater.

*****
Whenever I find a piece of clothing or an accessory that I really love, I try to find another--or more than another--just like it. I think how nice it would be to feel safely shelled like a turtle, every day; or to carry my things every day in a never-leave-home-without-it go bag that makes me feel like Queen Elizabeth II on casual Friday. I looked at some more Aran sweaters online, but I don't want another one--I just one a dozen more of the very one that I have, so that I always have the perfect sweater. My bag is also still available online, in six other colors, but I only really love the one I have. So why do I keep thinking about another sweater, or another bag?

*****
I always tell my sons that, contrary to what the world might tell them, that we're not necessarily meant to feel good and healthy and confident and capable every minute of every day. We're not meant to feel our best all the time. That's the point--you still have to do whatever it is you do. You still have to get up out of bed and do your job or go to school or take care of your family or maybe all of the above and more, no matter how good or bad or indifferent you might feel.

Most of the world doesn't feel so great most of the time. Most of the people in the world, I would guess, are wearing clothes that aren't quite right. Or they're having a bad hair day. Or they feel too fat or too skinny or too old or too not-right in whatever way. But they still put one foot in front of the other, they do what they have to do, and they get up and do it again the next day.

And what exactly is the point of all of that? What does that have to do with a sweater or a handbag or the price of tea in China?

I guess it's that a quest for the perfect sweater, the perfect thing to wear every day in every circumstance, or the bag that will carry everything you could ever possibly need, is really just a hedge against feeling bad. It's a way to avoid the truth, that it's a fallen world and that sometimes, we're supposed to feel bad.

But sometimes, we're supposed to feel good. Sometimes, everything is supposed to come together. Sometimes, after days of rain and gloom and too much work and too little sleep and zero fun, you sleep through the night and the sun comes out and you finish your work for the day and you walk in the sunshine and everything seems right. Like a turtle in its shell. Like the Queen and her handbag, with everything she needs, just when she needs it. Like exactly the right sweater.