proteanme

I used to be such a good sleeper. I fell asleep. I stayed asleep. Around 10 years ago that changed. I started waking myself up a lot moving around the bed, constantly changing positions. Then menopause hit, bringing night sweats, which are impossible to sleep through. Now, as I close in on 60, I’m just aging, and research shows that aging means you often have a harder time falling asleep and staying asleep.

Even as night sweats have lessened in intensity, aging has not, thankfully, as the alternative to not aging is a grim option. But this not very good sleep situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Most nights I get shitty sleep, waking with racing thoughts or a broken heart or startled by fear.

That was the case last night. At 2:30 and 4:30, I was awake enough that I considered going out to the couch or the day bed in the back room to read or listen to a podcast. This is the third I’ve awoken like this this week. I tried the day bed the first time and the couch the second, and I tossed and turned the rest of the night.

Predictably, I woke up tired this morning. Low buzz of irritation and anxiety right beneath the sleepy surface. And a perfect backdrop to do my part in escalating a disagreement with MTB about going to the grocery store, into a fight. It was stupid. I felt shitty. MTB felt shitty. The shitty feeling casting a shadow into the afternoon, long after the fight was over.

I think MTB and I are doing pretty good managing our lives together in our small house, with 2 dogs, 1 of whom can be ALOT at night when she devolves into a barking spell that lasts an hour or so. But we can’t do KIT (keeping it together) all the time. I’m not immune to the crummier parts of myself. And I’m only really aware, at least helpfully aware, of my diminished capacity in hindsight.

It’s better now. I wrote this blog. MTB is doing yoga. I’m going to make a pot of black beans for the second week in a row.

I should be outside. It’s partly sunny. The temperature is warming up. MTB is working away in the backyard, bringing her botanical vision to life. She’s a god damn garden genius. It’s gonna be an oasis back there.

But I am sitting at the one desk we have. Reading news, window shopping online, listening to podcasts. Despair. I feel it right there, under the skin. We stopped the world and it’s collapsing in on itself.

The two retail shops closest to us that are open are a gun shop and weed shop. How did gun shops become essential businesses? Rhetorical question, I know. Americans are gun obsessed. Our minds have become so twisted or so defeated by firearm fanaticism that we can’t even bring ourselves to do one fucking meaningful thing to protect kids. I’m talking teenagers, adolescents, children. You know.

Some states are trying to use the pandemic to ban abortions, which is a disgusting abuse of power, by the way. But no governors are using the pandemic for gun control, which is pathetic. The NRA, which was losing some clout, is newly invigorated. Gun and ammunition sales are sky rocketing. Gun control is a public health issue. We aren’t just having a global public health crisis. We are in below ground zero public health crisis. In the upside down. But god forbid, a mother fucker can’t go buy a god damn gun.

Our dog won’t stop barking at me. I’m on a zoom call with MD (we do a weekly writing group) and our dog Billie is furiously barking. I think she gets fired up by all the voices coming out of the computer. I tried earbuds tonight. But then MTB came in the room carrying her computer or phone and someone was talking out of that device. Barking ensued.

I’ve stopped talking to write and Billie has stopped barking. A miracle.

I was on a work meeting video call today, and the person I was meeting with has a young child who had discovered the doorbell. Ding dong. Ding dong. Ding dong . . . and it’s not like my colleague could mute herself, as our meeting required conversation. We both laughed. We still got our work done.

I’m on a lot of work video call meetings and there’s something very endearing about seeing my colleagues in their homes, often in a sweatshirt, mussy hair, dogs barking, kids walking through the frame in the background. Inevitably, someone is eating something that involves unwrapping something in polypropylene wrapper, like a power bar, or pulling something out of a polypropylene bag, like a potato chip, and the bag or the bar is sitting right by the computer mic, and the noise from polypropylene is exponentially loud.

The performative work self has been undone, at least at my job. We’re getting work done, a boat load of work, but without wearing our work facade, which in the past could get in the way of getting work done. It’s fitting. Hunker down. Get real. Get shit done. It would be weird if it were any other way.

Did I brush my teeth today? That question pops up in my brain almost every afternoon. I don’t like to brush my teeth before I have my coffee and these days I have my coffee right away when I first get up. And if it’s a work day, I just start working while I’m waiting for the water to boil.

When I was going into the office, I would brush my teeth first thing when I got up and then have my first cup of coffee at my desk. As a bike commuter, (or am I now a former bike commuter?) with a longer than average commute, it never worked for my gut to ingest more than a glass of water before my ride.

But I get it – what’s happening with the tooth brushing thing. I need a new routine. I need to adjust to the new shape of my days, really, the new shape of all of our days, that’s been imposed on us by the pandemic. Or really it’s the shapelessness of our days that feels so impossible. But creating structure for myself has never been my strong suit. And right now, I’m angry and sad and feel scared, and I don’t want to fucking create a new routine so I make sure to brush my teeth every day.

Yes, I am being hyperbolic. And stupid. And trying to make a point out of a low stakes something, which maybe didn’t work. I don’t know.

MTB went grocery shopping today. One of the other shoppers was wearing an N95 mask. GD and MB walked with their kids to Irvington park to find about maybe 20 people bunched up around the basketball courts watching a pick-up game. On Instagram and Facebook, I’m still seeing photos of friends at beach or on a trail. I don’t get it. It’s both disheartening and infuriating.

Right now, I’m in a squat off with my friend BH. She texts me, SQUAT, and I get up from my desk and do 30 squats. My bike thighs are already starting to give way. I’m hoping the squats will salvage them, at least kind of. Right now we doing 4 sets, so 120 total squats. My plan is to increase our sets by 1 a week until we are at 10 sets of 30 or 300 squats.

My other friend, MD, has workout flash cards, illustrating all sorts of body weight exercises. Core strength is what they are currently into. Tonight, on our Zoom hang out, we talked about V-ups for a good 5 minutes .

Most days, MTB does hot yoga in the back room of our house, courtesy a space heater turned on high. Sadly, her online yoga class often freezes up We have a bandwidth issue and often at the same time she is doing yoga, I’m video conferencing for work. We tried to upgrade our internet connection, but that would mean some dude coming into our house to hook us up with a new modem. No thanks.

When we went to Target a couple of weeks ago, we’d been hoping to score a jump rope and some 20 lb barbells, but the workout and fitness aisles were almost laid bare. All that was left were some 3 lb weights, an exercise ball and a couple of yoga mats. It was unexpected. And the unexpectedness felt jarring.

I bought some new running shoes. I’ve had them for a week. So far all I’ve done in them is march up and down a single step stool for a half hour while watching episodes about Gwenyth Paltrow’s horrible Goop enterprise. But the weather has been crap. Cold and rainy, and I’m not going to start up running until the sun comes back out.

I can’t tell, am I newly interested in body or trying to keep my anxiety and depression at bay? Am I dabbling with some magical thinking that fitness is going to protect me or that fitness proves I’m ok? I think all of it’s true. And in the absence of testing, my fitness is a sign to me, that today, I’m ok.

Work a little bit. Take a short walk to walk the dogs. Work some more. Then take a longer walk. Come home, eat food, load up dishwasher and then run it, for what seems like the millionth time since we were ordered to shelter in place. Will there eventually be a run on dishwasher detergent? Confession: we bought 2 extra bottles a couple weeks ago on a weird and depressing trip to Target.

There was a big sign right when you entered, alerting everyone: This is not a COVID-19 testing site. We don’t watch White House press briefings; so we didn’t know that the Dump had lied to everyone who does watch press briefings, announcing that there would be testing at major retail stores. I only just caught up to this particular lie this week, which, in retrospect, made the sign make more sense. At the time, MTB and my response was, what the fuck.

There was a real foreboding feeling, pushing our cart around Target. It was the first time either of us had been at a big box store since the lockdown, and the first time we’d been confronted with the gaping swaths of empty shelves that normally hold all the things everyone keeps buying up and or is hoarding: toilet paper, paper towels, flour, disinfectant cleaners and wipes, rubbing alcohol, aloe vera, and Cheerios. Even the shelves that weren’t completely emptied out had at least a couple of significant and un-ignorable gaps. Like, when did everyone start eating canned peaches? The panic underlying all that emptiness felt visceral.

Oh, good lord, I just scratched my forehead. Even though I haven’t been anywhere all day, except for a walk, where I didn’t touch anything, and I’ve washed my hands a gajillion times, most recently, just 10 minutes ago, touching my face brings on a jolt of anxiety. I hate it. I wake up in the middle of the night, scratch my cheek and hope I’m not infecting myself because I closed the bathroom door last time I got up to pee. I don’t know about you, but I miss mindlessly picking my nose.

Today I took a longish bike ride. Like around an hour. It’s the longest ride I’ve taken since I last rode home from work a little over two weeks ago, when we got the word we’d be teleworking for the foreseeable future.

It wasn’t a surprise, exactly. There had been less and less people around the hospital campus in each of the preceding days. Less car traffic on each commute. The week before, I’d asked if we could get hand sanitizer in our suite, only to find it was already sold out every where. My co-workers and I co-workers were punching elevator buttons with our elbows and using paper towels to open the doors of the fridge and the microwave. We had been getting daily COVID-19 updates since the end of February. On that last day at the office, there were 75 confirmed cases in Oregon, and 1187 confirmed cases in Washington.

When I got home, the dogs ran up to the gate and barked, like they always do. It was sunny and vaguely warm. Beau darted back and forth in front of the garden fence, tracking a squirrel scampering across the top of the cement block wall than runs parallel to the fence and stands at the back of our lot. Billie circled the yard looking for a bone to bring me. I rolled by bike into the shed. I fed the dogs. I fed the cats. I got the mail. I set my pannier down in the middle of the living room and emptied out the extra things I’d grabbed from my desk in a hurry: a power supply, a can of soup, a bunch of bandanas I kept in a drawer drawer and used for napkins, a sweatshirt, a special pen, and a small bottle of hand sanitizer I’d brought from home. I got on my computer and re-read the update about working from home for the foreseeable future. It felt so ominous, like officially ominous.

I did 2 things after that. First, I cleaned the two front windows on our house that are not covered by the porch. The dirt on the glass had been bothering me for weeks. I didn’t even mess with changing out of my bike clothes. I closed my computer, got out the windex, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and took them and a step stool outside. My neighbor across the street gave me a hard time about getting a jump on spring cleaning. The second thing I did, was put on my sweatpants, take out the weighted blanket I gave MTB for her birthday, crawl under it on the couch, then turn on the TV and fall asleep. I slept until MTB came home around 10 o’clock.

High temps and head winds. It’s like the whole ride home was uphill. Phew. At least it wasn’t windy on the ride in to work. When it’s a hard ride in, then there is an added component of dread to contend with for the ride home. And dread is like adding lead weights to my legs.

Tonight’s ride home was the second time I hooked up my mini bluetooth speaker at the start of my ride, right out of the bike corral. When I first started riding with my mini JBL this summer, on evening work commutes, I would wait until I was clear of the heavier bike traffic to pull over and turn on my Bike Jams play list. Just feeling a little self-conscious about drawing more attention to myself, which I decided was ridiculous, given who I am. Just walking into a bathroom, I draw attention to myself. So jamming out from the start of my commute home, even if it does turn heads.

There’s 1000 things I want to talk about, but what I’ve got today is a shout out to some of my favorite podcasts.

Another Round

Code Switch

About Race

The Undefeated

The Read

Tuesday night and Wednesday, I just felt sick to my stomach. Despair splitting my heart open and filling up my gut. Today I am so angry. So fucking angry.

The are 1000 thoughts running through my brain, but before I spill a few of them out onto the page, I wanted to get to some links first:

White Won

The Audacity of Hopelessness

Election 2016 and the Collapse of Journalistic Standards

Two NBA Coaches Call a Foul on Trump’s Power Play

Radical Pragmatism (from the Bush years)

Here, in no particular order, are some of my thoughts.

.1

To elected Democrats – obstruct. Filibuster. Filibuster. Filibuster. Get your talking points together. Support Obama appointing Merrick Garland to the supreme court. Remind the public of outstanding lawsuits http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/10/75-lawsuits-against-president-elect-trump.html against Trump. Call for an investigation of his abuse of women. Call for an investigation into his ties to the KKK. Call for the designation of the KKK as a terrorist group. Remind the public of the more 500 lies he told on the campaign trail.

Also: Don’t go to the inauguration. Don’t go to the White House. Don’t have a meeting with him, unless his ass will come to Senate or House and then the agenda is resist, resist, resist.

.2

To my people: Love is resistance.

.3

To the silicon power people, you are not seceding. You are staying right here. If you have a bunch of money to fund a campaign: Fund a fucking campaign to do away with the Electoral College. Set up life time funding for the ACLU or Planned Parenthood. Fund Black Lives Matter and National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Fund services for trans and queer youth. Fund the free press. You get the idea. Do something that matters with your precious elite power and all the money you’ve made off commodifying our social lives and need for work. You are nothing without us, so fucking do something real for us.

.4

To all the people that couldn’t be bothered to vote. What the fuck, man! There is no magic candidate that is going to fix everything. Not Obama. Not Bernie. Not Nader. Not Lincoln. Not Kennedy. No one.  So what. Our job as citizens is to hold our leaders feet to the fire. Make them do the right thing. Sometimes, like FDR, make them do great things. If you’re all boohoo, they are both fucked up, let me tell you that the lesser of two evils is really fucking less evil. And Trump is troll and bully with the heart of despot and soul of a dictator.