Words to live by

It's late Saturday night and I'm staying overnight at my sister's house, following her son's (my nephew's) graduation party. My nephew also just graduated from high school. He and my son are three days apart in age.

It's 11:30 and I'd be asleep now, except that the room where I usually sleep when I'm here is very hot. The ceiling fan is insanely loud and the windows lack screens. I'd rather be too hot than wake up in the middle of the night to find bats swarming around my head.

*****

No bats last night. It's Sunday night now and I'm back in my own bed under my very quiet ceiling fan. I have a busy few weeks ahead and a few projects that I need to work out in my mind. The heat isn't the only thing that kept me awake last night. I keep writing things down and trying to organize my days and my thoughts, but I fear that things are getting away from me.

The biotech company where I used to work had a GLP (Good Lab Practices) laboratory, and they had a saying: “If it isn’t documented, then it didn’t happen.” It’s a good saying, and I have adapted it slightly or my own use: “If it isn’t documented, then it won’t happen.” I’m going to make a few lists, and take a few notes (and of course, I’m going to write about making the lists and taking the notes) and then maybe I’ll feel a little more in control.

*****

It’s Tuesday and I don’t feel any more under control than I did yesterday; and strangely, I do not care. This will not last. I’ll be in my normal low-grade panic state any day now, but I’ll enjoy the feeling of being a person who doesn’t care for as long as that feeling lasts.

On my way to Philadelphia on Saturday, I passed a country homestead on U.S. Route 1, just north of Belair, Maryland. The front yard had a flagpole, and the flagpole was flying a flag, and the flag read “Trump 2020: No more bullshit.”

I don't support the pre-colon part of that sentiment, of course, but I’m all for the post-colon part. “No more bullshit” is a credo that I can get behind. Between “No more bullshit” and “If it’s not documented, then it won’t happen,” I have now not one but two solid life philosophies.

*****
So now it's Wednesday and I am multi-tasking. I had a meeting at HHS headquarters today, and I'm on the Red Line on my way back to Twinbrook. It's hot and humid and sunny, an ideal Washington DC summer morning. My meeting was short and productive and after it was over, I needed a soda to fortify me for the one-mile walk back to Union Station. Federal Center is closer but I hate changing trains. If it's not on the Red Line, then it's dead to me.

And that's another excellent life philosophy.

I take pictures of the Capitol whenever I walk past it. 

I stopped at a street vendor, because I wanted a soda in a can, and because a DC street vendor on a summer day is one of my favorite things. I found a diet soda in the cooler and I ordered a giant soft pretzel. The Korean vendor smiled at me. "Five hundred dollars," he said, hand outstretched.

I handed him a ten. "Can I owe you the rest?"

He nodded. "I send you a bill."

"Thank you," I said. "The check is in the mail."

"Ha ha! Good one!"

I ate the entire pretzel, making the walk to Union Station a necessity.

*****

I found these giant rock sculptures on my way back to my office from Twinbrook Metro.

"Hereafter" is kind of poetic. "Starsailor" is just silly.
 But "Field Rush" might be my favorite.

I have no idea what they mean, but that is part of their appeal. They might be someone else's guiding signposts. For my part, I will stick with "No more bullshit," "If it's not documented, then it didn't (or won't) happen," and "If it's not on the Red Line, then it's dead to me."

Oh, and the most important of all: "The check is in the mail."

Redeeming quality

On Monday, I was on LinkedIn, where a person who identifies himself as an author posted video of a stranger picking his nose on a subway train. I can think of no motive for doing something like this other than just shitty low-down meanness, but the so-called "author" claims that he wanted only to remind his fellow LinkedIn-ers that managing one's "brand" is a 24/7/365 endeavor, and that one can never be too careful in public, because someone is always watching, including jerks with cameras.

Let's set aside the remote possibility that this man wants to be known for his disgusting personal habits, and that public nose excavation would then be an integral aspect of his brand. Is there no other way to make your stupid and shallow little if-it-isn't-marketed-then-it-doesn't-exist point than to humiliate and degrade a person on the Internet? And it gets worse, because the post got a ton of attention. And according to my unscientific data analysis, reaction ran about 20% disgusted by the original poster's meanness and cruelty, and about 75% either neutral or amused. The remaining 5% of commenters actually took the poster at his word, and accepted his claim that the video was a public service announcement, meant only to illustrate the importance of brand management. Of course those people are stupid, and there's nothing you can do about stupid people.

*****

I won't pretend that I don't like social media. I do. I like staying in touch with family and friends whom I don't get to see often. I like posting pictures and writing funny captions and hashtags. (My hashtags are hilarious.) I like commenting and sharing and chatting.

But people are meant to be together, physically together. We're meant to see each other's faces and hear each other's voices. We're meant to connect, and not just electronically.

The loss of face-to-face interaction between people who are perfectly capable of meeting in person but who choose to engage with devices instead is a big problem, but it's not the only problem with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all of the rest of it. It's not even the biggest problem. Because of its remote and (sometimes) anonymous nature, social media has completely moved the line that people aren't supposed to cross. And the result is that in a pretty robust online debate on whether or not a person should have posted video of a stranger picking his nose, not one participant in that debate--not even among the right-thinking 20%--questioned the morality of secretly photographing a stranger in the first place.

*****

On Wednesday night, I checked in on Facebook. A neighborhood friend, who is confined to a wheelchair, posted a "feeling sad" status, and within moments a dozen people had posted "thinking of you" and "what can I do to help?" messages. Maybe it would have been better if we'd all rushed to her side. Her house is around the corner. But without Facebook, we probably wouldn't have known that she was sad and needed her friends.

Facebook has a lot of problems, but a thing that allows a lonely, disabled person to reach out and find immediate reassurance that there are people who love her and care about her can't be all bad. I saw my friend on Thursday night, and she was better. And that's what I'm sticking with. For every jackass who uses social media to bully and shame a harmless (gross, but harmless) stranger, there are ten good-hearted people who use it to cheer and comfort a person who's lonely or sick or sad. Social media is just like the people who created it. We suck sometimes, but we have our moments.

Boys and men

I'm waiting for my mother and my aunt right now. I forget sometimes how long it takes those ladies to get ready to leave the house for any reason, any reason at all. The upside is that I thought I wouldn't have time to write today, but here I am. I could crank out a whole essay in the time it takes them to get ready to go out for dinner, with time left over to copy edit. And that's how meta it gets around here. I can write about writing, and I can write about not having time to write, EVEN AS I AM WRITING. Meta.

*****

My mother and aunt live in Philadelphia. They came on Wednesday night, for my son's high school graduation, which happened on Thursday morning, at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington DC. 329 kids were high school seniors on Thursday morning, and now they're high school graduates.

I graduated from high school at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, a venue not unlike Constitution Hall. Our school was the only school in the city privileged to graduate there. Constitution Hall, on the other hand, is normally a serious concert venue, but it turns into a veritable graduation factory in June. The next class and their families were already streaming in as we edged our way out, barely moving on the jam-packed narrow sidewalk on D Street. Happy graduates and little children and parents and friends and elderly relatives with wheelchairs and canes in a claustrophobic crush of lunch-seeking people, and then finally the crowds thinned as we walked toward the parking garage on G Street. I needed a sweater, even in a dense crowd on a June morning in Washington DC.

This weather. What the hell?

*****
The graduation ceremony was lovely; just over two hours long, with funny remarks from the senior class president and a very moving farewell speech from the principal. I haven't been our principal's biggest fan. She's fine, I don't dislike her or anything. But she has always seemed to me the exemplar of a type that I call Administrator-Princesses. And I call them that because I'm a jerk and a smart-ass, and I have no idea what I'm talking about.

As you'd expect, she called out several of the graduates for outstanding achievements of one kind or another (including one of my son's swim teammates, who will study and swim at the U.S. Naval Academy). But she also gave heartfelt praise to several kids who struggled or made mistakes, but recovered and persevered and graduated by the skin of their teeth. Several kids had to work throughout the extended senior vacation to complete assignments or make up tests. One boy dropped out and then returned to finish, a year late. And one boy, as the principal put it, "took a very wrong turn" in his sophomore year, and made some very serious mistakes. With obvious emotion, she said that the day he came back and said that he wanted to turn his life around and finish high school "was one of the happiest days in my career as an educator," surpassed only by this day, when she got to see him walk down an aisle in a cap and gown. In every example, she made every listener feel the importance and the value of every single young person, some weighed down with medals and honor cords and stoles, and some with cap and gown and no accessories other than their beautiful smiles. 

Not a dry eye, I tell you. And so don't listen to me when I dismiss people with my snide little names and funny funny categories. I'm a jerk; and most of the time, I don't know what I'm talking about.

*****
The next day, my eighth grader graduated from middle school, and so we did the whole thing again, on a slightly smaller scale. He received a President's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, signed by Donald J. Trump and Betsy DeVos. Well, the certificate with its shiny seal is nice. 

Anyway, the eighth grade class adviser gave a funny speech about how the kids entered middle school as sixth graders, making play cakes with EZ Bake Ovens, and then advanced to baking actual edible cakes with store-bought mix, and then developed advanced baking skills, crafting homemade cakes from real ingredients. It was a good metaphor.

It might have been better had he avoided the phrase "master bakers" in a room full of eighth graders.

Know your audience, is all.

*****

So that which I have both dreaded and looked forward to is over. Graduations, Confirmation, last concerts, last games, last high school swim meets--all over for now. One more child will enter high school in the fall, and we'll do the whole thing over again. For now, we'll have our usual summer of summer swim meets and Friday night pasta parties. The long years of school and the short weeks of summer and the games and concerts and birthdays and college applications all go by very fast.

*****
It's Monday now, the first day of what we call "real summer" around here, because school is well and truly out, and spring sports are finished, and the pool is open from noon to 9 everyday. And the weather is finally hot, or at least warm. My son will turn 18 tomorrow, and he received his Selective Service registration card today. No time wasted, and no time to think about the implications of that little paper card with his name and address and date of birth. For now, we're all safe at home in the summer. But just like high school, nothing lasts forever.

Checklists and appointments

Donald Trump did something this weekend, I'm sure, but I have no idea what it was. I don't know what he said, or what he did, or what he tweeted, and I feel that I'm a better person for this lack of knowledge.

I decided not long ago that I'd avoid all news--especially political news--on the weekends. This weekend, I officiated at a swim meet, and went to a neighborhood kid's graduation party, and swam in a freezing cold pool, and cooked and ate and read and wrote, and didn't give a thought to the swamp on Pennsylvania Avenue just a few miles from my house.

*****
Now it's Monday, and it's June 10, I'm all caught up on news, and it's too cold to swim. But it's all right. My son graduates from high school on Thursday, and my younger son graduates from middle school on Friday, and people graduating means that summer has to return at some point.

*****
Oh, and I got a haircut, and it's a good haircut. It's maybe the best haircut I've ever had. Most people didn't even notice it, because it's not very different from my usual hairstyle, only it's cut really well.

I approached this haircut with considerable trepidation. My history vis-a-vis haircuts isn't good. But I was hating my hair and desperate to fix it so it would fall properly without fifteen minutes of struggle with a hairdryer and brush. Ain't nobody got time for that nonsense.

Half an hour after I walked into the new salon, I had hair that was half an inch shorter, but a hundred times better. The stylist, an older Iranian lady, gently suggested that I might consider some kind of color to camouflage the encroaching gray. She looked me up and down. "You're a very beautiful lady. Hair, skin, clothes, style, everything perfect," she said, with an up and down sweeping gesture. "Just a little bit of color, that's all."

I don't get "very beautiful" and "everything perfect" very often. This is how good this haircut is: I actually believed her.

*****
Well what the hell was that? Is this Glamour magazine? I mean, really.

It's Tuesday now, and it's still too cold to swim, and my hair is still pretty good, but don't worry--I won't be writing a sonnet about it or anything.

*****
The last few months have been just one long checklist, and I'm almost at the end.

Confirmation? Check.
Last middle school and high school band concerts? Check.
Last high school swim meet? Last middle school softball game? Check and check.
Awards nights? Potluck dinners? Prom? Graduation rehearsal? Check times four.

Graduation on Thursday, and middle school graduation on Friday. And then that's all there is. There isn't any more. It's a little sad. But at least my hair is OK.

Vocabulary

Context is everything, especially where weather is concerned. If I had time to go swimming, I'd hate the weather right now. It's cool and overcast and a little breezy with a distant threat of rain. But since I'm sitting outside at a baseball game, the weather is perfect. Context.

It's the end of the school year, second in chaos only to the holidays to suburban parents of sports- and music-playing high school and middle school kids. There's a lot going on. There are overlaps and conflicts. There's a lot of takeout food. But it's all over in a week, and the clouds are warmed by a tiny bit of golden light and the air is fragrant and soft. Dinner will be souvlaki from our favorite Greek takeout place.

*****

"Worrying about your children is sanity." (Adam Sandler's whatever-his-name-is character in "Spanglish")

Wisdom can come from anywhere, even bad movies. At least I hope that this is wisdom. If it is, then I am certifiably sane.

I have two children. Two teenage sons. And so I worry. Worry, of course, is nature to me. Not second nature, just nature. But teenage sons are worrisome, no matter your disposition. My two are very different and so I worry about them in different ways, for different reasons. And at different times. I alternate my worry schedules.

So that's a good thing. Because I seldom have to worry about both of them at once. I'm not sure if they work together on this or not; but generally, when one of them has a problem, the other one is OK. And luckily for me, they're both usually OK. But I still worry, because that's my nature, and because I'm their mother. Sanity.

*****
Having children who are teenagers, one about to graduate from high school and one about to enter high school, is an exercise in contemporaneous nostalgia. Look that up, because I might have just invented it. Everything I do, and everything my children do, reminds me of something that they did or that we did together, a year ago or ten years ago. And in June, everything--the breeze off the pool deck and the sunlight on the water and the very air--everything reminds me of their ever-so-quickly-vanishing childhoods. This summer is just barely getting started, and it's happening right now, and I miss it already. Contemporaneous nostalgia.

Problem solved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


via GIPHY

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

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

Rainy season

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

*****

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

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

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

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

There it is! 

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

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

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

Rhetoric

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

Almost perfect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Documentation

It's Friday and I'm working from home, from an interior room in my house, waiting out the second tornado warning in seven days. The first one scared me a bit. This is suburban Maryland, not Tornado Alley, and we don't see a lot of Wizard of Oz action around here. Or we didn't used to, because again--second time in a week. Climate change is real. And I'm jaded already. Other than moving a little farther away from the windows, I didn't do a darn thing to prepare for a tornado hit.

Well, that was quick. The tornado warning ended after 15 minutes. The roof is still attached to the house, and we're not in theoretical Kansas anymore. Onward.

*****
Saturday morning. My son was supposed to have a baseball game this morning, which the league cancelled because of field conditions, then reinstated because the field dried quickly in this morning's bright sun and chilly wind, then cancelled again because they had already told the officials not to show up and those officials, busy men apparently, were no longer available.

I was also supposed to have some work to do this weekend, and now apparently I don't have work to do.

It would appear that I'm using the word "apparently" a lot.

Do you see what I did there?

Anyway. From having what I felt was too much to do in too short a time, I have all of a sudden ended up with more free time than I expected and as always, this is a source of panic rather than relief. Because if I don't figure out what to do then I'll feel that the day has gotten away from me, escaped me like a slippery fish, which is really what you get for trying to fish without a hook.

Anyway. It's feast or famine. I feel either overwhelmed or desolate, and there's no in-between. I think I'd like an in-between.

I'm a fun girl, aren't I?

*****
It's Sunday now. Yesterday was actually a pretty good day. I planned and organized a bit. I wrote some things down. I manage stuff better when it's written down. Writing about something makes it real. There's a saying: If it's not documented, then it didn't happen. For me, if it's not documented, then it won't happen. So I documented the next month or so, and now I feel like it will happen, one way or another.

And do you see what happened? Yesterday was an in-between day. I wrote that I needed an in-between day, and voila. The pen really is mightier than the sword.

*****
Speaking of writing, I am watching Season 2 of "The Crown" on Netflix. It's 1956, and Queen Elizabeth II is making last-minute changes to her Christmas speech after having listened to Prince Philip's speech from the royal yacht Britannia. It's an incredibly moving scene, as two people separated by thousands of miles and the breadth of the British Commonwealth and the weight of the Crown declare their love for one another--in a quiet and understated, but unmistakably clear way--in front of millions of listeners from all over the world.

*****
April is almost over and not a second too soon. With May comes a pre-summer onslaught of last high school things and last middle school things, and I don't feel quite ready but I have a plan and it's in writing. It's documented, so it will happen.

Round 1

It's Easter Sunday, 8:15 PM. I'm glad that Easter is over. Spring is the worst.

*****

It doesn't make any sense that spring would provoke such anxiety and dread for someone who loves summer as much as I do. But it does, and I don't know why. Actually I do know why, but I don't want to talk about it. Or write about it. 

*****

I just finished Sandra Tsing Loh's The Madwoman in the Volvo. Years ago, I read Depth Takes a Holiday and A Year in Van Nuys, which were very funny. And then I forgot about Sandra Tsing Loh, until I found this memoir, which she wrote in 2014. A memoir of near-breakdown depression and anxiety was probably not the best reading choice for me right now. And that's probably all I have to say about this book. Except that it's possible for a writer to be too honest. 

So now I'm reading Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate. Personal writing by Asian-American women writers who had difficult childhoods was not necessarily a literary theme that I chose, but here I am. A long time ago, I read The Joy-Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, both of which (especially the former) I liked a lot. And then I just kind of forgot about Amy Tan. I'm glad I found this one.

The Opposite of Fate was published in 2001. It's a series of short essays, many of them about her work or the aspects of her life that fed her work. In one very funny piece, Tan breaks down the fallacies and errors that have crept into analysis of her work and her life, all the result of careless Internet research. This piece reads as very contemporary (not that 2001 was ancient history), and serves as a reminder that even after the 2016 election, we still tend to rely heavily on the Internet and to believe much of what we read online.  By "we," of course, I mean people other than me, because I am automatically and reflexively skeptical of every word I see online. But lots of people I know, even the smart ones, still share political memes and tweets that scream "Russian Troll Factory" to anyone with ears to hear, so to speak.

*****
In the foreword of The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan describes the pieces as "vignettes" or sketches or something less structured, less serious and purposeful than an essay. Sketch isn't right because these are very well-crafted little pieces of writing, but I get why she doesn't consider them essays. They're less outward-facing than an essay normally is, a little more personal, but not directly personal--she approaches her own life from a slight angle. It's very meta. Anyway, she's much better company than Sandra Tsing-Loh. I finished that book a few days ago and I'm still trying to recover my will to live.

*****
Well, that was harsh. It's Wednesday morning now, 6:45, and I'm writing when I should be waking people up and making lunches and generally preparing for the day. And I'll do all of that, in a minute.

It's do-or-die day for the Washington Capitals, game 7 of the first round of the playoffs against the Carolina Hurricanes. My son and I can't stop quoting the David Pastrnak Dunkin' Donuts commercial: "Hey ref--check your voicemail. I think you missed some calls." As an official myself, I am usually loath to criticize referees and linesmen, but I'll make an exception for Monday night's egregious failure to see what was plainly a good goal.

And that was a lie anyway. I'm not at all loath to criticize NHL officials. I'm the opposite of loath.

*****
It's Thursday now. I'm ready to start my own personal summer right now, but I was hoping that the Washington Capitals wouldn't be starting their summer until mid-June. I don't have enough to do, and now I have to figure out which of the remaining teams to root for.

On January 22, 2017, the words "Tonight's attendance: 1.5 million" scrolled across the Jumbotron at American Airlines Center, home arena of the Dallas Stars. Dallas happened to be playing Washington that night, and so I happened to see it; and for trolling Donald Trump, the Stars earned a special place in my heart forever. They are still standing, so they're my team until next October. I still get to watch hockey, but it won't be the same. At least I have a good book to read.