By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (219)

August 12, 2024

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 5, Day 124: My struggle with brain fog for the past decade has routinely made me feel akin to Charlie from Flowers for Algernon on the back end of the experiment: my mental capabilities have have peaked and now I was just on an inexorable downward slide. That was before I had a term for what was happening when my brain felt like cotton and I almost physically struggled to get my brain to work or think. These days, I know what it is but that doesn’t help the slight depression that sets in when my own personal Karl the fog rolls over. This is one of the reasons I started Duolingo, out of a hope that maybe the language practice will both sharpen my skills a bit and maybe get the brain synapses snapping enough to ward off the fog.

I’ve been lucky to be clear for a few weeks, but I can feel it edging in again. Sigh. I didn’t miss mini-Karl. Fitting that it’s rolled in thick, along with SF-Karl.

Getting back into the swing of things of work again has meant dealing with the height of people’s incompetence. I knew the pendulum would eventually swing this way, but hoped it would be a lot further off in the future. I published this tee and tote design to let off some steam.

Trainer time: we agreed to start with four small workouts a week to see how that goes. This week it’ll be Sun/Tues/Thurs/Sat to give me a rest day in between all workouts at first. Yesterday’s was broken up across the day: a 14 minute walk / 2 sets of 4 modified pushups (my wrists hated that) / 2 sets of 5 lateral raises (not bad), 3 sets of 15 second planks (I didn’t give myself much recovery time in between, no wonder the last two felt so much harder). Today is my rest day and the way I’m crackling, boy howdy. Nothing hurts too much yet so we’re going to not push it. That’s the whole motto of this training work: don’t push it. Consistency is our goal.

Year 5, Day 125: All Neil Gaiman works have been evicted from my shelf. They’re all in a box to be labeled with something appropriately scathing. I won’t be angry at myself for believing he was a reasonably decent person at the time I was a fan and enjoyed his works, the Death of the Endless is my headcanon, but I hate that he betrayed everyone’s trust so badly.

Work was sixteen kinds of frustrating today so I consciously chose to work on a personal project at night instead of putting in free overtime. I’m making packing cubes for the kids. I had completely forgotten how much I hate sewing corners. Hate hate hate. Jabbed myself several times with the pins and sewed over the zipper a few times trying to navigate those corners. By the end, I’d attached the zipper to the side fabric and the top fabric but was completely disgruntled instead of proud. The seams are hideous and the top fabric is trying to fray. Once I attach the bottom piece of fabric, it’ll be done. Ugly but done. I’d had a moment earlier today where I thought about auctioning a set of packing cubes or zipper pouches for a Lakota fundraiser but that’s going to have to sit on the back shelf until I get much better at this. How much of the problem is my fabrics mismatch? This time I’m combining a soft fuzzy material with canvas instead of a plain basic cotton and canvas. Maybe I measured better last time.

Trainer time: my first assigned exercise was 2 sets of squats, up to ten reps per set. Ok, no problem. I watched the video on form and set to it. It felt so easy so I was cranking them out but as I got to 6, 7 I remembered that this is my first week of exercise in decades. Also that pacing thing? Oh yeah. Stopped at 7. Gave myself a full minute of recovery time so I could fetch my lunch. Did another 6 being mindful I shouldn’t blow it all out in my first week as I am wont to do, and those 6 felt much harder. My legs had recovered enough from that initial set to say nope don’t like it.

It took two hours for the pain and fatigue to pass. I could still feel the strain by the time I wrapped up

Year 5, Day 126: I grew up hearing this song but never knew the name of it, or the lyrics. Thanks to The Brothers Sun for bringing it back to me. It’s first nostalgic and then painful because my earliest memories of it are my parents singing it together and that’s a period of time I just don’t know what to do with.

“The parent is always the parent. The child is always the child.” Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. I didn’t expect that bit of therapy.

Trainer time: Today’s a rest day. Stopping after the one exercise instead of pushing through for pride’s sake yesterday was ultimately the right call. I’m very tired today but not so wiped that I can barely function. Tomorrow, I’ll dial way back on the reps in each set so that I can do all of the 3 or 4 planned exercises across the day. Also it’s best if I don’t do them all in one go, I think, that way my body can’t surf on endorphins in the early sets and then crash like it usually does when I’m doing something fun.

Year 5, Day 127: Happy surprise, a few people donated to the Lakota Pine Ridge Giving Project today! ❤️ Not sure how they found me but happy they did.

Also, I got so many compliments on my Reading tee-shirt and Svaha shirt that I refreshed the design: Read Recklessly shirt and tote.

Trainer time! Still dragging this morning but I started early with one of the three exercises anyway: lateral raises. I like these! I did my modified pushups in the afternoon, my lying leg raises in the evening. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that doing it broken up this way is “wrong” but so far, doing it this way means I’m better able to gauge how much a single exercise has taken out of me before I completely go over the cliff. It can take a couple hours for that to sink in, so I’m hoping that after a while, I’ll be able to join up two sets of exercises further down the line, then all three or four, into a single session without more than this level of fatigue. There’s definitely more fatigue but it’s still bearable.

Year 5, Day 128: I had an awful nightmare where I lost track of JB and Smol Acrobat in an airport due to a series of terrible decisions I made in the dream that I would never make in waking life. I remember at the end of the dream asking myself why did I decide to do that?? It makes no sense! And it got me thinking about what my subconscious is anxious about (I’m a terrible parent?) and then about my mom and how she was at age 10 already carrying the responsibilities of an adult. About how the only thing she wanted was to feel loved later in her life but I was so ill-equipped to offer that to her because I didn’t even recognize how to show or accept unconditional love myself. Love is always conditional in my subconscious, when it comes to me. My kids only love me because I kept them alive, for example.

So I woke in a very emotionally ruffled state. Sadly, so did Smol Acrobat. I shook it off after trading terrible nightmare stories with a couple friends on Bluesky but they decidedly did not. They reacted to every little jostle with tears, and when JB helped them put their lovie to bed so they could go to breakfast, that also caused a waterfall. (A little related: Must resume my search for ice packs for the kids and for myself that can stay in the freezer longterm. My last couple of tries were returned since the instructions said the packs could only be in the freezer for a couple hours at a time. That’s not helpful!)

Anyway the latest on the UHC FSA debacle: after the Department of Labor questioned their practices, they immediately processed the claims again, however, we couldn’t log in to access the Explanation of Benefits. We tried 20 times on different browers and computers and internet connections: sometimes it would almost log in and then kick us out.

When PiC finally got someone on the phone to see why the log in wasn’t working today, they claimed that the username was case sensitive and that we weren’t entering the right combination of upper and lowercase. Except that we most certainly didn’t make any changes since we called them, and we definitely would not have changed it to the combination that they claim is the right one, so I’m positive that that isn’t the whole truth, and also that someone on their side changed it out of spite if it was indeed changed. Because if it had actually been changed, why would the log in work enough to get us partly logged in and then log us back out when we tried to access anything? That’s not how logins work.

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