NaBloPoMo

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?

Calculated risk

Confirmed U.S. cases of COVID-19. This line is way too steep a curve. Remember the curve from March? Yeah…this ain’t flat.

Medical professionals, amplified by the news media, have been vocal about their opposition to holiday gatherings this year. Who can blame them?

The pandemic is out of control.

The pandemic is out of control because Americans don’t want to do what is necessary, and they aren’t trained to think about systems and consequences.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. The reason it bears repeating is TGF and I are on day 15 of our pre-holiday quarantine.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and 2020 has taken so much that I decided a while ago I wasn’t willing to give it up. To figure out if Thanksgiving with MyMom, who is vulnerable due to age and due to a chronic lung condition, we did the math.

The CDC defines close contact as:

You were within 6 feet of someone who has COVID-19 for a total of 15 minutes or more
You provided care at home to someone who is sick with COVID-19
You had direct physical contact with the person (hugged or kissed them)
You shared eating or drinking utensils
They sneezed, coughed, or somehow got respiratory droplets on you

Based on these criteria and a deep, abiding desire to avoid having to plan my mother’s funeral for as long as possible, TGF and I made some assumptions:

Eating together is high risk. It requires being unmasked, and I doubt my mother’s dining room table is more than 6ft long. Also, if the weather is normal for where I live I expect it to be about 50degF and rainy just in time for Thanksgiving dinner.
I am the biggest risk vector. I have been going to in-person physical therapy for a shoulder injury. This requires some close contact with the therapist and distanced contact while inside a room with other people, who are also distanced.
TGF is the next biggest risk vector. She has been going to the grocery store and running other errands, always masked, always doing her best to maintain that 6ft/2M worth of distance.
MyMom has been exactly three places between February and today: Her doctor’s office (September), LabCorp (September), the dentist x 2 (no later than October 15th).

Because we are careful and all three have low exposures we made a choice to refrain from getting tested. After all, what better place to get exposed to COVID than a testing site?

The CDC also has guidance on how to quarantine if you are sick or think you may have been exposed to someone who is infected with SARS-Cov2 and is asymptomatic.

I have had no contact, not even masked or socially distanced, with anyone but TGF since November 4th.

TGF did a grocery shop in the middle of the day on November 10th, masked and as socially distanced as controllable, and has had no contact, not even masked and socially distanced, with anyone but me since that day.

Indeed, neither one of us has physically left the house in at least 10 days.

How to calculate when your quarantine starts and ends based on potential exposure. Courtesy CDC.gov

That means today is day 15 of a hard quarantine for both of us.

And while will be having Thanksgiving dinner and the usual events tomorrow, we’ll be doing all that with some precautions:

Traveling with no exposure to other people (i.e., we are literally walking)
Masks for TGF and me unless we are actually eating.
Limiting contact between us and MyMom even while we are masked.
Seating will be spread as far apart as possible while we are actually eating.

And, if course, MyMom has the absolutely right to decide she is not comfortable with any of this as late as when we open her front door.

Life inherently contains risk. The trick is to manage it smartly.

The dream is always the same

One of the great gifts of “these trying times” is the realization that depression isn’t my primary problem.

Anxiety is my primary problem.

The scientific method tells us that now probably isn’t the best time to consider that a hard conclusion given the amount of generalized anxiety in 2020 what with the pandemic and the possibility of a second Trump term. There are some leading indicators that it’s a strong candidate though.

I haven’t been a good sleeper for decades. Where other people see sleep as mechanical restoration or as a respite from the world, sleep for me is a challenge. It’s something I can never do right where right is defined as “coming out feeling rested, refreshed, and ready to take on a new day’s challenges.” Menopause has only made this worse.

It started a couple of years ago with the hot flashes, which were fine as long as they were only happening during the day. When they started happening regularly at 03:00 they got more than a little inconvenient. At least they were predictable, I told myself.

Somewhen during that initial year I reformed my attitude on sleep. The idea that we should be sleeping 8 hours right through is misguided at best and farcical at worst.

Waking up at night is normal, according to WebMD. And while this is one of the few WebMD articles that doesn’t immediately lead to “You have cancer,” waking up can be an indicator of something serious.

What matters, most experts says, is how quickly you get back to sleep. Which is a comfort when you wake up multiple times during the night.

The thing is, removing the pressure to “get good sleep” combined with other good sleep hygiene habits – consistent bed time, avoiding sugar, caffeine, and digital screens at night – has actually improved my sleep. Sure, I still wake up multiple times but if I’m back to sleep in under 15 minutes, I’m usually going to wake up rested.

Then the pandemic happened.

My usual level of anxiety – around a 4 on most days – rocketed up to about an average of 7 on a scale of 0 to 10. And that’s when the dreams started.

I don’t remember all of them. But they’re intense and weird.

In one memorable one this summer I was part of an outlaw gang hiding in the mountains. While the gang played board games I had to figure out in a wintertime mountain environment how they could go surfing. Shades of Point Break perhaps?

Then there was the house with bleeding walls. That was a fun one. Strangely, it was the house from How to Get Away with Murder.

And my brain is susceptible to influence. Fuck The Mandalorian and ice cave spiders. Fuck it right in the ear with a chainsaw.

These nightmares have gotten so frequent that even though I have the physical reaction – the terror, the sweating, the awakening, the aftermath – when I have what I’ve started to think of as the basic COVID-19 nightmare I can pretty much shrug it off because I know what it means because the dream is always the same.

Last night my two favorite grocery store chains had decided to open a location that was just one big megastore. Instead of having to go to one store for these items – special treats all because the closest outlet of this chain is not easy to park at and the next closest while easy to park at isn’t all that close – and this other store for the regular groceries, I could now go one single place to get all the yummy things I want to have in the house.

The problem was it was grand opening day and everyone was there. And I do mean everyone. It felt like an aerial photo of JFK Stadium in Philadelphia during the Live Aid concert in 1985.

And no one was wearing a mask.

Sometimes in these dreams I’m not wearing a mask, which adds an extra layer of anxiety and yet another way for my brain to beat me up. Last night I was.

Anxiety expressed is so commonplace it’s become a trope of film, TV, and novels.

No matter what form the actions take, what happens, or what you do, the dream is always the same.

Scatterday

I’m fortunate to be able to work at home full-time.

I’m even more fortunate that Large Financial Institution forecasts on the pessimistic side. Our C-suite has looked at the COVID numbers. They’ve also looked at our Q3 all-employee survey in which 56% of us said we’d be perfectly fine only coming into the office for special events.Â Based on these data, they’ve decided the soonest we can begin limited reentry to the office is June 2021.

While I am fortunate to be able to work at home full-time doing that has some unintended consequences. The days take on a certain sameness. The eleven stair commute to my office doesn’t quite have the same bounding effect as the walk to the subway, the train ride, and the walk to the office downtown. Rinse and repeat in reverse on the way home and you have a set work time and a set home time.

I’m rolling into the last month of the year with more vacation than I can roll to next year and with 20+ hours of uncompensated over time. I work too much.

The number of hours plus my shitty abilities to:

enforce my boundaries
prioritize my own pleasure
grasp the idea that it’s okay I’m not getting everything done

plus the sameness of the days lead to weekends when I have too much to do (seriously, ask me about the shelves I’ve been trying to put up since April) and have no idea what do to with myself.

I am like Robin Williams freaking out in the coffee aisle in Moscow on the Hudson. Or Mr. Bean trying to get to the dentist on time. It’s too many choices of things I need to do, want to do, and must do.

It’s getting so bad that I may have to make an actual list of things to do for the pleasure of crossing things off and so I don’t get lost and discover it’s 6pm on Sunday and I’ve spent my entire weekend in front of the TV trying to find something to watch.

None of this is helped by the fact that I historically haven’t slept well. Drop in menopause and the dumpster fire that is 2020 and you get a stew of weird dreams, broken sleep patterns, and resignation to the fact that the days when I could go to bed at 23:00, sleep right through to 06:00 and wake up feeling refreshed are so far in the rear view mirror they might as well be in another time zone.

Last night I turned out the light around 22:00, fell asleep pretty quickly, only got up for the toilet a couple of times, and was able to fall right back to sleep when I did. I had weird, disturbing dreams and was wide awake at 04:00.

And I mean wide awake. Like no chance in hell I’m going back to sleep. So I watched a movie – Pride and Prejudice.

When I say Pride and Prejudice I mean the 2005 version with Keira Knightly as Elizabeth and Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy.

I have not read what is perhaps Jane Austen’s most beloved novel. Why would I when I can enjoy lush cinematography and not have to wade through piles of description vastly necessary when the book was published because no one ever went anywhere but hardly necessary when I can get a live video stream from halfway around the world? And as I watched it I wondered, what is Mr. Darcy’s first name?

Turns out it is Fitzwilliam.

Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. According to wikipedia, the tradition of royalty using fitz as a prefix for bastard sons dates back to the Stuart era (1603-1714). It was revived in the 1830s for the Duke of Clarence’s illegitimate sons.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? The Jane Austen wiki says Mr. Darcy is the maternal grandson of the Earl Fitzwilliam, which probably explains why he’s so rich. But why would a peerage choose a surname that implies lack of lineage?

I could spend hours digging through the the internet but then I still wouldn’t have any shelves hung.