Immune response

I’ve been working on an essay for several days. Usually, when I get stuck with a piece of writing, I walk away, and I write about other things and I think about other things, and then when I go back to whatever it was that I was writing, the fog lifts, or the pieces all fall into place. Choose your metaphor. 

Sometimes, though, that approach doesn’t work. Sometimes, I end up finishing the essay anyway, knowing that it’s not my best work, but that it’s the best I can do at that moment. At other times, less frequently, I just give up and abandon the piece altogether, and I throw its charred remains into my graveyard of unfinished writing. This one is looking like it’s going into the fire. But we’ll see. 

*****

Things are opening back up again. It’s good. Of course, we still have to wear masks (and about my hatred of masks, I could write an entire book) and we still have to observe some restrictions. And my son is back in school and spring sports are underway and I have committee meetings several times a week, and when it’s a bad day, like today, it’s easy to think that I have the worst of both worlds--all of the terrible parts of the COVID lockdown, with none of the fun parts. But don’t listen to me. I’m glad that life is coming back, and I’m glad I get to be part of it. 

*****

But let’s talk about the committee meetings and board positions. One of the boards on which I serve is debating a thorny question, and we are deadlocked. I’ve been a member of this board for 13 years, and this is the most heated and contentious atmosphere I’ve ever seen. It might be time for me to step back and let a new person take over. Some of the newer members are gathering factions and rounding up supporters, and I find that I don’t have the stomach for bare knuckles politicking of that sort. It’s too much. 

*****

It’s the next day now. We seem to have reached an understanding, my fellow board members and I, and now I won’t have to mobilize my own forces and get out the vote and organize from the grassroots or whatever the fuck else. I mean, I have friends too. But I’m glad we have a solution. We have peace in our time, and I’m all for it. 

I had my second Moderna shot today, and my arm hurts. And I don’t feel sick, but I do feel as though someone injected me with a powerful sleeping serum. Thankfully, I don’t have much to do tonight except to sit on this couch and write about nothing in particular. That’ll all change tomorrow. I have stuff to do this weekend, and stuff to do pretty much every day next week. Today, right now, I’m going to rest as my immune system responds to the vaccine. Tomorrow, I’ll be back in the trenches. Maybe I’ll even finish that essay. Anything is possible. 

We'll take the lungs, too, if you're not using them...

How a conversation can alternate between hilarious and horrifying, in less than a minute: 

“Wait, what?”

That was my younger son, asked by the nice lady at the Maryland Vehicle Administration if he’d like to become an organ donor. He and I were there to take care of business; met to renew my expired driver’s license and him to take the test for his Maryland learner’s permit. It’s always later than you think. 

“Wait, what?”

“Step right this way, young sir. We’ll have those kidneys on ice in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. You won’t feel a thing.” 

Hilarious. 

*****

My son is very bright, but I guess he didn’t know how organ donation worked, and I certainly hadn’t prepared him for that question. You never want to think about your child dying in a car crash, or any other way, so we hadn’t discussed the organ donor box on the driver’s license. He was taken aback. I explained it to him quickly. 

“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “I won’t need them, obviously.” He picked up the stylus, signed the signature pad, and stood against the wall to take his eye test.

“I won’t need them, obviously.” 

Horrifying. HORRIFYING. 

*****

He passed his test, so now he begins nine months of actually learning how to drive. And Maryland extended the valid period for driver’s licenses, from six years to eight. My sons will both be grown men, maybe with children of their own, the next time I have to renew my license. It is always later than you think. 

The true and correct verdict

I started writing an essay yesterday, and I was going to finish it today. But it’s 4:56 PM on Tuesday, April 20 and the Derek Chauvin verdict is in, and I find that I can’t really think about anything else until someone tells me if it’s a guilty or not guilty. I’m praying for the former. It won’t bring George Floyd back, but peace demands justice. 

I’m watching the coverage on MSNBC. It’s a beautiful spring day here in Maryland, sunny and warm and almost perfectly still. The Minneapolis crowds surrounding the Hennepin County Courthouse are dressed in down jackets and parkas so it’s obviously cold there. But it’s sunny and almost perfectly still, at least from my vantage point in front of my TV hundreds of miles away. A few people are holding signs, and a few are recording video on their phones, and a few appear to be chanting along with a man holding a bullhorn. But most of them are just standing still, just waiting, just like the rest of us. 

It’s 5:04 now. The judge is about to announce the verdict. He just tapped on his microphone, and gave the all-rise order as the jury enters the courtroom. 

Members of the jury, I understand that you have a verdict. 

State of Minnesota, Hennepin County vs. Derek Chauvin. 

Guilty, guilty, guilty. 

These are the true and correct verdicts.  

Exhale. 

Oh no they DIDN'T

Do you know where I am right now? I am in Section 107 of Nationals Park, one of 10,000 lucky fans here in person to watch the Nats face the Arizona Diamondbacks on a very chilly Friday night in April. I'm dressed appropriately for the cold, but I am missing one thing. Women are no longer allowed to bring handbags into Nats Park. And now the entire Washington Nationals organization are my sworn enemies. 

Have you been here before? If so, then you know how I feel about my handbag. I don't like to go anywhere without it. Now I have to carry my phone and my wallet and my keys and my extra mask and my kleenex in the tiny girl pockets of my jacket and pants. It's almost like the Washington Nationals don't want women here. 

You might be thinking that I should have checked the handbag rules before I showed up at the gate, but I've been coming to Nats Park for over a decade, and I have always had a handbag with me. I even changed handbags before I left the house, because I knew that my usual Longchamp Le Pliage bag was too large. This terrible rule is brand new. And as they say on the Internet, I'm not having it. I am not here for it. 

I didn’t put up much of a protest at the security gate. After all, the staff don’t make the stupid rules. I stepped out of the line, pulled all of the essentials out of my bag (it's ALL essential!), and handed it over to my husband, who took the bag back to the car. He met us on the concourse a few minutes later. "Do you want to go right to our seats," he asked, "or do you want to walk around first?" 

"I have to go to the ladies room first," I said. "But wait. Do they still have a ladies room?" 

"Oh boy," he said. 

"I'm just getting started," I said. 

"Yeah," he said. "I can tell." 

*****

I tweeted @Nationals when I got to my seat. They didn’t respond. I looked around at the other women in the stadium. Some of them carried tiny wallet-on-a-string crossbody bags that just met the size requirement, and some of them had diaper bags for their small children (also allowed), but most of them carried nothing; at least, nothing visible. They probably also had wallets and sunglasses and phones and keys stuffed into pockets. 

I thought for a minute that maybe I should just get over it, and let it go. I’m too attached to things. Maybe I should just go with the flow once in a while, roll with the punches, adjust to circumstances. But I also need things to make sense, and a 5x7 handbag rule doesn’t make any sense. If God forbid there’s ever a mass shooting in a stadium, I promise you that the middle-aged lady carrying the Coach file bag will not be the shooter. 

*****

I’m still torn about this. We had fun at the game, and the Nationals won with a ninth-inning walk-off homerun. I want to go to another game, but I don’t want to knuckle under to tyranny. I don’t want to live by the man’s rules. 

A handbag is just a thing. But it’s also more than a thing. Women need things that men don’t need. Women have children who need snacks and band-aids and toys. Women have bodies that require supplies. Women have husbands and teenagers who carry nothing, who ask their wives and mothers when they need a kleenex or a mint or a squirt of hand sanitizer. Women carry makeup and hair ties. And we wear clothes that have shallow little pockets that barely accommodate spare change, let alone tampons and Lego minifigures and Altoids and keys. We shouldn’t have to worry about how we’re supposed to stuff everything we might need into our pants pockets, assuming that the manufacturer of the pants we happen to be wearing has deemed it necessary to even put pockets into those pants. 

So I think I have some letters to write. I think I have to take this fight right to the Lerner family. And I bet that Mrs. Lerner isn’t giving up her handbag for anyone. Nor should she. Nor should any of us. 

Cat and Mouse

I dreamed about mice last night. Well, more accurately, I dreamed that I had a cat. To be specific, I dreamed that I had just adopted a cat, much to my husband’s dismay. It was an adolescent cat, not quite kitten but not quite full-grown cat. And in my dream, the teenage cat caught a mouse on his very first day living in our house. And just as I was gloating about the brilliant usefulness of this cat who would be both a delightful and hilariously entertaining companion and a merciless exterminator of unwanted rodents, a herd of mice came skittering out from under the refrigerator, running in terror from our new feline enforcer. And then I woke up, having died of horror (in the dream, of course). 

“Herd” isn’t the right word, is it? Well, it’ll have to suffice for our purposes, because I’m not looking up the correct word for a teeming, writhing mass of tiny rodents such as I encountered in my dream last night, and which has continued to disturb my waking thoughts for much of today. 

*****

I don’t really remember my dreams all that often. Sometimes, I wake from a dream, retaining a few of the details for just a few minutes before I fully emerge from sleep and get out of the bed, by which time I have usually forgotten the dream or even that I remembered it in the first place. I awaken screaming sometimes but seldom recall the details of the nightmare. Was I running from a man with a dripping knife? About to be mauled by a bear? Falling from a great height? Who knows? When I do remember a dream, really remember it, it’s of the creepy or weird variety, populated with hideous creatures, like mice. 

*****

I get migraines, but luckily for me, they don’t come very often. Maybe three times a year, I get a headache that’s bad enough that I wish I could just lie still in a room without light or sound. I had one of those headaches yesterday, and when it finally released me from its vise-like grip, I was drained but euphoric. It was as if someone had suddenly relieved me of a small load of cinder blocks that I’d been carrying on top of my head unawares. Everything felt lighter. I turned my head this way and that, marveling at the lack of pain. And then I went to bed and dreamed about herds of mice. I don’t know if these two things are connected. Maybe I’ll report back. For today, my head is unencumbered. For tonight, I hope my dreams will be unpopulated, or at least unremembered. 

I feel better already

It's Friday morning, and I'm sitting on the examining table at the doctor's office, waiting. The nurse just took my blood pressure and vital signs and then I laid down on the table wearing nothing but paper, while she attached electrodes to multiple points on my body, and silently read the results on a monitor. At least, I think she was reading results. She could have been watching Netflix for all I know. I didn't ask her what she was seeing. I knew that she'd tell me that I'd have to wait for the doctor. 

It's been a very long time since I had a full physical exam. I go to the OB-GYN more or less annually, and I see the dentist every six months, but I avoid the medical profession otherwise. But I have not been well recently and I decided to try something different from my usual health care approach, which is to ignore all symptoms until they go away. I've gotten away with this for a long time, but my luck can't last forever. So here I am. 

Fortunately, I was allowed to put my clothes back on after the electrode exam or whatever the hell it was. I'll look it up and see. Meanwhile, I wait in this tiny spotless clinical space that looks and smells like every other doctor's office everywhere. A chair for my stuff, a rolling stool for the doctor, who gets to have all the fun; the paper-covered table for the paper-clothed patient, posters and brochures offering helpful advice and handwashing instructions, cotton balls and tongue depressors in glass jars, a rack that holds a thermometer and a stethoscope and the little pulse oximeter thing that clips onto your index finger, and the monitor that displays the output from all of these devices. All of that in a shiny-floored brightly lit room no bigger than 8 by 10 feet. 

*****

I’m a person who knows what she knows. What I don’t know is considerable, and there’s no field of knowledge in which my ignorance is more abysmal than medicine. It turns out that the electrode thing was an EKG. Duh. I’m 55 years old and I’ve never had an EKG in my entire life. And thankfully, my heart is just fine, and everything else is fine, too. Even my high cholesterol isn’t high enough to worry about. I don’t really know why I have been feeling so bad, because apparently, I am in perfect health. A little part of me wanted some kind of bad news, just because I need things to make sense. I need some sort of physical cause for the pain and exhaustion. But overall, I’m very, very relieved that I don’t have a dread disease. 

*****

For the rest of the day on Friday, I felt absolutely marvelous. I worked with great focus and purpose, and I accomplished more than I expected to. I had to cut my walk a bit short thanks to a weird early April thunderstorm, so I prepped dinner and did more work and then the sun came out and I resumed my walk and I could have run the whole way. I didn’t run even a step because let’s not get carried away, but after months of malaise and fatigue, I felt like a bottomless pit of energy. Maybe it’s the warm weather and longer days. Or maybe I just needed a medical authority to tell me that there’s not a damn thing wrong with me. Maybe I’ve been wrong about the medical profession all along.

Freedom

I'm off from work for a few days, and it's nice. I have errands to run and appointments to keep and calls to make and things to do, but I'll have some down time, too.

This morning, I woke up at 7:30, a time that my teenage sons would consider hideously and cruelly early for a day off but that constitutes sleeping in for me. I made coffee and checked my messages and emails and social media feeds, and then got ready to take a shower.

There is the first hint of the point that I will eventually get to with this little post that is going to be a hot mess, so don't say that you weren't warned. What does it mean to "get ready" to take a shower? Why does readiness or preparation of any sort even enter into this little equation? Taking a shower is in itself a readiness operation, but not a thing for which you need to get ready, right? 

Well, you're not me, now are you? Because when you're me, you plan your day around your to-do list and your compulsive household routine, and you look at the clock and you think "OK, it's a minute after 8. I wonder if I can fold the laundry, chop the vegetables for dinner, and wipe down the refrigerator shelves before 8:30?" And of course, being you, you can do that on your head; and by the time you’re done, it's only 8:28. So then you think "Hmm. I could also start the next load of laundry, clean the hall bathroom, and pack up this package that I have to ship, and I bet I can do all of that by 8:45." And guess what? You totally can. I totally can. 

At 8:45, I thought about going one more round. “9:15,” I thought. “By 9:15, I bet I can…” and then I stopped, First of all, because there was literally nothing left to do, housekeeping-wise. The house was clean and the laundry was caught up and the evening meal was prepped and ready to cook. And secondly because for crying out loud. At some point, it’s time to stop getting ready to start my day, and to just start my day. I took a shower and had a second cup of coffee, and I took my son to his eye doctor’s appointment. I wrote the first few paragraphs of this on my phone as I sat in a socially distanced waiting room chair. My son’s eyesight is 20-20. We left the eye doctor and we got some lunch, and I went on my way rejoicing. 

*****

Things are always proliferating and multiplying and taking over. If it’s not tasks and chores, then it’s stuff. Case in point: my husband gave me a wallet for Christmas. It’s a really nice suburban middle-aged lady Coach wallet, the full-size kind that zips all the way around, in a very light color that I would never choose for myself. I would never have chosen this wallet style period. But oddly, I really like it. It’s very nicely made; it feels smooth and elegant and substantial in my hand, and it easily fits everything I need to carry in a wallet. But it’s also kind of big, and a little bit heavier than I like. 

I carry far too much stuff, as you might know. This is a frequent topic of this blog and of the thoughts in my head. Stuff multiplies and proliferates, and it’s all I can do to keep it under control. I don’t hoard things; in fact, I’m often too quick to purge things and then wish that I still had them. But right now, I’m not talking about stuff in general. I’m talking about the stuff that I haul around with me, literally, because I like to be prepared. My bag is too heavy, and I want to lighten it, flatten it out a little bit. I probably still need to carry hand sanitizer or hand wipes or alcohol prep pads. But all three? Maybe not. I like to have a rosary with me, but do I need to have two? (In my defense, I didn’t realize that I was carrying two.) No, I don’t. One will suffice. Same thing for pens. 

I don’t need to carry a notebook with me. I use my phone to write if an idea strikes me, and there’s always a random scrap of paper in the giant wallet if I truly need to write something. I don’t need to carry a little card case for business cards, because they too will fit in the wallet. And a flashlight? No. I do not need to carry a flashlight. The phone will fill in as a flashlight, too. 

So the bag contains fewer things now, and it feels lighter, but I still have pretty much everything that I’m likely to need. I still have safety pins and cash. I still have Rescue Remedy and hand lotion and band-aids. I still have a stupid stupid COVID mask. I’m ready for just about anything. 

*****

My handbag weighs less now, and it looks better, too. I don’t like the look of a thing that’s overstuffed, full to capacity. Now that the bag is manageable, I find that I want to lighten the rest of the load, too. The handbag is just a start. There’s a lot of other clutter that I need to get rid of, and it’s mostly in my brain. 

Here’s what I want to do. I want to get up in the morning and just go, rather than trying to figure out how many chores I can complete before I allow myself to leave the house. I want to throw on whatever clothes are handy and weather-appropriate, without planning for every single possible eventuality that could arise throughout the day. I want to extricate myself from captivity to routines and lists and tasks. I want to get ready, without getting ready to get ready. I want to be free. 

That’s a lot to fix, a lot of mental clutter to clear out of an overstuffed brain. Sometimes I think they wrote whole sections of the DSM-IV with me in mind. Sometimes I think I should see a counselor or something, but we all know that that’s not going to happen. I can barely get myself to see a physician when there’s something actually wrong with my body, so there’s very little chance that I’ll ask for professional help with my compulsions and neuroses. But I did clean out my handbag, and that’s a start. A person has to start somewhere. 

Chat

In a test of my multi-tasking skills, I’m going to write and chat at the same time. I’m trying to buy a new phone and I’m stuck at the checkout. It’s more than I want to explain here, and you don’t want to read about it anyway. Just suffice to say that I don’t want to pay twice. Push comes to shove, I don’t want to pay at all, but stuff costs money and there’s no such thing as a free lunch or a free phone, so I’ll pay what it costs. But I won’t pay twice what it costs. 

Online chat is helpful but extremely tedious. (Ding).  The friendly agent keeps telling me what I should see, and I keep sending her screenshots to demonstrate my claim that I don’t see what I’m supposed to see, and we’re at an impasse. I’m close to giving up and just buying the phone from Verizon, which is what I had hoped to avoid. (Ding). And I’m cranky and snappy and trying my hardest not to yell in print at the hapless chat agent because this is obviously not her fault but it’s not my fault either and I can’t yell at myself. (Ding). 

So much for thinking that Google would be easier to deal with than Verizon. I’m finally about to give up after literally one hour of back and forth. Either they’ll figure out a way to sell me a phone without making me want to kill myself, or I’ll just get a Samsung phone from stupid Verizon again. You can’t fight city hall and you definitely can’t fight big tech. (Ding). Sorry, chat lady, I’m out for today.