Risen

Dawn Staley, college basketball coach: “He is risen.” 

Donald J. Trump, President of the United States: “Open up the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or get ready to live in Hell.”

Happy Easter, amirite? 

*****

We are just home from Easter Mass. I’m trying to get back in the habit of attending Mass every week, rather than whenever I feel like it because I seldom feel like it. I’m still mad at the American Church because I hold it largely responsible for the cancer that is MAGA, but I don’t want to disappoint Pope Leo. I know he keeps track. 

Easter has never been my favorite holiday, coinciding as it does with crippling Spring anxiety. But there’s the silver lining - Spring isn’t bothering me a bit this year. The Year of Our Lord 2026 has been one long panic attack, and Spring can’t hurt me. Do your worst, Spring. 

No, don’t. That was just a joke. As you were, Spring. Carry on. 

*****

On Friday night, my fellow Philadelphia public school graduates and I were ready to ride at dawn for Coach Dawn Staley. As they say on the internet, we do not play about Coach Staley. 

I had hoped that South Carolina would win yesterday, but Coach Staley and her team will be back. And as always, her post-game interview was pure grace and generosity. Win or lose, Dawn Staley is what Philadelphians call “a class act.” 

I was surprisingly invested in college basketball this weekend. My son and I spent part of Sunday afternoon glued to the DIII men’s final between the University of Mary Washington and Emory University. UMW is a Marymount sports rival, including basketball and swimming (the Saints beat the Eagles this year, for the first time ever), and we were all in for them. The last few minutes of that game were heart attack-exciting, and Mary Wash came away with the heroic buzzer-beater win. I love DIII sports. 

*****

And the rest of Easter was lovely, too. Dinner was very good, and everyone ate and enjoyed themselves. As much as I hate everyday cooking, I do love hosting holidays. I love watching my people enjoy the food and festivities that I make possible. 

*****

It’s Monday morning now, a day off for me. I had a dream in which I looked up at the sky above my house, and it was suddenly filled with hundreds of military aircraft. An Air Force jet, flying very low to the ground, ascended suddenly just as I thought it would crash on my neighbor’s lawn. That’s when I woke up. 

*****

The rest of Monday proceeded without incident. A family lunch out that included both sons and my nephew was the highlight of an altogether pretty good day. I read my book, I went outside and touched grass, I went shopping, I followed Artemis II, and we ate Easter leftovers for dinner. 

And now it’s Tuesday and the weekend is really over and the President is threatening to level an entire country. He makes empty threats all the time, so maybe he’ll back down under some fake pretext. God, I hope he’ll back down, or that someone will stop him. But he’s bloodthirsty enough to do it, and no one seems able or willing to stop him from doing whatever he wants. 

*****

Well, that was a day. Thank God that we didn’t blow up a whole country, I guess. Dodged bullets aside, though, the United States (the entire world, really) is in the clutches of an absolute raving madman, an evil and unstable non-genius who is going to keep threatening mayhem until he gets bored with idle threats and decides to just kill us all and let God sort us out. JD Vance is on yet another taxpayer-funded European vacation so he will not be leading a 25th Amendment charge today; and I don’t think one single member of Trump’s Krusty Kabinet Krew would support that effort even if Vance had the courage to initiate it. We’re trapped in a semi driven by an orangutan. The orangutan didn’t drive us off a cliff yesterday, but we’re still locked in the truck, and that fucking orangutan still has the keys. If only we had other government institutions or structures - something like branches - that could oversee the White House. If only there were some sort of system of checks and balances. 

*****

And now we’re threatening the Pope? How does that even work? Do they plan to assassinate him and install a pretender in a new seat in Washington, where Vance and Hegseth can keep an eye on him? Or are they planning to send an armored division into the Vatican to do battle against the Swiss Guard? I would not put either option past these raving lunatics. And now I hear that not only is Pope Leo not coming for the America 250 celebration (leaving us with nothing but WWE and another half-assed Trumpy parade), he’s apparently planning to avoid the United States altogether until Trump and his henchpeople are no longer in power. The threat must be real because Pope Leo of the South Side of Chicago does not strike me as a person who is easily intimidated. Meanwhile, now that Coach Staley received a proper apology, we’ll need to ride for Pope Leo instead. Don’t come for this Pope unless you want to fight every working class Catholic in the United States. We will throw hands even if we’re holding rosaries. 

*****

Such a week it’s been. It’s Friday now and who knows what the insane clown posse has in store for us this weekend. I will not speculate. Coach Staley is (as always) right - He is risen. What’s the worst that could happen? 

Do NOT answer that. 

Oh yes they call it The Streak

I didn’t write anything yesterday. Well, I wrote all day, but I didn’t write anything non-work-related. I write every day, 7 days a week, and I think it’s been at least three years since I’ve missed a day. I also broke a little NYT Connections streak. I started the puzzle in the morning and set it aside to finish later, and then forgot. I even have a reminder set up on my phone so that I don’t forget Wordle and Connections, but I guess I didn’t hear the alert.

So that’s two streaks inadvertently and carelessly broken, which means I start again with day 1.  

That's fine. Every streak begins with day 1. 

*****

Is this important amid all of this (gesturing wildly at everything)? No, not really except that little things are always important to me. I live for the mundane. I love everyday life and as much as certain people and certain Administrations are trying to ruin everything good about everything, I refuse to roll over and let them win.

*****

A few days later and I'm on my way to the first meet of the second half of the college swim season. Marymount vs. Randolph Macon. Marymount won that meet by five points last year, a very close margin for swimming, so it should be a good, competitive meet. 

It's Saturday morning and raining steadily. I'm glad I'm not driving - the windshield wipers are lulling me into a sleepy fugue state, which is not a good state to be in on the Capital Beltway. But I'm sure my husband will yank me right out of this nice little fog with some crazy hair-raising aggressive driving move.

And there we go. That took sixty seconds. I'm wide awake now. 

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about this time of year. Holiday stress and the shit show known officially as the year 2025 had me hyperventilating a little, and I thought that I just wanted to get past the New Year and into peaceful winter hibernation enlivened by weekly swim meets. We don't get our peaceful winter hibernation this year, but at least we still have college swimming. The 200 Medley Relay will sustain us as a people. 

*****

I wear contacts for presbyopia. Most of the time, they work as well as I need them to, but there are days when I can see either distance or up close, but not both. Yesterday was such a day. Up close was sharp and clear, and distance was a fog. I couldn’t see the record board on the opposite side of the pool (I like to look at it because my son’s name appears on it several times) but I could easily read the text messages of the lady in the bleachers in front of me. To be clear, I did not ACTUALLY read her texts, but I COULD have if I’d wanted to. 

The lady with the phone was, I surmised, a Randolph Macon grandmother. She took a photo of her grandson, and then got her daughter to help her put the photo on her lock screen. They were both adorable. 

The meet ended in a split, with the Marymount boys winning by a comfortable margin. The girls fell short but it was closer in the pool than it was on paper. My son won two individual events and was a close second in his third event. And of course, the powerhouse 200 Medley Relay dominated the pool as it’s done all season. We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging around with my son and his roommate at their favorite sports bar, which was nearly empty when we arrived at 245, and nearly full when we left at 5 for a quiet and cozy Saturday night at home. A 10/10 day. 

*****

My sister texted me on Sunday to let me know that she’s already booked her beach vacation. I’m not even capable of thinking about anything past the day in front of me, let alone renting a beach house for a week 7 months from now. And as much as I love the beach, I think we need a change of pace this year. I’ll figure it out later. My sister can talk to me in April. 

*****

Other than the swim meet and a few other little things here and there, I mostly laid low this weekend. I can’t really sleep but I did rest for a bit. I went outside and I watched hockey and I took a break from the gotdang news. After a few hours of sleeplessness on Sunday night, I fell asleep at maybe 4:30 and I woke up to find that we hadn’t yet invaded any new countries and that ICE had managed not to shoot any civilians. It’s the bare minimum, but I’ll take it. Meanwhile, if you’d told me in 2019 or so that Jerome Powell would one day be my hero, I’d have scoffed. 

*****

I thought that if I just kept writing this post, then a theme would emerge or a point would occur to me. If you continued reading this all the way through, then I’m sorry, but all sales are final. It’s time to wrap this up. I’m now several days into new writing and Connections streaks. Maybe I’ll get good at writing again. Maybe I’ll figure out how to make connections again. A demain. 

If it's not documented...

It’s December 18, so not only is it almost time for Christmas, it’s time to start my new day planner. I love my little pocket day planner with its crisp white paper and gold leaf edged pages and world maps. I especially love the maps, which are absolutely useless for navigating but they're pretty. 

I usually track everything in my day planner. I have weekly to-do lists, a book list, a very unsophisticated spending and saving tracker, and almost daily records of small daily details. Except that recently, I haven't been tracking anything, so the last few  weeks of pages are pretty much empty. 

***** 

I worked for a biotech company a long time ago. We manufactured diagnostic devices and reagents; and when I say “we," of course I mean the company and not me. But I also mean that we the company actually manufactured those things, right onsite. The company had about 400 employees in administration, operations, finance, sales and marketing, R&D, and manufacturing. Manufacturing and QA/QC were the biggest combined departments. This is apropos of nothing, except that it was only about 25 years ago, and the world has changed so much in that short time. I can’t imagine a company like this existing today. It was like working at a small paper company in Scranton.  I have so many stories about that job. One day, I’ll write them all down. 

Well, here’s one. The reagent manufacturing labs and manufacturing floor operated under what is called Good Laboratory Practices and Good Manufacturing Practices - GLP and GMP. These are official terms, which is why they are capitalized. And not being a scientist or a manufacturing engineer or a QA/QC professional, I’m not going to explain in any more detail except to say that the terms refer to a series of rules and procedures governing absolutely everything that happens in a GLP lab and a GMP manufacturing facility. Everything is written down, step by step - both before and after the fact. 

Our QA/QC director used to talk about accurate and complete documentation all the time. “If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen,” she would say. It was her catch phrase. She was so well known for that saying that it spread company-wide, and we said it about everything. 

*****

Wait, maybe this is why I’ve been lax with my planner - if I didn’t write 2025 down, then it didn’t happen. 

*****

What I like to say is that if it’s not documented, it won’t happen. I used to be the secretary for our kids’ summer swim team, and one of my responsibilities was to write the weekly email updates. In the first half of those updates, I would recap the most recent meets - because if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen. In the second half, I would let everyone know what was happening in the coming week: Spirit wear and suit order deadlines, Wednesday night B meet, Saturday morning A meet, Friday night pasta party, social events - summer swimming is a lot, and if it’s not documented, it won’t happen. Sometimes, I felt like I was writing things into being, as though the act of writing a thing out was what actually made that thing happen.

*****

I have two planner options for 2026: a Gallery Leather pocket size planner similar to the ones I’ve had for the past few years, or a very pretty Rifle Paper Company planner that my son gave me. The Gallery Leather has my beloved maps, and it also has a good number of extra pages for my additional notes and lists. I don’t love the color, though. I ordered what I thought was hot pink, but it turns out to be just pink, somewhere between bubble gum and carnation. The Rifle Paper one is prettier and it’s a gift from my son, but it’s an odd size and it only has five or six extra pages and no maps.  I have a week to decide between them. The recent documentation lapse is not the only thing that is making me feel unmoored, but it’s definitely a factor. The rest of this year is a wash, documentation-wise, but I’m going to start fresh in 2026. 

All sales are final

Forewarned is forearmed: This is a ridiculous post and you probably don't want to spend the next ten minutes of your life reading it. If you decide (unwisely) to do so anyway, then please be aware that there are no returns and no exchanges. All sales are final. 

*****

Today is Easter. It’s a beautiful spring day - perfect, really. Sunny, warm, softly breezy - an every-window-in-the-house-open kind of day. I’m sitting next to one of those open windows now. The slight rustling of the trees, some birdsong, a very distant lawn mower, an Orioles game on TV in another room in our house - it sounds very spring-into-summery out there. 

I’m hosting dinner. We’ll have a lot of food, but I didn’t make much effort at presentation this time. I don’t have a lot of Easter-themed dishes or decor. We’ll be eating our ham and asparagus and macaroni and cheese and fruit salad from paper plates. I forgot to buy wine, so I hope that my sister-in-law brings a bottle. The whole thing is much more haphazard than my holiday dinners usually are. It can’t be helped. I’m hanging on by the proverbial thread so I consider it an accomplishment to be cooking and hosting dinner at all. 

*****

Why am I hanging on by a thread? Well, I’m glad you asked but you won’t be, lol. Actually, I couldn’t really tell you other than all of this (gesturing around wildly at everything) combined with the annual spring PTSD attack, which is worse than usual. I’m very tired. 

*****

OK, here’s one thing that’s getting to me. The old lady whose grocery shopping I’ve been doing for five years has been querulous and fussy lately, much more so than usual. Her house is in appalling shape - dirty and dilapidated outside and I can only imagine what it’s like inside. I’m very sorry for her but I’m also not a doctor and cannot cure a hoarder, which is what she is. I can see the stacks of newspapers through the windows, and the enclosed porch is a pit of despair. I used to leave her groceries by the front door, as she requested, and she would bring everything in. But she has been asking me lately to bring the items all the way in through the enclosed porch by the front door. She gives arcane and detailed and specific instructions for how she wants everything arranged - some things double-bagged, perishables separate, certain items closer to the door, be sure not to block the door even though she wants everything near the door and there’s very little room in that nightmare of a porch to put anything at all, etc., etc. 

The way this works is that I drop off the groceries, and she leaves a check. She will not use the internet and so I always have to call to get her list and then call to let her know when I’m dropping everything off. Last week, she placed the check inside a large Ziploc bag, and wrote me a very long note in felt-tip marker ON THE ZIPLOC BAG. And so of course, what I saw was a salutation, a few words and then three lengthy paragraphs of illegible smear, and then a few words about a blessed Easter, and her signature. 

It turns out that the letter was additional detailed instructions for how she wanted her groceries separated and organized and placed in front of and as near the door as possible but not blocking the door even though the “enclosed porch” is nothing more than a junkyard filled with piles of old household items and empty bottles and cans and so much other stuff that you can’t even see the “porch” part. It’s not even really safe to walk through this mess. But sure, tell me all about how we need to neatly organize the grocery delivery, after packaging the canned goods and cookies and yogurt like they’re Hermes bags. 

I couldn’t read the letter, as we have established, so I couldn’t follow any additional instructions that it might have contained. I did the best I could, and got out of there. My phone rang on Saturday morning. She was sorry, so sorry, so very very sorry to bother me and she’s absolutely not complaining but she can’t find the 70% isopropyl alcohol and she needs it and she wondered if I saw the note asking me to place it with the paper towels right near the door. I said that I was sorry about that, without saying a word about the illegible note, and promised that I’d stop by later and find the bottle of alcohol and place it near the door on top of the box where she could reach it. “The box,” she said, although there are literally dozens of boxes in that crazy porch, several of which are right near the door. I didn’t bother to ask her to clarify because she would have, at considerable length, so I just assumed (hoped) that when I arrived, it would be readily apparent which box she meant. 

But it wasn’t. There were several boxes near the door, any of which might have been the one that she described, but I couldn’t be sure, and she will not come to the door.  I found the alcohol and a few other items that I thought she might need, arranged everything as best I could, and I got out of there as quickly as I could. 

The phone rang again, at about 9:45 on Saturday evening. I was tempted to let it ring but she’s old and crazy and alone and maybe it was an emergency, so I picked up. “Can you help me to understand something?” she said. This is never a good faith question. The person who says “help me understand” already understands perfectly - they just want to complain or argue. They just want to start shit. And right now, I am in no way in the mood for anyone to start shit with me. Not that I ever would be, but right now? Just please do not. 

“Can you help me to understand something? I have been advocating for people with disabilities for my whole life (this was news to me - she has told me 20 different things about her prior occupations) and I always seem to be able to clearly express what they need, but I can’t make myself understood when I need something.” I started to ask her what she meant specifically, but she kept talking. The alcohol was placed just out of her reach. There was a jar of instant coffee placed with the alcohol, and she didn’t want it there. Something wasn't double-bagged. The container of pre-cut fresh fruit that she had asked for had leaked and made a mess. Everything was bad and wrong and terrible, and it was all my fault. I couldn’t even respond - partly because I was upset, and partly because she wasn’t even pausing for breath. And then the call just dropped and the line went dead. 

At that point, I was tempted to just go to bed and forget about the whole thing. But I called her back several times, with no answer. I might have worried that she’d fallen or had some other medical emergency, but earlier the same week (just three days earlier, actually) I had called her multiple times and just as I was about to call the police to do a welfare check on her, she had called me back, cool as a cucumber, saying that she’d been listening to a radio program and hadn’t been able to pick up. I wasn’t going through that again. So I called her on Sunday, just to see if she was OK, and it was as if the entire conversation hadn’t taken place. She was fine. Everything was fine. Later, I sent her a plate of food, for which she was very grateful. 

So again, she was fine - which is great - but I was not. I felt gaslit and ill-used and manipulated, and not for the first time. I call this woman every Wednesday night to get her grocery list, and when she doesn’t pick up, about ⅓ of the time, she later tells me that she saw my call coming in, but had been on another call, or listening to the radio, or something else more compellingly important than talking to the person who is literally keeping her alive. 

What was the point of all that? Am I going to stop helping her? No. But I have to complain to someone. Sorry it’s you. 

*****

It’s Friday now. The lady and I had a reasonably pleasant conversation on Wednesday. I mentioned the Ziploc bag, and suggested that she write her notes on paper from now on because I obviously missed her instructions and she was obviously upset about that. “No no no, I wasn’t upset,” she insisted. “I wasn’t criticizing! I wasn’t complaining!” Reader: She was upset. She did criticize. She did complain. But whatever. I did her dumb shopping and I bagged her dumb groceries the way she wants them, and I dropped them off in the den of disarray that she whimsically refers to as her front porch, and I picked up the check (which she had stuffed inside a disposable glove for reasons best known to herself) and I went on my merry way. 

*****

And Easter was perfect. I did get that bottle of wine (two, in fact!) and dinner was very very good, and everyone had a wonderful time. And I will be absolutely fine - despite crazy old ladies and anxiety attacks and mama drama and all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) - I will be absolutely fine. 

Ineffective coping strategies

A few days ago I saw a social media post that read something like “I’m torn between saving for the apocalypse and saying ‘What the hell, the end is coming soon and I need a little treat.’” And that pretty much summed up the past three months for me. That feeling - that constant desire to buy something silly or have a second glass of wine or a third piece of chocolate, with the concurrent knowledge that I should save my money and that I should not stress eat my way through the day - was just so familiar. Yes, it’s March 2020, all over again. 

*****

Today was an unseasonably cold April day, following soon after a summery weather in late March. Maryland weather: You’re adorable. Whimsical. Delightfully quirky. And I’ll see you in Hell. 

But it’s not all bad. Everything is in bloom right now, so the view outside my window is pretty. The skies were bright and clear today and the bird and squirrel activity was exceedingly entertaining. But the spring 2020 vibes persist. 

*****

I look back at that time, five years ago (and yes, I am still shopping for my crazy old lady, who is now talking about sensitivity to electricity, which means that I am actually Jimmy McGill delivering groceries and supplies to Chuck) and I remember the constant anxiety, the constant worry about how this was all going to end - how bad would the pandemic get, would we all get sick, would our parents and families get sick, would the economy collapse, would all social and political structures collapse, would we be living in the Thunderdome? 

Every day of spring and summer 2020 was an exercise in maintaining some semblance of normality, keeping everyone sane, keeping everyone’s spirits up. And we were among the lucky ones. My husband and I kept our jobs, our kids were in high school and college so we weren’t trying to work and homeschool, and we all stayed relatively healthy. We did all get COVID eventually, but we all recovered. And Trump lost the election, which made it seem like everything would eventually be OK. And then we got the vaccines, and things started to open up, and things were OK, kind of, for a while. But the anxiety persisted. In just a few very short years, Trump came roaring back from electoral defeat, lawsuits, felony convictions, and won the next election. “Won” being a relative term. I have some thoughts about this. I have some questions. 

*****

Last October, I was very hopeful - I thought that Kamala could win and toward the end of the month, I thought she would win. But I never once thought that Trump couldn’t possibly return to the White House, that people would have learned - I always knew that he could make a comeback and I also knew that the second time would be much worse than the first. And I was right, and there is absolutely no satisfaction in being right. 

*****

But we were talking about 2020, weren’t we? It feels like it’s all coming back. I’m restless and distracted, all the time. I’m always in the middle of five to ten different tasks or activities, and I’m always buying some dumb thing that I don’t need. On my TV, a lot of British people are getting murdered in Northumberland, and a wily and irascible female detective in her 60s is solving those murders left and right.** I’m not sleeping well. I’m stressed out. Just like in 2020, I’m not only worried about what is happening right now - I’m also worried about what could happen. And when I worry about what could happen, I go big. The worst case scenario is my default setting. Always has been. 

*****

Take martial law, for example. I’m very unsettled by the persistent rumors that the President will declare martial law on April 20. I’m legitimately worried that this will happen, and I’m dreading the prospect of living under martial law, and my children living under martial law. 

On the other hand, it’ll be fun to mock Republican Members of Congress who will post about “marshall law” on social media. There’s always a bright side. Don’t let me down, MTG. Don’t let me down, James Comer. 

*****

The whimsical Maryland weather continues. Do you think that Trump’s tariff policy is unpredictable? Do you think that the financial markets are a whirlwind of uncertainty? Come visit Maryland in the spring. Stay a week, and experience eight different climates and 15 different seasons. 

*****

Here’s one thing that’s different about this year. The spring of 2020 and the transitional return-to-normal spring of 2021 seemed very very long. Schools here remained closed until after the summer of 2021, and I was working full-time from home, and the contrast between my normal spring of constant sports and activities and the languid pace of the COVID year made the time pass very slowly. But we’re running through this year at breakneck speed. I can’t even keep up. 

*****

Assuming that Trump remains in office for the full four years, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And I have to assume that he’s not going anywhere just yet, so I am going to have to learn how to live with the chaos without reacting to everything, and without panicking every five minutes, and without using shopping and chocolate and doomscrolling as coping strategies. I’ll let you know when I figure out how to do that. It’s probably not going to be today. 

*****

**”Vera,” of course, in case you’re not familiar. By the way, I’m quite sure that Vera is not supposed to be a fashion and style icon, but her whole look is flawless, as far as I’m concerned. Goals. I might need a trench coat. 

Fake spring

It's Sunday morning, and I'm in the backseat of my own car. My husband is driving and my mom is riding shotgun because she needs the legroom. She spent the week with me. It was nice to have her even though it's very hard to work and keep up with everything while I'm taking care of her. I'm tired. 

*****

It was almost 60 degrees here yesterday, and it won't get out of the 30s today. Walking outside this morning was a punch in the face. But really, everything is a punch in the face right now. We should all have black eyes and fat lips. 

*****

One night last week (and I mean week before last, even before my mom got here) I was sitting on the couch at 8 pm, struggling to stay awake. It had been a long day but I've never been as tired as I've been since January 20. I've always wondered how dictators grab control so quickly - it's always so quick - and how they hold on for so long. Now I'm beginning to understand that it's more than just fear that keeps people from fighting back. It's exhaustion. The chaos wears people out. 

*****

And I came to that realization almost 2 weeks before the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Vance and President Zelenskyy. We are no longer on the right side of the good vs. evil divide. We are no longer the world's defender of freedom and democracy and human rights. It's been two days and I still don't have my head around this yet. God willing, I never will, because this is not something that I should get used to and eventually come to accept.   

*****

I went to work very early on Monday morning. Now that the feds are back in the office 100 percent of the time, the parking garage, which was never really big enough to accommodate everyone who drives to work here, fills up early. As a contractor, I will actually be teleworking more now because we’re not eligible for parking passes, and my boss is a good person who doesn’t want us to have to deal with public transportation or other cobbled-together transportation schemes. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be in the office on Mondays only. I have mixed feelings about this. It’s nice not to have to rush most mornings, and it’s nice not to worry too much about what I’m wearing, but I really like my job and I really like the energy of the campus and the base, and I didn’t really like 100 percent telework the last time I did it. It feels similar, actually. It feels like I’m hunkering down at home as disaster unfolds outside my front door. Little did I know that 2020 would end up feeling like the gosh-darn good old days. 

*****

I watched the Oscars until about 10 PM on Sunday night, so I missed the big awards. The Oscar telecast gets more boring every year; and in past years, I’ve complained about Hollywood and its “courage” in speaking out on issues that pretty much everyone in the room agrees on. Last night, I’d have appreciated seeing some real courage, but I was sorely disappointed. Other than my new favorite actor Kieran Culkin (I really loved A Real Pain), who acknowledged Jeremy Strong’s performance in The Apprentice in rather a pointed way; and the beautiful Zoe Saldana, who talked about her immigrant grandmother, most people obeyed the Academy’s “don’t talk politics” rule. This would have been the year to disregard that rule and to speak the brave truths that movie people are always willing to speak when they’re pretty much guaranteed no consequences other than a round of applause. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now. I’m about to start work on a beautiful sunny fake spring day in the DMV. I don’t fall for fake spring anymore, and I'm not getting my hopes up even thought the temperature is going to reach about 60 degrees today. That happened last week, too, and then it was freezing on Sunday. Delightful, Maryland weather is - so whimsically quirky. 

I was on the fence about whether or not to subject myself to the President’s address to Congress tonight and then I remembered that I have a neighborhood association meeting and since I have to take notes, I won’t be able to listen in on the speech while I’m on the Zoom call. It’s just as well. Ain’t no good gonna come out of that speech, and I’ll read all about it afterward. 

******

Well, I don’t know why I did that to myself. The neighborhood association meeting wrapped up 30 minutes early (God I love when that happens) and so I was finished in plenty of time to watch the speech, and I did watch it - partly out of a sense of civic responsibility, and partly out of sheer morbid curiosity. What’s he gonna do, I thought? Announce that we’re leaving the UN and NATO? Declare martial law? Appoint Andrew Tate as Secretary of the Department of Protecting Women Whether the Women Like it or Not? Anything is possible, I thought. Anything could happen. 

It was pretty much just the usual Trump lies and bluster, though, with the added excitement of Rep Al Green’s ejection from the chamber (the rest of the Democrats should have marched out with him) and the surprising news that Melania Trump is somehow a patron saint of foster children, and the President’s inadvertent admission that Elon Musk is in fact the head of DOGE right after he declared straight-faced that the era of unelected bureaucrats is over. They’re still going to get away with doing whatever they want to do, of course, but I hope that the Trump lawyers who backed up Trump’s earlier claims that Elon isn’t really in charge of anything - in court, under oath - are charged with perjury. The rest of this spectacle just made me tired - even more tired than I already was. 

Meanwhile, I’m planning to attend my first-ever protest on Saturday. It’s supposed to be sunny that day, with temperatures in the low 50s - perfect weather to recover my energy. Perfect weather to fight the power. 

Gesturing wildly at everything

Is anyone else having a hard time concentrating on anything except *waves arms, gesturing wildly at everything*? It’s not just me, right? 

*****

It’s February 5, 2025. We’re now on, as far as I know, day 5 of Elon Musk’s hostile and illegal takeover of the government. Democratic elected officials are finally on the streets, just in time because just one more performative outrage post on social media would have pushed me right past the limits of reason. What they are starting to do is good, but it’s not enough. Senators and Congresspeople are still online posting about having been denied entry to USAID headquarters and the Treasury building. They cannot stand for this. They must try to force their way in, and let the American people see a foreign-born unelected cartoon villain centibillionaire order the arrest of their democratically elected representatives. That’s what it has come to. It’s been just 16 days, and on the 53-day Hitler timeline, we’re just shy of a third of the way to the end of American democracy. Any day now, the Republicans will pass their own Enabling Act. Any day now, we’ll have our own Reichstag fire. 

*****

It’s February 6 now, and oddly enough I’m calmer today even though I’m not sleeping much, and I’m consuming news coverage like it’s cocaine, and Elon Musk has not yet been denaturalized and deported. Today is the “Fork in the Road” deadline for all of my Federal colleagues and friends, and I don’t know one single person who intends to accept this suspect “buyout” offer. Meanwhile, I am running into people who voted for Trump - including a few who I didn’t expect would have voted for him, but what do I know - who are now wringing their hands and claiming that they “didn’t vote for this,” except that I am sorry to say that yes you did, yes you MFing did vote for exactly this, all of this, and I don’t understand how you can pretend otherwise. They told us what they were planning to do. It’s all written down. Plus, everyone knew how much money Elon was spending on Trump’s campaign and since he’s not known as a philanthropist, it stands to reason that he expected a pretty big return on his investment, and he’s getting it. That’s the best $250M that anyone ever spent, really. 

*****

It’s Friday now. My son came home from school last night. He felt sick and feverish and went to the student health clinic with what turned out to be a 103-degree fever. A few tests later, and he had a flu diagnosis, some meds, and an order to stay away from his classes and activities for the next few days. My older son picked him up at school last night, and he slept on the couch in front of the Capitals game until about 10:30 PM, and then went to bed, where he remained until 9 this morning. It’s very hard to convince that child (who is now 20 and I know he’s not a child, but he’s my child) to rest and avoid activity. He is a perpetual motion machine. The AEC Championship is less than a week away and I know he’s quite anxious about missing workouts. I want him to do well in the meet, and hope he’ll recover his strength in time to do that, but as long as he’s healthy then I don’t really care how fast he swims. Meanwhile he’s not getting in a pool until at least Monday. I will stand on that business. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning, February 8. Thankfully, my son is starting to feel better. Of course, he is plotting his return to the pool even as we speak. I might not win this battle. 

The sky is lead gray and although I haven’t been outside yet, I can tell it’s cold. We’re expecting a winter storm today. We’re expecting another winter storm on Tuesday. Remember a few weeks ago when I said that I was starting to like winter, just a tiny little bit? Yeah, that’s off now. I’m done with this weather. This weather is for polar bears and penguins and ice fishing enthusiasts from International Falls, MN. It’s not for middle-aged ladies from the DMV. 

I have a lot of work to do, at work and on the volunteer front. I’m going to do some of it today because I’m not going out in the freezing rain and because getting some things done will make me feel like I have some control over something. 

*****

It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Fly Eagles Fly. I don’t care very much about football, but Philadelphia is my hometown and I want an Eagles win for my family at home. And of course, I want Harrison Butker’s team to lose. We’ll watch the game, of course, because we always watch the Super Bowl. I hope that the whole stadium boos Donald Trump, who is expected to attend because what’s a better way to cut government costs than to send the President and several hundred Secret Service agents to the most high-risk high-profile event in American life? Very efficient. 

Of course I know that Trump is planning to attend the Super Bowl because I’ve been following every detail of everything that’s been happening. My no Trump on weekends rule is out the window. I’m checking my phone every five minutes. When I wake up in the small hours assuming I was asleep to begin with, I check my phone to see what might have happened, what news might have broken. It’s not good. It’s not healthy. 

*****

Fly Eagles Fly! I’m much happier about this win than I have any right to be. My mom and aunts and uncles and siblings and nephews and cousins are very happy today, and I’m happy for them. There was a pool - one of those little square things - at the Super Bowl party that I attended, and I won $100. And the TV crew kept their cameras away from Trump except for that one stupid shot of him saluting the flag (imagine me rolling my eyes here). I didn’t even know he left at halftime until after the game. I hope he left in a huff. I hope he was pissy and grouchy about the stupid Chiefs losing. 

Yes, that’s petty. Our pettiness will sustain us as a people until 2029. 

My son is 100 percent better now. Other than some lingering raspiness in his voice, he’s back to normal and will be back at school and back in the pool this week. And the last time the Eagles won the Super Bowl, the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup. I know that correlation is not the same as causation, but I’m still taking it as a harbinger. And it was nice to be with people last night. It was nice to be with my friends. It’s nice to feel like we are all in this *gesturing wildly at everything* together. 

Meanwhile, I’m going to splurge with that $100. Maybe a sweater. Maybe some new books. Maybe a dozen eggs. Anything goes. Anything is possible. 

Proverbial forks in proverbial roads

My gosh this month has been a lot. A lot. A LOT. It’s January 30 now. Yesterday, all of the feds where I work received the infamous “Fork in the Road” email. I hope that no one falls for that because I don’t know nothing about nothing but I do know that responding “RESIGN” to a spam email sent from an illegal server is not a good way to exit a job, federal or otherwise. There is absolutely no way that OPM or the personnel directorates in all of the Executive Branch agencies are prepared to manage a mass spur-of-the-moment exodus. Most people seem to understand this, though. I know a lot of federal employees, and I mean A LOT of federal employees, and I’m pretty sure that no one is falling for this. 

*****

Last night, a passenger jet and an Army helicopter crashed in mid-air over the freezing Potomac River. First responders worked all night and were not able to rescue anyone. At this point, it’s a recovery effort. 

*****

As everyone knows now, no one survived that terrible crash. It’s Friday January 31 and they’re still pulling bodies out of the Potomac River. I love living in the DMV - I always have - but it’s hard this week. It’s a dark time in Washington DC and environs. 

*****

I normally telework on Tuesdays and Fridays. Soon, I will have to say that I used to telework on Tuesdays and Fridays because we have to return to full-time in-office work at the end of February. As a contractor, I will not be eligible for a parking pass, so I’ll have to take Metro to work. Metro fare and parking are about $3500/year. I live six miles from the base, but the commute will take an hour each way, at least. I’m looking at all of my expenses and all of the ways that I spend my time and planning to make the adjustments that will - I hope - make the commute time and the expense and the loss of telecommuting privileges sustainable. Almost everyone I know is dealing with similar challenges, and we’ll get through it. There are worse things. 

*****

I won’t even bother addressing Trump’s response to the crash because what else would we expect from him? Decency? Compassion? Concern? He’s capable of none of these things and his comments about DEI hires were really the least shocking thing I’ve seen or heard all week. But JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy standing in front of microphones and cameras straight-faced claiming that ending DEI initiatives is all about hiring the most qualified people - that is quite another thing. I would love to hear any of these tiny little men explain exactly how they are the MOST QUALIFIED PEOPLE for the jobs they currently hold. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning now. It rained all day yesterday and after a morning trying to power through a bad headache, I took the afternoon off. It won’t be long before Elon Musk decides that sick leave is socialism, and so I might as well use a few hours of it while I still can. 

For four hours, I did almost nothing. I moved from my desk to the couch, and I watched “Vera” on BritBox, and I drifted in and out of sleep in a kind of twilight state. By 4:30, I felt better, so I got up and started doing things. Doing things always helps. And now it’s a beautiful mild sunny Saturday morning. The dirty weeks-old snow has finally melted and the ground is clear for the first time in weeks. January is finally over. Spring is around the proverbial corner and even Donald Trump can’t stop the cherry blossoms and the forsythia and the daffodils from blooming. 

*****

The week that was

I swore I wouldn’t look at even one second - not one second, I tell you - of Trump inauguration coverage, but of course I got up and turned on CNN as soon as I had coffee in hand. After five minutes, I switched to C-SPAN and then I remembered that C-SPAN 2 does unfiltered coverage of major events, so I watched a few minutes of blissfully silent video of the clear cold Washington DC streets between Blair House and the White House and the Capitol. 

And I do mean clear. It’s a small consolation, and Trumpity Trumpsters will never admit that the sparseness of the crowds is a result of anything but cold weather, but I’ve lived here for a long time, and it’s always cold on Inauguration Day, and I’ve never seen anything like this. People are lined up no more than one deep along the barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue. There were actually gaps in between spectators - if you wanted to go watch the motorcade, you could pretty much stand anywhere you wanted. 

It’s 10:35 AM. Trump will be President again in less than an hour and a half. 

*****

Well. 

I was texting back and forth with my cousin and sister yesterday. We’ve had an ongoing “Can you believe this shit” group chat since November 5. Finally, my cousin, a Philadelphia police officer, had to leave to get ready for work. She texted “I’ll talk to you guys later. I gotta go. Jesus Christ.” And with that, she provided my closing line for pretty much every conversation for the next four years.

*****

I don’t even know where to begin, honestly, except to say that I can’t get George Orwell out of my head. We’ve been a nascent oligarchy for 20 years now, but it became official yesterday, with a bunch of smug centibillionaires sitting front and center at the indoor swearing-in ceremony yesterday. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

And we all saw what we saw on the stage at my beloved Capital One Arena. I’ve seen every possible gaslight rationalization for what was clearly and obviously a Nazi salute, including my very favorite, which was that Elon Musk is neurodivergent and didn’t know what he was doing. I know a lot of neurodivergent people, and they all know a sieg heil when they see one. George Orwell (again) said it best: “The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

*****

It's Wednesday now and I'm back in the office, where the network is down for the second straight day. Weird, right? Probably just a coincidence. Meanwhile, I see that the President pardoned an international drug trafficker - a handsome well-educated white conservative Eagle Scout international drug trafficker, but an international drug trafficker nonetheless. It's fine, though. I'm sure that if Kamala Harris had won the election and pardoned Luigi Mangione on her second day in office, it would have been fine with everyone. I also read that we're apparently going to invest $500b in AI infrastructure. Let's not worry about actual physical infrastructure in a country in which a ship collides with a bridge, which then collapses. And where's the executive order on grocery prices? Will no one think about the eggs? Well, at least the broligarchs are getting their money's worth. 

*****

We had tickets for the Capitals game on January 18, a Saturday night, against the Penguins, and we sold those tickets. Let me tell you that we don't skip a Saturday night game, and we don't skip a Pittsburgh game. But based on videos of MAGAs partying in Chinatown and Penn Quarter that I saw later, we made the absolutely correct call. Instead, we hung around a bar in Arlington with Saints parents and swimmers, celebrating senior day and a win in the pool. Absolutely the right call. And the Capitals beat Pittsburgh, so they didn't need us there anyway.

*****

Last Saturday reminds me a lot of the last Saturday before the pandemic really hit. On Saturday, March 7, 2020, I went to my son’s very first high school baseball game, a JV scrimmage against a much better team in Frederick County. I don’t remember the score, but I do remember that it was a chilly but clear and sunny early spring day here in Montgomery County, and that it was at least 15 degrees colder at Thomas Johnson High School, and the other mothers and I sat together, cheering on our freshman boys and kicking ourselves for not wearing warmer coats. Fortunately, we were all experienced baseball parents and we all had blankets in our cars. We needed those blankets. We knew, at that point, that the nascent pandemic was soon going to affect our daily lives, but we didn’t know how and we certainly didn’t know how long it was going to last. None of us had any idea that we were sitting at the last high school athletic event for the next year. 

*****

For the foreseeable future, I will be doing Sarah Sherman’s Nosferatu hand gesture every time I make a stupid joke. 

*****

It's Friday now. It was a week. No adjective will really cover it so I'll just call it a week. 

I'm at Catholic University now, in the Raymond DuFour Athletic Center, watching Marymount vs. Catholic University. Marymount barely lost this meet last year in large part because their top fly swimmer had COVID and so the medley relay came in second. A relay is worth a lot of points. I got here just in time to see the relay win. The rest of the meet will be back and forth. These are pretty well matched teams. Meanwhile I need to run out of here as soon as my son's last event ends.  There's a lot going on at work.. There's a lot going on everywhere.

*****

Marymount lost to Catholic, although the men’s meet was very close. Spring sports will have to step up if we’re going to take back the Pope’s Cup. IYKYK. I was only there for about 90 minutes - I arrived just in time for the medley relay, and left just after the men’s 100 breaststroke, which my son won by .02. It was his second best time and at the end of this season, he will occupy 3 of the top ten 100 breast spots in the program record book.

I had planned to take the day off but I was needed at work and I didn’t mind changing my plans. It’s nice to be needed. On Friday morning, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get away at all, but my bosses and colleagues were willing to cover for me, and I was available by phone, and so I was able to get to the meet and see that amazing race, which was the highlight of this very very dodgy week. It’s Saturday now, and we have one more regular season meet today, against a very strong Mary Washington team. Just for a few hours today, I will pay attention to nothing else except what’s happening at Goolrick Pool at the University of Mary Washington. Go Saints. 

On Freedom

I talked to my brother last week. We don’t talk that often, but we stay in touch via text and the occasional phone call. This phone call was about plans for my mom’s next visit here, but we ended up briefly discussing the election. “It doesn’t matter who’s president,” my brother said. “They’re all the same. Two wings on the same bird. That’s why we have the eagle as the national symbol.” 

My gosh, right? I restrained the urge to call him an idiot, because he’s not an idiot. He is a smart person who, like the rest of us, occasionally says idiotic things. And that? Was one of the most idiotic things I’d ever heard. 

I could tell by his tone that this was his final word on the subject, so I just told him that I think he’s wrong and then changed the subject back to the original reason for his call. I’m sure that he hung up shaking his head and thinking that his sister is an idiot. It would not be the first time. 

*****

“‘Everything is shit.’ Cynicism about the system slips into nihilism that serves the system.” 

This is Timothy Snyder, in On Freedom. I wrote very briefly about this book in an earlier post, but I have a lot more to say about it. Snyder has the perfect word for my brother’s attitude, which many people share. The word is “notalitarianism.” While “totalitarianism claims to have the one truth that unites everything,” Snyder explains, “notalitarianism denies any truth or values…Notalitarianism is seductively snide. Believing in nothing is presented as intelligence.” Exactly. Every “it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same, voting is the opiate of the masses” cynic I’ve ever met is convinced that they are just too smart to fall for anyone’s propaganda. These are the same people who use the word “sheeple,” who say things like “Open your eyes,” and “Are you awake yet?” 

*****

Snyder understands that a reasonable standard of living is a prerequisite of freedom. People can’t be free if they don’t have a decent roof over their heads, nor any way to provide for their basic needs, nor any way to take care of themselves when they get sick. But that doesn’t mean that money necessarily confers freedom - it can only make it possible to eliminate the conditions that obstruct freedom. I thought about this as I watched “Black Doves” on Netflix, with its inconceivably rich villains who live in bunkers and spend all of their money and time and energy escaping justice, avoiding assassins, and protecting their ill-gotten wealth. I thought about it when I read yet another story about the crazy dude who spends $2 million a year and pretty much all of his time trying to live forever. Snyder argues, correctly, that immortality is the last thing a person should want, because it makes life meaningless: “Forever is the wrong time scale. Freedom requires a sense of time that extends into the future, through one life and into the next generation or two…” The world is full of rich people who are nowhere near free. 

Maybe because they completely lack any understanding of freedom, many of these same rich people reject the very idea that people have a God-given right to a decent life, and that freedom is impossible without food and shelter and education and healthcare. They oppose social safety nets and welfare state programs because they claim to want to break the cycle of “dependency,” as if any one of us was not dependent on the entire rest of the human race. They perpetuate the lies of trickle-down economics, the unfettered free market (Timothy Snyder points out that only humans, not markets, can be free), deregulation, tax cuts – and our economic system grows more and more unfair, and the inequality becomes worse and more unsustainable all the time. 

*****

Solidarity, as Snyder points out, is the key to real freedom, because a fair and just and decent and more equal economic system benefits all of us and makes us all equally free. Redistribution is good. But with such a vast divide between the very rich, who are growing more and more powerful; and the rest of us, solidarity becomes less and less possible. If you are a middle-class person - even upper middle class - then you have no solidarity with Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy or Mark Zuckerberg or any other greedy grasping billionaire, no matter what they tell you. Your solidarity is - or should be - with the people who pick up your trash, and harvest your produce, and generally do the work that makes life possible for the rest of us.

I don’t know, really, why this isn’t obvious, but it isn’t to a lot of people, who think that their natural alliance is with the rich and powerful. This is an aspirational delusion - if I align myself with the oligarchs, then they’ll see me as one of them, as part of their club, and then I’ll actually be part of their club. It’s shocking to me that working and middle class people still vote for and support deregulation and so-called “free market” policies that only benefit the richest and that have only ever benefited the richest. Snyder puts it best: “The notion that freedom is state inaction makes sense only for the tiny minority who can protect their families without a representative government.” IOW: Donald Trump and Elon Musk will be just fine no matter what happens, and they don’t care at all about the rest of us. 

Actually, it’s more than that they don’t care. They absolutely want to restore early Industrial Revolution pre-Progressive Era conditions. They want a tiny handful of people to have all the power and all the money, and they want the rest of us to work 80 hours a week for as little as they can get away with paying us. And they’re not going to give us anything in return, other than the bare subsistence minimum. At least the early 20th century robber barons had a tiny bit of conscience. They used some of their ill-gotten wealth to build parks and universities and hospitals. Andrew Carnegie was a rapacious capitalist but at least he left us some nice museums and libraries and concert halls. The new ruling class billionaires want the noblesse but not the oblige. They want the Gilded Age without any of the gilding. 

*****

It’s all pretty bleak, really. It’s December 20, and I should be in a holiday mood. Maybe tomorrow - my son comes home this weekend, and it’s also cookie weekend. I hate making cookies, but I like eating them, and I like watching the people I love eat them. But the only thing I’m thinking about now is that we are once again on the brink of a government shutdown and I once again have no idea if I’ll be working beyond today. I was going to take most of next week off anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is that a bunch of billionaire cartoon villains are running the country, and half of my fellow Americans voted for them. Oh, I know that Trump voters think that they didn’t vote for Elon Musk but they did. And if the government does shut down, Elon and his assistant Donald Trump and all of their little Republican henchmen in the House of Representatives will look right at the TV cameras and blame the Democrats, and people will believe them even though all you have to do is look at Mike Johnson’s smarmy little insincere smile to know that he doesn’t believe the words that are coming out of his own mouth. I’ll turn it over to Dr. Snyder once again: “Let the liars lie and the truth perish…Let the world end with a smirk.” 

*****

I love quoting “The Princess Bride.” What’s more fun than shaking your head at a kid who tells  you “I’m starving,” and saying “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” What’s more fun than showing up at an event and writing “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” on the little name labels, right below the word “HELLO.” But my favorite Princess Bride quote is this: “I’ll tell you the truth. It’s up to you to live with it.” Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson and Sherilynn Ifill and Robert Reich and Eddie Glaude Jr and lots of others are out here telling the truth. And we might have to live with it for now but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it forever. We can’t stop the liars from lying, but we don’t have to let the truth perish. 

Scattered

 *****

I’m distracted right now (meaning recent weeks through this very minute). I’m scattered and forgetful and every waking hour of my day is broken into fragments of working on or thinking about at least 10 things at a time. I’m always like this, but I’ve been REALLY like this of late. I can’t concentrate, I’m looking at my phone every five gosh-dang minutes, and I cannot keep my mind on a single task or occupation without thinking about what I need to do next or what I should be doing instead. And every day, I’m asking myself the same question: What is wrong with me? What is wrong with my brain? 

*****

I was home working one day last week, and spent the morning working on a last-minute project with a short turnaround time. This is actually my favorite kind of project. The panic keeps me focused. I worked steadily, occasionally checking the clock, and by 10:55, I had a draft ready to show at an 11:00 check-in meeting. Everyone was happy, and so I was happy too. I took a lunch break at 11:45 and after eating some leftovers (leftovers for lunch is one of my favorite WFH perks and yes I know I can bring leftovers to work and I do that but it’s not the same), I decided to spend 30 minutes on housework, and my focus fell to pieces. 

There was laundry in the dryer, which had just finished drying. I knew this thanks to the 30 seconds of  “Die Forelle” that the dryer plays every time it finishes a cycle. I do wish that all of my appliances would shut up. But I digress. 

I think I folded maybe 2 t-shirts and a towel or something, when the kitchen counter caught my peripheral vision. There’s too much mail piled up there, I thought. Time to sort through it. Time to separate the wheat from the chaff. I started doing that and almost finished and then saw that some jerk had left a coffee cup on the counter NEXT to the sink. How hard would it be, I thought, to put that cup IN the sink, or in the dishwasher? How hard would it be to just wash it? Then I noticed that it was my cup. I’m the jerk. I’m the problem. It’s me.  I stopped to wash the cup, after putting away the handful of plates and mugs that had been drying on the rack, and then I remembered the laundry. I started toward the dryer but noticed that I hadn’t quite finished dealing with the mail, so I did that and then started toward the dryer again. 

I folded and stacked shirts and towels and socks until I was almost finished. Then I noticed the debris on the laundry room floor, which turned out to be remnants of some tissues that had gone through the laundry in some jerk’s pockets. Yes, the jerk was me again but is that relevant here? Is that germane to the issue we’re discussing? Does that have anything to do with the topic of this post? 

What is the topic of this post? What are we even talking about? 

It would have been smart to just finish the laundry and then sweep up the lint and tissue debris but having noticed that mess on the floor I had to do something about it immediately. Immediately! So I swept the laundry room and then finished folding the last few items. By now, 30 minutes had passed and I needed to get back to work. In an uncharacteristic move, I left the folded laundry in its neat piles on the dryer, because if I’d gone into any of the bedrooms to put clothes away, I’d have noticed something amiss, and I’d have ended up on my hands and knees cleaning baseboards or dusting furniture or organizing a sock drawer. 

******

The afternoon proceeded apace, as afternoons tend to do. I do my best work in the afternoon, between about 1 and 5 PM. My mornings are spent responding to emails and making lists and crossing small items off existing lists, and posting stuff on various social media accounts. I always try to schedule meetings in the morning, too, because I might as well use the unproductive hours on unproductive pursuits. I can concentrate in the afternoon, and so that’s when I can do the kind of complex and demanding work that requires focus and creativity. Afternoons go by very quickly. 

But once the afternoon is over, so is the period of focus and concentration, and I’m back to my scattered and distracted self. At 5:15 or so, I decided to stop working and start making dinner. Making dinner is not my favorite thing to do and so I’m very susceptible to side tracks and diversions when I’m thinking about planning to prepare to make dinner. I started with putting away the laundry that had spent the afternoon resting on the dryer. 

Yes, you predicted correctly. I did exactly what I knew I would do, which was to sidetrack myself into closet organization and drawer straightening and baseboard dusting, frittering away 30 minutes during which dinner could have been cooking merrily away and instead the ingredients remained trapped in the refrigerator while I sorted socks and separated t-shirts into keep and donate piles. 

I did finally cook dinner, a simple stir fry of chicken and vegetables over rice. It was delicious. 

Later, I was falling asleep watching hockey, so I went to bed. And there it was on my bed - the pile of laundry that I had carried to the bedroom at 5:15. I put it away, resisting the urge to do some reorganization work in my closet and drawers, and finally climbed in under the covers. 

******

I wrote all of this about a week ago, and I’m still a scatter-brained mess. I’m struggling to focus, and I’m making stupid mistakes. I drove home from work on Monday night and at 7:15 on Tuesday morning (Tuesday is a telework day), I realized that I had left my computer on my desk in my office. How was it possible for me to walk all the way across campus to my car without wondering why my tote bag was so light? I’m looking absentmindedly at my phone wondering just why I had picked it up in the first place, and I’m wandering in and out of rooms and forgetting completely what I needed to do in those rooms, and I’m waking up at all hours of the night and trying not to look at the news. But it’s a losing battle and will be a losing battle until at least November 6 and possibly beyond. I hope not on the “beyond” part, but I’m afraid we’re in for a shit show next week no matter what. Maybe I’ll start on a new project. It’ll distract me. 

Decision 2024

It’s October 24, the first day of early voting in my home state of Maryland. We have one week, October 24 through October 31. I’m not sure why early voting doesn’t run right through that next weekend until the day before Election Day, but I don’t get to make those calls. 

Today is the day I shop for our crazy old lady. We’re well into year 5 now and it’s just part of the routine. By the time I finish that, I probably won’t want to go vote but we’ll see. I’m definitely planning to do it sometime during the early voting window, though. I expect long lines on Election Day. Maryland’s electoral votes will certainly go to Harris no matter what I do, but we also have a very close Senate race here, and I want to make sure that Larry Hogan doesn’t win a Senate seat. He was a competent Governor and is one of the few decent Republicans left, but I don’t want to see a Republican majority in the Senate. And I like Angela Alsobrooks. And when I’m old(er), I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I voted for the first woman president. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning and our backyard is covered with leaves. The trees are in full multicolor autumn mode, and the morning light is golden and warm. Just a few weeks from now, the trees will be almost bare, filtering white-gold November sun for a few weeks of perfect light before the winter starts asserting itself and everything turns leaden gray and stays that way for four months or so. I need to pay attention to what’s happening out there. I need to go touch grass today, or leaves, or whatever. I don’t want to miss mid-November, no matter what happens on the 5th. 

*****

I was thinking about going to vote today. I was going to wear my Kamala 2024 shirt, with a sweater over top so that I’d know that I was wearing that shirt, but the election judges wouldn’t. I was going to bring a book to read. I was going to wear comfortable shoes, suitable for standing in a long line. I had a plan. 

Then last night I was home by myself, and when I looked up the open hours for my local early voting site, I saw that it was still open for 45 minutes, and I decided to go and vote right then and there and I did. The line was very short, and the election workers were in good spirits, and even though I know that Kamala will win Maryland with or without me, I still wanted to make sure that my vote was on paper and counted. 

So now I have more free time than I thought I would today. It’s a beautiful day so I’m going to go outside. It’s going to be a long 10 days.

Unfazed

Will no one rid us of this turbulent weather? It rains every weekend now. That’s our new climate here in Maryland. It seems that we just have to learn to live with it. 

We’re one week away from MDW, but nothing seems further away than summer. Yesterday, Saturday, it rained almost all day long with very brief breaks that promised some a lightening of the sky and a few dry minutes but then ended abruptly with more rain. The temperature remained in the dismal low 60s. It’s Sunday morning now and the forecast called for a reasonably nice May day. It’s not raining at least but it’s not sunny either and if I had to guess I’d say that it’ll probably rain again. It’s gloomy, is what it is, and everything feels damp. 

One nice thing is that everything is very very green. The grass is lush and our shrubs and flowers are wildly in bloom. Yesterday, I was looking out my kitchen window at the riot of growth, and I saw what looked like a turkey parading across the front lawn. But it was a vulture. I wanted to chase it away but I know what these vile creatures do when confronted with anything resembling a threat, and I wanted no part of this. Thankfully, it flew away on its own, obviating the need for any action on my part. 

But plenty of other things do require action on my part. Right now, I am fighting my way through a very long list of medical appointments and administrative tasks, two of my very least favorite things. It’s Tuesday now, a beautiful summer-is-coming day. I have a mammogram appointment this afternoon. Last week, my new doctor ordered a series of routine tests and screenings, all of which I had been avoiding. The mammogram was the first on the list, and it was the very last thing that I was planning to do. But they didn’t wait around for me to call and make the appointment because they’d have been waiting around for a while. They called me, catching me unawares, and next thing I knew I had a mammogram appointment. I hung up the phone feeling a little resentful, a little shanghaied, but I also acknowledged the wisdom of their approach because I’d have avoided a mammogram like it was a carrion bird on my front lawn. I even thought of canceling the appointment because I still have to take my car in to get it fixed, but the car can wait, I guess. 

It’s Wednesday now, another beautiful day. My son came in from swim practice at 7 this morning, just as I was getting ready to leave for work, and he said that he got a “whiff of summer” when he got out of his car. It really does smell like summer now. It feels like summer too. The mammogram was fine and I scheduled my car repair and reserved a rental car. I packaged up some items that needed to go in the mail, and I activated my new debit card and cut up and disposed of the old one. So much progress! Buoyed by this unexpected little burst of get-things-done energy, I decided to tackle Verizon, too, always one of my least-favorite things to do. My lifetime record in fights vs. Verizon is a whole other topic about which I might write because I won this round. 

*****

It’s Thursday now and it turns out that the mammogram might not have been fine. They called me yesterday and I have to go back for a second look. There’s a “shadow,” a term that apparently covers everything from scar tissue to cancer, and the only way to find out is to get another mammogram. 

I am surprisingly unfazed by this, considering my well-documented tendency to lose my damn mind over every little thing. In fact, the only thing that really bothers me right now is that I have to fit yet another thing into my schedule for next week. Not only do I have another appointment, but I have to add something back to my to-do list. I had “get mammogram” on that list and when I came home from the appointment, I crossed that item off with a rather triumphant and smug little flourish, and that attitude came back to bite me in the ass, didn’t it? Did I mention that medical appointments and administrative tasks were among my least favorite things? Well having to re-do a task that I thought I was done with is even worse. That’s the thing that bothers me most about this unexpected callback. 

*****

It’s Friday now, Friday of Memorial Day weekend, in fact. It looks like summer and it feels like summer and other than the possibility of a terrible diagnosis next Thursday, I have no problems that summer can’t solve. 

Again with the cavalier attitude. Will I never learn? 

I’m actually not cavalier about this at all. I’m kind of worried, but strangely far less worried than I would expect to be. There's really nothing I can do right now except to rejoice in the return of summer and put one foot in front of the other. It’s a three-day weekend, and other than catching up on the minutes from the last neighborhood association meeting, I can’t check off a single to-do list item until after the weekend. Until next week, everything is fine. After next week, it’s all in God’s hands. 

Crash

In the 25 years I’ve lived in Maryland, I’ve been rear-ended four times. The fourth time was yesterday, on my way home from work. I was at the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Hathaway Drive, the first car at the light, just waiting patiently for the light to turn green so that I could make the left turn onto northbound Georgia. 

The intersection is a slightly hairy one. One lane is a left turn only lane, and the other is for right turns and traffic proceeding directly across Georgia. The opposite intersection is the same way, and neither has a left turn arrow, which means that when you’re turning left, you have to wait until the oncoming traffic crosses Georgia. Unless you’re the lady who was right behind me, who saw the green light and just hit the gas and slammed into me. 

It was rather disconcerting to say the very least. It felt like quite an impact, forceful, and the crash noise was fairly loud too.My car is damaged and it needs to be fixed, but the damage is much less than I would have expected considering what the impact felt like. 

*****

The next morning as we were waiting for the start of our daily meeting, I told my coworkers that I had been in a minor accident the previous night. Everyone was concerned and sympathetic. Then another coworker shared his own most recent road mishap. He is a cyclist, and when a driver blew past him screaming “Get off the road,” he decided to approach the person at the next stoplight to explain that he has exactly the same right to use the public thoroughfare as any motorist. This was a risky course of action; much safer for a man then a woman, but people are crazy and if a crazy person has a gun, then it won’t much matter if you’re a man or a woman. 

As it turns out, the angry motorist did have a weapon - a set of Hello Kitty brass knuckles. As my coworker tells it, the youngish (early 30s) woman brandished the brass knuckles, and said - with a straight face - “Do you want to mess with me? Do you want some of this?” He laughed aloud, as anyone would. Do I want some of this? What is “this”? Hello Kitty swag? Because obviously, yes please - who WOULDN’T want some of that? 

Hello Kitty brass knuckles - why does this exist? 

*****

My little fender bender, which I know was minor though it didn’t feel minor at the time, was already an additional measure of fuel for what seems to be a growing case of agoraphobia. And now, of course, the bears are back. It’s May, and for the fourth or fifth year in a row, Montgomery County has seen an uptick in bear sightings. And not just in the quasi-rural north and western ends of the county, either - bear sightings were reported in Rockville and Silver Spring. Last year, we had a bear on the Navy base although you’d think that if a bear was considering enlisting, he’d go right for the Army. They’re already experts at land navigation, bears are, and so he’d nail that part of basic training. These bear visits, once considered rare and anomalous, are now apparently just a fact of life in the DMV.  My newsfeeds are filled with stories about suburban bears (and urban, because there’s a bear in NW, too), complete with commentary from experts telling us to learn to coexist with bears because they’re here to stay. They live here now. They’re our neighbors. So now I’m scared to drive anywhere (more so than even usual) and I’m also scared to walk anywhere. But of course, I’ll still do both. 

*****

There are so many situations in which a Y chromosome would come in handy, and none more so than dealing with an auto body shop. I have to get the car fixed, and I planned to take it to the same shop that fixed my old car after my son’s accident in 2021. I called them this morning, thinking that it would be smart to ask them to look at the car, figure out what needs to be done and how long it will take and what parts they’ll need; and then let them order those parts, and come back when they’re ready to do the work. That is good thinking, right? I thought so. But apparently not. Apparently, that’s dumb girl thinking.

“Oh no,” he said. “You can’t bring it in today. We don’t have any openings until the 20th. And we’ll probably have to order parts, so it would just be sitting here.” 

Hmm, I thought. Is that not exactly what I said? I think that’s exactly what I said, and I politely pointed this out. 

“Yes,” he said patiently. “But I mean if we order parts, and then we take everything apart and find that we need MORE parts.” 

The damage is minor, and there’s nothing to take apart - just replace the bumper, pull out a little dent on the back door, and paint. Easy peasy. My husband said the same thing when I relayed the conversation to him. I hadn’t bothered to push back on the body shop guy.  “I should have called them myself,” he said. Even men admit this now. Even men acknowledge that a woman isn’t going to get a straight answer from anyone in the automotive profession. 

Don’t @ me. It is what it is. 

*****

I have an appointment with the body shop now. I’m still a little nervous at stoplights (I keep looking in my rearview mirror to make sure that the car coming up behind me is slowing down enough to stop short of my bumper) and my head and shoulders don’t hurt anymore. All’s well that ends well as far as that goes. I have no idea what I’ll do if (when) the bear shows up in my neighborhood or on the walking track at work. Brass knuckles, I guess. Hoping the bears won’t want some of that. 

Regulation

It seems that I am not the only person who struggles with anxiety. My newsfeeds are filled with advice from experts real and self-proclaimed on how to regulate my stress response, activate my parasympathetic nervous system, stimulate my vagus nerve (what?), drop my shoulders while engaging my core and practicing breathwork, and just calm the heck down. I don’t do any of this. I look out the window instead. 

If we ever left this house, the view outside my office window is one thing that I would really miss. And it’s not a particularly spectacular view. It’s just pretty - a large number and variety of trees on both sides of the fence between my neighbor’s house and mine, the hanging birdfeeders and the visiting birds, and the sky, which is wintery pale bright blue today, with a few fluffy pink-edged clouds. There are many window views that are more beautiful but few that are more soothing. 

*****

I wrote that yesterday, which was a rather bad day. Today is much better. It's Friday afternoon and I'm in the stands at the Rose Bente Lee Center pool at Marymount University, watching the first meet of the second half of the 23-24 season. Marymount is hosting Randolph Macon and my son's medley relay just scored its first victory of 2024. As the B relay they should have finished second but someone forgot to tell them that. 

The women's 1000 yard freestyle is just finishing up, and the men will follow. Distance events are not my jam but I certainly admire the athletes in a better them than me kind of way. 

*****

We’re midway through the meet now, and the swimmers are warming up for the second half. It's a close, competitive meet, fun to watch. I think we're winning but I'm not sure. But we're not running away with it. Marymount completely dominated its early season opponents, so much so that it was almost like watching an intramural meet. Winning is great and all but I'd rather see a real race. I like a good old fashioned duel in the pool. 

*****

Saturday morning, cold and very pale gray. It’s January 6, and we’re waiting for the threatened or promised winter weather that was supposed to begin this morning. So far, it’s nothing but January cold and a silvery gray sky that looks very soon-to-snowish. The rest of the house is asleep, and I’m back in front of my window, watching the birds enjoy breakfast at the just-refilled feeder. The seed mix that comes out of that big Costco bag must be delicious because it’s a scene out there, bird-wise. It’s a bird party. I could sit in front of this window all day. 

Yesterday’s meet finished in a split decision - a win for the men and a loss for the women. My son won one of his individual events, too. Today, I’ll work for a bit to catch up. I had had some vague idea that I’d try to work for a bit during the distance events at the meet yesterday but that was just silly. But I don’t mind working today. Yesterday was almost a day off. It felt very Saturday-ish. And the weather today is dreadful, so I’m not going anywhere unless I have to. 

*****

Saturday was a gloomy gloomy day. Not unpleasantly gloomy, just weather gloomy, with an ice storm vibe. It wasn’t quite cold enough for ice, but almost. I got my hair cut in the morning and then came home and worked and did housework and read my book (The Broom of the System) and watched a movie (“Leave the World Behind”) and hung around the house, now pretty much completely clear of all signs of Christmas except for a few boxes of chocolate that still remain in the kitchen. It’s sunny and bright today and the place feels wide open. The day feels wide open. It’s Sunday and I don’t have any particular plans other than to get out of the house. An indoor day is nice once in a while but one is enough. 

*****

Have you seen “Leave the World Behind”? It’s a disaster movie, kind of, but we never really find out what causes the disaster - a foreign attack, a cyber event, an environmental catastrophe - but the world goes haywire just as an affluent Manhattan family begins its impromptu vacation in a beautiful rental house in the Hamptons. The owners of the house, a Black man (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter, show up in the middle of the night after escaping from chaos in the city, and the tenants (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) must decide whether or not to trust them, having never actually met them face to face. Things get increasingly chaotic and terrifying - strange animal encounters, and self-driving cars going haywire, and a mysterious illness that strikes one of the vacationers’ children - and the two families are forced to overcome their mutual suspicion and mistrust, given that they appear to be the only people remaining, except for an angry, armed survivalist played very well by Kevin Bacon. 

Most of the action takes place in and around the beach house, and with the very small cast (the two families and Kevin Bacon) it has a closed-off, quasi-theatrical feel. But it’s still realistic, and scary. I liked the movie very much, even though dystopian disaster movies are the last thing I should be watching right now given my pretty fragile grip on reason. Julia Roberts is especially good as the everywoman wife and mother who is angry at the world and racked with guilt over her own ill temper and bad disposition. She shares the movie’s best scene (in my view) with the very talented My’hala Herrold as Mahershala Ali’s done-with-these-damn-white-people daughter. Surrounded by a pack of wild deer and other animals who appear to be poised to attack (and I keep telling you that the deer are going to turn predator), the two women stick together, face down the animals, and ultimately scare them away. They hold hands, clinging to one another as they realize - to both their relief and dismay -  that they need one another, and that even though people are the worst, it’s far worse to be without them. 

*****

I like to re-read books sometimes, especially at times like now when my mental health is not great. I hadn’t thought about The Broom of the System - or David Foster Wallace in general - in years, but Zadie Smith reminded me to revisit Wallace, and The Broom of the System was my favorite book for a short time during my twenties. I wanted to see if it held up. 

Wallace wrote The Broom of the System, his first novel, when he was in his 20s and it created quite a stir - critics recognized Wallace as a genius right away. I think it was popular too - my friends and I all read it, at least. What still works - the book is still very funny, hilariously so; and very imaginative. Wallace juxtaposed the real (Cleveland, Ohio; Amherst College, Gerber baby food, Bob Newhart) and the imagined (the Great Ohio Desert, Stonecipheco Baby Foods, the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes) seamlessly, and creates a world that is both absurd and believable, and that the reader recognizes and understands almost immediately. The dialogue is hilarious, and the characters are flawed and neurotic (or downright crazy) and interesting. 

The book still holds up, for the most part, though of course I saw it very differently as an almost-old woman as I am now vs. a very young woman (maybe 22) when I first read it. I really loved Lenore Beadsman, the main character, when I was in my 20s. She was different from every other female character in books and movies and TV. She was quirky and fiercely independent. She was not glamorous or fashionable but she was obviously beautiful, being the object of desire for at least four of the novel’s male characters. She was, of course, an early Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which explains why I loved her so much. Even before we had a name for her, young women in their 20s were (and remain) very susceptible to the allure of the MPDG. She’s not like all the other girls. 

*****

I started writing this a week ago, in the midst of an anxiety spiral that has mostly passed. Writing about it and then thinking about other things - like swim meets and books and movies - helps me to get a grip and to calm down a little. It helps me to regulate my nervous system, as the influencers like to say. Of course, who am I to need regulating? I’m not walking on a beach or digging in a peaceful green garden but I’m also not fighting for my life in the middle of a war or disaster. I’m not facing down a pack of attack deer (I promise you, they will be a thing very soon). I’m not lost in the middle of the Great Ohio Desert, handcuffed to a madman (Wallace reference, IYKYK). Everything is fine. Everything is grand. Reading and writing are all I really have any business doing anyway. 

High effing finance

Do you know why I can’t be a rich person? No, it’s not because I keep buying stupid handbags (although that doesn’t help). It really has very little to do with income or spending - I could make a lot more money and/or spend a lot less money, and I still couldn’t be a rich person. And this is why.  

I have two checking accounts in two different banks - a smallish community bank and a credit union. The credit union account is really both a savings and checking account. It earns a little bit of interest, and it’s where I save money for short- and medium-term goals; things like travel and holidays. My emergency fund money is also in that account.

I keep a very simple tally - on paper, mind you - of money in and out of the credit union account, categorized by type of expense or fund (travel, holiday, emergency) for which deposits are intended. Every so often, I reconcile my total with the actual account balance to make sure that I have the money that I think I have. 

This is all fine. Where it gets complicated is electronic transfers between the accounts. 

I have a Visa card, which is my only credit card, from the credit union. I normally pay the bill for that Visa card, on the rare occasions when I actually use it, from my primary checking account, which is how I pay all my bills. However, I used the card for some holiday shopping and rather than pay the bill from the primary checking account and then transfer funds from the credit union, as I normally do and definitely will do again for reasons that will be clear in just a moment, I decided to pay it directly from the credit union share draft account that holds my holiday short-term savings. The money intended for holiday shopping goes directly toward the credit card that I used to make the purchases. Eliminate the middleman. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Except that I made this payment on November 8 and on November 17, it still does not appear in my payment history, although it is showing clearly as a debit to the share draft. 

I don’t usually use the banking app for the credit union, because I don’t pay bills from that account, and so I had been hesitant to pay a bill using this untried app. Rather than pay the entire balance as I normally would (it was about $470 or so), I made a $100 payment. Even as I sent that payment, I thought that the test payment amount should have been $10, not $100, because who am I, Oprah? Anyway, just to be sure, I checked for this payment every day for several days, and when it didn’t appear in my credit card transaction list, I realized to my dismay (dismay defined as 20 percent “what happened to my money?” and 80 percent “Oh my God, I have to CALL SOMEONE?”) that I had no choice except to call the credit union to figure out where it had gone. The money came out of one place but didn’t go into the other, so where was it? That was my question for the member services representative who answered my call today. 

Long story short (yeah I know, too late) the representative also saw the payment on the outgoing side but not the incoming side. He and I agreed that this was very weird, very weird indeed. He suggested that the whole mess was kind of my fault because I made the payment using the bill pay application and not the credit card application (although there is absolutely nothing on the bill pay application site that tells customers not to use that application to pay credit union Visa bills). Then he said that I could wait a few days to see what happens, or stop the payment for a mere $30, or 30 percent of the amount in question.

Lol! After firmly but politely disabusing him of the silly idea that I should pay for the credit union’s mistake (remember -  it was a payment from the credit union to the credit union) I decided to wait until Monday, and see what happens. No big deal, right? Easy come easy go. A hundred here, a hundred there - whatever. What's a single Benjamin in the fast paced world of high finance?

******

Sometimes, I tell myself that I long for the days of Friday-is-payday, so you go to the bank and deposit your check, you take out some cash so you have some walking around money, and then you write checks for all of your other bills. It was a simpler time. And it actually sucked. Imagine having to stand in line at a Center City Philadelphia bank at lunchtime on a Friday, you and every other schmoe who just got paid, because direct deposit didn’t exist. Credit cards existed, of course, but they were not as easy to obtain as they are today. We even had ATMs, but they weren’t on every corner and in every grocery store like they are now. And the check-writing. My God, the check-writing. I hate writing checks SO MUCH. Just thinking about having to open all of those envelopes, dig through the inserts to find the bill, write the checks, address and stamp the envelopes, and then get them to the mailbox or the post office - it just doesn’t bear thinking about. So no, I do not long for those days, not one bit.

****

The payment finally posted, ending a few days of minor stress and worry. I think I’ll go back to my old way of doing things, when I’d just spend the holiday or travel funds as appropriate, and then reimburse my checking account by writing an actual check from the credit union share draft account. 

And that is why I cannot be rich. I can earn money, save money, and save money, but I don't want to track the flow of cash through the electronic ether of the American banking system. I don't want to balance my books. I can't manage this level of administrative complexity. I need to keep it simple.