By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (153)

May 8, 2023

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 38: JB has been sleeping in Smol Acrobat’s room weeknights and the unlooked-for side effect is Smol gets JB up in the morning far earlier than their usual. This has slowly shifted everyone’s waking time earlier. Usually the kids blow that time playing because we can’t get it together, which is fun for them but exponentially less fun for us when we have to interrupt their play to head out. Then everyone is cranky.

This is the first morning we’ve intentionally left as early as possible, like we did last school year, to drop off both kid which means the work day can finally start at a reasonably early hour. If we can make this our new routine, we might all be a little less stressed and cranky by the end of the day.

~~~~~

It’s May 1st! I don’t know why that feels so portentous or something but it does. Also my neck really hurts and that feels like an ill portent. Why are heads so heavy?

~~~~~

A few more checklist items for the Wells Fargo account bonuses: setting up the $1000 direct deposits to the new accounts (done), linking those accounts to an outside-Wells account so I can transfer all our money back out later (done), checking if my qualifying spend had posted to the CC yet so I can pay that off (checked, not yet). I LIKE doing these bonus things if I can find the energy, it yields so much ongoing dopamine.

Year 3, Day 39: BOO 5 am wake ups with Smol. I zombie parented for an hour until PiC took over at 6 am. I crawled back into bed, sure I’d regret not staying up, but that rest helped my neck to feel about 70% better. What a huge relief that is!

~~~~~

I can feel negative self talk creeping up: I’m not doing enough, I’m not generous enough, I’m not good enough.

Shush, brain. I’ve packed four giant packing boxes of goods to donate to Pine Ridge as of today, thanks to a friend dropping off a van load of goods on the weekend, and I haven’t even gone on my coat gathering expedition yet. I hope we have enough boxes for the coats by the end of May. I’m disappointed that the Giving Box shipping labels have gone up 50% to $30 per label, though. That’ll cut into our funds much more quickly. I’d also like to preserve funds for back to school shopping for the reservation and Red Shirt School, so that increased rate is not my friend.

The negative self talk is my brain’s response to exposure to Stressful People and to cutting our savings rates and tightening up our spending temporarily. My subconscious gets irrational when the savings rate or our spending power go down, even when it’s intentional and strategic. Fear, and then fear of failure, play up no matter how irrational that may be. I’m worrying that we will be caught flatfooted somehow, by something I can’t anticipate, and the perfectionism / hypervigilance wants to drive the car. I hate not being able to give money freely this month while I reassess, and that overshadows everything that I am doing. This is a pernicious reflex and I need a whole lot of practice unflexing it.

~~~~~

This is data back up week! I should be doing this on a schedule rather than just when I feel like it but that’s just how things work right now. Yesterday, I backed up 3 years of photos onto my external hard drive. Now I’m transferring them into our cloud setup. One month at a time. I’m stuck in 2018 for the next week or so, then I have 2019, 2020, and most of 2021. JB was still a cute toddler and Seamus was in his prime. Little JB walking Seamus. Seamus and Sera forming a circle with their sleeping bodies. Seamus sitting on my lap. Memories. I miss him so much.

Year 3, Day 40: Rain again. That reminds me! I put down the recommended ant bait last weekend (thank you all!) and have been watching it work. The ants swarmed bait, too much bait because I read the instructions and then promptly made up my own theories on how to put it down which were, of course, wrong. After a few more days of wandering scouts, they seem to have died down. They were active in other parts of the house too but I wanted to wait a week before scouting a likely location for putting down a more sensible amount of bait if still needed. If they came from different colonies, I’ll need to. If they all come from one giant far-roving colony (🤞) then I won’t.

~~~~~

Wear the ghosty boo-sheet shirt, have a boo-sheet day!

I ran into a local friend after school dropoff and got the bad news that they’re moving WAAAAAY way out of town. It’s not as bad as JB’s last friend who left the state entirely but it was still a blow. We hung out with them a lot last school year and enjoyed their company. It’s hard to make local parent/child friends where all the parts work well. 🙁 It was wet and gloomy all day. I somehow have a cut on the side of my tongue. The kids cut up all evening long down to the last minute of being put to bed. Everyone was grumpy. I fled to the shower for some much needed alone time and the acid reflux started.

Tomorrow, I wear a different shirt!!

Year 3, Day 41: I have begun voting my proxy votes for the companies that I own stocks in this year. Really never had the time or inclination to do this before but I want to use every tool I have at my disposal to influence any possibly good changes at the companies we own shares of. What I’ve noticed is that the Board always recommends against shareholder proposals. The shareholder proposals I’ve seen so far mostly have to do with human rights, DEI efforts, and other generally good things. So at the moment, I take a rather jaundiced view of the Board’s recommendations to vote against them. Wherever it makes sense to me and it’s not working with right wing conservative groups, I vote for shareholder proposals.

~~~~~

Hell of a long day. After dinner, we had to get everyone out the door again for Open House. We made it there ok but I felt completely physically deflated. I was just utterly peopled out. I had to talk to people at school dropoff, and then at picking, and then again at JB’s self defense class. Then again after dinner? Just too much!

Year 3, Day 42: Midlife…not crisis…but maybe maundering. Sometimes I look up and it feels like everyone’s lives have grown so much in the past few years and ours haven’t. It feels like our little family has mostly been at a standstill trying to navigate work, life’s daily demands, COVID in a world that doesn’t care about disabled and immunocompromised people and POC, plus all the things we have to fight politically. Sometimes it feels like I’m waistdeep in quicksand trying to keep us from sinking any further but not making much progress. Meanwhile people we know (sort of) are publishing books, getting promoted, moving, changing jobs, getting TV shows, etc. It’s not clear what my gut identifies as “acceptable growth”, though.

Is a change of scenario really growth or is it just same problems, different city? I don’t know. And of course everything is relative. Taking another perspective, we’ve been incredibly lucky to be stable. We’ve been incredibly lucky to keep our jobs, to stay relatively healthy (for certain values of health: no COVID at least though yes so many winter viruses, my chronic stuff is the same), to be together even with some rough patches.

Just as many people have been incredibly ill, struggling with Long COVID or cancer, lost their jobs, had relationships fall apart. Mind I never think of divorce as a bad thing, I think it’s amazing and wonderful that we CAN have a legal exit from a relationship that is falling apart. It’s still a big stressor to go through that transition.

I don’t think that I think there’s some template for success or living a good life. But maybe my subconscious still does? And maybe that’s why sometimes I wonder if I am living a good enough life, or what I’m doing and why.  If only there were clear concrete markers for “good” and “enough.” Like I said, maundering. Usually focusing on the day to day is fine but the zoomed out view isn’t so easy to handle, emotionally. It’s probably brought on by a few sad things. A local friend is moving away, a long time dear friend maybe doesn’t want to be friends anymore but I’m not sure, it’s a complicated situation, and then this (mortality related) coming up yesterday:

I went to a deceased friend’s blog while I was missing her and it led to one of those terrible Trojan! Hacker! Something! pages instead. And that shouldn’t have been a surprise but it did trigger an extra wave of sadness. I had put a tech savvy friend in charge of my digital assets in case of unexpected death but I do wonder if I’d want, or if it’d be worth, asking them continue to pay for the site after 14+ years of blogging. I do wonder if it’s even worth keeping the blog up. It’s meaningful to me but so many readers have come and gone, is it worth preserving since I’m still pseudonymous?

I’m feeling pretty disconnected from the people I care about and don’t know how to reconnect.

Do y’all have end-of-life plans for your social media/digital life?

Do you ever feel all / any of this? Does it help you more to zoom in to small details and focus on that, or out to an even bigger picture for perspective?

Sharing is caring!

Email

Twitter

Pinterest

0