Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (151)
April 24, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 24: The kids have been deeply into building JB’s old magnetiles set and a bin of 40 year old Legos handed down from our friend last summer. This is tempting me to buy a larger set of magnetiles that are on sale. But do I really want another set of magnetiles in the house? Yeeess … we could build taller! wider! more!
Do I want more stuff in the house that I’m constantly decluttering? Dammit. No. The answer is no, self, no more magnetiles. Even though it’s a lot of fun.
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My fibro flare continues. It feels like I’m a walking lava monster. I’m currently theorizing that this is a reaction to the cold-like virus that Smol Acrobat brought home last week. I haven’t had symptoms other than my own green snot, but Smol’s been a dribbly snot factory this entire time. Not that it matters a how or why this flare-up started, I’m just speculating while grumping about pain that drains all my daytime energy and doesn’t let me sleep at night. Rude.
My therapist had offered me this link to guided meditations and we tried a short one. I’ve been pretty jumbled up recently. I know things are ticking off my anxiety (less alone time than usual, my routines have been and will stay upset for at least a month, anticipating an unpleasant upcoming week with unpleasant people, I’m covering for absent staff, etc).
I know that all this transitional stuff knocking off my routine is putting me off my stride. I know what the problem is. But knowing doesn’t dissipate the tension it generates. The stuff still fundamentally sets off my fight or fight reflex which cannot be satisfied, so there’s a self sustaining feedback problem going on. The guided meditation helped a little bit so I’ll be trying to do a short one each day to see if it reminds my body how to let go a little.
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I didn’t know that Smol Acrobat knew how to say: handbag, castle, medicine. That was a surprise!
They’ve been trotting around for the past few days saying ohhhkay (in a really mellow tone) to everything and it’s weirdly cute.
Year 3, Day 25: Whoops. So it’s Picture Day for Smol. We don’t usually care about school pictures but in the spirit of fairness, agreed to get a small package for them like we did for JB. One time in their daycare “career” per kid. We had to pay for the package ahead of time (which I thought was sort of silly, and that was foreshadowing for you).
JB absolutely loved their photo shoot but that was pre-COVID, we were able to be there, and toddler JB was a total showboat for the camera.
Poor Smol Acrobat found the whole experience frightening. We couldn’t be there for it. The big flashbulbs were popping. They were separated from their peer group and taken to a strange room with strangers behind big cameras. I was 0% surprised that they cried and refused to take the picture. Poor kid. We decided it wasn’t worth distressing them to try again. We get plenty of candid photos.
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I’m happy about two food treats we splurged on: a po’boys and beignets lunch and a stack of banh mi that’ll make three meals for everyone. That cost $109.
I’m equally happy about a surprise Poshmark sale. A perfectly new-with-tags dress I can’t wear leaves my closet and $16 comes back to me. This only thrills me down to my toes so I suppose it’s fair that it’s not much money compared to our spending on food.
Twitter was good tonight too. It gave me this thread of my favorite kind of accidental eavesdropping, when people are talking to pets/animals (DAMN, @baddestmamajama went private, I hope she’ll be public again later so we can enjoy the thread again), this amazing cartwheeling teeballer, this kitten, and this commentary on the nexus between madness and gender. And this cat.
This is the good stuff I’ve been missing.
Year 3, Day 26: Our wind feels like getting ice water dumped over your head. *shiver*
Testing my physical limits today, to see if I’m through this flare, and the results are mixed. My muscles are still upset, my bones are less so. That’s a bit of progress but I’m still relatively sidelined. So even though I got through my critical work early enough that I could have gone with JB to their library activity, my body was staying planted right here.
I used this time to process an Old Navy return. I’d bought myself a shirt, in addition to clothes for gifts, but it didn’t fit right. Organized more clothes for the Lakota Giving Box I’m filling, I’m hoping to stuff it to the brim with jackets the end of next month. Sent a Coffee on Ko-Fi to an artist because I want to support them a bit but I can’t afford their super high quality jewelry. It’s amazing art but the pieces that are my style are wildly outside my price range.
Who doesn’t feel this tired? While I’ve always had prepper tendencies by nature, after all we’ve already been through, I’m not volunteering to navigate through a post-apocalyptic world.
I posted this on Instagram and it may be the most shared clip of my stand up ever and that’s fun… but also disturbing because thousands of people are saying “SAME” we are not well pic.twitter.com/DVX3FDtS80
— Sara Schaefer (@saraschaefer1) April 18, 2023
Year 3, Day 27: I feel ~100 lbs denser this morning. As if every part of me is exponentially heavier and thus requires more energy to move.
But the good parts of this morning: one load of laundry, done! one dental cleaning, done! (I love the dental chair, it’s so soft and cushy) one UPS drop off return, done!
After a couple hours of intense work (and an ill advised 2/3s of a delicious chocolate hazelnut piroshky), naturally, I crashed. Since I couldn’t actually tap out, so I just kept slumping down further in my chair.
Year 3, Day 28: This tweet gave me a good laugh today.
I disagree. Wealthy people might spend less money on attire proportional to their income/cash flow but I do not think that wealthy people, as a group, spend less in absolute dollars consistently enough to make this a rule of thumb. I think spending on clothes is much more related to each person’s inclinations and career and a whole host of other things that aren’t defined by their money.
I have a handful of wealthy friends. The ultra-wealthy think nothing of spending $500-1000 on a single high quality piece of clothing. Or they DO think about it and it’s worth it to them.
If I look at myself as an example of being relatively financially comfortable, my conclusion is the same. I came from being deep in the hole, paying off so many tens of thousands of dollars of debt for my parents, to being reasonably comfortable on our two salaries. Mostly, I dress the same as I did back then. Jeans, t-shirts, and a sweatshirt. I still wear the sweatshirt my cousin gave me back in 2006.
Yes, we can both afford to dress better. No, getting to this level of “rich” did NOT give either of us better taste. We do have a few very high quality pieces. I bought him a nice watch (nowhere near $1000), I bought myself a few pieces of clothing from Elhoffer Design. We both have very warm coats. I do own more cute earrings but that’s more about being able to wear them without an allergic reaction and less about having money.
But other than that? We are walking proof that how you start is often how you carry on. Making enough money to make ends meet and a little more did not come with a magic style boost for either of us, and we don’t mind! He likes his free t-shirts and I like my three identical black sweatshirts I bought during pregnancy and a pair of athleisure pants from ten years ago. Money =/= magic.
Related thought: more generally, if you’re poor and hope to succeed in higher income fields (barring computer / tech because that’s probably a weird industry for dress norms), you probably need to dress more nicely than you might normally. My friend who entered the i-banking field from a non-wealthy background had to drastically upgrade her wardrobe in order to look like she belonged. When I entered management, I had to dress up much more formally to look my age and be taken seriously. Now that I’m senior management, I’m back in my preferred uniform and my reputation speaks far louder than my hoodie.
Anyway I’m not trying to make any academic points here. I just think it’s as silly as the proclamations that only poor people buy new cars or buy new phones or whatever the current faintly derogatory declaration is.
If you earn enough, that’s what is going to make you wealthier, not just abstaining from new technology and looking like a slob.
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It was a beautiful sunny, even warm!, day and that went a long way to boosting my mood. I’m soaking it in and holding it as a hedge against next week when I will be dealing with some Unpleasant People TM. Wish me luck?
Good luck!
Thank you!
Good luck!
We don’t own magnetiles, though there was a period when I considered getting them. My kid LOVED them at the library, where they had two enormous bins-worth. I ended up deciding to let them be a library-only thing– expense + cleanup.
Re: the clothing thing: I have a couple of thoughts. First is that they’ve really cherry-picked their examples of who the “rich” are. Four white men, three of whom I know for sure are tech-wealth. (I don’t recognize the 4th guy.) I can guarantee you that less-white, less-male, less-tech have different norms.
Second is that the way those particular tech-wealth men dress still has appearance-signaling built in. It’s just different appearance-signaling, which is apparently too subtle for that particular twitter poster.
Thanks!
JB loved them at daycare too, so much so that we couldn’t say no when they were gifted. I’m glad because Smol is enjoying them so much too.
Yep, I agree with all that! People jump to conclusions so much when it comes to wealth and appearances.
G’luck!
Also, for me, this helped Re:Unpleasant People . . . when I realized that their *normal* mode of conversation is unpleasant, so that them getting all testy and angry wasn’t about me. Like, if I were that confrontational or adamant, I’d remember it for days/weeks, but for them, it’s just another conversation — the way they roll. So in the moment, I could better divorce my own emotional reaction from theirs, in a way I don’t with Pleasant People.
No idea if this applies in your situation; it’s just memory bubbles floating to the surface.
This got caught and held by an overzealous spam filter!
That’s a helpful tool to put in my pocket, thanks for sharing.
Good luck!!!! I hope you feel relief when your time with the troublesome people is over.
Alice said everything I wanted to say about those tech bros. That look is deliberately cultivated and intentionally says a lot.
Thank you!!
I’m doing that thing of focusing on how wonderful it’ll feel when it’s over again to help me get through. I think it, plus some guided meditation each day, will make a big difference.