Pre-holiday

It’s Saturday morning, and Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away. This means that it is time for my annual pre-holiday panic, and I feel it lurking, just below the surface, but it hasn’t fully emerged yet. My little anxiety cicada is going to stay underground for a few more days at least. 

I did start my Christmas shopping earlier this week. So that’s something. I’ll work on my Thanksgiving grocery shopping today or tomorrow or maybe a little of both. I don’t feel like cooking or decorating or baking or shopping or wrapping or any of it but I’m going to do it anyway because that’s what you do. You get up and you keep going. 

Still, I wish I had a plan for today. I can’t decide what to do first and so I’m afraid that I’ll dither and daydream, mired in indecision, until the day is half over. And then I’ll stress out about having wasted time when I have so much to do. 

Well, that last part at least I cannot blame on current events because that’s just how I am. 

OK, time to get going. 

*****

Saturday turned out to be a pretty darn good day all around - I got things done and I hung out with friends and family and I spent some time outside touching the grass (metaphorically of course because my hand never actually made contact with any grass). Today is Sunday, and it’s peak golden November. We have a dogwood tree in our backyard and I can see part of this tree framed by one of the family room windows. Its leaves are wine red, and the trees behind it in the  no-man’s land between our yard and our neighbor’s on the next block are in varying stages of autumn from golden to almost bare. Our redbud tree, framed by another family room window, is almost bare against a backdrop of a huge old evergreen tree, also in the no-man’s land. That tree should probably come down but it looks pretty in the pale golden November sun. It’s pretty out there, is what I’m saying. 

*****

It’s Wednesday now, just a week before Thanksgiving. There’s a large turkey sitting in the bottom of my freezer, and I set a reminder on my phone so that I remember to take that turkey out to defrost on Saturday. The turkey weighs just over 20 pounds and is frozen solid, so it will take at least five days to thaw completely once I move it to the refrigerator. If you have never cooked Thanksgiving dinner before, now you know - you can’t take the turkey out of the freezer the day of or even the night before unless you’re planning to eat frozen turkey. Don’t say that I'm not out here offering helpful hints. Follow me for more life hacks. 

I bought the turkey on Sunday, my first holiday grocery shopping trip. First of how many? I’m glad you asked. It’s usually three, but never fewer than two. I buy the turkey, frozen, on the first trip, along with some non-perishables and easy-to-store things like canned jellied cranberry sauce (do not @me) and tomato juice and butter and sugar. Then I go back on Monday or Tuesday of Thanksgiving week to buy vegetables and fruit and other perishables. And then I go back for anything I forget. 

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It always has been, and now even more so now that I’m a college student parent. It’s fun to go grocery shopping just before Thanksgiving, running into all of the other Rockville alumni moms who can’t wait for our kids to come home for a few days. That Safeway is going to be lit this week, I tell you what. 

*****

“Windows is getting ready to update. Don’t turn off your computer.” 

It’s Thursday morning and I should be working but I’m waiting for updates to install. For once in my life I decided to just install the updates as soon as I got the prompt, rather than snoozing it multiple times until the last and final “you must update NOW” prompt appears just as I’m trying to join a call or finish a project. So now I’m just waiting for the little progress wheel to count its way up from 11% to 37% to 100%. It’s on its third round now. No hurry, Windows. Take yer time. Let me tell you that I can “get ready” a lot faster than Windows. 

*****

My computer finished its update almost as soon as I typed that last sentence. It’s Friday morning now. I took the morning off and I’m on my way to George Mason University for the Patriot Invitational, Day 2. The only thing I love more than a college swim meet is a college swim meet that lasts three days. We’ll be back tonight for finals and tomorrow for prelims and possibly finals as well.  

The Patriot is a D1 meet, and Marymount is way out of its depth but no one cares - it’s fun to watch competition at this level, and everyone is in a holiday mood, despite the unceasing round of one damn thing after another that constitutes civic life in the United States right now. 

Meanwhile, golden November appears to be stepping aside unseasonably early and making way for leaden gray December. The weather is wintry today. We’re even supposed to get some snow. We’ll see. 

*****

65 degrees on Monday and snow on Friday. Welcome to November in Maryland. And Virginia, of course. It was snowing when we arrived at George Mason yesterday morning. A group of parents from Florida Atlantic University gathered in the parking lot, catching snowflakes and shooting video of the falling snow. It was like they’d never seen snow before. Maybe they hadn’t. 

We went from the chill of the parking lot to the indoor warmth of the aquatic center lobby to the intense sauna-like heat of the natatorium, removing layers as we went, and settling into our bleacher seats with all of the other parents in our college swim t-shirts and our psych sheets. The noise was deafening, and it got louder in the first heat of men’s 100 breaststroke, with me screaming “GOOOOOOOOOO!” all the way through my son’s best-ever swim that put him in third place in the university record book. 

*****

The brief winter preview ended and Saturday was a beautiful glowing November day. We drove back to George Mason in the morning, and Fairfax looked its best with November sunlight filtering through the almost-bare trees. We had plans to see a movie on Saturday night or to maybe get last minute-tickets to the Capitals game (glad we didn’t do that because we can’t beat the Devils) but then my son made finals again so we got to go back for the last session. 

We arrived early - 5:20 for a 6 PM start, and our son’s race wasn’t going to start until 7:20 or so. The section where we’d been sitting for the previous sessions had lots of unoccupied seats, but University of Richmond parents had “reserved” them with “U of Rich” signs handwritten on little scraps of paper. 

Contrary to popular online opinion, most sports parents are decent and reasonably cool people. But there are always exceptions, and the exceptions are usually rude and entitled enough to be memorable. I wanted to go and ostentatiously tear up their stupid little signs and then sit down in their reserved seats. My husband, however, wanted us to be nice. So we sat in the next session over, and when newcomers arrived and stood scanning the section for seats, I would rather loudly comment about how there appeared to be plenty of open seats over there but that someone seemed to have “reserved” them and I wondered who authorized this. My husband nudged me, but I felt like stirring things up a little. I don’t do this very often, but sometimes it’s necessary. 

I posted all of this on social media and lots of people weighed in. Two themes dominated: Swim parents are usually cool but some of them are the worst. And this behavior is very much on track for the University of Richmond. I didn’t know anything about U of R before this weekend but apparently the place is well known for a culture of spoiled and entitled behavior. People are still commenting. I struck a nerve. 

*****

It’s Sunday evening now, well over a week after I started writing this so it’s time to wrap it up. Thanksgiving is in five days, and the turkey has moved from the freezer to the refrigerator. 

Fun Home

After I finished reading Secondhand Time, I told myself that it was time for a break from “it’s 1939 all over again get ready for the hammer to fall” reading, and so I picked up a graphic novel. This is a complete departure for me. I really never read graphic novels or comics, but I had a Barnes and Noble gift card burning a hole in my pocket and had decided that I’d buy an actual book (I read most books on Kindle) and not a fancy notebook.(Of course, I bought a fancy notebook too, a very pretty one for only $10.) Anyway, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was sitting on a table of recent fiction, and it looked interesting and beautiful and I thought that it would look nice on my bookshelf next to Lynda Barry and Roz Chast and Jason Polan, even if I didn’t like reading it. 

But I did like reading it, very much. It took some time because when I started it, I was reading another book, and it takes twice as long to read a book when you’re reading two books at once. There is also a great deal to look at, a lot going on on each page, and you have to take your time to look at the text and the metatext and the illustrations. All of these elements work together to tell the story of Alison Bechdel’s father, who was obsessed with renovating old houses, including the house they lived in; and the rest of her family in the middle of the American century. 

Bruce Bechdel was a high school English teacher who also worked as a funeral director in his father’s funeral home, which the family nicknamed the Fun Home - hence the title, which works on many different levels. The funeral home was an oddly fun place for the Bechdel children, unlike their actual home, which was a showcase of their father’s aesthetic vision and so probably not the most homey and relaxing place to be. And Bruce Bechdel, the author’s father, lived a bit of a fun house mirror life - a respected citizen of the family’s small Pennsylvania town, he was also a closeted gay man with many secrets. 

Death is ever-present in Fun Home. The family spent a lot of time in a funeral home, a physical memento mori. And spoiler alert: Bruce Bechdel was hit by a truck and died of his injuries when Alison Bechdel was in college and just beginning to figure out the world and her place in it. His death was the dominant event of Alison Bechdel’s young adulthood, leaving many issues unresolved and many questions unanswered. 

Humans are impossibly complex, and so are human relationships, especially marriages and families. People deserve privacy; they deserve to have their little secrets, even from those closest to them. I believe that. But the secrets we keep from the people we love shouldn’t upend those people’s entire worlds when they are ultimately discovered, as secrets often are. It’s one thing not to tell your children about a wild adolescence or a disastrous early first marriage or whatever you did or didn’t do that affected you but not them. It’s quite another to have another life altogether separate and secret from that of your family, or to hide your essential identity from the people you are supposed to love and trust and who are supposed to love and trust you. 

Full disclosure - I still have a few pages to go, so I don’t yet know the whole story. But of course, neither does the author, and that’s the point. Spoiler alert 2 (you're smart, so you probably already guessed this one): Fun Home is more tragic than comic and therefor probably wasn’t the best choice for someone trying to read her way out of a doom spiral. But it is quite a beautiful book in both the visual and literary sense, and very much worth reading. And it really does look very pretty on my bookshelf.  

The course of human events

I want to write about something other than the Godforsaken election but I can’t seem to think about anything else so that’s what I’m going to write about. Maybe people will get sick of me and my vast reading public will abandon me. Whatever. Who cares. 

We went to a birthday party last Saturday. Almost every person at that party was a Trump supporter, and we wouldn’t even have gone except that the birthday person, who was turning 80, is very much not a Trump supporter. He and his lovely wife, an immigrant, spend their free time cooking for and collecting donations for various shelters. They’re among the best people I know, and I would not have missed their party. 

And they are the only reason that I was able to restrain myself when I witnessed a group of other partygoers nodding to one another and agreeing that it’s now time for “unity.” LOL! Yes, just like in 2020, right? It would be bad if a bunch of Democrats stormed the Capitol next January. It would be terrible if Harris voters spent the next four years screaming about voter fraud and stolen elections. Yeah, let’s all unify for the sake of unity. That’s a great fucking idea. 

*****

I keep waiting to no longer be absolutely furious that Grab ‘Em by the Pussy is going to be the President of the United States for a second time. 

Nope, still mad. Even madder than last week, actually. 

*****

Do you know what’s weird? What’s weird is how hard everyone is trying not to talk about politics in social settings, at least in my circles. Do we not want to offend each other? Are we all just trying to protect our own mental health? Are we afraid of what could happen in the future if people know what we believe, and how we voted? It could be any or all of those, but I’m afraid it’s that last one most of all. I’m afraid that we’re all complying in advance. I don’t want to comply in advance. 

*****

Is anyone else highly amused at the appointment of two guys to head the “Department of Government Efficiency?” Two guys in charge of one agency - does that seem efficient to you? Lol. You literally cannot make this shit up. What is entirely made up, however, is the fictional idea that Elon and Vivek can “shrink” the Federal government, when what they are actually going to do is expand the government in all kinds of new directions and then outsource most of the actual work to contractors. End result - fewer government employees (look, we “shrank” the government!) and a lot more government spending benefiting billionaires. If you remember 2008, you’ll remember a lot of Republicans screaming about “redistribution of wealth.” Everyone is about to learn what that really means. 

*****

Well this keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it; and by better of course I mean so much worse. It’s Thursday November 14, the day after the announcement of Tulsi Gabbard as keeper of the state secrets and Matt Fucking Gaetz as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. What’s next? I’m waiting for the appointments of George Santos as Director of the Government Accountability Office, Jared Kushner as Secretary of the Treasury, Tucker Carlson as FCC Chair, David Duke as EEOC Chair, and Kid Rock as Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Maybe Judge Jeannine for SCOTUS. Maybe the worst coal mine owner in all of West Virginia as the Secretary of Energy. Maybe the Papa John’s guy as the Secretary of Labor. Anything can happen. Sky's the limit. The proverbial guardrails are gone baby gone. 

*****

Do I need to step away for a bit? Probably. Will I? Probably not. 

I’m trying to figure out how to remain (comparatively) sane and reasonable without cutting myself off from all information. I feel strongly that I have no right to turn away from reality under the guise of “protecting my peace” or whatever. And I also just need to know what’s going on. On the other hand, it’s not unreasonable to try to hold on to my sanity and preserve my own mental health. 

I used to listen to NPR as background noise while I worked. On November 6, I started listening to classical music on WETA, and it’s quite lovely. I’m also going to reinstate the No Trump on Weekends policy that got me through the worst of the years 2017 to 2021. But I’m not going to turn away entirely. I didn’t vote for this mess but it’s still my country and I’m going to pay attention to the course of human events in America, political or otherwise.  

A modest proposal

I'm at the doctor's office again. This is a doctor who is new to me so I don't know what to expect. Since I'm old, I have to get a routine colonoscopy and this is the consultation appointment. 

I've been through this once before but with a different doctor whom I really did not like. I was prepared, however, to see this doctor again because it's a 15-minute consultation followed by a procedure through which I will be unconscious so who cares, right? But as it turns out, my brilliant primary care doctor doesn't like him either and she referred me to someone new so here I am. 

I'm in the examining room now. A lovely African nurse came in to take my blood pressure and vitals, and we ended up commiserating about the dreadful election results. It's still raw.  She and I agreed that this country is just “not ready" for a woman leader. It probably never will be. India, Pakistan, Israel, Germany, the UK (twice), Ireland (twice), New Zealand, Finland, and Mexico have all managed to elect women to their countries’ highest offices. Not sure why we can't manage to do it here. 

*****

Or maybe I know exactly why we can’t manage to elect a woman President here. 

BTW if you are not familiar with the “your body, my choice” meme, then do yourself a favor and stay off the internet. Maybe forever. 

*****

I deactivated my Instagram account for a while. I’ll miss the funny cat videos and profane Elmo yelling “get the fuck outta my way” and the “white women ain’t scared of shit” guy,  but it’s for the best. Meanwhile, the new doctor was lovely and the appointment was fine other than the absolutely disgusting discussion of what to expect during the colonoscopy prep. But I guess that a gastroenterologist who is that enthusiastic about bowel movements is a gastroenterologist who really loves his job. If a dude is going to be scoping my large intestine, then I want someone who is really committed to his work. 

*****

Speaking of shit shows, Donald Trump will be President again in 72 days. I trust Joe Biden to use the time well, and I have some excellent suggestions: 

• Pack the Court right now. Expand it to 13 Justices, and appoint four immediately while you still have the Senate. 
• Make Kamala Harris one of those four. 
• Pardon Hunter because fuck Fox News.
• Pardon a whole bunch of other people.
• Order the Department of the Interior to claim Mar a Lago and turn it into a National Park.
• Get some rich Democrats to indemnify Marla Maples so that she won’t have to worry about her NDA.
• Issue executive orders left and right, including orders to protect the careers and pensions of the many military officers and civil servants who have angered Trump. 
• Resign on about January 15 or so, making Trump the 48th President and rendering all of the Trumpity Trumpsters’ 47 merchandise obsolete (this idea is not mine, but it’s excellent)..
• My favorite: Order the IRS to release the tax returns - not just Donald, but Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka and Jared (ESPECIALLY IVANKA AND JARED). 

OK, some of this is probably totally illegal. I guess he could only get away with it if he had some kind of Presidential immunity. 

LOL. 

Well

It is 7:17 PM on Election Day 2024, and I’m nervous. We have a neighborhood association board meeting tonight for God knows what reason (well it’s because it’s always on the first Tuesday of the month but still) and I am the secretary of the association and so I have to pay attention to the proceedings and just lol. I had a glass of wine with dinner, which is a thing that I don’t normally do on a Tuesday night, and it feels like not enough. The edge is still there. 

It was a beautiful day today. I worked from home, and after conquering my nervous distraction, had a very productive afternoon. That’s all shot to hell now. The returns are starting to come in and I am boycotting Indiana and Kentucky as if I’d ever visit either of those places to begin with, but still. 

My Kamala t-shirt got in the way of some sauce and I sprayed some stain remover on it but I’m not taking it off. This t-shirt feels very talismanic. This t-shirt is holding my body together right now. If I change my shirt, I might undergo a rapid unplanned disassembly. Maybe just one more glass of wine. What is the worst that could happen? 

*****

Well wasn’t that a prophetic and obviously unwise question because I jinxed the entire country. It’s weird how today, November 6 2024, I am feeling the exact opposite of happy, healthy, confident, and free. 

The board meeting ended much earlier than is typical for those meetings, which was all to the good, but of course within an hour I was wishing that I was back on that call or really anywhere except in my family room watching election returns. I did have another glass of wine, which absolutely did not take the edge off. The edge is sharp. 

Like many people, I’m sad and furious and expect to be so for some time. But I’m going to just keep doing everything I need to do, and I’m going to try to be there for others who feel just as bad or worse. I’m going to try to be kind, as much as I can. But I do want to point out that if a person voted for Trump, that person is a Trump supporter. That is the definition of a supporter. I’ll have very little patience with anyone out here saying that “I voted for him because (immigration, inflation, crime, transgender prison surgery, blah blah blah) but that doesn’t mean that I support him.” Yes actually it does. Live with it. And I will lose my shit with the first person who tries the gaslighting “that’s not what he means” trope with me. Yes it is what he means, all of it. The FA part of this timeline was no fun whatsoever. I hope that the FO part won’t be as bad as I fear. 

Novemberish

Remember two weeks ago, when the Republican candidate for President addressed the very important subject of a dead golfer’s genitalia during a campaign speech? And then remember last week when that same candidate took part in a rally where speakers called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, and made jokes about Latinos breeding like rabbits and Black people carving watermelons for Halloween and a “businessman” called Kamala Harris a prostitute? And then remember two days ago when he speculated about Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad (yes that is what he meant)? And then remember yesterday when he mimicked a sex act on a microphone after threatening to knock the hell out of the venue staff? Every time I think this has to be the thing that ends this disaster, there’s another thing that makes the last thing seem like the gosh-darn good old days. 

By the way, the Arnold Palmer jokes and the microphone thing were televised. Where are the Moms for Liberty? Won’t anyone think of the children? 

*****

Yesterday (Saturday November 2, three days out) was a really lovely day. We took the Metro to the Marymount swim meet at Gallaudet, a lovely and picturesque place especially in early November. We scuffed through the leaves in the .7 mile walk to the Gallaudet Field House, and Harris-Walz signs were everywhere in the NoMa neighborhood surrounding the campus. People were out and about, and the atmosphere was festive. Marymount won the meet in decisive fashion. Later, we took my mother-in-law to dinner for her birthday, where I drank entirely too much sangria, a rare excess for which I have absolutely no regrets. The Washington Capitals beat the Columbus Blue Jackets, continuing the best start they’ve had in years. I’d love to say that I stayed up late to watch Kamala’s appearance on SNL, but I don’t drink very much and I was asleep by 10:45. 

It’s Sunday now, and we’re just entering the fleeting weeks of perfect November light, melancholy and golden. And hopeful this year too, because I think that Kamala Harris is going to win this election. She’s going to win, and she’s going to prevail in all of the multiple Trumpity Trumpster legal challenges, and our long national nightmare will finally end. And a woman will finally finally finally get a chance to lead the country that I love so much. 

Touching the grass

If you’re on social media for more than five minutes a day, then you have seen the videos of parents and politicians and tour guides and doctors and lawyers and who knows who else using Gen Z slang, sometimes with on-screen translations, which are entirely necessary. Skibidi toilet rizz. It’s giving mildly humorous, no cap. 

*****

Last Saturday was a perfect day, especially if you like autumn-y PSL football weather. It was sunny and blue-skied but also a little overcast, enough that the sunlight was filtered and soft and not glaring but not so much that rain would seem likely. It was cool but not cold. It was breezy but not windy. I wanted to be outside, and not just to walk around the neighborhood or hang out in my backyard. I wanted nature but not camping nature, not hiking up a mountain or trekking through the woods nature. Brookside Gardens was just the thing. It’s practically around the corner from my house, and it’s just lovely - peaceful and beautiful, with just the right combination of real and cultivated nature, rife with walking paths and gazebos and ponds spanned by little foot bridges. Brookside is small, so you can walk through pretty much all of it in an hour or so; but there’s enough to look at that you could spend an afternoon. 

Lots of other people had the same idea, which was nice, actually. I like other people. There was a wedding group gathering for a photo (Brookside is a very popular wedding photo spot) and retired people getting their steps in and families with little children, much like we were not very long ago. I hadn’t been to Brookside in over a year but when my children were little, I was there all the time. My little boys loved to run on the paths. There was a climbing structure with little speakers, and you could push the buttons and hear different bird calls. It might still be there. There was a maze, which is still there but the dirt pathways through the maze are now paved over with stones that contrast with the larger, darker stones that outline the paths, but the contrast isn’t great, and so it just looks like a great big circle now. I liked it better with the dirt paths. The Japanese tea house, accessible by a little boardwalk and a little footbridge, is being repaired now so we couldn’t sit in there but I’m glad they’re maintaining it. 

We spent about an hour and a half at Brookside. We strolled around on the paths and walked through the conservatory buildings. We looked at plants and flowers and trees, and sat on benches near the ponds, and absorbed sunshine and breathed fresh air. It was just the thing. 

*****

I have not adopted very much of the new online jargon for my own use, even though much of it is colorful and delightful and hilarious (though nonsensical), because it would be silly for a 59-year-old woman to run around babbling like a 15-year-old on TikTok. It’s just not my language. 

But I do find myself saying “touch grass” all the time. First, it’s a concise and sharp but not mean way to dismiss someone - “go touch grass” is the 2024 version of “get lost” or “go jump in the lake” (which are also both still very serviceable). But “touch grass” is also solid advice to a person who’s losing their grip, as in “go touch grass.” Go put down your phone and step away from the news. Go outside and take a walk, get some fresh air. Touch some grass and some flowers and some trees. Breathe. The influencers are always out here telling people to touch grass, and having taken that advice, I can tell you that they are not wrong. I spent last Saturday afternoon touching all the grass that Brookside Gardens had to offer, and I felt so much better. 

Two words that say so much - “Touch grass” is a pretty much perfect expression. I’m pretty sure that in 25 years, no one will remember “skibidi toilet,” but “touch grass” has officially entered the lexicon.