THE MORNING WALKS

The sun was just up and lighting the sky with orange and gold as Josephine and I headed out for our morning walk. The sun is up earlier now and even though it is 5:30 in the morning, we are not walking in the dark now during our morning walks. The early walk time is necessary for me to get to work on time and to beat the heat of summer. This particular morning was cool, but with the thick heavy air of the rains and storms predicted for later in the day. It was the kind of air that makes the connected space between your fingers feel sticky. Our walk route for this day was the neighborhood walk. For this, we have to cross our street at Lydia and 77th tends to be a busy street during the seven AM rush hour, but not usually at 5:30. Yet, Josephine and I had to wait for a number of cars to pass before crossing. I was surprised by the amount of traffic for that time in the morning.

Eventually, we made our way to the park that’s just east of our house. There was a middle aged couple passed out and tightly spooned together on the pavement in front of one of the park benches. This was the first time I’d seen them in the park. Recently I had noticed a path from the sidewalk leading into the thick overgrown edge of the park. I could tell that someone was living back there; the hint of a blue tarp visible through the overgrowth. But the inhabitants were like the fox family that lived in the same area a few years earlier. They were elusive. I don’t know if the middle age spooning couple were the ones living there, but on this day, a pile of mostly folded and clean clothes laid on the ground near the path. The clothes looked like they had been folded, ready to be put away before someone came along and dumped them out of the laundry basket. I thought about the spooning couple as I saw the clothes, how they were passed out cold, but tightly clinging to each other. It’s as if their argument started with the clothes and ended with a reconciliation a few yards away.

Josephine and I walked the loop of the park, passing another couple with their dog. Again, something rare, seeing other dog walkers at that time of the morning. The couple looked new to dog walking. One of them was wearing a sweater even. Josephine can be reactive towards large dogs on leashes. I kept her relatively controlled on my side while they kept their large dog barely restrained. Still, we managed to pass each other with a nod and a smile without incident. As Josephine and I exited the park, we passed by the spooning couple again, noticing that they had not moved. I briefly wondered if I should check for pulses, but decided against it. From the park, Josephine and I walk up the street to a bus stop. There’s a trash can there and a good place to toss the poop bags. This street is the Paseo, a major and historic boulevard. Across from the bus stop, in the wide grassy median, there’s a fountain. You know…because we’re the city of fountains. On this morning four or five teens were perched around the fountain. The air around them smelled like soap as if they had all just bathed in the fountain. I heard one of them say something about getting back to the hotel. Their conversation made it seem like they were lost but knew exactly where they were all at the same time.

We turned down the street that takes us back home and passed the house that always has random piles of crap in their front yard. Today, there was a shopping cart there and a young man sorting through the contents. A block from the house, a young trans woman passed us, smoking on her vape. We smiled at each other and said good morning at the same time. Then Josephine and I were home and I felt like I had dreamed the whole walk. Never have I seen my neighborhood so active at that time of the morning. I’m used to seeing possums and raccoons at that hour, not people. There is usually the same old man sitting at the bus stop who always exuberantly wishes me a good morning and I pause to have a small chat with about the weather or his health. But now that I think about it, I haven’t seen him there in months. It’s possible that he no longer rides the bus anywhere any more.

I’m used to seeing people on the morning walks in Tower Park. This is the time of year when there are more people sleeping in this park. Most of them congregate on the picnic tables in the large pavilion. There’s a scattered few on benches throughout the park. Some times, there’s tent set up next to the two trees that remind me of lovers with the way their branches reach towards each other. No one is stirring when we walk through. This morning, we heard actual snores from someone sleeping so soundly. There was a time during the pandemic when the park was full of unhoused. I walked carrying a backpack filled granola bars that I would leave next to sleeping humans. I got out of this habit when officials cleared the park. Now our unhoused are seasonal, showing up after the last freeze before drifting off to hopefully someplace warmer when the temperatures drop. Most likely though, they are moved involuntarily after the complaints from the neighborhood start to pile up. Even in my blue bubble, there are those who are unsympathetic when it comes to our unhoused. They know about it and feel bad about it, but don’t want to see it.

Out of sight, out of mind.

A number of our seasonal unhoused are teens. They are either tossed out for the summer, unsupervised during the summer and or the park is safer than their homes. Those who ask ‘why can’t they just a job?’ are oblivious to the complexity of being unhoused. It’s not easy filling out applications when you don’t have an address or doing an interviewing knowing you look like you took a sink bath at the gas station because you did take a sink bath at the gas station. It’s not easy to just stop doing the drug you’re addicted to and can even be deadly to stop cold turkey. Not every one has health insurance or access to mental health care. It is not hard for me to be empathetic here.

It might be time to start walking with a backpack full of granola bars again.

WOULD YOU

I was scrolling through the front page of the New York Times and there it was, an oversized pink square highlighting an Ideas article with the title “Would You Want to Know If Your Baby Had an Incurable Disease?” I did not click on the bait to read the article, but I could imagine that it reads like an editorial with some factual research on genetic testing thrown in. It is one of those think pieces that are meant to prepare you for tough decisions, but it is not a new to me think piece. This kind of question is the basis for Twilight of the Golds, a play by Jonathan Tolins.

A thousand years ago, during that idyllic college time, Chris was in a production of Twilight of the Golds along with Talaura, Misti, Kirk and John. The story revolves around the couple Suzanne (Talaura) and her husband Rob (Chris) discovering through genetic testing that their baby boy will probably be born gay. Suzanne’s brother, David (Kirk), is gay and all of this leads to family discussions about the trials of raising a gay child and whether or not Suzanne should abort the fetus. In 1993, the “incurable disease” was(is) homosexuality. As Chris’s theater support, I found myself in his dorm room during show seasons running lines with him in between my class schedule. I am not, nor was I then, interested in being in any of the plays. I am not talented in this way, but Chris… well it was his talent in this way that made me notice him to begin with. Most of the time, running lines was a fun activity, but this play was awful. Chris’s character was moody and angry and most of the character’s interactions was with his wife. Their discussions were hard and complicated and heart breaking. I couldn’t wait to be done with this play. The only good thing that came out of it is one picture I have framed and hanging in the family section of prints in my house. The photo is a family photo of Misti, John, Talaura and Kirk taken as a prop for the set.

It is a cherished photo.

It is no surprise to anyone that I am and always have been pro-choice. It is none of mine or your business of what any woman does with her body. I know that if I found myself pregnant today, I would have an abortion scheduled for the very next day. I don’t need to tell you the many reasons I have for that choice and I would not wait around for genetic testing to make this decision. This play gave me a list of one reason for not getting an abortion. Because I would never once even consider the tiniest of thought of ending a pregnancy if my child was going to be LGBTQ+ in some way. Yet…I know people who would. I know that their hate for the LGTBQ+ community is so great, that if genetic testing made it possible for them to know this about the child they were having, they would immediately abort. I know people who have no place in their hearts for love and acceptance, not even for their own child. I am not friends with these people, but I know them and at the very root of this “would you?” question is the reality of knowing that there are people who would say ‘yes’ to aborting their child for this reason.

And that knowledge has put a dark smudge on my heart.

I was off camping in the woods the weekend KCMO was celebrating Pride. I missed the parade and seeing people walking together in love and solidarity. I am the biggest softie when it comes to seeing two people together who are so obviously in love and who have realized that they have found their person. I think I have more LGTBQ+ friends who are in long term relationships than straight friends. I recognize the difficulty in finding your person when the odds of doing so are so stacked against you and I so respect and admire those people have beaten the odds. And so, I turn straight to mush over it. My heart swells up at the sight of it and I will rip out the throats of anyone that tries to come in to hurt or destroy that love. My dark smudge has made me deeply protective of love, mostly because I know what it feels like to have found my person only for him to be cruelly taken away.

I think about this every Pride month. I think about that awful play and I even get a little mad at Chris for the role he played in that play. I think about how rotten a human has to be in order for sexual orientation to be the reason to have the abortion. Then I look over at the people and friends who show me every damn day that love is always the winner.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The omelet is my go-to left-to my-own-devices dinner choice when I feel like I should do more than just eat a can of tuna. I usually always have at least two eggs in the fridge and you can fill an omelet with whatever. There’s always some kind of greens in the crisper and a variety of cheeses in the cheese bin. If I’m feeling a bit extra, I might rehydrate some dried fancy mushrooms to add in. Do not be fooled. The omelet is only an option if I’m left to my own devices on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Not Wednesday because that’s kitchari night every week and takes only the effort of putting ingredients into the Instapot. If it’s a Friday night, I’m eating a can of tuna with a sleeve of crackers while drinking wine. This is a long and drawn out way to tell you about the last time I was on my own for dinner and made myself an omelet.

Omelets always make me think about my dad.

When my sister moved out of the family house right after graduating high school, I was just ending eighth grade. So I was like thirteen or fourteen and the last kid left in the house with two adults who bickered every single day of their lives together. They left me out of their squabbles for the most part, though that was also the summer I lived with my brother and sister-in-law because of the severity of said squabbles. Eventually the two of them agreed to minimize the amount of bickering and I came home. I don’t know how breakfasts in bed got started, but I suspect that summer was the catalyst. Every Sunday morning, before Mom and I got out of bed to get ready for church, Dad would bring us both breakfast in bed. Like for real. I would get a tray with a plate of breakfast and glass of orange juice sat down on my lap with my back propped up against the headboard of my bed.

Like a complete princess.

Dad was very good at cooking a handful of things. Eggs were his specialty and often he would make me a cheese omelet. Dad’s cheese omelets were off the hook. He would put so much cheese in it that sometimes it was more cheese than egg. I often wonder if he was having a competition with himself over how cheesy he could make an omelet. It should be no surprise to anyone that I was an irregular pooper when I lived with my parents, but mostly because of that omelet. That amount of cheese on a Sunday set the tone for the week, but I never said a single discouraging word about the omelet. I greeted every breakfast tray with enthusiasm and gratitude.

I never once asked for breakfast in bed. This was something Dad just decided to do. It was one of his ways of showing love. The three of us, my brother, sister and me, all grew up with different versions of our dad. Some versions of Dad were not great. He could get angry at the tiniest of things, but as he aged, he mellowed. Sometimes I feel a little guilty because I got more of the mellowed out Dad version. By the time my sister moved out, Dad had less things to worry about. I didn’t require much parenting and less time was needed for keeping me alive, leaving more time for the fun stuff. And Dad reveled in the fun stuff. He loved being involved with all of my extracurricular activities. Dad practically lived at the Christmas tree lot for the band boosters every season. He loved selling those trees and making popcorn for the concession stand at a Friday night football game. Dad was into all of it and he met every task with joy and enthusiasm. There were times when I just wasn’t into something, but then Dad would get so hyped up about it that it would change my mind. His enthusiasm was infectious.

I miss that.

I was fortunate to have had that.

Celebrating Fathers’ Day is complicated when your Father is no longer here. I am grateful to have had a dad who taught me to meet tasks with joy and enthusiasm.

And how to make really cheesy omelets.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Last year, I had a goal to put together a car camping kit for solo camp trips. I completed that goal and then never went on any camp trips, solo or other wise. But I have gear for two all organized into bins, ready for adventuring. Michael and I have not been tent camping together since 2016. That’s when we slept on a leaky air mattress in the almost freezing summer conditions of northern Wisconsin. That air mattress didn’t even make it home. It went right on into the campground dumpster when we packed up to leave. This was the camping trip that led to the purchase of the camper. The two of us figured that maybe our bodies were no longer the kind of bodies that could sleep on the ground.

So we upgraded to a tent on wheels and that served us pretty well for a number of years. Then the act of packing and unpacking the pop-up, along with the constant stress and worry over possibly damaging the camper, finally took its toll on us. We sold the camper a couple of years ago and have not been camping since. We’ve stayed in cabins in remote places, but actual camping with campfires and camp stove cooking has been a no go. Frankly, I miss it. I miss hanging out in my hammock chair with a book and the wilderness. I miss the big hike that always takes places while camping. I miss the rustic camp dinners that get made that always seem to taste like the best meal you’ve ever eaten even though it is only a hotdog. This is the longest stretch of time in my entire life where I have not spent at least one night in a campground.

We’re taking the Cabbage to their summer camp tomorrow. This year’s camp is basically college. They will be staying for three weeks at Truman State, taking a college class and living the dorm life. I think they are equally excited and nervous. Camp is usually a week long thing for them, so this will be the longest time spent away from parents. Since I was that kid who spent 80% of their summers at some sort of sleep-away camp, I’m excited for the Cabbage. Those independent “study” summers helped shape me into the grownup I am today. I think the Cabbage is going to love this time of freedom and independence. And since we’re driving them all the way over to Kirksville, Michael and I decided to find a nearby campground for a couple of nights of camping.

Old school.

In a tent.

With a better air mattress.

At the beginning of this week, the very thought of lugging my camp gear out of the basement and planing and prepping meals felt exhausting. Wednesday evening, I pulled my camp kitchen box and a bag of random camp needs out of the basement. I opened up the kitchen box to check my inventory and was pleasantly surprised by how well I had organized myself for camping. One tote contained all of my kitchen needs, including my two burner stove. Then I remembered how I used to have to pack the pop-up trailer just for the kitchen. I took a three-tiered wheeling tool chest and converted it into a camp kitchen that I called Fat Max. Fat Max fit perfectly into the storage rack on the front of the camper, but was heavy lifting. We would load Fat Max, the ice chest, our camp chairs and another bin of camp supplies all into that front rack. Then it would all have be unloaded to set up the camper. Very little could be packed inside the camper because folding it up took up any floor space and made the refrigerator inaccessible. Now, I have one bin, two bags (one for bedding, one for camp supplies), one tent, one air mattress and one ice chest, which is how I camped before the camper. I have simplified our camping and in doing so, I have gotten very excited about our camp trip this weekend.

For the life of me, I cannot understand how I let the simplicity of camping become so complicated. I created more work for myself and this soured the experience. But, I think, in general, this is something we all do to ourselves. We overcomplicate all aspects of our lives. Some of this is because many of us were taught that life is a struggle, that it even has to be a struggle. If you’re not struggling, you’re not working hard enough for success. We should be struggling to make ends meet. Our jobs should be a daily struggle. It’s called work because it is supposed to be work. The concept of life being a struggle leaks into every aspect of living and we need permission for ease and simplicity. This idea has fueled businesses selling concepts of health and wellness. Feel the burn, but unplug for self care. Its hard to separate the things that are going to be work from the things that don’t have to be work.

I remember a camping trip once with Chris, Traci and James where Traci had purchased a new tent. The tent was supposed to be really easy to set up. All that was required was to push up from the center of the tent and the poles would lock into place. Easy peasy. Except it wasn’t. Traci was too short to press up far enough for the poles to lock. Even then, it turned out that it required quite a bit of force to lock the poles into place. Finally, after a whole lot of swearing and sweating, they finally got that tent up with the poles locked into place. At the end of that trip, Traci pulled down that tent and threw it into the dumpster. She thought she had bought a tent that would make camping easier. It did not and so she got rid of it and moved onto something else. While it is a memory I will never forget (that whole weekend was filled them), it was also a lesson I should have been paying attention too. Those activities that we like doing should not be something that requires so much work.

Camping shouldn’t be work.

I’m grateful to be able to test out that theory this weekend.

AVOID

I’m not avoiding you. I am avoiding me. I came back from Woods Hole with a stack of forty-ish pictures to process from my Nikon and every single one of them turned out to be a whole mood. There are many in the stack that I like a lot. They’re the kind of images I’d want to make really large prints of and hang in a minimalist modern house that has more windows than walls. I also came home with four seashells that I hastily threw into my backpack without really cleaning. My backpack now holds all the usual things like wallet, travel Kleenex, Invisalign storage container, a random feather and now four seashells and some sand. Oh…I think I have two protein bars tucked away in an inside pocket for emergencies.

The feather will end up being the thing that saves my life someday.

I also came home to a dead scooter. The battery on Valerie got zapped by our winter. I did put it on a charger and the battery charged. We had a good month of riding in between bad weather. Then she sat for two weeks because of weather and me being out of town. Michael had to push her up the driveway for me on Saturday because I got to the bottom of the drive and the engine would not turnover. I put her back on the charger and rode to work without incident on Monday. I didn’t ride on Tuesday because of tornados (everyone is fine here). Then on Wednesday, I put the key in the ignition and tried starting the scooter in the garage because I have learned my lesson. But nothing. So this summer, not only am I going to learn to do my own oil changes, but I’m also replacing a battery.

So. Exciting.

This is yet another reminder of how somethings can be very much the same while also very different. And I’m doing my best to not make comparisons, but what I want to say is that V (my original Vespa) wouldn’t be having this issue. I also had a magic battery for V that lasted over ten years. I only replaced it because Michael said I needed to replace it. Something about battery lives and blah blah blah. If I sit to long with the thoughts, V becomes more of an identity than a scooter and I feel myself shifting over into a comparison of losses and founds. We all do it some unintentional way. We can’t help ourselves. It’s part of being in a society of too many choices and the disposability of some of those choices.

Chris used to buy up toiletry bags like candy, each one purchased after the previous failed to meet expectations.

This comparison of losses and founds is not delegated to just things. We apply it to people more often then anyone wants to fess up to. I am so over conscientious of doing this, but I gave V a human identity. She was the first scooter, the one that broke open my soul with joy, the one linked to Chris, the one that held all of those memories of scooter rides with Chris. This scooter, Valerie, is just a new scooter model without all of those memories or links. This scooter is an easy target for my angst and pouts over how my life was better when…fill in the blank. I give myself a few moments to wallow in all of that before shaking it off like a dog. The line from that Natalie Merchant song floats through my brain.

Your mamma is a bitter bride. She’ll never be satisfied. - Natalie Merchant, Life is Sweet

I tell myself "You are not that person.” Except…

Sometimes, I am.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Today is a travel day as I make my way home from Woods Hole. I’ve been here for most of the whole week and when I scheduled this trip, I thought I would be spending some time orienting new visitors to our lab space. The scientists spending their summer here were delayed with their paperwork. So I’ve had the lab space mostly to myself, which was good. I believe that I got everything in order in the lab so that it will be ready for our visiting scientists this summer.

The last time I was I here, I joked that I had never been to the Cape when it was warm. I thought by pushing this year’s visit to a little bit later date, I would at least be able to leave my coat behind. The weather was lovely on my first full day here but I spent the day organizing the lab space. The rest of the week felt more like walking around inside someone’s cold wet sneeze. At this point, I’ve come to terms with just embracing the weather in what ever form it comes in when I’m in this area. At least I don’t have to be here in the middle of winter.

This trip, I got invited to tour a bit of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). A former colleague was given her own lab space and she walked me through her very new lab while discussing her plans for the future. I didn’t know her well when she was in Kansas City, but I could not help gushing with pride and joy as I do with all of our graduate students and postdocs who go on to be successful scientists. This is such a scary time to be starting out as scientist and this young scientist admitted that she’s worried about finances, but she’s taking each day as it comes right now. Which is really all any of us can do. We had a depressing conversation about funding cuts where I confessed that we had new graduates and postdocs who had jobs lined up, but then rescinded after this administration put a halt to funding scientific research. One of those postdocs confessed to me that she was applying outside of the US because she couldn’t see a future for her scientific research in this country.

I interrupted this part of our conversation to move the focus back to her success because being offered your very own lab any where, let alone at some place as prestigious as WHOI is a big freakin’ deal. Getting the opportunity to witness, in person, this success is a gift that I needed right now. Because while it is bleak and pretty awful what this administration has and is doing to our scientific community, there is hope. The take-away here is to take each day as it comes and being grateful for small successes in this moment.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

At the end of today, people will head out of the office and into a long weekend of BBQs and maybe even a little get-away. They will celebrate the beginning of summer which is marked by Memorial Day. Everything summer opens up Memorial Day weekend. School’s out for summer. Except here. We had too many snow days this year. Michael’s last day of school is the 29th. The Cabbage’s last day of middle school is a half day on a Monday, June 2. They are so mad and have spent weeks complaining about having to go in for half a day on a Monday on the first day of summer. They’ve been petitioning an out, but their mom thinks they shouldn’t miss their last day of middle school. I am Switzerland on the subject, but honestly, the Cabbage has been over middle school since December. They’re ready to move on.

We have plans for attending a BBQ on Sunday with Jenn and Wade and some other friends. We’ll do the typical Memorial Day stuff even though Memorial Day has not been typical for me or my family in a really long time. This August will mark twenty years without my nephew, J. For those of you knew to my blog, we lost J to a car bomb in Iraq, August 1st 2005. My family is a small one and J was more little brother then nephew thanks to our four year age gap. Despite having a wife and two little boys (who are now grown adults), he did what a number of young people did after the attacks of Sept 11. He joined the Marine reserves as a way to serve and honor his country. We were all a bit delusional in thinking that because he was part of the reserves and had a young family, the government wouldn’t send him to Afghanistan. And they didn’t. They sent him to Iraq and two weeks before he was supposed to come home, his unit was hit with a car bomb. J came home to us in pieces and this broke my tiny family.

My tiny broken family has changed quite a bit in the last twenty years. J’s young boys are now grown men with wives. His young wife remarried and has two more boys, who I guess are not so much boys anymore as they are young teenage men. My tiny family grew a little bit with the addition of these people but then shrunk a bit with the loss of Chris and Dad. We’ve all moved forward. I no longer visibly cringe when someone thanks me for my sacrifice. It has taken me twenty years to understand that what I really sacrificed was naivety and innocence. I did not willing offer up my nephew to be a sacrificial lamb for this country. Instead, I sacrificed the idea that such tragedy could ever happen to my family. I sacrificed a belief that my country would ever allow such tragedy to happen to any family.

Twenty years later and I still don’t understand how J’s presence in Iraq helped this country.

My so called sacrifice shapes my vote, as I meticulously research candidates and their stance on veteran affairs and support of military families. It is one of the many reasons I did not vote for Josh Hawley (MO. Rep). He voted against supporting expanded health care for our veterans. The DOGE, set up by Trump, cut thousands of jobs for the Department of Veteran Affairs, a department that was already understaffed and implemented a hiring freeze. Veterans will now have longer wait times for health care, disability claims, burial and funeral expenses and the Veteran’s Crisis Line. As a citizen, it’s not like I didn’t care about these issues before this country wrongfully sent J to Iraq. It just made me care more and because of that, Memorial Day is more than BBQs and sales events. It’s about remembering those who died in service for this country, one that doesn’t truly support them.

I am grateful to those who support our military with more than words and accolades. I am grateful for those who still choose to serve in spite of the lack of support they will receive from this administration. I am grateful J turned out to be the kind of person who believed in doing good deeds and a man of integrity. I am grateful to the young ROTC group who decorated J’s grave site this morning by raising the American flag, something the group does every year. I am grateful to spend some time with friends this weekend and I’m grateful for the start of summer.

I SHOULD WRITE THIS SHIT DOWN

Saturday morning after my usual breakfast sandwich and journal writing time, I was driving to Trader Joe’s along Ward Parkway. Kansas City is a city of boulevards and parkways. Ward Parkway is particularly lovely, lined with tall trees and old mansions. There is a wide lush median with an the occasional fountain (we’re also the city of fountains). At the intersection of Meyer and Ward there is a large roundabout that circles the Meyer Circle Sea Horse Fountain which was just refinished last year. The stones that make up the fountain now shine a bright white. It’s a really pretty fountain. Any hoo…as I made my way half way around the circle, I noticed the sun reflecting off the water and the people jogging up and down the sidewalks and I sighed with the loveliness of the day. Then something entered my brain and I thought “Ooh…I should write about that thing! That would be something not depressing to write about.”

Now I’ve completely forgotten what it was that entered my brain.

You see? Nice things float around inside my head. It is not all doom and gloom in there. I just seem to be misplacing those thoughts at the moment. I seem to be misplacing a number of things at the moment. Thoughts. Appointments in the calendar. Reasons for why I got up from the couch or why I walked with purpose into the kitchen. Did I feed the dog? I think maybe I did? Josephine got two dinners that night. Lucky dog. It’s like I only have a brain for science and as soon as I step out of the work space, someone blows a thick smoke into my ears. This does sort of happen to me when I’m on two wheels. The number of times I end up behind a car containing heavily pot smoking passengers (new band name?) while I am on my scooter has become immeasurable. I’m more likely to pull into the driveway with a contact high than not.

But no. This fog isn’t pot fog. I know that it is the hazy brain of an aging female mixed in with a brain that tends to be the keeper of the locations of all the things. It is a combination of hormones and just asking too much of my brain. I’m learning French (if you can call it that). I’m reading a book that I checked out digitally from the library which means it will be yanked out of my digital reader when the time is up. I’m learning how to build code to run a slide loading robot. That shit is hard. And all of those reasons above are why I might sit in the driveway in my car, scrolling through Instagram for fifteen minutes before taking the groceries inside or forget to sub that yoga class (yeah..that happened). I have things on my work calendar that I only see in when I have Outlook open. I have things on my google calendar that only see when I have my gmail open. I have stuff on my phone calendar that I never really even look at it.

My calendar situation is a mess.

I spent fifteen minutes this morning fixing all of that and combining my calendars into something that makes more sense. At least for now. I went with combining it all to my google calendar because I have everything color coded and I feel like my brain appreciates this. In fact I just moved a red work block activity scheduled for a previous day to an earlier day because of an unexpected opening on the microscope I need to use for this project. I found great pleasure in this action, but also that red work block was wedged into a full column of other work blocks. It was nice to visually clear that space and now I may be able to actually finish a cup of coffee that morning.

Even still, I forgot to take my Tuesday block of pills and Wednesday morning I stared at my pill box for a long time convincing myself that this day is Wednesday.

Not Tuesday.

DIRECTION

I have this superpower that I genetically inherited from dad. It’s nothing major. I can’t fly or shoot lasers out my eyes (yet). It is a relatively simple little superpower. Heather calls it my party trick. The trick or superpower is the ability to point to north or south under any situation. For instance, if I’m inside a building and someone asks “which way is west?”, I can point them in the right direction. There’s only been one exception and that was in Portland OR. Apparently that place is my kryptonite because every time I visit I lose all sense of direction. Someone told me that it was probably because Portland has two norths, a regular compass one and a magnetic one. Anyway, directions and map reading and the ability to know where I am on the planet was something my dad did very well.

This internal compass might also have something do with life trajectories. Though it felt a little stronger in my youth. I was always heading in a particular life direction. Every extra curricular activity was a stepping stone in that life direction. My inner mantra back then was “must get to college.” It was only once I got to college where I finally allowed myself to ignore the straight line of the compass. I was never completely without direction until Chris died. Then, understandably, I spent some time just wandering around the forest of life. It took some time and making some really dumb (and at times dangerous) choices before I finally had my sense of life direction back. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of my stagnant nature of late.

Is my compass broken?

Someone sent me a cartoon once depicting how someone in science receives information versus others. The non-science person’s bubble read “Yeah, I saw it on TikTok. It must be true.” while the science person is surrounded by a stacks of journal articles researching the validity behind the TikTok video. It would be funny if it were not true. During the pandemic, a number of people contacted me with questions and I spent a lot of time reading articles about what we knew then and what we know now so I could reply with a clear answer that would include what I knew personally at the time. In a way, we are still experiencing a pandemic. This one threatens the validity of our news sources like NPR and PBS, sources for the public (it says so in their names).

The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. - Mon Mothma, Andor

Trying to shrink that abyss is exhausting.

I read something recently about how we change over the years and the author said something about setting down the things she was not ment to carry or had become too heavy to carry. This made me pause. Who the fuck do I think I am?!? Why on earth do I feel like I need to carry the entire weight of a rebellion? I don’t! I can’t! I learned a long time ago that people will only listen to facts and truth if they are open and willing for listening. I no longer waste my time on such people who are not open for listening. I mean, many of them fell for that whole anti-abortion propaganda that was circulated in the early 70s that claims women use abortion as birth control. I can think of four reasons for why a woman would have an abortion. None. Of. Your. Business. Those are the four reasons, but also abortion as birth control is simply not true. Yet there is no reasoning or argument to persuade them otherwise.

I have been attempting to pull myself out of melancholy for months now and get back into the routine of doing things that I enjoy doing. Winter was hard. My country has been turned to garbage. We’ve had one of our grad students all ready denied for a VISA and some of our other grad students terrified of going home to try to renew their VISAS. I am very busy at work, but in that whole ‘hurry up and wait’ busy that usually happens in science. I’ve felt overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy in aiding the rebellion. I realize that my inability to pull myself out of this funk is directly related to my unwillingness to stop carrying the things that are too heavy or not entirely my thing to carry. There’s so much stuff and the enormity of it all is what has me feeling lost. Where do I put my focus? My time? My energy? Perhaps my compass is not broken and I have not lost my direction. Maybe I don’t need to be heading into anything while carrying heavy things. I’ve never been into the idea of pack-in camping.

My compass is telling me to set some things down so I can move in a direction I want to move into.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

My friend Melissa is currently raising money for a charity bicycle ride she’s doing in September for the Kelly Bush Foundation. The KBF provides funding for purchasing adaptive sports equipment for people with spinal cord injuries. This is how Melissa was able to purchase her adaptive bicycle. I don’t think I can explain just how important it is for Melissa to have this bike not just for her physical health, but for her mental health. She told me that she’d really like to raise enough money for the KBF to pay off the grant she received from them for her bike. Every time she tried posting about the fundraiser on Facebook, they took it down for ‘spam’ violations. I shared the link to my Facebook in hopes of spreading the word and so far so good. It’s still up.

Look, she’s not going to like the next part of this post, but I don’t care. Melissa is one of those friends I have that I kind of can’t believe she’s my friend. She’s the too cool for school type, goes to all the cool concerts and has real adventures. Her body handed her a real shit deal, but she hasn’t let that stop her adventuring, concert going spirit. Any way, she’s a cool cat and she’s my friend, which makes me cool by proxy. This whole Facebook thing has me furious. This week has not gone as I intended. I caught the summer cold virus that seems to be floating around the office and spent one whole day on my couch. The thing I started writing sounds so bleak and depressing that there’s no way to spin that into gratitude. I’m not even sure if it will ever see the light of day. So I’m changing tactics. This is what I am grateful for this week.

I am grateful for the friends I have in this life.

This is part of the reason I keep my social media accounts. It is a place for sharing joys and triumphs and words of encouragement. When everything happened with the election, so many people jumped off the social media boats in protest. My protest has been to stay put and refuse to allow others to turn those spaces into nothing but untruths and hatefulness. I adamantly maintain that Facebook is a place for community. I had a friend post a request to send her grandmother cards for her 100th birthday and without blinking, I requested an address (it’s in the mail today!). Amy posted about her kid selling Girls Scout cookies and even though I won’t see them until probably August, I bought some dang cookies. I support my friends and every time I’ve made an ask or request, my social peeps have been there to support me right back.

Today, I have a request.

If you still have a Facebook account, please click this fundraiser link and share it to your Facebook accounts. I’m not asking for donations, but if you feel like you can give some money to this great charity, that’s awesome. I want to flood Facebook with the opportunity to give to a good cause and also to spread some awareness for adaptive programs. I also want to give a giant middle finger to the hypocritical algorithms of social media. Let this be your protest today, your act of rebellion.

Gratitude is an act of rebellion.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I just received an ad for Mothers Day gifts for dog moms and it kind of makes my brain feel itchy. I am one hundred percent a dog mom. I love Josephine so much that Michael often tells her that she’s a terrible tragedy. He says she can’t understand a word that we say and I know for a fact that she understands everything. Because Josephine and I know that he understands nothing. She’s the best most smooshy face cuddle puppy in the whole dang world and we just got in trouble with the veterinarian because I have been giving Josephine all the treats that she asks for. We’ve been put on a treat diet. The point is, I agree that I treat Josephine better than I would an actual child of mine, but giving me a Mothers Day gift feels like a bit too much.

I recognize that someone doesn’t have to actually drop a baby out of their body in order to be a mother. Motherhood comes in a beautiful kaleidoscope array of colors. Raising a human being, a good human being, is really difficult. Raising a human to be empathetic towards others, community minded, kind, generous and thoughtful is the defining reason for my choice to not have children. I just never believed that it was something I had a skill set to do. There was also a whole thing about money. Kids are expensive. Chris and I were always struggling financially. I don’t think we ever had a savings account or if we did, it held only the bare minimum to be active. Chris and I were not responsible people and sure, I know that there are plenty of irresponsible people out there raising children. I just didn’t want to be one of those people.

To be clear, I still don’t want to be one of those people.

I came across a photo of my sister-in-law and nephew in a box labeled ‘Cindy’. My mother had sorted photos into various boxes. for us. There was one for my sister, but I didn’t see one for my brother. As I sorted through my box, I came across a number of pictures that clearly should go to either of my siblings. Like my sister’s wedding photos and my nephews Eagle Scout Ceremony. This one particular photo though, made me tear up when I looked at it. It was an old Polaroid photo of my sister-in-law and nephew curled up asleep on my parents couch. They were both still dressed in their Easter clothes. My Strawberry Shortcake blanket had been draped over them. That photo said everything that there is to say about being a mother. Love, comfort, safety. All of that and more. The thing you can’t see in this photo is just how hard it is to love someone so much and then just have to let them go out into the world, living their own lives. Motherhood is hard. And it’s made harder when something unimaginable happens to the person you birthed. I’ve seen those mothers who have had to navigate the unimaginable while remaining steadfast and true and there are so many of them who do it so well. They had to have been designed for it.

Motherhood is hard and we live in a country that doesn’t support it. The current administration has slashed funding for schools and school safety, along with free meals. They’ve put a stop to funding for investigating child sexual abuse and other crimes against children. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs are now working with a greatly reduced budget. We are the only high-income country in the world that does not mandate paid maternity leave. The administration has cut funding for research regarding women’s health, particularly reproductive health. Meanwhile, this president thinks that a $5,000 incentive will encourage women to have more babies while the average cost of infant care is around $14,000 a year.

As Kristin Lawless points out, recent estimates find that mothers are working 97 hours per week in the home. If they were paid accordingly, it would amount to $115,000 per year — which includes 13.2 hours as a day care teacher, 3.9 hours as household CEO, 7.6 hours as a psychologist, 14.1 hours as a chef, 15.4 hours as a housekeeper, 6.6 hours doing laundry, 9.5 hours as a PC or Mac operator, 10.7 hours as facilities manager, 7.8 hours as a janitor, and 7.8 hours driving the family car. - Robert Reich (substack article on mothers day)

Being a mother is a full time job on top of the full time jobs most women have. Mothers are over worked and underpaid. To truly support mothers in this country is to support legislation that cares for mothers. Instead, our answer for all of this is to have a day devoted to moms where we let mom hang out in bed eating the burnt pancakes we lovingly make them. While, it may have been a well meaning holiday, Mothers Day has gone the way of many of our well intentioned holidays. We’ve commercialized the fuck out of it so now we send out ads to include as many people who will be willing to pull out their credit cards. The reminders that we need to ‘give Mom the very best’ and to ‘show her that you love her’ would be nice if they were not attached to diamonds and bouquets and other trinkets that your mom doesn’t need or want. Those reminders are also daggers for those whose mother is no longer with us.

I know this doesn’t sound like a very thankful post. It sort of went off the rails, but it needed to go off the rails. Pointing out these little bits of information on the difficulty in motherhood, makes me very grateful for a number of reasons. Mothers do whatever they need to do to ensure the survival and success of their child. My own mother raised me amongst a village of women who could fill in the nurturing gaps when she couldn’t be there to do it. So, I am particularly grateful for the whole kaleidoscopic forms of motherhood. I am grateful for a mother who can do the hard things and navigate the unimaginable times. I am grateful for the mothers in my life who have helped to shape me into the woman I am today. My way of celebrating these women is to recognize them every day, support a government that supports them, and maybe send out some words of encouragement.

Happy Mothers Day.

AT THE CAR WASH

Back in March we had a super horrible cold snap. It was so cold that the windshield washer fluid in my car froze. When I say ‘my car’ I am now referring to the car I inherited from Mom. It came to us from Oklahoma where they can just put any old washer fluid in their vehicles because it never really gets to the level of cold we see here in northern Missouri. So for a week, I drove the car with windows I could barely see out of, occasionally collecting enough thawing snow water from the cars in front to run the wipers and smear the filth across the windshield. What can I say? I like to live dangerously. I had a car once where the windshield washer didn’t work at all. I carried a spray bottle of cleaner with me and would roll down the window while driving. Then I would take the spray bottle and stick my arm out the window and spray my windshield while running the wipers.

I know how to live without fancy things.

By the end of the week, the weather had finally warmed to tolerable and Michael helped me determine that there was nothing wrong with the washer pump. Then he suggested that we go buy new washer blades and get the car washed. The carwash of our choice was too busy to do interiors, but they were offering a special on their monthly pass that included the interior. It was such a good deal, that Michael yelled “Sold!” and handed over his bank card. Now, I was not sold. I had owned my car for over year when I met Michael. The second time we were together in my car, he asked “When’s the last time you washed your car?” I looked at him with my head tilted like a puppy and said “Wash….car?” I had not washed my car since I had purchased it. Car washing is not a thing on my radar. We don’t do that in Oklahoma. I mean, we do but not like people do here. People go once a week to the car wash! Every carwash you drive past is always packed with people and cars. It is one of the craziest things I’d ever seen.

I felt that the carwash membership was unnecessary.

Michael, who currently drives a truck with signs of rust damage from the previous owner, believes that washing your car on the regular saves the car’s life. I get it. There’s a lot of salt that gets thrown around onto our streets. Right now, everything is coated in a thick layer of pollen. I think if I listen closely, I can hear my dad agreeing with Michael. Any way, I agreed to stop at the carwash every Saturday morning after my Trader Joe’s adventures, being sure to include an eye roll while agreeing. The next weekend rolled around and I went through the carwash and then parked in one of the lanes. Then a teenager came over and cleaned the inside of my car while I waited inside with a cup of coffee. They waived me over when they were done and I got into a very clean car to drive home. And something flipped over inside my chest. I honestly am not sure how to describe it other than love.

I love the carwash.

I mean, I love it. I’m a little disgusted with just how much I love it. It feels so wasteful and bougie. It can’t be an environmentally sound action to take and I don’t want to love it. But I love it. The moment I release control of my vehicle and get pulled into the carwash, I drift off into a space of peace and tranquility. I marvel at the psychedelic soap bubbles as they stream down the windows and when I get back into the car after they’ve cleaned the inside, even when I don’t think it’s that dirty, I sigh with pleasure of being inside a clean car. At the end of that month, my carwash subscription was going to double because I’d reached the end of the promotion period. Michael and I had a serious debate about keeping the membership. I argued against it because…Paris. Michael argued for it because of the joy it brought to me. We compromised on keeping a carwash membership but down grading to just the unlimited wash (no extras like interiors). Michael said that once a month I could have the interior cleaned as an add-on.

There was some concern that just going through the automatic carwash would not be enough for me, that I would not experience the same euphoria. On Saturday morning, I released control of the car, picked up my mug of coffee and settled in for the ride. I sipped coffee and drifted off to a lovely Zen garden and when it ended, I just drove off. I was not sad about it, but I do kind of wish I could have stayed inside the carwash a little longer. When I said this to Michael, he reminded me that my membership is unlimited and I could just loop back around and go through again if I wanted to. I gasped at the thought of it. Go through the carwash twice?!? In the same day!?! That’s hedonistic!

I’m totally doing that next week.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Last year around this time, I spent a weekend with my friend Heather who lives in Des Moines and one of our activities was to make a Cheetos birthday cake for another friend’s son. Heather and I make a pretty decent Lucy and Ethel and the cake, while not being the tastiest, definitely was the funniest part of the weekend. This year Heather picked up a 3d lamb mold at an estate sale and I returned to help make a red velvet lamb cake. It was a short yet necessary visit and feels like a new tradition to occur at the end of April every year. 

The drive from home to Heather’s is a very easy one. I don’t even need to make a stop for a break. It was a Saturday morning and This American Life was playing on NPR. I caught it right at the beginning. The topic of the day was graphing chaos and how to make statistical sense of the things happening in our world. So as I drove north, I listened to two American doctors about their experiences treating victims in Gaza. Both doctors were struck by the number of children under the age of twelve with fatal gunshot wounds to the heads. In one day, one doctor counted at least thirteen children in his hospital with one or two gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Once they were back in the US they started comparing notes with other doctors who had been in Gaza and they started piecing together a very horrible trend. The angle of the wounds were too precise, too deliberate, to be accidents. Israeli soldiers were, are, deliberately killing children. I listened to the whole segment, tears streaming down my face and then the program moved to the next story and I lost my NPR station. A quick radio search later and I was back to a new NPR station. This one was also playing This American Life, but I was catching the program near the beginning and once again hearing about Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian children. I pressed the seek button on the radio only to come back to this story on loop. Then I opted for no radio at all. Though, this didn’t really help. By the time I reached Heather’s, I had fallen pretty far into a black abyss.

Heather greeted me at her door with brunch and champagne and then we drank mimosas pretty much all day. We commiserated about the state of things. Her hip is in bad shape and she’s planning a replacement. I confessed to not ever feeling as hopeless about this country as I do right now. Not even after Chris died. Then she made cream cheese frosting and I turned coconut flakes green. She had already baked the red velvet cake in the 3D lamb mold and we marveled at how perfectly it had come out of the tin. There was a bit of debate over the best tools for frosting, but Heather found the right frosting tip to make curly lamb fur. We used dill pickle flavored jelly beans for the eyes and the green coconut provided a layer of edible grass. All in all, this cake turned out way better than the Cheetos cake from last year. Friends arrived and we ate cake and when they left, we swapped our champagne for wine and wrestled an entire block of cheddar cheese from one of her beagles. 

And we laughed. A lot. 

I left the next morning intent on making a detour to see the covered bridges of Madison County. As I exited the highway to make my way onto a gravel road for the first bridge, I thought about all the things I needed to do at home before the start of a Monday. My little detour was going to put a wrench in my chore list. Then I thought that maybe I shouldn't go searching for the next bridge. I should just get back on the highway and head home. But I resisted those thoughts and continued my drive through lush, green rolling hills. The landscape through Madison County is quite lovely. I didn’t expect it and with each curve of the road and crested hilltop, those thoughts about the chore list floated away. I suddenly realized that I just didn’t care if vegetables were chopped for the week or that I still might have a load of laundry to deal with. So what if the floors didn’t get mopped today. I stopped at four out of the six bridges and spent some quality time with my big camera at each of the four. I told Michael about them when I got home and he found a bicycle route map for the area. We’re talking about maybe planning a camping trip and taking the bicycles to see the last two bridges on my list. Now I want a dog stroller to attach to my bicycle so Jospehine can go with us on bike rides. That way she can see those covered bridges too!

Anyway, by the end of my drive, I didn’t feel quite as hopeless. The combination of ridiculous amounts of champagne and laughter along with my photography scavenger hunt for bridges managed to scrape some dark bits of goo from my soul. And this is something to be very grateful for this week. 

DEATH BECOMES ME

I watched all of the series Dying For Sex on Hulu. I ate it all up in the most glutinous manner and I sort of regret not savoring it more. The whole candidness around sex and women who want to try different kinds of sex, along with the discussion on actual death made this series so….charming? Delightful? I’m not sure how to sum up the feelings this invoked, particularly the final episode. The hospice nurse, played by Paula Pell, is the hospice nurse I wish we had had when Chris was dying. Her candor and enthusiasm about the miracle of death is infectious.

The biological process of death is a miracle.

And of course, watching stuff like this stirs up the sludge that tends to settle at the bottom of a really good fish sauce. I ended thinking about moments in Chris’s last week, the memories of which I keep shoved into a cluttered back corner. I hate thinking about or remembering anything related to the last two months of Chris’s life. Favorite shampoos and soaps from that time frame have been completely eradicated from my life so that their smells don’t trigger memories. Any time water starts to back up in the basement, my heart seizes not with the anxiety of home ownership, but with memories of Chris being in the hospital while we had sewage backup into the basement. My body tenses with the memories of scrambling to take care of all the things at the same time and how everything had literally turned to shit. These are the reasons I avoid those memories and would prefer to shove them in a dark corner.

I had a week where I was consistently on my mat every day. This doesn’t mean I’m back to any kind of a routine. I am not. It just means that in this particular week, I managed to do an exercise I love doing more than once. After one of those yoga sessions, as I was walking back to my cubicle from the gym, I started thinking about that day after we all celebrated Chris’s birthday and I had to drive our friend Todd to the airport. He hugged me goodbye and told me that I was doing so good. He told me that I had this and there was comfort in his words. At the time, I was the first of us, our group, to experience death in this way. Our experiences had all been slightly removed before this one. There would be no phone call from another one telling me the news. I suppose maybe that I had at least done a good job of making it look like I was doing a good job? 

I think I still do that, make it look easy or like I know what I’m doing. Not too long ago, one of my coworkers was presenting in lab meeting, talking about a project I’ve heard about a half a dozen times already. I straight up stopped paying attention at one point and was scrolling Insta on my phone when suddenly I heard “I don’t know. Cindy, you’ve done that technique before. What do you think?” I think I deserve an Oscar for what happened next. I shrugged and said “You know…sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all voodoo really.” And everyone in the room chuckled and nodded their heads in agreement. I did pay attention after this, but was also pretty proud of the performance I had just given. I would never say I am a great pretender, but I just might be a great masker. 

In the breakdown of what happens when a person dies, one of the steps near the end is called ‘the rally’. During the rally, the person who is dying experiences a sudden burst of energy and engagement. The person is alert and talkative and aware. I had read about this in the little book of death left behind by a hospice nurse. Chris and I joked about how it was nothing like The Handbook for The Recently Deceased. We found the booklet to be dull and uninformative. Any change in Chris’s demeanor or language or sounds he was making, I would pause and ask “what stage is this?!?” I was looking for signs of the rally, but either I missed it or Chris skipped this part. Now that I think about it, it is very possible that the rally happened during his birthday when the house was filled with people who love us. At least I hope this is true. The TV series made the rally look really very nice. I hate to think that we missed it, that we were present only for the real crap parts of dying. 

I wish we had celebrated the very act of dying. Instead, every moan or gasp or ugh made me panic and pace our room while asking “what do I do?” over and over and over. There are so many times I should have never listened to Chris. My fault lies in listening to the men in my life and believing them word for word. I do it now with Michael. I did it always with Chris, believing every “no, really, it’s fine.” or “we don’t need hospice just yet.” I was so distracted with “the what do I dos?” that I didn’t allow time for just being present in the miracle of death. Maybe I could have never been present for it. I was too mentally close to the person dying. When we did finally have a hospice nurse come in, I left the house for twenty minutes and in that time, Chris died. The nurse said Chris had been waiting for me to leave. There was no way he was going to die in front of me because he knew it would also kill me. 

Chris was stupid. 

So was I for listening and believing every word. 

I’ve started watching the last season of Andor and I know I shouldn’t be watching it all, because it just makes me sad. Of all the movies and television I’ve watched since Chris died, this for some reason is the thing that makes me want him here more than ever. To sit in silence next to him on the couch while we watch the beginnings of a rebellion and then to dissect each scene, each line, in discussion would be… The audacity of anyone to add to Chris’s bible, his religion, with him not here to approve or disapprove, to be his own Council of Nicaea. This is all of the cliches. It is not fair. It is infuriating. It is impossible. It is unimaginable. Which that part is fine. I don’t need to imagine the loss, the grief, the heartache. I am fully present in all of that and how there is always a layer of it with me always. Even while I move forward and make my own way. 

I am fully present.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Last Spring, a pair of geese decided to nest on the roof of the entryway into our building. I had the perfect view of them from my cubicle window and I watched as the female goose laid five eggs. Then we all watched and waited. It takes 28-35 days for a goose egg to hatch and the mother goose sits on those eggs the whole time. She might rearrange herself or stand to stretch a leg for a second, but for all of those days, she is tied to that nest. There’s a ledge around her rooftop nest that makes it impossible for her chicks to to get off the roof on their own. But those five eggs hatched and we had five healthy goslings running around the rooftop until we convinced the window washer to toss the babies off the roof. Once the family had made it to the ground they all tottered off and we assume, lived happily ever after.

The corner of the roof that she chose is not well sheltered from the elements. The mid-day sun directly beats down on her back and there is no protection from the rain. We’ve had a pair of red tailed hawks living in the eaves of one of the taller buildings for years and quite often you see one of them out on patrol or a hunt. Add in the ledge that traps the babies on the roof, this is a terrible spot to raise a family of birds. Yet, the pair came back again this Spring. There was an attempt at deterring them with predator spray, but they insisted and this year the female goose laid six eggs. Monday of this week, all six of those eggs hatched and we had six healthy babies running around on the rooftop. 

When I got to work Wednesday morning, my first action was to look out my window to check on the birds, but they were nowhere to be found. I knew that we had contacted groundskeeping when the chicks had hatched so they could climb up to rescue them, but I guess I didn’t expect them to do it when no one was around. At first I panicked. What if they hadn’t been rescued? Nature is harsh. Talaura, Michael and I stood on a trail for half an hour at Devil’s Tower watching helplessly with a crowd of tourists as a snake devoured the eggs of a nest in a tree with the parents squawking and attempting to defend the nest the whole time. It was horrifying but we couldn’t look away. This is not just a cruel world for women. I managed to track down a groundskeeper while on my coffee walk to confirm that all the babies had been safely removed from the roof early this morning and the whole family had once again tottered off, moving on to swimming lessons. My group was a little more than disappointed to not have the opportunity to witness the rescue this year. We all agree that we’re missing a sense of closure, but we are also relieved to know that they all survived. 

Survival is miraculous. 

For months now I have been trying to gain momentum to get on my yoga mat consistently and not the sporadic routine I have going on now. The dog walks have also been sporadic. Anything involving exercise or getting into a habit of any kind of healthy movement has felt impossible. I am very busy at work right now and I go home to the usual chore list of cleaning and cooking and making sure animals are well fed and loved. By the time I sit down on the couch in the evening, what’s left of my energy gets funneled into a Duolingo French lesson and maybe the crossword. I am eating healthy meals and not using the elevator at work, but I recognize that I am in survival mode. I know I am not a wild animal and in a few weeks it will be easier to delegate the household chores to others. I have all the tools for gaining momentum. I will get back to something more consistently healthy than my current state. While survival may be a miracle, thriving is the gift of surviving. Getting back to something consistent will be more of a thriving situation.

Today, I am grateful for the miraculous, but I am looking forward to the gift.

THE WAR ON WOMEN

Even though the state of MO voted and passed Amendment 3, which repealed the ban on abortion, the MO House of Representatives proposed a constitutional amendment that would repeal the reproductive rights of Amendment 3. I read a quote from one of the protesters of the new constitutional amendment in a news article last week that said “This is a dangerous time to be a woman.” My first thought was to ask “Has it ever been safe to be a woman?!” But yes, it is still very dangerous to be a woman and lately that list has been growing. 

It is dangerous to be a woman

It is dangerous to be a woman of color

It is dangerous to be a woman in science

It is dangerous to be a woman living in poverty, low income and even working class (that’s me)

It is dangerous to be an international woman studying or working in the US (in science and other fields) even if they have the correct documentation to be here. 

It is dangerous to be a woman in the LGTBQ+ community

It is dangerous to be LGTBQ+

It is dangerous to have tattoos

It is dangerous to not be a member of Evangelical Christianity

It is dangerous to be Palestinian

I could easily keep going, but in particular, I’d like to circle back to the whole Evangelical Christianity thing. The president and his administration spent last week celebrating “the living Son of God who conquered death, freed us from sin, and unlocked the gates of Heaven for all humanity.” These are the actual words released by the White House for Easter celebrations. Ramadan got “warmest greetings.” by contrast. That’s fine. I don’t really care what religion anyone decides to follow. We were founded on the idea of freedom of religion. So, if the president wants to pretend christian, let him. I mean, they did a lot to get him there. He’s got to at least up his drama skills and pray along.

The problem here is not the celebration, but the incorporation of a religion into government. This administration has also implemented a faith office led by two conservative christians with the sole purpose of challenging separation of church and state. I can think of a number of reasons why merging church and state is a big problem. First of all, whose religion? In what state? I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale. I have also read the bible. Gillead is what happens when evangelical christians are in charge and that makes this country even more dangerous to be a woman. What is it about evangelicals that makes them want to force everyone to practice their beliefs?!? They are the most myopic religious fanatics. Do I even need to ask, what if this faith office was run by Muslims or Catholics or any other religion? Would the American people be okay with that?

For a political party who campaigned on the rhetoric of preserving our freedoms, they sure are doing a lot to take away most of our freedom. 

I’ve never been one for conspiracies. If someone gives me a bit of “news”, I immediately dig into the validity of that news. When my chiropractor was trying to get me to try Light Therapy, I asked if this was voodoo. She told me it was not voodoo, but I still went and scoured all of the medical journals for research on light therapy. I found enough peer-reviewed research papers that convinced me that light therapy was maybe not voodoo. I am a fact finder. It’s what I do. So even when the opposing team to this administration says something that sounds whack-a-doodle, I look that shit up. The problem is that the things I think must be whack-a-doodle like declaring martial law and deporting US citizens or demanding women have three forms of identification for voting is not so whack-a-doodle. These are things that are happening. So while we haven’t started burning women on stakes (though we are imprisoning them for miscarriages, so…) it is a pretty dangerous time in American history to be a woman. They want to start offering incentives to women to have babies. Of course, by incentive, they mean a one time payout of $5000. That might cover a month of childcare. They start with incentives, but it is only a matter of time before they implement demands on women to have babies. A convicted rapist is running the country and he is being guided by evangelical men who would like to reduce women to property status, revoking the rights that allow us to be independent. 

So, yeah…it is a dangerous time to be a woman in this country, but it is also terrifying. 

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The other day, I was helping a graduate student set up auto imaging of a slide on a very old microscope. This microscope is the system I have used for years to run batches of slides for one of our labs. It requires me to run a fairly complicated program that works with a slide loading robot and over the years, I have developed a love/hate relationship with this system. When it is working, it is great. When it is not working, there are a million possible reasons why it is not working and I have to troubleshoot all of those reasons to fix the problem. The older the system has gotten the worse these little issues have become. So it is finally time to replace this system with something new. By the time I had given a hard stop to accepting any more slides for batch scanning, the program had become so glitchy that it was randomly not imaging slides. 

The lab I run these slides for had a really hard time with the concept of pausing their imaging experiments while the new system gets installed and we learn how to use the new robot. Finally we agreed they could still use the system until the company moved it, but they would not be able to use the robot and would have to run only one slide at a time. I trained a graduate student to set up the program and run the slides. Of course, he had loads of problems but the company came to move the system. So this week, I was once again going over how to set up the program to run one slide at a time on this old microscope that has basically been decommissioned. Part of setting up the program is entering in a number representing the z plane of your sample. I always think of it as years because the numbers are usually 1771 or like 1884. This time around the number came out to be 1998 and I said “1998! That’s the year I got married and graduated undergrad!” The graduate student I was training said “Whoa…uh…congratulations? I was one.” I did my best to laugh at this and not murder.

Then I thought…wait…he’s just starting! When he was a year old, I was getting married in Vegas and graduating college! Chris and I were just beginning to move into grownup land. We managed to postpone grownup land by going to graduate school, but we were doing the thing. Living the life. In fact, while this person was navigating through childhood, adolescence, and undergrad, I was doing the most grownup stuff of my life. I got a little woozy at the thought of all the life I have lived during this young person’s lifetime. It’s a lot! I’ve seen a lot of things, experienced a lot of things. It’s staggering to think about it. There seems to be swaths of time between milestones and events, yet no time has passed at all and I am confused about how I’ve managed to crame so much living into this amount of time. Michael keeps reminding me that we’re almost fifty. “I’ll be fifty THIS YEAR!” He’ll exclaim. It’s possible he’s more surprised by this than anyone considering he really believed he wouldn’t live this long. He seems to be leaning into being ‘old’. This week, J would have turned forty five and I am sure that if he were still with us, I’d be teasing him about a midlife crisis. He probably would have taken up Cage Fighting as his midlife crisis. This is also the twenty year anniversary of his death. Both of his children are no longer children, but married adults. Yet I do not feel old enough for any of this to be the case. 

I am old enough to have an elderly parent who no longer remembers my married name. 

But again, none of that seems possible because I am a child. If you only knew the number of fart jokes my friend Lauren and I send back and forth to each other in a week. Also, I heard a joke recently that makes me laugh every time I think about it and it is so dumb.

If science were easy, it would be called “your mom”. -unknown

Now doesn’t that make you chuckle?! When I told that joke to a coworker, we laughed so hard that tears leaked out. Because ‘your mom’ jokes, along with ‘dees nutz’ jokes are juvenilely hilarious. So while I have lived a life and grown, so to speak, I am mentally a thirteen year old teenage boy. I sent a text to Michael this week about Sweden being the place to go for moose spotting and I included a link for a place that offers Moose Safaris. I told him if we spotted a moose on the first day, we could then go to that outfitter’s Beaver Safari, wink wink. He did not respond about the Beaver Safari, but I like to imagine he found it just as hilarious as I did.

While, mentally I’ve remained childlike, I am also very aware of the possibility of retirement. CBS Sunday Morning last week was all about retirement. Then I went over to Billy and Dean’s for a game of dominoes and tea where I met two lovely ladies of retirement age and we had an enlightening discussion about my possibilities. My take away from all of that is that I will one day retire so that I can be even more childish and playful. I know exactly what the ‘little old lady’ version of me is going to look like. Spoiler, she looks very much like me now just with more wrinkles and gray hair. I’m lucky because I got my mom’s hair where the gray and blondish brown blend in a way that makes the gray look like it was put there on purpose and you’ll only notice the wrinkles when I come to a stop on my Vespa. I may end up retiring in Italy or Portugal, but I’m thinking about opening an adult only disco skate rink. Something that combines skating and dance music and maybe bingo. 

So to that young grad student who was only a year old in 1998, thank you for the congratulations. Graduating college was a big life milestone that led to so many more. That alone is worth congratulating. But maybe really the congratulations should go towards the quantity of living I’ve managed to do in the twenty seven years since then. It tells me a lot about just how much I can accomplish in a short amount of time. And there is an unknown amount of time left for me to fill up with adventures big and small.

I better get busy.

IT'S NOT ME, IT'S YOU

Everyone tends to dread a Monday, particularly if you’ve had two days off from work, because Mondays are reentry days. It is not uncommon for reentry days to be rough with sharp edges. My reentry day was fine. Not great. Not bad. Just, you know, fine. At one point, my friend Melissa was texting me a rant about about a certain white guy we know (look…his whiteness is important for this story…dude is a patriarchal cliche). At some point Melissa said she must be getting her period because she was so ranty. And I thought about this really hard for a second before responding with:

I hate that as women, we’ve been reduced to blaming our rage over the patriarchy on our monthly cycles.

We don’t need to use hormones as an excuse to be angry. I mean, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act didn’t pass until 1974. That’s two years before I was born! Up until then, women had to have their husband’s (or father’s ) permission to open a bank account, get a home loan, have any line of credit, you know…just basically be able to live an independent life. I mean, we still don’t have body autonomy, at least not in about twenty states in the Union. The House just recently passed H.R.22 (the SAVE Act) which will require documented proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration and voting. if it passes the senate. Proof of U.S. citizenship for any of us is our birth certificate, which sounds reasonable, except my last name is not the same as the one on my birth certificate, which is true for all married women who took their husband’s name. Now, I tried a number of times to get ahold of my congressman to clarify some things, but he (his staff) are sending all of the phone calls to voicemail. But it looks like I will need my driver’s license, my birth certificate and my marriage license in order to vote if this bill passes the senate. In spite of voter fraud incidences being very very rare, this is what our voted officials think is important to address during this time.

But wait! There’s more reasons for women to be angry all the time!

On average, woman do more during a day than men. I can already hear some men grumbling about how that can’t possibly be true and for those men I ask you “how did you get clean underwear? Where did your groceries come from? How is it you have a planned out meal? What about the clean environment you live in? Who put clean sheets on your bed?” Now I’m not saying that men never do this. I’m saying that these things happen on a regular day to day occurrence without notice. Women take care of the things that need to be done without talking about taking care of the things that need to be done and they do this while holding down 9-5 job. They GO TO WORK and then come home TO WORK. And it is frustrating and exhausting and when we reach a limit and show any emotion about it, it’s because we’re ‘hormonal’. I can assure you that hormones or no hormones we have plenty of reasons to show some emotion over the bullshit of inequality, but guess what? We GO TO WORK while feeling crampy and bloated with our periods and then come home TO WORK, still feeling crampy and bloated with our periods too. Even with all the “hormones” we still do all the things without talking about doing all the things.

We just get shit done.

So if you are a woman and you come to me complaining about some privileged white dude, do not try to excuse your complaining with being on your period. I will politely stop you and tell you that you have every right to the feelings you are having. Your complaints are valid menstrual flow or not.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Tuesday after work, I headed to my polling place to vote. The polling place in my neighborhood is never really busy. It is plagued with by with the usual problems of a polling place in a low income neighborhood where people struggle to get to the polls because of jobs and transportation. Early mornings are busier than afternoons, but I’ve only ever had to wait in any kind of line during presidential elections. I want to see the polling place full. I want to stand in a line. It gives me hope to stand in the line at the polling place. This week, I walked right up to the election worker and got my ballot. When I got up to put my ballot in the voting machine, I was behind a young woman with three young children. I watched as the three little ones helped to place the ballot in the machine and then they all took stickers. As I stepped up for my turn, I heard the young woman say “Now, hold onto those and we will take a selfie when we get to the car.” When I got to my car, I looked over just in time to see the four of them proudly holding up their sticker while the young mom took the picture.

Then I cried all the way home.

I know I’ve told this hundreds of times. Change happens in increments and the biggest impacts happen locally. There were five things on the ballot this week: two education board members, a bond to improve KCMO schools, keeping 3.5 acres of park land, and a tax to build a new jail. Not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but things that will have a big impact on my community. I know I’ve talked about my parents taking me with them to the polls every time the polls were open many times here and how this imbedded the importance of voting every time. They both taught me this was a way to show up for my community even if it there is only one thing on the ballot. I can still remember how frustrated my parents would get whenever a school bond would come up on the ballot and it would fail to pass because not enough parents would even show up to vote. We lived in a town where the elderly outnumbered us and the elderly vote. I mean they vote. Even though I do not have children and the one that sometimes lives at my house does not attend KCMO schools, I’m always going to vote for something to improve the schools.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. -Benjamin Franklin

I don’t know that young woman’s story. Her children ranged in age between maybe six and three. Maybe she has a partner to help or maybe she’s a single mom. I do know, just by seeing her car, that she probably lives paycheck to paycheck and barely so. Making time to vote is hard and she made a commitment to do so while wrangling three small children. Seeing her cast her ballot filled me with hope, something I’ve been pretty low on these days. I’m not only grateful for her sense of civic duty, but for the enthusiastic way she involved her children. Her lesson to them on voting is not just about civic duty but it also teaches community. Voting on small ballot issues has a great impact on our communities. Every time I get overwhelmed by the latest atrocity, I remind myself to put my head down and focus on my community where I can do the most good. I have one regret from my voting experience on Tuesday and that was not saying Thank you to this young woman’s face.

Where ever you are right now lady, Thank you.

DOCTOR, HEAL THYSELF

The New York Times posted an article recently about 10 Simple Ways To Improve Your Brain Health. It was a list compiled by a group of neurologists and I was happy to read that I am already doing most of the things on their list. I always wear my helmet whether it is for the scooter or the bicycle. I floss every day. If I was the one mowing the yard, I’d wear headphones. I take daily walks and mostly stand at my desk. I am doing the things required for managing my cholesterol. Look, I even convinced Michael to eat a tofu meal this week. I am putting so many healthy vegetables and beans into our weekly meal plans. I feel like I’m winning at something. 

There’s like two things on the list that I’m not doing and one of those things is not my fault. The Neurologists recommend masking on smoggy or smoky days. I know I should do this, but I spend so much time inside that it is something that just doesn’t dawn on me to do. But this does bring up a point about how I should be masking when I’m out in public spaces, particularly when tuberculosis cases are increasing in my area. People don’t know this is happening because the government department in charge of public health just got gutted and there’s not one really staying up to speed on daily cases. You have to do an extensive search for the data and since most everyone I know gets their medical advice from TikTok, extensive searching is not happening. Bottom line is that masks save lives and I should be wearing one. 

I’m going to do better.

Number ten on this list is “Sleep Well”. I love how it is so simply stated as if one can just tell another to “sleep well” and it just happens. There are nights when I think I’m sleeping well because I only woke up twice in the middle of it all. I have no idea what it is like to wake up because my alarm clock actually went off and my alarm is set for 5:15 AM. At this point, I set the alarm as a fail safe just in case I don’t wake up in time. On weekends, I sleep in until 6:45. Why 6:45? See me shrug. That just happens to be the time when I look over at the clock and then say to Josephine “Let’s make you breakfast so I can go get my own breakfast.” My Saturday morning breakfast haunt opens at 7:30, so this gives me plenty of time to be there when they are unlocking the door. Is this sleeping well? Maybe, if I’m going to bed at 9 PM on Fridays but I am not. I refuse to go to bed until I have folded the last of the three loads of laundry I start when I get home from work. Doing some basic wine math will tell you that it is well after ten or eleven before I am crawling into bed.

But this is under normal circumstances.

The week before my period should not be considered normal circumstances. During this week, my dreams are vivid and wild. They are cinematic but also make no sense. Rapid hormonal fluctuations are equivalent to tripping on acid. Or what I believe it would be like to trip on acid. I do not know. I did want to try this at some point, but TV has convinced me the fentanyl is in everything and this will kill me. At some point in the night, I get hot and throw off all the blankets only to start shivering two minutes later. I’ll pull the covers back on and in an hour I will wake up because my neck is sweaty. MY NECK. A part of my body that is not even really covered with blankets. Is sweating. 

Finding ways to improve your time spent sleeping, and the quality of that sleep, can go a long way toward helping you stay sharp and fend off dementia, Dr. Feldman said. -Mohana Ravindranath, NY Times

I wonder what my odds are of fending off dementia if I do everything on their list but this one. Because what I’m gathering from the lore of women passed around the witches cauldron on full moon nights is that what is happening to my body in regards to sleep is normal or at least not a unique experience. If anything, these are mild conditions compared to some women's experience. The third witch to the right of the cauldron tells me that I am damn fortunate that my sleeping experiences are not worse. And I will agree with her. I am sleeping and I feel like the times in the night when I am sleeping are quality sleep moments. Just, according to neurologists, I need more of those moments. 

Ugh. Really?!?

The Cabbage and I were having a great discussion on tampons and menstrual flow last weekend. They were complaining about how rough their periods were and how they’re still a bit random. I told them about my nineteen year old self and birth control pills and how modern medicine smoothed out those menstrual wrinkles. Then I told them how they will have years of ‘regular’ cycles and this will lull them into a false sense of reality. Because eventually you will go right back to rough and random. You will look back fondly on all of those years when you could predict to the very hour when the first drop of blood of the month will hit the pad. Those restless nights will come from daily life worries instead of rapidly fluctuating hormones. I tried to end on a positive note, something like it’s great! You’ll be alive to tell the tale and continue passing around the lore of women.

But honest to a god, human bodies are just weird. Actually body weirdness is not limited to humans. I see enough at work to know that structures involved in living any life are just bizarro. Some time maybe I’ll tell you about baby coral and their mucus cells or how I know so much about the planarian manus. Biological life is interesting. We are gross in an interesting way. But I guess the most important takeaway of this ramble is to be a regular flosser of your teeth (not the dance move), always wear a helmet, mask up on smog days, eat your veggies, be little a bit of a social butterfly, take a walk and sit on the floor, have your eyes checked out, make sure you’re getting enough oxygen to your brain. 

And if you do all those things, maybe you can wear yourself out enough to sleep well at night.