It's a beautiful fall-ish day here, sunny and just cool and breezy enough to be autumnal. A friend gave me a fresh apple today. Our yard is full of the smell of fermenting grapes. (Sure, Cook made some juice, but there are still a LOT on the vines.) The girls have a month of school behind them and are settling in. 

We haven't yet figured out where all our stuff goes now in the new house configuration, so things still feel a bit unsettled here. We're also still getting used to having Duchess gone. We're glad she's out there in the world, as she should be, and she seems to be thriving (if grumpy about Midwestern humidity), but we also haven't quite shaken out into the new triangular normal. 

I've also apparently entered a stage of life where I keep being surprised by how much time has passed. Cook and I have now been married for 22 years, which means that our marriage is probably graduating from college and getting a job. We've lived in our house for 12 years. Somebody at work recently referred to a mild local political kerfuffle that happened a decade ago, and I realized that while I will never be a full-fledged Portlander,* I've logged nearly 17 years of my adulthood here. Somehow. And somehow I have friends here whom I've known for a decade or more. I recognize that this is how time actually works, but it still boggles my mind.

* This requires at least being born here yourself, and ideally having at least one parent born here as well. 

Dear lord it is somehow time for school again

 I read somewhere that as you age time feels sped up because your sense of time is determined by the way you sort experience and memories, and as you age you have more established categories (which I imagine as file folders) in which to place experiences as you have them, so your brain does not have to take the time to build new categories, just drops the experiences into the established categories and moves on.* 

Point is, the last year has passed extremely quickly for me, presumably because I am so old that nothing is new to me any more. And yet, in that time I have moved out of and back into our house, started a new job, and experienced a kid going through the college application process and then leaving for college. Feels like that should have taken longer. 

We're starting a new school year, and a new phase of school for both kids. Skipper had her first day of high school yesterday, and Duchess has her first day of college next week. Skipper is tackling high school (loud, chaotic, class sizes of 30+, confusing, etc., and thus not at all Skipper's jam) with her usual grim determination. When I asked her how the day was, she said "It was okay. Only 171 more days to go!"**

Duchess, after a week and a half of the crosscountry preseason, is starting freshman orientation proper tomorrow (and meeting the rest of her fellow freshmen, including her roommate). She's having a pretty great time so far, in Duchess style, which means that she has been getting acquainted with every single person on campus, including the lady who serves pasta in the dining hall and a French guy she met in the dorm elevator. (He lives in Paris. Imagine LIVING IN PARIS and deciding to go to college IN MINNESOTA.) She has been generously communicative with us in this initial stage, and it's been fun vicariously experiencing the collegiate delight of going somewhere new and starting a new life with lots of comfortable safeguards. She's making lots of new experience categories.

*I tried to look this up to determine if this single-sentence paragraph has any actual science behind it or if I just completely made it up, and the search results I got were along the lines of "when will my toddler learn to sort objects" and so I may have made it up.

** I don't know where she got this number, or if it's accurate. 

I had surgery. Wear sunglasses.

 So I had my first real medical intervention last week. I went in for an eye exam a few months ago, and they identified that the weird-looking skin on the inner margin of my eyelid (right up against my eye), which I had thought vaguely was some kind of combination of blepharitis, generally crappy skin, and just becoming an old lady,* was definitely not normal. The doctor did a biopsy on the spot, and that was very unpleasant - the local anesthetic hurt so much I actually shuddered involuntarily, and it turns out that having somebody cutting right next to your wide-open eye is psychologically pretty terrible. (Foreshadowing!) The biopsy indicated basal carcinoma, which is the "good" kind of skin cancer, but its location meant that I needed relatively complicated surgery. 

On Thursday I went in for the removal, having followed the instructions to wear comfortable clothes and pack a lunch. This was Mohs surgery, which is used I guess in situations where they want to take the absolute smallest amount of tissue possible. They give you local anesthetic, cut the thing out, and cauterize the wound, and then send you back out to the waiting room to wait two hours until they get a chance to analyze the tissue and see if they got everything. If they didn't, they bring you back in, and repeat the whole process. This can be repeated multiple times, though 2-3 is the standard. I expected it would be pretty awful, but I hadn't realized how bad I would feel. A friend later identified the emotional awfulness of this sort of thing as your brain forcing your body to do something your body thinks is a terrible idea. This feels right to me - every bit of the surgery felt like danger, and my poor body wanted to run away all day. They put in numbing drops that felt like poison - bleach or something that should NOT go in your eye - and then stabbed me with about a pint's worth of lidocaine, and then they put a black plastic contact in my eye to protect it, and then they did a lot of cutting and snipping and tugging around my eye, and then they cauterized my eyelid, which makes a sizzling sound, and a terrible smell, and the whole time I practiced square breathing with all my might. And then they put an enormous bandage on my eye, and I propped my glasses over it as best I could, which meant I could see only mediocrely at best, and escorted me to the waiting room, where I sat and tried not to cry. 

Cook was planning to come get me when I was done - he had offered to come wait with me, but I thought it would be silly for him to waste the workday that way, and it's not like he could help me with anything. I think of myself as a fairly resilient person with pretty good coping skills under duress, and I figured that I could manage this. Which I guess I could have, but I realized pretty quickly that I really didn't want to try- I felt so wobbly and vulnerable and miserably uncomfortable. (This was not improved by the elderly man with whom I was alone in this room. He very much wanted to talk at me about his opinions, many of which were stupid and some of which were racist in a crappy all-lives-matter kind of way and I felt filthy just from being in the same room. When they paged me back in for the second round of nightmare surgery, I actually felt relieved to escape him.) The second round of surgery - on my already-beaten-up eye - was even worse, and when I got back to the waiting room and Cook was there, I felt the most enormous wave of relief and safety. And then they paged me again, and I shuffled off to what I assumed would be a third round of cutting, but it wasn't - the second surgery had done the trick, and I could go home.  So I went home, missing much of my lower eyelid, with antibiotics in hand, my eye bandaged shut and strict instructions to keep my head above my heart, to not do anything that raised my heart rate, to not bend over, to not lift anything, to not sleep flat. 

The next day I had to go in for the plastic surgery to actually repair my eyelid. This was my first ever actual surgery*** - the kind where they make you take your clothes off and wear a gown (the nurse said I should probably take everything off, because "when you get really relaxed sometimes your bladder relaxes too, and it's a mess") and a comical hat for your hair, and you can't eat or drink anything after midnight the day before. I talked to a lot of medical staff, who were various combinations of extremely nice to me and extremely condescending.*** They gave me Versed, a sedative that immediately made me feel drunk, and wheeled me off to the operating room, where they shot me up with another pint of lidocaine and I spent an hour listening to 90s hip-hop and staring up at bright lights, watching them cut and tug and sew my eyelids. (Nightmare part 2 - I could not close that eye, even if I wanted to, I could only stare.) While the sedative (and the bed that actually had room for my arms, and the warmed blankets) made me feel somewhat more relaxed about this than the day before (though sadly not relaxed enough to pee myself), and it was physically less painful, it was a very emotionally draining morning. And then they took me off to recovery for a bit, and then I got to put my clothes on and go home, with the same strict instructions. I spent a lot of the afternoon napping, propped up on my bed. I'm not a napper, usually - it makes me groggy and nauseated - but I felt so tired and heavy, from some combination of exhaustion and sedative. Every time I moved my open eye, my other eye moved too, which tugged painfully on the stitches. 

I've spent the weekend in a weird useless state, napping and sitting and listening to podcasts, feeling uncomfortable and nauseated. Occasionally I get up and wander around, but moving around too much feels bad and woozy. My vision is weird, too - my right eye is struggling to figure out what its job is now, and what I'm seeing with that eye right now is like grey static on an old TV, which then underlies my left eye's view of the actual world, so that everything I look at is weirdly static-y looking, alarmingly similar to the way my vision darkens and fragments when I pass out. And it's oddly difficult to understand that for my right eye, there's no difference between closed and open. When I blink my left eye, my right eye sort of squeezes too, and it hurts. 

I have another surgery scheduled a month away to "open up the eye." (As best I can tell, the surgeon took the inner layer of my upper eyelid, flapped it down over the hole in my lower eyelid, and stitched everything up. The stitches will dissolve in a few weeks, leaving me with a fused-shut eyelid. In July, he'll more or less just cut across the flap. This seems like magic, and I'm very dubious about it - how does the cut surface figure out that it's a mucus membrane now? - but apparently surgeons have been doing it for a hundred years.)

I took off the bandage today to reveal my sad swollen shut eyelids. I have a couple of piratical patches to cover, for use in public and on work video calls, but for now, the stitches are covered by my upper eyelashes, and the eye just looks closed, like I'm constantly winking. (Cook occasionally does finger guns at me and winks back.)

This has been a really difficult experience to calibrate. On the one hand, it is a tiny bit of skin, and the prognosis is very good - the carcinoma is very unlikely to recur, and the repaired eyelid should be entirely functional (if eyelash-less). Really not a big deal at all. On the other hand, the physical, emotional and logistical impacts of it are substantial, and it all has kind of a horror movie feeling, so it feels like a big deal. I suspect it'll feel like much less of a big deal in a week or so.

Anyway, two takeaways: 

1) I really appreciate my family, especially Cook, who is taking care of all of his usual housework plus all of mine, taking care of me, and handling most of the parenting (including navigating Skipper's panic about all her end-of-year schoolwork). The kids are stepping up to pick up some of my housework and to bring me things and read to me. (Skipper is reading me an Agatha Christie book, and has taken a strong position that the British spelling of "moustache" must be pronounced "MOOstash" which makes me giggle every time.) I am really lucky to have a family that can hold me up at home, and also bring a feeling of home to me when I need it.

2) The doctor told me this kind of eyelid cancer is likely the result of childhood sun exposure. Wear sunglasses. Put sunglasses on your kids. 

*In retrospect this seems crazy - obviously irregular skin is something to worry about. But every previous time I thought something was wrong with me, it turns out to be either a) me getting old or b) me being anxious. I've never thought something was wrong with me and had it actually turn out to be something that was both wrong and actually fixable. 

**I mean, I gave birth in a hospital once, but that was a fairly high-speed event, and I was too busy to pay much attention to things like wearing a hat (or, say, shucking  off all my clothes in a room crowded with, I think, about a hundred people).

*** My surgeon has the classic surgeon's bedside manner. When I had my pre-op meeting with him, he told me brusquely that I'd probably have my eyelids sewn shut for a month and that I would never have eyelashes on my lower eyelid again. This was all news to me, and I said cautiously "I'll never have eyelashes?" and he said "Well, would you rather have eyelashes OR WOULD YOU RATHER NOT HAVE SKIN CANCER?!" And when he came to see me right before the operation, he didn't greet me at all, just walked up to me and said "You're going to have your eyelids sewn shut for a month" and I said "Hi."

Sources of information

Cook and I both had encyclopedia sets as children.* I remember picking up random volumes and just leafing through them, marveling at How Very Much Information There Is In the World. My kids, of course, can just leaf through the internet any time they please, but they also have fingertip access to an extraordinary variety of information concierges who tell them what information is important to know.  Skipper has been watching not only Stephen Colbert, but also a lot of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which means that she is constantly surprising me with her knowledge about things like SLAPP suits and biased jury selection. (This knowledge has been relevant because of the presidential election and the fact that we've been watching The West Wing.**) She listens to podcasts when she runs, and she often sits on the porch for a little while afterward, cooling down, staring off into space while listening to a podcast about volcanoes or what it's like to be the organist at a baseball game. So much information, so many potential guides to point us to what's important and what's not. I don't know how any of us can organize it all,  but I guess I'm glad that John Oliver is one of Skipper's teachers in her remote schooling life. 

*Cook's family's encyclopedia set was procured by Mrs. Big Cook from a stranger in a parking lot. Cook doesn't know any more details than that, and I have secretly built it out in my head into an elaborate adventure during which she wears a fedora.

** Skipper started watching it, and then Duchess discovered that it's leaving Netflix at the end of December, so now Skipper is watching a LOT of it. She calculated she'd have to watch more than 5 episodes a day in order to finish the series, and I don't think she's going to make it, even though she skips an occasional boring-looking episode. The West Wing is also prompting her to consider all kinds of questions. What's "Don't Ask Don't Tell?" What's Kashmir, and why are India and Pakistan fighting over it? Why should a president do fundraising calls inside the residence instead of the office? Why doesn't C.J. get more respect?

Welp

Still at home. Kids have no school for the rest of the year at least. I don't know if I'm going to have a job after six months. Cook is furloughed for a tenth of his time. Everything is crazy. And there's still no toilet paper on the shelves half the time when I grocery shop.

Our temp dog got adopted on Monday, and we are feeling sad about it. He had been cuddling with both kids a lot (they let him on their beds, and he LOVES a soft place with people on it), and they miss him most. We told the foster people we're ready for our next dog RIGHT AWAY.







































































I administered quarantine haircuts last weekend. Verdict is still out.

Working from home is hard. Like everyone lucky enough still to be working, I'm struggling with distinguishing work from personal; it all swirls together. Cook and I did invest in some office set-up equipment (headphones!) and time, acknowledging that we're not going back to any "normal" office commute any time soon. The bedroom is now my office, with an old piece of kitchen furniture repurposed as a standing desk. Cook shares the study with the guinea pigs. The TV is now in the basement. I know my way around all the video conference software, and roll my eyes (with video off) at people who still can't manage to "raise hand" in Zoom. I attended a two-day virtual conference this week, complete with networking sessions.

We watched every single one of the Star Wars movies. (Okay, I didn't actually sit through all of them with full attention. You got me. Lots of them aren't very watchable.) Skipper and I have developed shared escapist/vegetable habits of playing Stardew Valley on the Switch and watching Parks and Recreation.

I just feel really, really tired. So tired. I just want to live in Stardew Valley and plant parsnips.

Ha, and I thought perimenopause was crummy!

We're "social distancing" here in Oregon. Today was the first day for me of working remotely. My office is encouraging everyone who can to work from home with no/limited in-person meetings, and Cook's office is reorganizing around staggered shifts and partial teleworking so they can all stay six feet away from each other all the time. (All the meeting rooms have been assigned quotas based on their size, so the smaller meeting rooms can now accommodate two people who sit pressed against the opposite walls.) I was supposed to go to a conference in Chicago next week, but it was cancelled. (And I was really looking forward to it.) Skipper's school trip to Japan in June has been cancelled. (Though our family trip to Japan is not cancelled- we're going to hope as long as possible that we can pull that off.) Skipper's baseball season and Duchess's ultimate frisbee season (long story) have been postponed. All my meetings have been cancelled or turned into video chats. THE LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS CLOSED.

All the stores are out of toilet paper, which briefly seemed very problematic when I thought this morning that we had only two rolls left in the house. Turned out we had an unopened box in the basement containing 36 rolls, so we'll make it a bit longer.

The kids are out of school as of today, through next week and the following week (which is spring break) and half the week after that (unless they extend it). All activities are cancelled. I'm not sure how that's going to go. Based on experience so far, Duchess will spend it lying in bed texting, and Skipper will read a bunch of books and periodically appear to ask questions like "What's communism?" or "What's a nuclear family?" or to startle me as she did this week when we were talking about COVID-19 and she said "Well, Mom, one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic" and I said "ARE YOU QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN AT ME?!?!?" and she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said "Yeah!" like that's a normal person thing.

None of us know how to prepare or what to do. Skipper had a sore throat and abdominal pain this evening - do we now all stay in the house for 14 days? Are grocery stores going to run out of food as the supply chain falters? Should I have bought more canned beans today? Is it really going to snow tonight? The future, even the immediate future, feels wildly uncertain. And yet, people are still out and about, going to work and to bars like it's normal. I met a colleague at a coffee shop this morning; he was firmly in the this-is-overblown camp, and mentioned that his 75-year-old mother who has compromised lung function is really paranoid right now and makes everybody wash their hands. Sitting there, eating an almond croissant, with people socializing cheerfully all around us, I felt crazy. (And I told him his mom is right and he should wash his damn hands.)

Anyway. I bought a puzzle and the new Hilary Mantel book. We may starve to death, and/or have to wipe our butts with rags and moss, but we're not going down without reading material.

What is this life?

I feel unmoored. Nothing has happened to make me feel this way, particularly. I think it's the cumulative effect of everything. Not only does the entire world appear to be falling (further) into chaos and tribality, and the national situation seems unsalvageable, but Oregon is flooding (better than burning? maybe...), the political left is unable to stop tearing itself apart at any level, The Good Place is over, parenting a teen is the hardest thing, and I'm looking menopause right in the eye. Also, I'm still on the downward slope of the happiness curve.

My job, building on my last job, involves talking and thinking a lot about things that have to change - we have to build more densely in our cities, and we have to get around more without cars - but that are incredibly difficult for people to imagine changing. The way humans normalize things is staggering to me, whether it's normalizing purging and dehumanizing your enemies or normalizing traveling around at speed in a mostly-empty metal box that emits air pollution (that gives us heart attacks and cancer and alzheimers and learning disabilities and HAIR LOSS), messes up the climate, and crushes to death 40,000 Americans a year.  We are capable of accommodating and rationalizing so much. And pushing on it makes me feel exhausted. I'm not naturally inclined to activism; I like being a cog, and I don't like saying things that make people scrutinize me. (I love lecturing to passive, approving audiences, though - let me know if you've got one of those needing a speaker.) However, my personal theory of What We Need to Do (which is well-supported by research - I swear I am not making this up) can come across as wildly radical to normal people. Even the most liberal people mysteriously believe in a whatever-deity-granted right to free parking for eternity. And this makes me feel kind of unhinged all the time. It's totally possible that I SOUND unhinged a lot of the time. The other day I was explaining my theory of transportation systems to a person I had just met in a professional context, and he listened to me explain that a person who takes transit instead of driving to a destination, even if they go there for the most nefarious purpose, such as murder, has made a prosocial choice of transportation, and then he said "Do you say this kind of thing in public?"

So there you go. Unhinged, unmoored. However, I just want to say, please consider driving a little less. It was 65 degrees in Antarctica today. Maybe look into how you could get involved in local upzoning efforts, or maybe some advocacy around bike infrastructure. Bumblebees are going extinct. Ask city hall to dedicate right-of-way to buses instead of car storage. I'll let you off the hook about menopause, but you should definitely take the train next time.

It's messy and weird in here.

I've been thinking a lot about pain over the last year. I haven't experienced very much pain, personally. I occasionally get headaches, of course, and I've had a few minor injuries that were painful (fireworks are BAD!!!!), including sports injuries that still occasionally hurt, decades later. I'm not like that lady in Scotland. But pain hasn't really been a feature in my life. When I was a kid, my family didn't really do over-the-counter medicine. We definitely had aspirin or ibuprofen or acetaminophen or something that was occasionally used for things like headaches. And band-aids, I guess? But I don't remember pain or discomfort being really a thing in our life. The sense was that discomfort is a symptom of something that might need to be treated, but the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily or even usually merit treatment. Pain felt (and still mostly feels) like a clear, direct and actionable communication from my physical body to my thinking. Your head hurts? Drink some water. Take a nap. Your stomach hurts? Drink some water. Rest. Wait and see what happens. For now, for me, this mostly works. (Except chest pain associated with anxiety. That's weird and confusing and unproductive.)

For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.

And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.

Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.

Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.

I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.

What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)

Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.

It's all about me, part 586

Having my youngest child turn ten feels like a personal milestone in my life. I am officially a Parent of Old Kids. Then there's Parent of Multiple Teenagers, and then there's Parent of a College-Age Kid, and then there's Parent of Adult Children. It's a different place, here, and I like it. (Except for the part where I'm going to die.)

I like that my kids do things themselves. Skipper gets away with us doing a lot more for her than Duchess has, because she gets so ragey when asked to do things that it's just easier to not ask, but even she is stepping up to the plate more, and can of course do most things in a pinch. Duchess requires almost no transportation to anything, and while she resents that her friends all get rides everywhere,* she does like the freedom of being able to take the bus all over the city on her own schedule. Having them both be able to stay home on their own is a great blessing. Having them decide to make pancakes and then make them themselves is lovely.

And I like that they are their own people. Weird, poorly behaved, selfish people, but still.

Duchess is in Canada this week, at a rowing regatta. She's experiencing the Duchess Plateau in rowing right now, and she's struggling with it. As usual, her coachability gave her early success, and she quickly rose to the top of the group of the kids she started rowing with. Now, though, her improvement has flattened out, and some of the other kids are getting better faster than she is. With that, plus the addition of new, good rowers coming from other clubs (Duchess's club is the largest and most competitive in the area), Duchess actually got demoted to a worse boat last week. She was very, very, very upset. It's an interesting moment - I'm not sure if her enjoyment of the sport and of her friends is enough to push her through the discomfort. I thought that when you rowed, you competed at the beginning of the season, got placed in a boat, and rowed with that boat all season. That's not the case at all; you're continually competing with others to protect your place and try to displace the next person in the ranks. She's a sensitive person, and external judgement is very important to her, so this constant evaluation is hard on her, even when she's moving up or holding fast. When she's moving DOWN, it's very hard. And she's also not temperamentally inclined to voluntarily and on her own do the kind of extra work it would take to improve her outcomes. Cook and I are watching with interest - we have no idea if she'll quit and move on to other activities, or if she'll keep doing it and keep being tormented (this is definitely the worst outcome for the rest of the family, since Duchess does NOT suffer in silence), or if she'll keep doing it and develop a reasonable coping strategy. Or if she'll suddenly, magically turn into the kind of person who does extra work on her own. Or if she'll become the largest coxwain in the rowing world. Stay tuned!

I keep interviewing for jobs and not being hired for them. (I actually bought a blazer for my last interview!) I'm trying to learn how to brag more and also blather less, which are both difficult for me. I find that am a self-deprecating but also somehow self-centered windbag, which is a weird combination, and not great for convincing people to hire you.



*This makes me bonkers. Our neighbors drive the .75 miles to the local grocery store, and 1.2 miles to their kids' school. If people can't even manage walking or biking those trips on quiet streets with sidewalks, climate change seems completely unsolveable. 

Impostor/author

I struggle to accurately understand my own accomplishments in a lot of fields. Sometimes I feel like I'm amazingly good and other times I feel like I don't even deserve to be in the room where this work is being done. I am given to understand that the second part of this, impostor syndrome, is common for people who might be considered under-represented, and that women often struggle with it. I don't know why my experience of it alternates with delusions of grandeur, though.

The impostor syndrome side of this really shows up when I'm looking for work. I'm 42, and I still am clicking on entry-level jobs. My coworkers are encouraging me to apply for higher level jobs, managing projects or programs, and I am constantly surprised by this.

Last night I dreamed that a woman who was some sort of semi-famous lifestyle coach invited me to speak about my book at a lecture series. I said "sure, why not!?" and then when I arrived at the venue and was waiting in the wings, prepared to just kind of talk off the cuff,* it occurred to me that I wasn't sure I had actually written a book. I tried to remember, and the first thing I considered was that I couldn't remember getting any royalty checks. Or, you know, actually doing the work of WRITING A BOOK. And then I picked up a copy of the book, and flipped through it, and I started to realize that no, I definitely had not written this book.** I started thinking about how I was going to solve this problem, and then, fortunately, I woke up.




*This actually makes some sense. I'm usually happy to talk off the cuff in public, in spite of my anxiety and mediocre social skills. 
** It was titled "Life is Good," which definitely should have immediately tipped me off that I didn't write it.

Momentum and inertia

Summer is rapidly approaching. The kids have reached the point in the school year where everything is pointing toward end-of-year performances/tests/celebrations/field trips. The weather is leaning hard toward shorts. The trees are leafing out. Cook is mowing the lawn right now.

I find myself even more than usually lazy. I literally lay in the hammock yesterday and did nothing but lie there and grow my ennui. It was pretty nice, but I do recognize that weeds need pulling and dishes need washing and dinner needs cooking, and it's probably not a great marital-maintenance plan to just let Cook do all of it. Last weekend I forced Skipper to accompany me to the library and grocery store, and she objected strenuously. I said she needed to leave the house and do something other than loaf, and she said "WHY!? What's the POINT? Why can't I just read books and do word searches?" and I didn't really have a great argument for that. So maybe she's just persuaded me to give in to the sloth.

It just seems like there's so much schlepping; a classic middle-class middle-aged person's complaint - orthodontist appointments, dentist appointments, eye doctor appointments, regular doctor appointments, vet appointments, roller skating lessons, grocery shopping, hardware store trips, bike repair appointments, car repair appointments. Plus, you know, work and housework and the normal slog of shepherding everybody through the day. It feels like A Lot, even while it also feels like a great stroke of luck to be able to have this particular bag of A Lot.

We're all doing the same old things. Skipper is walking herself home from school every day and latchkeying it. She likes that a lot. She instant-messages us when she gets home to tell us she's home, and then she just reads for hours. The third day she did it, I was at a meeting when she normally arrives home, and didn't look at my phone till a little later when I was alarmed to find no message. I got a text pretty much right away from Father Blond, saying that Skipper was at his house and that she was "Wet. Unhappy." Turned out Skipper had run home in the rain (she had no raincoat, due to poor planning) and couldn't find her key in her backpack, so she left her backpack on the back steps and walked to the Blonds' house. She knows she's not allowed to cross the major street between our house and theirs except at a controlled intersection, but she got disoriented and walked much further out of her way than she needed to to get to a light. She walked 16 blocks in the rain, terrified that she was going to get arrested (she actually saw a school friend of hers and hid behind a corner until the friend's family was out of sight because she was afraid that they would call the police if they knew she was unescorted), and arrived at the Blond house weeping and soaking wet. She was upset, scared, embarrassed and uncomfortable. After I retrieved her, I pointed out that she had in fact just demonstrated her coping skills by solving the problem in a fairly sensible way, and she made a bunch of good decisions. I felt a lot more confident about the whole thing after that episode. I'm not sure that she shares my confidence; as always, she was pretty focused on the stressful and humiliating elements of the experience. I did reassure her that the police are NOT going to arrest her for walking alone in the rain.

That's pretty much the news.

Kids these days

I've been reading a book about how screwed millennials are, and what I'm gleaning from it* seems like it will dismally apply to Duchess and Skipper.

Also, Duchess and her phone. Ugh. She's constantly holding it and staring at it. Last night I made her turn it off earlier than usual, and she was such delightful company - she played a stupid card game with Skipper, manically and amusingly did a dance and voice interpretation of my uterus, and worked on a crossword with Cook.** I've missed her.

*Kids are having to work increasingly hard on training themselves and making themselves more valuable resources in order to compete with each other for increasingly unstable and poorly paid jobs. This is bad.
**I have fond memories of doing crossword puzzles with my friend in middle school, in the Eugene Maleska era. That's how I learned the word "ort."

Question Maker

Last week I picked Skipper up from after-school care a little early, and watched the end of her kung fu class. As all the other kids gathered up their things and trooped out of the room to go to the main area, Skipper helped the teacher put away gear, in a companionable way that suggested she had done this many times before. Afterward, I asked her if she always helps the teacher, and she said she does. I asked why, and she said "I like it. It gives me a chance to ask her all the questions I have about forms, because of my One-Minute Question-Maker."

I had not heard of the One-Minute Question-Maker, and I was intrigued, so I interrogated her a little. Skipper explained that she thinks of at least one question a minute all day every day. Some of them she forgets before she can ask them, some are silly and she dismisses them. But mostly, she asks them. She asks and asks and asks. She stores them up and them they pour out.

Also, the guinea pigs are feeling more lovable. We finally figured out that they're a lot more fun to hold one at a time, because when they're together, Momo gets pissed off at Snufkin* and snaps at his face.






























































What else? Halloween happened. It was a bit of a debacle. Skipper decided she did want to have a costume, but didn't want to go trick-or-treating, because she gets pretty stressed asking strangers for things. We were fine with that - it's not a bad thing to have a realistic understanding of yourself and how you will experience things and what you will enjoy. (Skipper only rarely attends birthday parties these days, because she doesn't enjoy them. We try to follow up the declining of the invitation with a one-on-one playdate with the birthday kid instead, which Skipper does enjoy.) So she assembled a classic witch costume in which she would greet trick-or-treaters.

Duchess had said she's too big to trick-or-treat, and feels self-conscious about looming up on people's porches like an obnoxious teenager. We thought she would go out with friends, but somehow she ended up staying home. (She was also pretty sick.) Whatever the case, we ended up on Halloween night with both kids at home. Skipper decided she did want to trick-or-treat just on our block and then come home, and Duchess decided she would hastily put together a black cat costume and go along as Skipper's familiar. They went out together, which was delightful - I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly and cheerfully that came together. They came back five minutes later, both very resentful and aggrieved. Skipper had decided she had had enough just as Duchess was picking up steam and starting to get really enthusiastic and happy about getting to trick-or-treat after all, and Duchess was angry at having her enthusiasm ruined, and Skipper was angry at being made to feel guilty for her decision. I have seen the adorable photos of my friends and coworkers' children in their costumes, and the only photographic evidence I have of Halloween 2017 are these photos of my two petulant children.

After they seemed to have recuperated a little, I took them both out again for a small-scale trick-or-treating. We stayed within two blocks of the house and went to a bunch of houses that weren't getting much traffic, and were happy to give large handfuls to Skipper. Duchess stayed on the sidewalk with me, but she was still pleased to get to go out and see the decorated houses and the kids' costumes. Everybody was fine with the evening, in the end, after muddling through the emotional muck.



*To be fair, it's understandable why she's pissed off at him. She's neutered, but he isn't, and he spends most of the time when they're together attempting to convince her that it's Sexy Time (which male guinea pigs do by making a funny chuckling noise and rolling their hips amusingly as they walk), and she spends all that time either running away from him or explaining to him at great length that It Is Not (in a torrent of irritated chirping noises and, if necessary, a sort of guinea pig hip check).

Summer winds down.

Hello from steamy Portland! We've been in an oppressive streak of hot days, which combined with a few days of terrible air quality to make a miserable end-of-last-week. But we survived. We try not to move very much. Skipper has been sleeping in the basement because the upper bunk in a west-facing bedroom is unbearable at her bedtime.*

Updates: 

1) We had our third weekend in a row of camping, and it was a lot of fun. The camera ran out of batteries, so I have no photographs. But it was fun. There were a LOT of my relatives, and dogs, and an adorable toddler, and there was river floating and swimming. The kids were thrilled. Duchess paddled an inflatable kayak by herself, and she loved that - she was afraid at first, and then super-pleased with herself for not falling out in one of the little rapids. Skipper got to ride in a canoe, and also was afraid at first and then delighted by the experience. And now we're home for a weekend, scrambling to catch up with all the stuff that went undone for nearly a month.

2) Duchess is gone, off in Minnesota competing in an ultimate frisbee tournament, under the quasi-supervision of some young volunteer coaches (thank you, volunteer coaches).** After the tournament, she's going straight off for a few days at a lake house with a teammate and the teammate's relatives. She'll be gone for a week total, and doing stuff that requires her to take more responsibility than she ever has before for both logistics and her own emotional and physical well-being. She seems to be having a great time so far, as far as we can glean from her cursory, infrequent communications.*** Cook and I fully expect she will return home completely converted to ultimate frisbee. Duchess was born to be part of a team,**** and ultimate has some fundamental characteristics that really appeal to her, plus she loves the people. One of her communications was pretty much a lot of squee over a player she thinks is AMAZING! 

3) Skipper has been muddling through all her activities in a storm of anger, fear, and resentfulness.  She's been struggling with swimming - she has missed so many practices due to vacations and camp that she hasn't ever really settled into it, and she still feels very uncomfortable. She has also continued to struggle with ultimate - she enjoys it but feels really uncomfortable because she's so bad at it. She went to her first ballet class today very anxious, and came through it okay. She's talking and thinking a lot now about her habitual thought patterns, though, which is potentially a very good development. (Actually, having Duchess gone is giving her a time and space to do a lot of interesting processing. Last night she asked me where love is stored in the heart - if there's like a big reservoir or what.)

That's pretty much it. We're turning the corner toward school now, and I think both kids are looking forward to settling back into it...

* I have also learned this week that Skipper is extremely embarrassed by the way I look in a tank top. I've been trying to explain to her that body-shaming is not okay, and also I'm HOT and I'm going to let my blotchy upper arms fly.

** To clarify, Duchess is now playing ultimate frisbee at an elite level not because she's good (she's mediocre, though being tall is helpful), but because teen girls who play ultimate even mediocrely are scarce in Portland, and an even smaller number of them have families who can be suckered into buying their kid a plane ticket to Minnesota.

***Either she's having a great time or she's joined a cult. I guess we'll find out when we go to pick her up at the airport.

**** Left alone, she's pretty much an inert lump. Put her in a team environment, and she instantly kindles into life and becomes an energetic, responsive, thoughtful, engaged participant. Take away the team, and you have a lump again. It's an amazing social alchemy. 

Summer, part two

I still haven't really settled into summer. (We're coming up on a streak of camping trips three weekends in a row, so that will be hectic.) I keep starting my bike ride home from work, and realizing I don't know what route to take, because I haven't thought through who needs to be picked up from where. The thing is, nobody needs to be picked up, because the kids are already home. Nothing needs to be picked up, because I can just send the kids to get groceries or pick up library books if needed. Bliss. Also, nobody has homework to throw tantrums about!

The kids haven't really worked out how this is going to go, either. They swim in the morning and then they bicker and read and are bored.*

Skipper is, as I mentioned, very angry that I have signed her up for some activities (frisbee, choir, and some dancing) - I secured her grudging agreement when I signed her up, but now that the activities are getting closer, she's getting very upset about it. I don't think she's ever going to be comfortable being bad at things. This weekend, I finally just handed it all over to her, because it's time for her to own her discomfort.  She needs to take responsibility for her choice to try or not try things (and she frequently does want to try, deep in her terrified little heart). It can't be me or Cook. I told her I'd withdraw her from any or all the activities she's registered for, no questions asked. She said she needs to think about it. (She least wants to do ultimate frisbee, but she's very seduced by the new cleats we got her, so she's waffling on that. Gear is really compelling.)

This wasn't a principled parenting decision, made calmly according to all available information. I'm just tired of doing the work for her, and I doubt that it's the best way forward anyway. I'm just giving up on the emotional effort, basically. It scares me, though. I am afraid that she will cramp herself into the smallest possible life; she is actively afraid of taking up space, of being seen and heard and acting in the world. There's nothing wrong with a small life,** but I would like it to be an informed choice instead of an entirely fear-based choice. However, I don't get to choose for my fierce little fear-monkey, so it's up to the siren song of the cleats.

I will note, though, that her swimming skills, and her confidence in them, have improved enormously already after a few weeks of swim practice, so at least she'll be a fear-monkey who can swim.



*They get really bored. Cook and I are 100% unsympathetic.
** I have a small life, and I really like it. It's definitely somewhat fear-based, but there were choices involved, and I know I turned away from the wider world. (I was just listening to a podcast interview with Denis McDonough, and I realized that I would really like to be White House Chief of Staff.  If any of you become President, please keep me in mind for the job.)

The days are not long enough...

So we had a wonderful trip - four days in Iceland, three days in London, and eight days in Scotland. Nothing terrible happened (in spite of my fears, some of which were very lurid - I am very good at fears), and everything went very smoothly. We saw SO MANY beautiful places and things; I felt like the vision part of my brain started exploding when we got off the plane in Iceland and never really stopped lighting up with fireworks at any point.  We ate new things, learned new words, and learned a bunch of history. The two things I ended up really taking away from it, though, were surprising to me.

First, I enjoyed spending time with my family. We were pretty much together continually for the whole trip, which is not a normal situation for us, but it worked. The kids are old enough to carry a lot of their own logistical and emotional weight, and even though they whined a lot and were super-annoying a lot, they were also good travel companions. They were curious and excited and had things to say, and when we had to slog, they slogged. We all mostly enjoyed each other's company. (Duchess said "Mom, I forgot that you and Daddy can be fun!" which was broadly insulting but I took it as a compliment. Duchess also, much to our amusement, wrote about London in a postcard to a friend: "I have to sleep on a pull-out couch, and there's no wi-fi, but it's worth it.") I was afraid that we'd come home utterly sick of each other, but we didn't. Well, at least I didn't. I feel grateful for all three of them.

Second, I thought a LOT on this trip about mortality. Apparently, the combination of spectacular grand-scale scenery, visits to historical sites focused on the lives of people who lived their little lives hundreds or thousands of years ago, and doing things that I'm sure in the moment will kill me (like flying on a plane, or driving in rural Scotland) makes me think about death. Not sad thoughts, mostly, but I just ended up thinking a lot about how brief life is, and how our lives are both really poignant and totally meaningless. I felt very small. I also wanted to hold onto EVERY SECOND.

Ice dragons and television

Oh hi.

We're fine. We're kind of grumpy. (Actually, Cook isn't, but the rest of us are. Okay, FINE. I'm kind of grumpy.) Kids are still thriving, while also going through normal developmental ugliness. Duchess trick-or-treated with her friends on Halloween, leaving poor Skipper with nobody to lead the way up every set of porch stairs. You have never seen such tentative body language on an ice dragon before - she shuffled cautiously up to each door with hunched shoulders and said very quietly "trick or treat..." Even after she got comfortable in a groove, and even skipped a little, it was a careful, tense skipping. Skipper's world is a fragile place.

I, on the other hand, am feeling weirdly powerful lately - I think it's because I turned forty and decided to just be an old eccentric lady with a beard and weird pants and loud opinions. I've taken to just saying things assertively at work meetings even though I have no reason to think that I deserve to take up airspace and I have no particularly great insights. (I figure if men get to do this, I might as well get to, too.) I'm really enjoying it, and so far experiencing no negative feedback. (Hey, this is what it's like to be a man!)  And I'm also feeling really joyful, as well as grumpy. The world feels enormous and indifferent and amazing - and I feel like I have room to be expansive in a way I haven't before. Forty, you guys. It's awesome.

And I get to balance my growing and definitely unhealthy addiction to political podcasts* by watching so much awesome TV,** which just reinforces my understanding that I'm incredibly forking lucky.




*NPR Politics for the win. Keepin' it 1600 for the chance to listen to nerdy frat boys obnoxiously saying everything out loud that I think inside my head. (Oh my god. I am, deep in my heart, an Obama Bro. This explains the entitled talking at work meetings, too.)
** I finally know who I am, after forty years on this planet. I am a person who really enjoys watching Brooklyn Nine Nine and The Good Place. And yes, New Girl. And, yes, unlimited reruns of Parks and Recreation. We live in a golden age of television that was apparently designed in a laboratory to please me.

updates

1) I had two days at work last week that did not meet my new baseline for a successful day. One of my coworkers offered today to teach me a few exercises she learned "from a local shaman" to help me shield myself from negativity emanating from other people. I enthusiastically took her up on it. At this point, any kind of shielding - magical, physical, psychological, hypnotic, technological, imaginary, placebo, cardboard box, whatever - is something I will try. We scheduled a training session for tomorrow (right before I have to go talk with some people I really need to be shielded from). I'll let you know if it works.
2) I am continuing to Eat Less. I consequently weigh less. (I suspect that my commitment to this campaign is due to the fact that I desperately need a successful project in my life to balance my increasingly awful projects at work.) Turns out that I don't actually need to eat anywhere near as much as I thought I did in order to function perfectly well. I don't know where this knowledge is going to take me, but it's probably a good thing to know.
3) I am bullying everybody in the house into an ongoing pseudo/lite-KonMari tidying process, one small category at a time. Next weekend, stuffed animals!
4) Skipper has a piano recital coming up.
5) Duchess meets every stereotype of adolescence that you could possibly imagine. Surly? Check. Sulky? Check. Sleeps late? Check. Really wants a phone? Check. Et cetera.

6) Skipper lost another tooth.

Hey, it's been a while, eh?

I'm home today with a limp and feverish Skipper, and feeling kind of crummy myself - perfect opportunity to blog!

Except I don't really have much to say. I'm not doing a lot of thinking lately.

I'm starting to tentatively look for another job (mine will officially be over at the end of June) while also trying to do decent work at my current job, which has brought me to tears several times over the last few weeks, once (humiliatingly) in public. This is pretty draining.

Duchess continues to be large and loud. Skipper continues to be small and mean. They both continue to refuse to take any responsibility for anything going wrong, and this continues to madden me and Cook.

Skipper is quite happy without gymnastics.

I've laid out the basic summer plans already, and Skipper is, for the first time, going to a mini (one-night) sleepaway camp. She wants to do this for the same reason she wants to do many things - to match up to Duchess (who would be delighted to spend the whole summer at sleepaway camp). She also has a friend who's going to a WEEK of sleepaway camp, and wants Skipper to come. We haven't decided on that one. Duchess is going to a week of sleepaway horse camp, and is very, very, very excited. The plan is also to have Duchess do parks and rec swim team again, which means an hour of swimming every weekday morning. If I am employed, she will be on her own all day, and will walk herself home and (presumably) lie on the couch reading for six hours at a stretch. She's pretty excited about this, too. (Skipper, predictably, is pissed that she will have to go to daycamp if I have a job, and do stupid activities with stupid other people instead of getting to lie on the couch and read for six hours. I pretty much feel this way about work, so I get it. Stupid other people.)

We're also thinking that it's probably time to buy the kid a phone. Many questions remain.

The Eating Less campaign continues, with decent success. I still feel that it is easy to see what I have to do, and set things up so I can generally do them successfully, but I certainly feel the drain of the requirement that I have to repeatedly and endlessly make the choice to not eat, and to stop eating. There's only so much I can do to set myself up to make better choices, because I can't actually set things up so I don't eat at all. Eating less, unlike many other self-control challenges, requires me to frequently do a little of the thing that I want to do a LOT, and then exert willpower in order to stop doing the thing. That's a big demand on my small reserves of self-control.

That's about it. I have to write up some job applications now...

Food for thought

Note: This is a boring, narcissistic post about diet and weight loss. Proceed at your own risk.

One of the things I've been busy with this year (too busy to blog!) is my new lifestyle change, Eating Less. Eating Less is something I've historically been terrible at, so I went into it feeling very pessimistic. Also, annoyed that I have to Eat Less. Last year's lifestyle change (exercising 2-5 hours a week all year) was a big lift for me, and I felt like I should have lost lots of weight just from doing that. I deserved it!

But it became clear after a few months that exercising alone is not going to help me lose weight. I spent the rest of the year feeling indignant and disappointed in myself and sad. For me, being fat is an unhideable shame. It feels like wearing a big sign on my head that says I AM A WEAK FAILURE OF A PERSON.

I have had a blog post half-formed in my head about this for a while, about how I feel about being fat, especially when so many people, some of whom seem like pretty crappy people, manage to not be fat, which makes me feel like I must be even more crappy. I don't understand why I continue to fail to do something simple - just not be fat. It's not like you need any special skills or talent to not be fat. I'm kind of great at not doing stuff, so you'd think I could handle this.

However, I never got around to actually writing that blog post. (And lest you feel obliged to reassure me that I'm not an extra-crappy person, I really do know that I'm not really extra-crappy. I have many valuable qualities. And yes, I am proud of my 2015 lifestyle change.)

So here, instead, is what I'm thinking about right now - it turns out that Eating Less, while somewhat time consuming (so much lunch and snack prep!), is actually not that hard. I can't say I LIKE it (spoiler alert: I don't), and I also can't say that I'm being as healthy as I could be (hello, fatty cheese! whipped cream with berries!), but I really also can't say that it's been hard.

I was reluctant to identify this, because my brain extrapolates it to two conclusions:
1) It's ridiculous that I haven't done it before. If this is so easy, that means I'm even more of a weak failure than I thought.
2) If I fail to continue something that is easy, that means I'm even more of a weak failure than I thought.

I feel how dangerous that thinking is. I recognize that something that's not hard for me right now, in my current emotional state, could be very hard for me under other circumstances. There are things that are true now that weren't true a few years ago. I have a job in which I feel appreciated and challenged, my kids are relatively well-settled in their lives, etc. I can also see that if anything gets off-kilter (hello, unemployment!), it could stop feeling so (relatively) easy. And I can also see that it will feel different after months instead of weeks.

But it's (relatively) easy right now. So I'm going to run with that.