September 13, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 176: I’m feeling so conflicted. Day to day, I feel like we have more than enough to share more generously with people who need a helping hand. Everyone else’s struggles remind me frequently how fortunate we are. But I worked my tail off to get here specifically because I am concerned about the murky future and my ability to work. It’s very important to give but I’m also responsible for keeping our own parachutes in good repair. Even with whatever work I do to improve my health, which I can only do now because I’ve been so aggressive with saving that we can afford some of that crucial healthcare, my baseline immune system is unreliable. I need to be able to step away from work earlier than later. Mortality aside, I don’t have good years in the tank. At best, they’re slightly less crappy than before years. They’re dominated by pain, fatigue, and limited range of motion. I want to have more freedom to use my precious energy only / mostly on what’s actually important to me and my family, which doesn’t include working a job. I feel selfish about taking care of myself financially. I shouldn’t. But I do.
In writing this, I just realized what it is. I feel selfish for taking care of myself first. If you told me that I had to look out for JB’s health future because they had chronic health issues, I would take on the world to make sure it was as secure as possible. If it was Smol or PiC on the line? Same thing. But because it’s me who is the “weak link”, well, I’m reverting to form and saying that I’m not good enough to be a priority.
Look at that, spotting an unhealthy pattern happening right there.
It’s wild that it’s hard for me to say: It’s ok to take care of myself. It’s ok to secure my future. It’s ok to make sure that I have choices even if I wasn’t thinking about making sure I wasn’t a burden on my kids in the future.
*****
We’re so grateful for the holiday weekend. I still had work to do but the reprieve was so much needed. We spent the whole weekend at home doing all the needed chores and trying to rest and reset.
Year 2, Day 177: Related to yesterday’s thoughts: My job isn’t actually a bad one, especially when I remember to put reasonable limits on the madness during times of extra stress, but I am definitely still reacting very negatively to the most minor provocations that at best deserve an eyeroll. I’m so tired of work. I’m also just so tired. This tiredness frequently puts me in the negative spiral mood: thinking that I wish we were further along in our FI journey so I could exercise the choice to not work for a long period of time. Getting mad thinking about all the money I wasted taking care of a lying, selfish grifter father because that much money invested back then would have made SUCH a massive difference in our choices today. I can’t even let myself run those numbers because to have the confirmation in numbers that it would have made it possible for us to have better choices during this terrible time makes me mad enough to spit.
Sadly, I can’t take a leave of absence and come back to this job. The team is too small to do without me and keep my job for me. I’m also very much not interested in any of the compromises I’d have to make for every other job out there, I’ve looked, so keeping this job is the least worst of all the available options that I am aware of. Sigh. Anyway, getting that off my chest periodically helps release that pressure and stop the If Only spiral by reminding myself I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time and now I’m doing the best I can too.
Part of me grumbles that I did a piss poor job back then so why should I take comfort now with the knowledge that maybe I don’t have all the relevant information and maybe I’m just in a perpetual cycle of screwing up but I suspect that’s a new bad spiral.
*****
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September 6, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 169: Oh Monday. PiC took the 630-930 am shift so I could take JB to school and then try to get some work done. I’m doing my best to stay focused in the time we have when Smol Acrobat is asleep. They had a rough go of it with the first nap, waking up after half an hour and crying inconsolably for an hour. Literally inconsolable, I changed their diaper, changed their sleep sack to a warmer one, offered a bottle, patted them, sang to them, rocked them, nothing. None of it helped. Eventually they physically pushed me away and I had to let them work it out on their own in the crib. I could only watch helplessly on the monitor. Thankfully they were clearly safe and just really tired, and eventually did pass out.
*****
I’m worried for my friends, near and far, affected by horrible COVID-related policies and threatened by wildfires. I miss my friend who is fighting a serious mental health battle and I worry about them. I’m worried for a loved one who seems to be making the same mistakes that have been a pattern all their life. I’m worried about my own sanity – my work has (temporarily) tripled and it’s not like there were enough hours in the day for the original work, which is piled atop my worries for JB’s safety at school and whatever is going to happen with this recall. There’s a lot of emotional turmoil and I’m trying to find moments of less turmoil rather than relief since I’ll just get angrier when I’m not relieved. I just want to stress bake cookies.
The emotion breaks out at odd times. Yesterday, I was stretching and just burst into tears. Smol Acrobat watched me with intent interest for a while and then started to laugh because faces are funny. Which in turn made me laugh a little.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was stretching today but the emotion surge was less intense.
Insomnia still plagues me intermittently through each night. I can catch a little sleep in naps now and again but I keep waking up and struggling to go back to sleep. Sleeping like a baby, indeed.
Year 2, Day 170: I’m starting to turtle up emotionally. It’s been too much turmoil and worry, too much racism and fascism and sexism.
*****
Smol’s daytime schedule seemed to be shifting to dropping the third nap, which worked out a bit better in giving us longer stretches at night. We were trying to go 3 hours between naps, it worked for a couple of days, then they reverted again to shorter naps during the day and needing three again. Which in turn meant less sleep at night and waking up at 5 am again. That’s truly what the doctor ordered! /sarcasm
PiC speculated that it’s to do with their brain development. They do seem to be trying to achieve another level of mobility which I’m absolutely not ready for.
***** (more…)
August 30, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 162: We’re still cautious about in person school but we’re also well aware that unlike our friends across the country, our district has at least some of the most needed mitigation strategies in place: universal mask mandate, they claim to have updated all the ventilation and to have an air purifier in every room (the latter two I want to see with my own eyes before believing it).
Naturally, Republican Californians had to try to make this darkest timeline even worse with the ridiculous recall election. Newsom is not the best governor ever but at least we have mask mandates. Not a single one of the candidates on the ballot inspires anything but disdain or disgust.
*****
I’m on Day 4 of not getting good sleep. At least last night was just interrupted sleep but not as pain-riddled as the previous 3 days. I had finally escalated to the heavy duty pain meds and that helped enough so that when I slept, it was relatively decent. But not nearly enough. I can usually function on moderate sleep deprivation. It gets tougher when it hits high sleep deprivation like it has now. I took a long rest both Saturday and Sunday but clearly I need another rest today.
It makes me wonder if I should try caffeine but that’s not going to give me more energy. It’ll just stave off sleepiness, which isn’t the issue, so that doesn’t help anything. Right? That’s how caffeine works?
*****
Because just doing my own work at twice the speed anyone else would isn’t enough, I had staffers out today so I had to cover for them. I made a couple executive decisions: I’d take care of most of their stuff, within reason, most of my stuff, and bump the rest to tomorrow. And I’m taking a short rest today. I’m not going to kill myself for work. I’m not going to use up my last dregs of energy and then be a growling monster at my family because I’m clean out of patience. Priorities.
*****
Meanwhile, in Smolville, Smol Acrobat done lost their little infant sleeping mind. They were showing all the signs of sleepiness, including doing their yelling at me that they do when it’s naptime. I comply and go through the whole routine. Do they sleep? They do not. They holler for 55 minutes. We tried three times to resettle them, finally feeding them some more formula, before they finally passed out. I do not know what broke there but it was a whole lot of mess.
Year 2, Day 163: Boy, I thought the past few days were rough. They were. But then last night was the worst. I caught two hours of sleep, then was stuck awake for the next five because of painsomnia and anxiety. I’m guessing the fatigue is why I spent most of the work day (counted only as the time spent in front of the computer, not the time I was minding Smol) in a state of being poised for flight. I just wanted to run away screaming. Pandemic normal, right?
***** (more…)
August 23, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 155: Yesterday was such a bad day with JB that the funk has followed me into today. I just want to lay my head down and be left alone for hours. Naturally, I cannot. We have school drop-off, work, more work, Smol to take care of, more MORE work, Smol to settle down for a nap, work, school pick up, JB’s after school lessons that will stand in for some version of aftercare to schedule.
I don’t know if it’s tempting fate but I filled almost in the rest of the school year’s dates on our calendar for JB. Who knows if these dates will stand. But I will want to know them later and what better time to do that then when I’m stressed and looking for administrative mindless scutwork?
I did sort out their tutoring and Spanish scheduling too, so I was able to start booking those out for a few weeks. This gives me a (faux) sense of control over something. Look at me! Planning things!
*****
I finished our two direct aid projects for friends and did tell myself that I’m not allowed to pick up another project for at least 24 hours. Will I be able to do that? WE. SHALL. SEE.
*****
We donated to the Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay to support their refugee resettlement efforts. This situation in Afghanistan hits really close to home. Our family had to escape their homeland after the US withdrew their troops after the fall of Saigon. One uncle who worked with the CIA disappeared forever, leaving behind his wife and three kids. No one has seen or heard from him since 1975. Another uncle was thrown into jail for decades for fighting for the “wrong” side. Most of my family had to flee under cover of night, embarking on a dangerous journey they were lucky to survive.
People deserve a safe place to live and I think we have a moral responsibility to extend that safety (dubious though it may feel when I look around at how citizens of this country have behaved in recent years).
Year 2, Day 156: I am forcing myself to wait at least until tomorrow before starting up another project. I do have plenty of work to do, I just don’t want to do it and I am clearly using these projects to help me feel a tiny bit better about a world that I strongly resent and dislike.
I’m realizing that I’m simmering at a high amount of rage every day. I haven’t been in this emotional space for a long time and I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until this weekend when JB and I had the worst most terrible-parenting interaction I’ve ever had and it’s finally sunk in that I’m so overtaxed, so filled with anger at the world, that I have lost every reservoir of patience.
I had to meet someone that a loved one has been seeing for a while and it was immediate red flags and I just want to yell nooooo but they won’t listen so there’s no point. Having been their near-daily support for years through similar bad situations, it was so hard to watch what appears to be them walking down the same path again. I’m also furious with some family because GET YOUR SHOT AUGH. The refugee situation in Afghanistan pushes some very personal buttons, as my family including my generation, were refugees after a war. (more…)
August 17, 2021
Nicole and Maggie got me thinking about why it is that I keep running down my academic history. They referred to them as achievements, actually, but when I started writing, I caught myself saying they weren’t achievements. It’s a long-running habit, I now realize. But why?
As an Asian and an immigrant’s kid, I was expected to work my butt off and be academically competitive. We had to do better than our parents so we could support ourselves, and then support them in their old age. That was the script, no questions asked. I did well enough until middle school. Going into high school, school got tougher. When I compared myself to most of my high school friends and peers, I didn’t even come close to their level of smarts and I always felt that difference even though no one treated each other differently over academics. While there were certainly small groups that were academically cutthroat, they were the exception, not the rule. That wasn’t my friends or our wider circles. They no more commented on my academics than I did to my friends who weren’t in the Honors track. It was simply not an issue. We didn’t have any nerd v jock dichotomy in our circles, either. Everyone was a bit of some combination of interests. We were honors students and athletes. We overlapped in band, orchestra, choir, sports (competitive and not), student government, yearbook and volunteerism. One of my best friends was in a completely different academic track and I view her accomplishments with respect. But not mine.
The same goes for college: we went to anywhere from community colleges to state colleges to Ivies. No one had any opinion on anyone else’s alma mater, aside from the (mostly joking) USC / UCLA rivalry. But the fact that I didn’t apply to a selective college, that I was not willing to put myself out there for the expected rejections, and that I mostly approached the process like a hermit crab trying to just keep in my shell to protect myself? I think I’m still ashamed of that. I’m still ashamed that I wasn’t willing to even try applying to a “better” school. So I put myself down. I diminish the very hard work that I put into college once I got there. I diminish the fact that I was able to graduate in four years from a good school where graduating in five years wasn’t uncommon. I diminish the fact that I managed that even while working double time at one job and holding two additional jobs. (more…)
August 16, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 148: Each Monday seems to take the preceding Monday as a challenge of one-upsmanship.
I was juggling time zones, time critical problems with our systems, onboarding new people, hiring new people, my regular work, and dealing with the school board trying to get the information we need to make the least-worst decision for JB’s upcoming school year. PiC had to take the bulk of parenting today as I was in deep for hours and only emerged to shovel several bites of food down around lunchtime and get back to work. I’m also juggling the ongoing tracking and orders for our latest Lakota family and organizing contributions for a former PF blogger who was recently diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia. Oh and I still need to wrap up the last part of JB’s teacher appreciation gifts before our 5 pm meeting with the superintendent, and our 6 pm call with the school.
My urge to stress shop at JetPens is rising.
My urge to stress eat cheesecake is definitely rising.
We didn’t wrap up the night until well after 9, and it felt like it’d been a week in a day.
Year 2, Day 149: We had our dry run walk to the school today with the whole family in the morning to see how early we have to leave. We can make it in ten minutes handily which is good because I’ve got a bum ankle from yesterday and now a bum shoulder today.
Half the day was school prep. We had the meeting with the teacher, we had to cut filters for JB’s masks, we had to organize their to-go area by the door so that they won’t waste all morning running around trying to figure out what they need. I wrote a list to be posted on the wall and made them a backpack tag with the same list so they can check their belongings when they leave the house and check again before they leave school. All day I was stressed but I realized midday that I’d gone to Ice Mode. I desperately wanted to break down and cry but I literally could not show any emotion. Except some anger. Which I repressed. Of course.
I’m highly conflicted. I have no way to assess the risk in numerical terms. We have gotten a lot of last minute information about the mitigation layers. They have said that all classrooms will have a portable air filter, that hand sanitizer will be supplied, the desks aren’t spaced apart but they do still have little barriers up, the doors and windows are supposed to stay open unless it’s raining, everyone is to be masked indoors and outdoors. They will be eating outdoors unless it’s raining. It all sounds like it should be reasonable measures except for the part where they’re going to be indoors with 24 other people for 5-6 hours a day and that’s a lot of people who are seeing a lot of people who are also seeing a lot of people. They have also confirmed that it’s actually always been a legal requirement for them to inform parents of close contacts within classrooms so the principal was being shady as hell acting like they didn’t know what that protocol was. It’s unfortunate but this school is one of the preferred schools in the district for this age and she clearly knows it and acts accordingly. I have been completely unimpressed by her leadership through this pandemic.
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August 10, 2021
I was looking at JB and was struck by the sense of how much has changed in the past 18 months. I can’t call this a before/after yet, not with the Delta variant having so recently raged through India and now appearing in California.
With all that’s gone by, I want to record my observations of Jan 2020 to now, a whole year and a half later, before I completely forget what the before times were like.
Current Events
Before: In January, I was obsessively reading all the news about COVID. I don’t think we actually knew that it was coming for us just yet. Though I didn’t truly have the energy to spare, my alarms were all going off about this latest virus and I was starting to hunker down mentally. We were slowly adding to our food stores and I was evaluating our cash holdings. We were impacted by the shutdown in China at work and I suspected it would get worse before it got better.
Now: I had no idea how much worse. I worried but I truly didn’t know how horribly the US response to the virus would be bungled, and for how long, and how politics would dominate the response to a global health crisis. I’m sick to my soul with how broken this country is. We have vaccines now and a good swath of the country is vaccinated but huge groups still aren’t. We have people in our families who still refuse to get vaccinated and I just don’t get it. The Delta variant is coming through and I don’t know how badly that’ll affect the remaining folks who aren’t vaccinated, whether by choice or not.
Before: We had no idea what was going to happen for school. Daycare had shut down and school was mere months away. I was grateful that we didn’t have to deal with it yet in the early months, hopeful that we’d have a reasonable response in time to have some kind of a school year come the fall.
Now: Wrong. And now we are heading into the new school year with some states going out of their way to put kids at risk (Texas, Oklahoma), and us in CA having to be grateful for scraps like “at least we have a universal mask mandate for the moment but that could go away too” and not having any good alternatives if we have vulnerable family who are higher risk. This. Sucks.
Family
Before: We were a 3 human, 2 dog household.
Now: Smol Acrobat burst onto the scene and is growing by leaps and bounds. I’m both glad I know that things will keep changing rapidly and stunned by how quickly it flies by once the hardest parts are behind us. How do we have a small baby that can eat solids and sit up and try to crawl already? Soon after, we lost our sage and wonderful Seamus.
Before: JB was a fresh minted 5 year old that needed ALL THE ATTENTION. Play with me, play with me, read to me, draw this for me because I can’t do it, very much attached to PiC, meh about me. They were loving swim lessons and playdates, and the birthday parties I had no interest in. They still had a lot of little kid features. Their fondest dream was to go to kindergarten.
Now: We have a seasoned 6 year old that can still be quite attention-needy but ALSO can: do chores on their own initiative, draw a whole boatload of cute things, read chapter books, ride a bike, ride a scooter, push a stroller, get the dog to obey simple commands (come, sit, lay down, leave it). They are forming lots of opinions, reflecting tons of things that we say back to us, sometimes in thoughtful ways and sometimes not. They’ve achieved a level of confidence with their art that I love to see, and they’re learning to type, to write more legibly and to compose their own correspondence. The changes in their hands and feet strike me the most. They’ve always been tall by comparison to say, me, but seeing their hands lengthen into real kid hands and lose that little kid chubbiness is really startling. They used to daydream constantly about what it’d be like to have a baby and now that reality is here, they’re thoroughly enamored with their baby sibling. They’re looking forward to first grade; their kindergarten teacher sucked most of the joy out of their first experience of school so we’re hoping for a better teacher this year.
Before: I was climbing the walls worrying over how to handle the shift from full time daycare with 12 hours of coverage possible to a school day schedule. The only aftercare we knew about, that was affiliated with the school, was by lottery and oversubscribed many times over.
Now: No aftercare? Eh, fine. We’ve been through the gauntlet with fulltime work and zero childcare. We’ve found many ways to remotely connect and educate JB, and many ways to entertain or let them entertain themselves. As long I continue to work remotely and am physically present, I’m not going to bother fussing with the aftercare lottery.
Before: We had our perfect Seamus overseeing everyone, and goofy Sera who could barely handle her ownself.
Now: Our hearts are sore. Sera is coming along with her training. She can tolerate seeing other dogs sometimes.
Before: PiC was miserable at his job. It had evolved several times over the years and the last evolution transformed the job into a very poor fit. He did the best he could but he was annoyed all the time and second guessing himself constantly.
Now: PiC changed jobs and while he’s still stressed over learning a new job and the workload, he’s in a very different emotional place. I’m really glad for him.
Before: I sometimes felt like I was losing my grip on the reins at work. I probably wasn’t really, but I didn’t feel like I had my arms around my team the way I wanted to for them to be well supported and operating efficiently and effectively.
Now: Being on leave reaffirmed my value at work and reaffirmed that I no longer value my work as a high priority in my life. An odd juxtaposition.
Before: I hadn’t had a haircut in about a year and I was too lazy to get it cut in January when PiC and JB went.
Now: I haven’t had a haircut in 2.5 years and I’m still definitely too tired, busy, and lazy to get it cut. My hair is two feet long. I’m only five feet tall. This is getting awkward. At least I think it’s hit the maximum length it’ll grow. If it kept growing, I’d be in danger of being an imitation Rapunzel.
Before: We’d had a long visit with family and friends, I was socially tapped out and physically extremely fatigued. The physical fatigue had pushed me to despair. Thankfully my mentor gave me that final nudge I needed to seek help with my health through therapy.
Now: Therapy has been transformative for my mental and physical health. It’s not a cure and it’s not banished all pain. It’s simply eased my suffering in wholly unexpected ways. It’s also challenged me to my core.
Household
Before: We used to run the dishwasher if we had hosted a meal with company or maybe once a month to make sure it got used.
Now: We run the dishwasher 2-3 times a week.
Before: We had strict one hour of TV on the weekends only rule.
Now: We joked that the rule went out the window. We sometimes allow half an hour of TV on the weekdays and an hour every weeknight after dinner. They were obsessed with it for a while but we’ve always enforced the rule about balance – there’s no binge watching. 3 episodes of something max, then move on to something else. We made a few mistakes letting the TV time run a little long, and sometimes it was for my survival, physically but JB’s intense obsession has worn off. They love watching still but it’s not the end of the world if we veto it some nights. We were starting to think of how we’ll pull back but I’m sure that some of it will just happen naturally as they start getting back into school and activities.
Money
Before: I was definitely sick of the mental chaos from the rental property. That disruption was probably contributing to my sense of unease. I really hate feeling like I am not making the best possible choices for our family.
Now: I’m still VERY glad we sold the rental. I could not imagine dealing with that mess on top of everything else.
Before: I was stockpiling cash.
Now: I’m making myself let go of part of the stockpile and even finally set up auto-investments to our brokerage. I missed out on a good deal of growth last year because I was worried about the stability of our jobs. My risk assessment at the time was that we had no idea whether either of our companies were financially stable enough to weather the unknown that was ahead of us without layoffs. It was a good surprise that both our companies had done a good enough job of saving and investing that they were able to take the hit of 2020 without cutting headcount. I won’t make our financial plans based on hoping that key people at work aren’t incompetents or fools but so long as the current leadership remains in place, it seems safe to assume that they will probably still make similar kinds of plans going forward.
Before: We were paying for full time daycare for an older child and money felt TIGHT.
Now: We’re getting ready to pay for part time daycare for an infant and as I’m getting ready for that line item, where the heck all our money has been going?? Yes, I do know what we spend on but I still can’t believe how fast it adds up.
:: I’m sure I’m forgetting things. What’s on your before / after?