So yeah, it's been too long since I've said anything around here. Usually when I go quiet it's because nothing much has happened, but that can't be right, you think. Christmas has come and gone, it's a new year. Surely something noteworthy has happened.
Nope. Thanks for asking, though.
For the first time, we didn't travel for Christmas. Usually as the holiday approaches it's a matter of deciding where to go (do we visit grandparents to the south or to the north?), but in the time of a pandemic we had to consider whether we should go anywhere, ultimately deciding that it wasn't worth the risk. Christmas will come around next year, after all, and the one after that; we could give one a miss in order to help assure everybody is around for as many future ones as possible.
New Years was even less eventful. Not that it's ever a raucous party around here anyway, but this year we chased the kids to bed at a normal bedtime and watched with apprehension to see if the worst year in recent memory had one more trick up its sleeve (turns out not).
So yeah, it's been a bit of a yawn around here. I'll let you know if we manage to become interesting, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
2020 is finally over and I've been wondering if I should try to recap it, but quite frankly I'm not sure I'm ready to process it yet. So I won't, for now at least. Life moves on and so must we all.
To that end, we threw the kids in the car over the weekend and drove into the foothills. We're not the most outdoorsy family in the world (nor even on our block), but fresh air and doing something other than sitting around the house had a particularly strong appeal, enough so that our plan was little more than, "Drive north into the hills and find a place to park where we could walk around," and we still thought, "Yeah, let's do that."
It's possible that we're going a little stir crazy.
One might expect that such a lackluster "plan" would fail miserably, but we ended up near a lovely little stream complete with rocks to climb and gang graffiti to observe (hey, it's still Los Angeles). The Boy got a little too adventurous and slipped off a rock into the water (thankfully getting just his feet wet) and I got to teach both the kids how to skip stones (the Girl managed to get a triple skipper). It was an entirely satisfying day in which nothing of consequence happened.
I've really missed those.
I feel like I've forgotten about an entire genre of entry around here, those quick-shot, slice-of-life bits that are good enough for a mention, but aren't actually stories. For example:
There is currently a sign hanging over the toilet in the kids' bathroom that reads, "Not a Reading Chair." The Wife made it for the Boy because he likes to read on the toilet. Not while he's using the toilet, mind you: he just likes to sit there and read. Often fully clothed, as if he just finds it a comfy place to sit or something.
The weird thing, though ("That's not the weird thing?" I hear you ask) is that I have some kind of mental block about it. Every day I see that sign and I think, "Why would she make...," and then I remember and shake my head, only to forget about it until the next day like the worst possible Momento sequel.
Some time ago (a couple days? weeks? decades? does the passage of time even have meaning any longer?) I heard an interview on NPR that referenced the idea that modern marriage is too demanding on relationships. The thrust of the argument is that, once upon a time, couples turned to other relationships in their lives, among their friends or coworkers or wherever, for some of their personal needs. Disappearing are some of the archtypes of even just a generation ago: the work ally you complain to about your coworkers (because they actually know your pain), the best friend and confidant/e who listens when you just want to gripe (especially about your spouse), that one friend who shares an obscure passion of yours (sometimes it's the only thing you have in common with them, but when you really want to geek out about that thing, they're the one who gets it). More and more, these psychologists argue, spouses are expected to be all these people, on top of everything else they're expected to be, and the strain of it is breaking marriages.
I suppose I can see the point. I mean, I don't turn to the Wife when I want to get my nerd on and argue about the best Spider-man story arc of all time ("Kraven's Last Hunt" obviously) or to talk me down when I want to throttle that coworker who eats at his desk five feet from my ear (that's the sort of thing you need done in the moment, not after you've gotten home and, presumably, fired for assault). And that's fine. Two people can't be everything to one another, even if they'd like to be. Forget being impossible, I don't imagine it's healthy to even try.
So what does that mean in the middle of a pandemic when you're spending 98% of your time around just your family? All of us satisfy some of our personal needs through the countless encounters, with friends and strangers alike, that we're used to having every day, only now that's not happening. Some people are adjusting to it better than others, I'm sure. I think I'm in that camp, but then again I'm a misanthrope, so cutting off contact with the majority of the human race has been a lifelong goal. More the reason to pity the Wife, who suddenly has to rely on me for the majority of her emotional support.
But really this idea got me thinking about the kids, more or less locked up in the house for nearly a year (!!) now, contact with their friends and peers limited to what they can manage virtually. It's been easier on the Girl, being older and more online, but even so I can't help but wonder what this has done to the social and emotional development of both of them. It's likely nobody will know the full effect of this lost year for some time to come--I wouldn't be surprised if psychologists and sociologists write PhD papers about it for decades to come--but I can't imagine a lot of upside. And I can't help thinking about those studies I mentioned earlier.
One thing hinted at in the article linked above is that modern married people tend to spend less time with friends and family than their non-married peers. Logical enough: married people have got married stuff to do. But that shrinking of their social circle surely contributes to the problem, and here we all are, being forced to shrink our social circles to an extreme. As adults, it's likely that ours are more durable: the friends that I have now I've had for many years and I doubt this disruption, no matter how long it lasts, will do any long-term damage there. The kids, meanwhile, are probably going to have to completely rebuild their social circles from scratch and I can't say I envy them the task.
But more than that, I wonder how much they will be able to, or even feel the need to. Could something like this have a more lasting effect, could having to adapt to it at their ages condition them to it? If they're able to normalize meeting their social and emotional needs with a scant handful of relationships, might they not see the need for a wider social circle? I don't know, of course. Heck, for all I know it will end up being the exact counter to the problem with modern marriage that I started out this little piece pondering: if both they and their future spouses grew up with this as normal then maybe leaning more heavily on one another won't seem to abnormal.
There's way too much to consider here and no way for somebody like me to even predict what it will all mean, but they're talking about opening schools back up again in our area, at least for the elementary students (so in our case, for the Boy). Back to school means back to friends, and that will be an interesting thing to watch. Will he reconnect with his old friends? Will he make new ones? Will he want to? Who knows. The only thing I think we can say with confidence is that it's not going to be easy.
So, it appears that I've been suffering from some kind of anxiety or something lately. I know, What, only lately? Where have you been?. I'm a bit of a late bloomer.
It started a couple weeks ago when I noticed I was having odd breathing events. I wouldn't have described it as being short of breath--I never felt like I was wheezing or gasping or anything like that--but every now and again I'd take a breath and...be unsatisfied with it. It was like the breath wasn't deep enough, as if my brain had expected a nice, 100% draw and only got 90%. So I'd try again, this time mindful of taking a deep breath (because all the sudden maybe I just need to focus more when I breathe?) and it just wouldn't work, 90% again. So I'd try again and again and after a couple times I'd get it, a nice, satisfying, lungful of air, and my brain would reward me with a nice little hit of dopamine or serotonin or whatever it gives you when it wants to pat you on the head (I don't know how the brain works) and everything would be great. For a while, anyway. Then it would happen again.
At first it was a few times a day, but before long it was a few times an hour. Pretty sure that it meant I was dying (because, I'm frustrated to report, even going on 17 years in remission, your brain still says, "cancer?" every damn time you feel weird), I turned to everybody's favorite source of wisdom and knowledge, that modern-day oracle in her temple, the internet.
Now here's where things take a slight turn, because the idea that I just put in your head was in mine, too, but instead of telling me that I had lung cancer the internet tried to convince me that I was suffering from anxiety. Nonsense, I told the internet. I didn't feel anxious about anything, life was normal (for current definitions of normal, of course), we're all healthy and we have enough money to meet our needs, everything was fine.
(I pause here to note that around this time I stumbled across a post on some forum somewhere wherein a person asked my very question, "Why can't I take a deep breath sometimes?" and he went on to describe symptoms similar to mine. The top response was from a therapist who told him simply, It's anxiety to which he responded, "Nonsense," and proceeded list off all the ways in which his life was normal and fine and besides, he didn't feel anxious or anything like that, and he went on for a bit, to which the therapist merely replied, OK. It's still anxiety. I, of course, ignored this whole exchange because I'm dumb.)
So, having rejected the anxiety answer out of hand, I turned to the next most popular suggestion: heart burn. I even learned you could have acid reflux without actually feeling it. That seemed much more likely. I'd been skipping breakfast (an irony of my life is that while I love breakfast and breakfast food in general, I'm rarely hungry in the morning) and just having coffee in the mornings and since coffee on an empty stomach seems like a literal prescription for heart burn, I decided that was the problem. I even started to feel a litle burning behind my sternum. Had to be it.
Luckily, we had some pepcid in the house and I could start eating a piece of fruit or a bowl of cereal in the morning, so problem solved. I should be able to knock this one out in a day or two, right? You might have already guessed that didn't happen. Nope, it only got worse.
By this point you're probably wondering why I didn't consider the possibility that I'd gotten covid, and I did, of course. It didn't seem likely: we rarely left the house and came into contact with almost nobody, when would I have contracted it? Still, I hooked myself up to the pulse oximeter we've got in the house a few times to check out my oxygen levels and they were always fine. In a weird way, that's probably what started making me feel better, knowing that even if it felt like it, I wasn't actually having trouble getting air. I was comforted by the data.
Eventually, I came back to that discussion in the forum with the therapist. What if it were anxiety? I mean, life hasn't been easy or simple for any of us this past year and, when I let myself think about it, I can tick off dozens of ways this whole ordeal has been a constant, steady drip of stress. But why would it start getting to me now? If anything, things have are getting better: vaccines are rolling out, cases are dropping, there's even been talk of finally being able to send the kids back to school. Things almost seem hopeful.
And then I got it. I should have seen it earlier, of course: I'd done this dance before, a couple times in fact. Everybody deals with trauma in their own way. I'm one of those people who compartmentalize: take the stress, the despair, all the negative crap and push it aside so you can focus on getting through it (whatever "it" is). It's a survival strategy, and I've found it to be a pretty effective one. It does have one drawback: once it's over, you've got all the deferred trauma to deal with, and that's when you freak out.
It was the hope that was killing me. As soon as my subconscious started to sense that all this might soon end--the strain of quarantining, the constant fear of the virus getting in the house and endangering not just you but your kids, too, the almost existential dread of what this lost year has done to the kids' development, even just the stress of being around the same people all day, every day, nonstop--as soon as I even got a whiff that it might be ending, the bill came due. It just took me a while to recognize it.
Fortunately, I have some experience dealing with deferred trauma. Acknowledging it is a good first step. After that, it's all about processing it. Everybody does that differently. Me, I find long-winded blog posts are generally a good start.
Before I make myself look like a complete idiot, I feel compelled to point out that in order to tell this story with any semblence of brevity I have to cut out a whole lot of time between the relevant bits and, in doing so, will likely make the ending obvious to you, my dear reader, and in my own defense I can only say that in reality things were...well, OK, they were equally obvious in real time as well, if only I weren't a complete idiot. Hmm, looking back on that sentence, I'm afraid I'm going to fail my implied promise of brevity. Ah well, let's just jump in, shall we?
A couple weeks ago, while the Wife was doing the grocery shopping she texted to ask if it was important that we use [brand name redacted] dishwasher detergent pods because there was a bag of [different brand name redacted] pods on sale. I assured her that we had no brand loyalty and since [second brand] was plenty reputable, it should be fine.
Spoiler alert: it wasn't fine. The pods were bigger than usual and almost didn't fit in their little door inside the dishwasher. What's more, they did a fairly poor job of cleaning the dishes and we had to leave several things in for a second wash. We resolved to never buy it again.
Fast forward a few days and the Wife informs me that when she woke up and went downstairs for coffee she discovered that the Dog had peed on the kitchen floor overnight. Our floor is tiled with big, 12"x12" terracota-looking tiles (or maybe they're sandstone, I'm not sure) with rustic edges and wide grout gaps. These gaps basically form a criss-cross network of canals all across the floor and she reported that the ones in front of the oven were all damp when she'd come down earlier. It hadn't been much, so she cleaned up the mess and took the Dog out to finish his business. We decided to wait and see if it was a one-off or not.
A couple things about the Dog and his bladder: first, he has some kind of chemical imbalance or something that causes crystal formations and it makes him need to urinate all the time. He's on a special dog food to correct the problem and, with a few exceptions, it's worked well for him over the years. Second, he's getting along in years and, quite frankly, neither the Wife nor I would have been surprised to learn that he was becoming incontinent. All this is to say that the idea that the Dog might pee on the kitchen floor was not suprising in the least. So we waited.
Sure enough, she found the same thing on the floor the next day and the day after that. Each time she cleaned up the mess (the mop got a lot of early morning use that week) and we started to discuss ways to deal with the problem. A vet visit was scheduled and the idea of keeping him locked up in the bedroom with us overnight was considered and rejected (he sleeps at the foot of our bed, but gets up before either of us to eat his little breakfast, and I pointed out that if we kept him from it he'd simply whine and scratch at the door until we let him out, and besides, if he was going to urinate anywhere in the house, I preferred kitchen tiles to bedroom carpet). We resolved to endure the problem, hoping the vet could help, but prepared to accept that this was just life with an old dog.
Until one morning when I got up before she did, so was the first to go downstairs. Sure enough, I found the floor wet, but noticed that the worst of it seemed to be in front of the dishwasher. I grabbed some paper towel and wiped a bit up to have a closer look and noticed a bit of foam, just ephemeral enough to dissolve almost instantly. I groaned. It wasn't the Dog, I realized: the dishwasher (which we always run overnight) was leaking.
I figured it was the seal around the door and opened the dishwasher to inspect it. That's when I noticed a bunch of foamy bubbles at the base of the tub. That wasn't right, those should have all been dissolved by the rinse cycle. I checked to make sure the full cycle had completed and it had. So why did it look half done?
I suspected that the problem was the pods. Maybe, since they were nearly too big for the soap dispenser bay, they were getting stuck and dropping into the tub too late in the cycle? I grabbed the bag from under the sink so I could take one out for a closer look. That's when I noticed it, written on the front of the bag.
"Fights Odor. Whitens Whites. Brightens Colors."
Brightens colors? I actually laughed out loud.
"I fixed the Dog," I told the Wife when she came down twenty minutes later.
"What? How?" she asked, looking around to be sure that he was still in one piece.
"By using my extensive knowledge of the canine urinary system, of course," I told her. "And by figuring out that we've been putting laundry soap in the dishwasher. It wasn't him, it was the dishwasher that's been peeing on the floor."
Thankfully, no permanent damage was done. Once actual dishwasher detergent was acquired (the Wife insists the laundry soap was shelved with the dishwasher pods and accepts a minimal amount of blame) the floor returned to its usual dry (albeit slightly cleaner) state. The Dog still isn't sure what all the fuss was about.
The kids are on spring break this week and, since we're somehow still in the middle of a pandemic, they're spending it around the house doing essentially nothing. That's not to say things aren't progressing, pandemic-wise that is. Next week when school resumes, for example, they'll both be returning for in-person classes, part time at least. I think it's fair to say that this news has met with mixed reviews.
The Boy was actually back in class for one day last week as a bit of a trial. The kids all wore masks and the desk were arranged to ensure safe social distancing and all that--the school district went to considerable pains to make everything as safe as they could and assure parents that they weren't sending their kids into a petri dish--and they were only there for a few hours in the morning. It was a glorious few hours, though. It's hard to describe how good it felt to feel even just a little normal for even a short time. We weren't sure how he was going to react, though. After more than a year of distance learning, how would he adjust to being in a class again? Would he even want to?
Amazingly, he didn't want to leave when it was done, going so far as to ask us to get him enrolled in the after-school care program because, while school had been fine and all, he hadn't gotten to play and he heard the kids in the after-school program got to play, on the playground and everything. We were just happy he hadn't broken in hives after being away from his Nintendo Switch for so long, but if he wanted to stay longer, we weren't going to argue. We told him we'd see if it was possible.
The Girl, meanwhile, is less enthusiastic. Like me, she's taken to telecommuting like a duck to water. She's content to entertain herself in her room all day, wandering out every few hours to graze for sustenance. She can go days without even looking at her shoes. She's had a few missteps in a couple classes while adjusting to things like keeping her own schedule without somebody ringing a bell to tell her when it's time to go or getting an assignment in on time without a teacher hounding her, but on balance she's done very well. She would probably be fine never going back to campus.
Things are changing rapidly around here and restrictions seem to be loosened every week. Vaccination rates are rising and case rates are falling. Things are looking up, but I'm not going to lie: after a year of this, sometimes it feels like we're relaxing too quickly, going a little too fast, but I certainly understand the impulse. We all want to get on with life and get moving again. Right now, for example, I'm in the spare room upstairs and the Boy is in the driveway playing. He's found an old metal box that a load of cookies came in (a Christmas gift, I think) and he's banging on it like it's a drum. Earlier, he was picking through the hedges for interesting rocks which, after thoroughly examining, he would toss into another hedge. He's bored and craving activity. He needs to play. So maybe things are progressing too quickly, maybe we're taking a bit of risk getting him back into school now instead of waiting until the fall semester when it's likely to be safer. But we think it's a minor risk, and the potential rewards are huge.
Not to say that we won't be monitoring the local developments closely, ready to pull them out at the first sign of rising danger. In a way, for us, it will be as stressful as when this whole ordeal began, but hey, that's all part of being a parent: taking on all the worry so they don't have to. And if we do end up getting skittish and deciding to bring them back home for the rest of the school year, at least one of them will be into it.
So, this has been one of those months. You know the kind: something heavy happens, you struggle to process it, then something else happens before you quite manage, then something else, and so on. Before you know it, you're a few life events past the first thing and you realize you never really finished with it, that it's still lingering there, in the back of your mind, like leftovers lost in the back of the fridge, slowly rotting, until it starts stinking up your entire kitchen.
Yeah, not my best analogy there. Sorry about that.
So, a few weeks ago, an old friend died. I'd known him since college, he was a core member of my rather small friend group there. If I tell a story about my college days, chances are good, even if he doesn't feature in the plot, that he was there. He was the RD of the dorm where I was an RA; together we conspired to shape the minds of our incoming freshmen class, or at least do them as little damage as possible (to varying degrees of success). We bonded over role-playing games, The X-Files, and mourning Michael Jordan's (first) retirement. After college we split the rent on a townhouse with a third friend. On paper, it was a great idea. In reality, it's where things started to go wrong.
We were too similar. It's something that was obvious in hindsight, but that we couldn't see it in the moment, probably because we weren't similar in a lot of ways, just the ways that worked against us. I won't go into the whole thing because, quite frankly it's really stupid, but we were both stubborn and proud and that's an awful combination. In the end, we decided to not re-up the lease and went our own ways: he got a studio apartment down the street and the other guy and I picked up a fleabag closer to our jobs two towns over. We didn't speak again for years.
I think if you could ask him what drove the wedge between us, I don't know what he would say, but I wouldn't be surprised if his answer was different than mine. I don't think it matters what it was anyway, the point of that little story I didn't actually tell is that we had been close friends and we didn't speak again for years over god knows what. We did that, both he and I. Stupid, stubborn pride.
Eventually, after enough time had passed, our paths crossed again and we just sort of looked at each other, shrugged, and agreed that we'd been fools. We didn't try to deal with it, we didn't acknowledge that the wedge had become a chasm, we just acted like we had done those things and told ourselves it was enough. It wasn't, of course.
He's been dead for weeks now and I don't feel as if I've grieved. I've been sad, of course. It was a shock, it upset me for several days, but those are pretty mild reactions to the death of a friend, aren't they? I've been struggling to figure out why I'm not more upset. Maybe it's still coming, but somehow I doubt it. I fear that, emotionally at least, that stupid, stubborn, prideful person I was killed my friend a long, long time ago. That, after our falling out, I coped by telling myself that I didn't care and that I told myself that long enough for it to become true. I don't know how to undo that. I don't know if you can.
Last time we met, I hinted at multiple events all piling on at the same time, so I guess I owe you a little story about the next one. About...wow, has it been about a month ago now? I really gotta update more often. Anyway, about a month ago the kids started going back to school part time. I mean, they've been in school the whole time, but it's been remote learning. With the infection/hospitalization numbers dropping around here and vaccination rates going up, schools were authorized to start bringing students back to campus for in-person learning on an opt-in basis. It was up to us whether or not to send them back.
We were conflicted. In more ways than one.
On the one hand, we were both excited as the prospect of the kids being around other kids again, but on the other hand, the fact that it would mean they'd be gathering together indoors gave us some pause. We briefly thought about keeping them home through the rest of the school year, just keep doing the zoom thing, but we just felt that they both needed to get out of the house, though for different reasons.
The Boy had been going more and more stir crazy, becoming increasingly disobediant. I don't think he was doing it intentionally or anything, he was just an eight-year-old boy who'd been cooped up in his house for a year. He was slowly going nuts. He needed to see other kids, be around people who thought burps where the height of entertainment. Even just having a chance to look at a different set of four walls would be an improvement. He needed it desperately or one of us was gonna kill him.
The Girl, on the other hand, was doing just fine in lockdown. She's her father's daughter, all right; perhaps a bit too much. I'm not going to say that we had to drag her out of her room and shove her toward the school the first day, but I'm not not saying that either. We have been graced with the look most every morning that she's had to go since. She might not have been as eager to be around her peers as her little brother, but she might have needed it more. Besides, the position of curmudgeonly recluse in this family has already been filled.
On balance, returning to campus been a successful experiment. The Boy is there four days a week, but only for the morning. Still, those few hours with his friends has been a tonic for him. He's still a complete twit now and again, but it's not nearly as bad as it had been. The Girl, meanwhile, goes twice a week, but for the whole day. She's not enjoying it, per se, though she acknowledges that in-person class is different (and often better) than remote. She even observed that one of her least favorite teachers (on zoom, anyway), is actually much better live and nearly lamented that she wouldn't have the chance to have a normal year of classes with him.
We still worry a little about them getting sick, though we know the chances of that are quite remote. The statistics are in our favor and getting better every day, plus the Girl has gotten her first dose of the vaccine now (with the second one coming up shortly). So we don't worry a lot, it's more like a vague fear that just pops into your head now and again, unbidden, to make your blood run a bit cold for a minute before you can dismiss it and get back to your life.
It's been good practice for adjusting to life getting back to "normal" (whatever that's going to mean going forward). Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, its success has helped us be a little more adventurous with other things, family outings and going out to eat (though still dining outside)(and I'll be honest, as far as I'm concerned, that's something that can stay; it's just nicer) and things like that. A small part of me, back in a dark corner of my mind, is still shuffling around and warning that we're moving too quickly, that it's still too soon, but every day it gets a little quieter and maybe, ultimately, that's how we all get over the trauma of the past year: day by day, inch by inch. And that's all right. It took us a long time to get here, why would we think it won't take a while to get back?
So, part three in my "It Just Never Ends" trilogy of woe (though I think I'm testing the limits of the term by applying it to our concern over sending the kids back to in-person classes) is about my job, or more specifically, lack thereof. Yes, once again I found myself laid off.
As an aside that does not apply much to this story, I've been laid off several times in my career, though never, I think, for the same exact reason twice (two times it was because of a merger, but once I was actually offered the chance to keep my job if I wanted to relocate to Atlanta, so I'm not counting them as being the same). I've been working in tech for long time now and, it being an industry that's always changing, it's a pretty normal experience. I could wax philosophic about it, but there's not much of a point right now. The result was the same as all the others: I was out of a job and needed to find a new one.
This time around was a bit different, though: for the first time, for a variety of reasons, I had a bit of a financial cushion to fall back on. If my math was right (not the sort of thing I'm comfortable asserting), we should have been able to float on for several months without missing a beat, even longer if we tightened our belts a little.
It was a new experience for us. My past lay offs were accompanied by a sense of panic as, while we weren't always living paycheck-to-paycheck, sometimes it was nearly so. This time, I had the luxury of being able to take my time and be selective about my next job. It was...weird.
Unfortunately, it also didn't do much to tamp down the sense of panic. Despite knowing I didn't need to take the first thing that came along, that things were stable and that I had a rare opportunity to go after something I really wanted, I just couldn't relax. I'm sure there's something to that, but I'm not sure I want to scratch that itch just now.
Besides, as it turns out I didn't need to worry much. The job market was plenty warm: I started interviewing within a couple weeks and accepted a position shortly thereafter, one that's a step up in several ways (on paper anyway). My first day was today, in fact. It was also the last day of school for the kids, so that's two of the three things that have been weighing on me recently taken care of. That just leaves....
Oh yeah. Guess I'm going to have to deal with how I feel about my dead friend now.
Damn.
I've caught a cold, the first one I've had in I-don't-know-how-long, though it's probably been more than two years. I'm miserable, thanks for asking, but it's just a cold and I'm sure I'll be fine in a couple days.
And before anybody decides to mark those as "famous last words" I should say that of course I know covid and the common cold share several symptoms, including the ones I have (runny nose, congestion, sneezing, cough), but from my understanding, it's rare to have covid and have only those symptoms. Sure, you might get them, but you're usually going to get some flu-like crap thrown in too (fever, nausea, etc; haven't had any of that) or even some of the weird stuff (my sense of smell and taste are just fine). So, just a cold. Pretty unremarkable really. Except, where did it come from? I mean, I'm sure I've "mentioned" (and by that, I mean complained) about the tedium of 18 months of lockdown and lockdown-like conditions, so how did this little virus make its way into our home through all our precious precautions?
A fair question, person I just made up who ended up being more aggressive than I expected, and that gets to the heart of today's little musing for, you see, I know exactly where it came from. It was the Boy. And I know how he got it. We let our guard down and sent him to a summer camp last week and he picked it up there.
For his part, he was mildly irritated by a stuffy nose for all of about 20 minutes, but it was long enough for the Wife and me to get a little freaked out and watch him like hawks until we were certain he was all right. As the only member of the household not yet vaxxed (not being old enough), it was potentially a nightmare scenario.
I'm sure the camp did all they could to safeguard the kids, but they're kids after all, they're going to do whatever seems like the most fun thing in any particular moment unless there's an adult standing right there telling them to not do that specific thing. Despite all the hand sanitizing, mask wearing, distancing, and all the rest, if one of them has a bug, they're all going to end up with it by the end of the week. And that's a terrifying reminder of what we're up against. All it needs is for you to let your guard down just a little.
The thing is, he's signed up for a couple more mini-camps and we're probably going to let him go to them. If that seems hard to reconcile to you, well it does to me, too. I think it's just a question of how long anybody, no matter the threat level, no matter the danger, can stay vigilant. You go as long as you can, to the limits of your endurance and then past them until, finally, you just need to relax, just a little, or you'll snap. I suspect that's just how we're wired as humans, the variation being how long we each can last. I think we did pretty well getting as far as we did, but now we need to be allowed to live a little.
I'm aware that all of this reads a lot like some anti-mask/anti-vax rhetoric, and I think that (the similarities, not the rhetoric) is ultimately my point. We are about as far from being those kinds of people as you can get, to the point that all of us who could get vaccinated did it within days of becoming eligible. We still mask up indoors, we still social distance, all that stuff, but it's been so long. And I can't believe that we're alone in this. I think it indicates a very dangerous potential future, one where the delta variant surges and cases start spiking again, only too many people are too tired of it to go back to the same, strict precautions that seemed fine to them just last year. What happens to us then?
Pray we don't have to find out, I guess.
Huh, that ended up being more of a downer than I expected. I'm usually better at finding the humor in this sort of thing. I blame the fact that my head is leaking mucus like an old Cadillac. On the other hand, it wasn't an accident that I used the word "novel" in a post about contracting a virus. I promise, I started off with the intention of being light-hearted, albeit a little dark, as is my wont, but seeing as I haven't been able to breath comfortably for 48 hours now, I guess failure was inevitable.
I suppose I should pop up and say something, just to let it be known, after my last post, that what I suspected was just a cold turned out to be just a cold (probably; I mean, I guess I can't know for sure) and that I didn't die or anything. What a terrible last post that one would have been, eh? Though, to be fair, any of my posts would have been terrible last posts. My charm, if I can be said to have any, is that I usually seem to give the impression that I might do better next time. Perhaps one day I'll live up to that.
Anyway, I don't have a lot to say because nothing much has happened. Expect a ramble to follow, so if you want to go ahead and click away now, nobody would blame you. But yeah, we haven't done much, nothing terribly amusing to report, not even a annecdote worthy of a weak grin comes to mind. Alas, life in a pandemic is a boring one.
I've been thinking about the ways the kids are going to remember these years. I think about that a lot, but lately it's been because of something unexpected: Perry Mason.
Now, in my imagination that statement divides you all into two groups, probably broken down by age: if you're old enough to be a long-time member of AARP, you probably remember the old Perry Mason TV show with Raymond Burr; everybody else probably said something to the effect of, "What's a Perry Mason?"
I had to look it up, but Perry Mason ran for almost ten years, from 1957 to 1966. If you've never seen it, Perry Mason is a fictional defense attorney (originally created in the 30s by author Erle Stanley Gardner) who keeps getting mixed up in bizarre and convoluted cases that require his unique intellect and legal acumen to solve. It's part detective noir and part legal drama and entirely terrific. Even if you know nothing about Perry Mason, you still know the cliché of the savvy defense attorney tricking the criminal into implicating themselves on the witness stand, sometimes even wringing a full confession out of them even though they were on the brink of getting away with it: Gardner pretty much created that, it was Perry Mason's go-to move.
(Also, Gardner wrote Perry Mason books into the 70s, more than 40 years worth of them, and for a while they were the best selling series of books in the world. I was working at a bookstore around the time the kid's series, Goosebumps, knocked them out of the top spot, itself eventually overtaken by the Harry Potter series. To the best of my knowledge, however, it's still the third-best selling series ever.)
It's also weird that I love it, seeing as they stopped making it years before I was even born. You see, my mom loved the show, too and its reruns were on every Monday-Friday at noon when I was a teenager. She and I watched it all through the summer one year. It's a fond memory.
Well, I recently discovered that Perry Mason is rerunning on a cable channel late at night a couple times a week. As much as I recognize my need for sleep, I still feel compelled to stay up to watch at least one episode. More than once, that's turned into two or three, stretching into the wee hours.
Obviously, I blame my mom for my loss of sleep.
It's gotten me thinking about the kinds of things parents pass along to their kids, not just memories and values and things like that, but the subtle things, tastes and preferences and the like. I love Perry Mason because of my mom. My fondness for the Beatles and Elvis are both from my parents (the former from Dad, the latter Mom). My mom loved Star Trek and used to make me tape TNG for her, which is how I started watching it; I've now seen every episode of every Star Trek series (most of them many times) with the exception of the new ones (I don't have the CBS streaming service).
I wonder now and again about the kinds of things the Wife and I are passing along to the kids. The Girl, for example, already has a small affinity for 80s New Wave and 90s alt rock music and the Marvel movies (and now Disney+ shows) while the Boy loves Spongebob Squarepants and Lego. Both of them have shown interest in baseball and cooking and I'm sure all those things come from us (well, maybe not the Spongebob thing; I don't think either of us are responsible for that one). Are any of them good things to have given them? Will any of them enrich their lives in any meaningful way?
And then I remember Perry Mason, something that I'd struggle to say has enriched my life in any meaningful way. It's just an old TV show from a bygone era that hardly anybody remembers, it didn't help propel me to success nor did it hinder me in the pursuit of the same. My mom surely didn't mean for it to hold some kind of special place on the nostalgia shelf in my mind, it's something she gave to me quite accidentally. But I'm glad she did. Because even now, more than thirty years later, it can make me feel connected to that summer and to her.
Because obviously it's not an old TV show that I love, it's my mother; my affection for the show is merely association, but it still holds that power because I came by it honestly. Mom wasn't trying to instill a love for the show in me, she didn't have an agenda when we watched it, she was just spending time with me, sharing something she enjoyed with me, bonding. It could have been anything. It didn't matter what it was.
So I still wonder what we might be passing along to the kids, what odd affinities they're going to have later in life, affinities that they can't really explain, but that make them happy all the same whenever they stumble upon them. I wonder, but I don't worry about them. They'll come by them honestly, because we wanted to spend time with them, share something we love with them, bond. And they'll be these weird little things that they'll have warm associations with and won't be able to explain exactly why.
Though I kinda hope one of them is Flood by They Might be Giants.
I made a joke yesterday about how any of my posts would be terrible final posts. Today (the very next day), a wasp flew in my face, causing me to trip backward down a step on my patio and slam my head against some flagstone. (As everybody knows, wasps are jerks. Well, laugh while you can, wasps! I'll have my revenge!)
Anyway, don't tempt fate, kids. Fate will always win. Fate cheats. And it has the wasps on its side.
(And apart from a sore lump on the back of my head, I'm fine. My thick skull saved me from most of the dain bramage.)
Our dog is part cat. I mean, maybe not in a strictly literal sense, but in the ways that count it's true. And I think we've always known. When we adopted him, for example, it was weeks before he even barked, he just explored the house making little noises that could be described as "mewling." That was the first clue. The next was the way he used to lay on top of the back of the couch and claw up the material there. It was impossible to stop him and we eventually gave up trying, opting to just drape an afghan across the back of the couch instead.
There were other hints along the way, but it's really become more pronounced as he's aged. He spends almost all of his time napping (he's always been a lazy thing, but it's nearly 23 hours a day now) and generally only shows interest in us humans when it's time to be fed. Sure, those could all be seen as the sorts of things some dogs do, but now he's gone and done the most cat thing possible: he's gotten a hairball.
I'm going to pause here to say that I don't know for certain that he has a hairball (it's not like I've seen it), but he grooms himself constantly (especially his feet)(more cat behavior!) and several times a day he coughs three or four times in a row then makes a wet, hacking noise like he's about hork all over the floor. Nothing ever comes out, but it's not for a lack of trying. Sure sounds like he has a hairball to me.
We'll have to take him to the vet for a more professional opinion, but I think the truth is clear: our dog isn't a traditional dog, he's part dog and part cat. A dog-cat. Or possibly a cat-dog, I suppose it depends which one he's more of. Either way, not wholly one or the other, but a bit of both.
It'll be an adjustment, learning to live with our dog-cat. He's certainly not what we expected when we first brought him home, not what we prepared for. Still, you can't help but love him. I mean, I'm looking over at him, sleeping in his bed, his silly little tongue sticking out, and I can only think, "Dog-cat or cat-dog, he's still our pet and that's what counts."
So long as he doesn't puke up a 5-pound glob of wet hair on the rug. If that happens, he's out on his ass.
I spent a very weird day at home today. Being home isn't too weird, of course; like so many of us, I've been home nearly every day for the past year and a half. I worked, I walked the dog, I even did a partial water change for the fish tank that was overdue. I puttered, I put a few miles on the bike, all perfectly normal things. What was weird about it was I was all alone.
That shouldn't be weird, of course. Anybody who knows me knows I love my solitude. Once upon a time, before all /waves hands around wildly/ this started, I loved working from home while the rest of the family was off doing their respective school and work-related things. They were all but therapeutic for me.
Well, the kids started school yesterday (I'll have to write a bit later about how nerve-wracking that is) and the Wife went into the office today so, for the first time in almost 18 months, I had the house to myself. It should have been like lowering yourself into a steamy bath, like getting under a heavy blanket on a winter's night, like a third thing that's comforting but I'm too lazy to think of right now, but instead it was just...weird.
Part of it was the quiet, of course, but it certainly wasn't just that. There have been times, for example, when it's just been me and First Born home and, if you've ever had a teen-ager with their own room to retreat to, you know how much being home with a teen can be nearly the same as being home alone. But you know somebody else is there, even if you don't see or hear them. Today, I knew I was alone. I walked around the house and all the doors were open, reminders of all the empty rooms, just me to fill them, one by one.
At one point in the late morning, when I needed to stretch my legs and look at something that wasn't my computer screen for ten minutes, I walked in and out of every room in the house, but I paused in the kids' rooms, starting in Firstborn's, then in Secondborn's, just taking in those spaces. I don't know what came over me, maybe I was trying to absorb some small fragment of whatever of themselves they had infused there. It was a little intrusive, I guess, but their doors were open and we've always, as a family, understood that while we all have spaces that are our own, we're also all welcome in any of them. We are both communal and private people, and that's a paradox that just works for us.
But there I was, standing in the middle of Firstborn's room, looking around at their stuff, remembering the Christmas when they got this and the time they bought that at a flea market and I suddenly felt, keenly, achingly, the passage of time. There was a child in those memories, a child who exists only there now, only in memories, replaced by this clever, complicated, and equally wonderful teen-ager. I moved next door, to Secondborn's room, and had a similar experience: floor littered with dozens of Dav Pilkey books and half-built Lego sets where once it had been all Dr Suess and Mega Blocks.
After so long bumping into each other every day of every week of every month, to suddenly be alone in this space seemed to force my mind to fill it with ghosts. Thankfully, I picked up Firstborn from high school a few hours later. The house was just as quiet, but at least I was no longer alone. Somehow, it chased the ghosts away.
There's a middle school a block away from our house. Firstborn went there and Secondborn will before long, too. When I walk the Dog at night, we pass by it and, as of late, the parking lot has been full of SUVs and family-sized sedans, even at that late hour. There's a large field behind the school and it's soccer season, so there are games there almost nightly. Little girls in matching uniforms run between the cars, their beleaguered parents shuffling along behind them, laden down with folding chairs, soccer balls, shin guards, and water bottles and I can't help but hope that they appreciate just how perfect their lives are at that moment.
I recently read something on social media, a woman was recounting what might be fairly called the worst day of her childhood, and musing that one of the lasting ways it affected her was that, if you asked her now to imagine a "kid" she would automatically conjure up someone a little younger than she was on that day because, to her, the trauma of that day forced to start "growing up" and created a clear demarkation between childhood and adulthood. I realized that I did the same thing, for much the same reason: in my mind, kids were ten and younger; anybody older than that was something else, "young adults" or whatever. The carefree innocence of childhood no longer applied, not in my mind anway, and it's been impairing me.
I suspect that most people have a timeframe that they would consider the best years of their life and, for many parents, it's likely defined by their kids. For example, watching those girls in their uniforms running off to the soccer field, their parents-turned-pack-mules struggling along behind them, I realized that timeframe for me would be a handful of years ago, when Firstborn was eight or nine (peak kid) and Secondborn was three or four (peak toddler). If I could freeze an era of my life in amber, that would probably it.
But why? Simple nostalgia? Or is my personal trauma warping the way I think of Firstborn and causing me to want their childhood back? They're not a little kid anymore, no doubt about that, but in so many ways they're still a kid, and a pretty darn great one, too. Why should I prefer then to now?
For that matter, I can see the way it affects my perception of Secondborn, too. His birthday is coming up and that means he's about to start bumping up on this imaginary boundary in my head. It's creating a kind of ticking clock in my subconscious, like I have to squeeze whatever enjoyment I can get out of his childhood now, while I can, before it's gone. I know intellectually that it's not going anywhere, but that doesn't stop the ticking.
It's a lesson I seem to have to keep relearning, but maybe it's one of those things you can't learn enough: there's nothing stopping you from making now the best days of your life. Or, I suppose the real lesson this time around is if there is something stopping you, figure out what it is and deal with it. So sure, if I could freeze a time in my life in amber, to preserve for eternity, it might be then, but the reality is now is all we really have. And now is pretty great, too, if we only let it be.
I had planned to write a bit of a thinkpiece today, something that explored what made for a "good dog" and maybe, by extension, a good person. I was going to toss around ideas like essentialism and existentialism and I was sure it would going to be smart and sophisticated, right up until I realized what it really would have been is pretentious. I do pretentious all the time; it doesn't feel right to do it now.
We said goodbye to the Dog a week ago today. He'd been starting to show his age (16+) for a while, so I'm not going to say that it was a surprise or anything. Still, the end came on suddenly enough to catch us offguard. Probably most of them are like that.
It was kidney failure. It came on rather quickly--his last blood test had only been a few weeks prior and things looked OK then--and it became obvious over the course of 24 hours that the inevitable had become imminent, and worse: that it was impossible to stop and that he was only going to suffer if we didn't help him along.
The In-laws happened to be in town for a belated celebration of Secondborn's birthday, so the Wife and I were able to take him to the vet while they watched the kids. It was gut-wrenching, but neither of us doubted that it was the right thing to do.
One of the things that got me pondering the question of what makes for a good dog is that, while he was with us, the Dog was as much pest as pet. I'm not going to detail all the ways he annoyed me, that seems petty even for me, but I'm going to own up to the fact that he was the one family member I loved begrudgingly.
But I did love him. He was our pet for more than 15 years, we had him before Firstborn, and it's not like he was a constant nuisance. I might be mostly dead inside, but in the words of Miracle Max, mostly dead is slightly alive. And that slightly alive part of my soul insists that he was a Good Dog.
By the way, the surprise ending of my pretentious-but-deleted post would have been that all dogs are good dogs. Even rotten dogs like ours. That's just how dogs are and it why they're better than people. It would have been the crowd-pleasing sort of ending that, as a writer, you're not particularly proud of--it's a bit pandering, let's be honest--but if you construct the piece well enough, take the reader on a journey you like, you can take pride in that. If, you know, you can get over yourself long enough to actually write it.
One of the reasons I decided to scrap it, though (apart from the pretentious thing), is that something strange happened over the course of the week: I missed him in unexpected ways. Of course I was going to miss him, I'm not a monster, but what surprised me were all the little habits I've developed that are Dog-centric. Just today, for example, I grabbed my keys and automatically looked over to where his bed used to be because whenever he heard the keys jingle he'd look up to see if it was time for a walk. I feel vaguely unsettled every morning because he and I don't go on our usual walk. And every time I come down the stairs--every single time--I scan the living room as if I might find him napping there. Things like that happen dozens of times a day and every time they make me a little sad. There's a dog-shaped hole in our home, an unfilled space where he used to be, and that's harder to get used to than I expected it to be.
When he was alive, I denied strenuously that he was a good dog. It was a game I played with the Wife and anybody who met him, pretending that I didn't like the pet that everybody else loved unreservedly. I suspect I called him "you rotten dog" more times than I called him by his name, though I did it in that up tone that dogs like, so he might have thought it actually was his name. What can I say, it's how I show love.
Because of course he was a good dog. They all are. More than that, he was a part of the family and we loved him. Rest well, little buddy. We're going to miss you so much.
You rotten dog.
There are all kinds of hard decisions. The classic is knowing what you should do even though you don't want to, that one's all over books and movies and the like. Sometimes there just isn't a good option and sometimes there are too many. I had a new one come up recently: I had to choose between two approximately equal job opportunities.
Now, I can hear you say, "That doesn't sound new. You get laid off every couple of years, don't you have to do that all the time?" First, how dare you? And second, not like this.
The short version of the lead-up to my situation goes thusly: when I was laid off this spring, I took a contract position and it was approaching the end of its term, so I started testing the job market. I got an offer for a permanent position with a local company, but before I could accept it the first company decided they wanted to bring me on full time and made a counteroffer. So there I was with competing offers, both of them quite good. And that was the problem.
Now, you were correct earlier when you said that I've changed jobs my fair share of times (no used denying that you said it, we all heard you), but most of those times the decision was between job and no job (usually not a tough call) or between a contract position and a permanent one (also not tough). Looking back on it, this was the first time I needed to make a choice between two good options.
No problem, right? Just accept the better of the two. Except neither was really better. If one had the edge here, the other was better there. I was going to have to make the decision based on the margins, weighing intangibles and making my best guess as to which would be better in the long run.
It turns out I'm not great at making those kinds of decisions. It was more than just the uncertainty (all decisions come with some of that), it was the sense that choosing between two equal things was ultimately a bit arbitrary and "arbitrary" is hardly the way you want to make potentially life-changing decisions. I spent an agonizing couple of days hunting high and low for a decisive differentiator and found precious little, certainly nothing big enough to make the choice obvious. I was going to have to decide based on minor distinctions and guesswork. I might as well be flipping a coin.
In the end, I turned down the counteroffer and took the local job. I just finished my first week and, while I still have a lot to learn before I'm actually useful, I feel good about the decision. I'll wonder about what might have been for a while, of course, but I don't think I'll regret the direction I've gone. I suppose that's enough.
My phone has been putting together these little slideshows of old photos. Packages labeled "8 years ago," or whatever, accompanied by a collection of pics it has in memory from then. The problem with that is I pretty much only take pictures of the kids, so once a week or so I get to look back on my babies and be reminded of how quickly they're growing up. It's been bumming me out.
The other day I was in the kitchen, cooking something or other (it doesn't matter what it was), and I dropped some bit of food on the floor. I had the same reaction that I've had every time I've dropped food on the floor for the past fifteen years: "Better pick that up before the dog gets it." That made me sad.
A few weeks ago, my ears started ringing. I've had transient tinnitus all my life, like just about everybody else on the planet I imagine, but the thing this time is, it never stopped. Nonstop ringing, going on a month now. Every now and again I think it's stopped, but it's always just that I'd been tuning it out. My doctor, after processing a referral to a specialist, told me, "I've had that for the past 20 years. It happens to some people when they get older." It might be my imagination, but I think he paused, ever so briefly, before that last syllable. I'm hoping the specialist has an answer that's not old age, but the fact that it's probably only that? Yeah, that's depressing.
It's like I've been visited by the three Christmas ghosts, only they're not trying to get me to turn my life around, they're just trying to bring me down.
Wait, does that make me Scrooge?
Bah, humbug.