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NaBloPoMo 2020

Rules for survival

Rules for survival come in all shapes and sizes. Some rules only apply to certain situations.

Don’t bring up a problem without having a potential solution and never embarrass your boss in front of people higher up in the structure are two rules that primarily apply in the work place.

Some rules for survival are primarily defensive.

Don’t go a a second location with someone you just met. Had a bunch of drinks? Double down on the first rule.

My mom, like a lot of moms, is a pragmatist. My mom is also a bit bloody-minded and a bit of a badass.

When she was 75 she repelled a push-in home invasion by slamming her full steel front entry door on the guy’s hand and then shutting it after he leapt back in pain.

Find two weapons in this room is a game we used to play at my house. Not to make it sound like my mother did this to a toddler, but I’m old enough to not be able to remember when we started this as a thought exercise.

And for the record, there are a lot more weapons in any given room then you might think.

We’ve been watching more TV that we might otherwise watch during ”these unprecedented times.” This how we ended up watching the first three seasons of Wynonna Earp (Netflix; Syfy originally). Imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer only with less heterosexual male gaze, a ton more sass, and gorgeous western Canadian landscapes.

CurrentMe has been wondering what PastMe was thinking ignoring this show for the first three seasons.

The short version: Wyatt Earp pissed off a demon and as a result the first-born heir in each generation since has been cursed with having to put down Wyatt’s kills, who rise from Hell as revenants upon the death of the previous generation’s heir.

Wynonna is the black sheep of her generation. The second born, never meant to be the heir, wild-child dealing with a lot of unresolved trauma stemming from the fact that she accidentally shot and killed her alcoholic, abusive father while revenants were kidnapping her older sister Willa, the rightful heir in her generation.

Upon her uncle’s death, Wynonna returns to Purgatory and to her sister Waverly, who maybe isn’t actually an Earp.

It doesn’t spoil anything to say that at the beginning of the second second Wynonna finds herself in trouble. It’s during this episode she remembers her mama’s rules for survival.

One: Don’t panic

As a first rule, don’t panic makes a lot of sense. Panic serves no purpose other than to draw energy. It also causes you to miss things.

Two: Assess the situation calmly

Evaluating your situation without emotion allows you to take a realistic look at your options.

Three:  Take inventory

What do you have that you can use? What is around you that can help? What is your physical condition? Is the environment – your location, the weather, the time of day – working for your or against you?

All three of these rules make complete sense, especially if you’re trying to physically survive. Where they lack is in what I’m going to call

Four: Figure out your goal

You can’t do the thing without knowing what the thing is you’re trying to do.

Focus on your goal and your goal alone. Others may be ignoring rules 1 and 2 and may try to take you down with them.

If you know what your goal is, these rules are flexible enough to apply to almost any life situation.

Presenting to your boss’ boss’ boss unexpectedly?

  • Don’t panic. That big boss is just a person, like you.
  • Assess the situation without emotion. That big boss is probably just bored or has heard good things about you. Maybe assume the best.
  • What tools do you have that will help you? Probably there’s a slide deck involved. Maybe you’re 20 minutes deep into a 45 minute presentation. You’ve practiced this, you can summarize.
  • What’s your goal? If it isn’t “Don’t embarrass your leadership” you might want to think again.

These rules also apply to the new reality of social interactions.

Yeah, some people aren’t going to wear masks, and some don’t fucking get that the reality of “keep back 6ft/2M” is that maybe you have to wait to get the thing off the shelf where I’m getting a thing off a shelf.

If you keep the goal – don’t get COVID – in mind, there are still ways you can deal with their behavior that don’t involve going all raging self-important asshole in a store.

My life is, objectively, pretty good. The curse of my imagination and the skill of that inner critic regularly torture me with “what if…” and it’s getting really boring.

For me, the struggle is how to move from surviving to thriving, and how these rules relate to that challenge.

By the numbers

  • Height: 5′ 9″/1.75 meters
  • Weight: 174 lbs/78.9 kilos
  • Trips around the sun: 18,728 days, 6 hours, 33 minutes and 0 seconds
  • Times I’ve been in physical therapy: 2
  • Degrees: 2
  • Professional certificates: 1
  • Full-time jobs held: 12 or 13 depending on how you count
  • Books written: 6
  • Books read: too many to count
  • Movies seen: ibid
  • Times I’ve doubted myself: ibid
  • Times I’ve gotten back up: ibid

Yes, today is one of those days. Those creepy, crawly nasty days when self-doubt kicks in and my incredibly talented inner critic sharpens its claws.

I’m trying a new technique this time. I call it the P.O. Technique.

When the inner critic pipes up about how I have set myself up perfectly to be distracted from the work I need to do on the last book, how I’m going to fail anyway because I don’t fit the profile publishers will look for any more, and how, ultimately, I’ve wasted my life I’m going to tell it to piss off.

In case your BritEng is a little rusty, piss off is a fairly rude way to tell someone to go away. And that’s what I want my inner critic to do: go away.

If I’m going to enjoy the rest of my life, I need to be a better friend to me, and I sure as hell wouldn’t say even half the shit to a friend I let my inner critic say to myself.

It’s not perfect, and it’s something I’m going to need to practice. But practice I will because I need to be a better friend to me.

 

You can never go wrong with lights

There’s something comforting about lights in the dark. It appeals to our most base instincts around self-soothing. Light, we think, gives as more control and more control equals a higher chance of survival.

Most winter festivals are about lights. You see it all over Europe where Christmas markets with their colorful lights, food stalls, and places to buy gifts start popping up in the middle of November. Hanukkah is literally “the festival of lights.”

We didn’t do lights last year at my house because we spent the holidays traveling. No lights. No tree. Nothing. Yeah, it was a lot less to clean up when we got home in January and wow was the bulk of December oppressive.

We decided to go all out this year. We are now those people – the ones who put up their lights Thanksgiving weekend.

 
 
 

And yes, the last errand we do before going back into quarantine for TGF‘s birthday and Christmas will be to buy a tree. No way I’m doing Christmas 2020 without a tree.

Differential consumerism

Last night I had a dream that I was at dinner with Janet Yellin of today and Michael Madsen circa 1995.

My brain can be a real asshole sometimes.

The Janet Yellin bit roots squarely in the fact that today is Buy Nothing Day.

I’ve written about Buy Nothing Day multiple times in this blog (2010, 2008, 2007(graphic only), 2007 (adjacent)). This year, I’m ambivalent about it.

From an environmentalist perspective, Buy Nothing Day makes absolute sense. So many things manufactured in the past 30 years have been made to break.Craftsmanship appears to be dead, and repair is a concept that in a lot of places just doesn’t exist.

The economic perspective, particularly now that we are most likely in a K-shaped recovery – better for those at the top and continuing to look shitty for those at the bottom – is a little different.

Our economy runs on consumption. All economies run on consumption, doesn’t matter if it’s the individual doing the consuming or the state. Companies employ workers to produce goods or provide services, they get paid for those goods and services, and the workers turn around and buy goods and services in return.

The more we buy, in theory, the more jobs there are. Assuming, of course, it’s a closed system and someone hasn’t figured out that they can keep raising the prices of goods while moving the jobs to places where people will take significantly less money.

I’ve ordered way too much shit this year I probably didn’t need. Also included in this total – dishwasher tablets for the house (monthly), and food for the cats (bi-monthly).

Can you be a conscious consumer, buying only what you can’t make, repair, or purchased used yourself? Making a point to buy local, avoid soul-crushing big companies just to save a few dimes? Sure you can. But it’s hard as fuck because everything in the U.S. version of capitalism is set up to prize convenience and price over humanity. And it’s even harder in a pandemic.

I bought things today – a robe hook, a kit to weather seal my leaky back screen door with plastic for the winter, a handle to help fix the sticky side yard gate. I bought them at my neighborhood hardware store because I needed them and couldn’t make what I already had in the house work for the problems they solve.

TGF went to the grocery store today. We needed milk and a few other things we’d run out of during our Thanksgiving quarantine period.

Technically we bought things. I’m okay with that. Now I just need to do something about where I source the things I buy the rest of the year.

Gratitude matters

There are at least half a dozen reasons why I tend to focus on the negative aspects of any event. For practical, daily impact, the why of me tending that way isn’t important. What matters for daily life is steering that tendency into something else.

I’ve been doodling variations of this a lot in 2020.
I admit I was skeptical. There is so much bullshit psychology out there. That something as simple as finding one thing to be grateful for on a daily basis has the power to reduce depression, improve eating habits, and encourage better sleep while reforming what I consider to be a base element of my personality seemed too good to be true.

Turns out I was wrong.

Being grateful helps me be calmer, happier, and better for the people I care about. That doesn’t mean that I’m not still, at base, a cynical fuck who expects the worst of people and is rarely disappointed in that expectation. I just means that I’ve learned to put my cyncism in its place.

Despite all the calls from people deep in the racial justice space to stop celebrating Thanksgiving, which wasn’t a holiday until the middle of the U.S. Civil War and is based in part on a misunderstood, warped story about one of the earliest instances of racial genocide in what is now America, every culture has a Fall harvest festival.

Every culture recognizes that winter is coming, that it’s going to be cold and dark for months, and that food may be scarce.

Do we need to be mindful that the entire United States sits on land stolen from people who were here already when white explorers showed up from Europe? Totally. All of Washington, DC sits on Anacostan and Piscataway land. And a lot of the names in and around where I live make a so much more sense when you know who was here first.

Being mindful of that doesn’t make being grateful any less necessary or beneficial. Here are some aspects of my life I’m grateful for:

  • TGF‘s patience and kindness as I continue to learn to be a fully functioning adult human being.
  • My generation who is fully aware of our family dysfunction and has made an unconscious agreement to support each other through deailing with it.
  • I have a job…
  • …that pays me a rude amount of money…
  • …to do something I’m good at…
  • …in comfortable physical conditions.
  • My mother taught me to think critically, to plan, and to observe looking for outcomes. Being able to do strategy matters for a good life.
  • My physical health is good enough that even though I could I don’t have to add “for my age.”
  • My friends who love me – you know who you are – enough to comfort me when I need it and to gently call me on my bullshit when I need that.

What things are you grateful for today or any day?

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