SQUIRRELS IN THE ATTIC

I just bought a beginners embroidery kit because I saw an ad for it in my Insta Reels. I watched the whole ad, mesmerized as I watched a needle and thread travel through fabric to form a perfect little bee and something inside of me said “Cindy…this is a need.” Normally I skip right over those ads without blinking an eye. I don’t know, man. This ad just spoke to something in my soul. I listened to a lot of NPR as I traveled between home and Mom’s. I got the beginning of this episode of Hidden Brain and the episode started with stories from listeners talking about their time during the COVID lock down. Every single story was sad and mostly all centered around the isolation. When the lockdown lifted, the consensus was that people were happy to gather with friends and family. That first get together after months of isolation brought excitement and joy, but over time the same kind of gatherings started to lose that initial sparkle. On my way home, I caught the next part of this story where Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist, explained what was going on inside the brain as we habituate our daily lives and how to find that sparkle of day to day life.

Maybe that embroidery kit is an attempt to reintroduce some sparkle.

While the lockdown introduced a level of anxiety I had not experienced since Chris’s illness inside of me, I’m looking back on some parts of it and feeling a longing for the good old days of isolation. [Side note: Did I mention that moment when lockdown became official and I drove my car over a retaining wall and got stuck? Three large fellas happened to be across the street and they lifted (yes, lifted) my car off the wall, declared that everything looked okay and I drove off. I only told Michael about it months (possibly a year) later when we drove by the now broken retaining wall.] If I set aside those moments where I was panicking about losing my job and trying to climb out of my skin from feeling like a caged animal, the lockdown wasn’t really all that bad. My house was the cleanest it has ever been and I spent at least two hours every day on my yoga mat. We experimented with challenging Bon Appetite recipes and murdered our first two lobsters. I kept a sourdough starter alive, something that I need to restart because suddenly people in my house remember the pizza dough I used to make with it and want pizza.

The summer months are meant to be the time when I do what ever I want and forget about the daily chores. I have not transitioned into this idea very well. To be fair, we did hit the summer running. Between theater camps, kid camp, moose hunt and another theater camp our calendar’s have been full. Earlier this week, I opened my Google calendar on my iPad and it was sitting there open when Michael walked by. He said “Your calendar looks like Donkey Kong.” I think he was referring to all the color coded boxes arranged in each day of the week. I was in the process of re-doing our dry erase calendar for the month of July. Wait. I’m about to confess something that is going to make everyone’s eye twitch. I have my Google Calendar. Then a work calendar through my work email. Then I have a dry-erase calendar for everyone in the house. At one point in time, I had my Google calendar connected to the TV screen on our refrigerator as reference in case I missed something for the dry erase calendar. Our TV did an update and I never reconnected my calendar. Look, just forget the part about my fridge having a TV because TVs in fridges are dumb and unnecessary. Trust me. I see the crazy as I write this.

While my calendar might remind Michael of a video game, I will say that the month of July is the most open, unscheduled month I’ve had in ages. I finally see some space for doing whatever I want. Museum date with Melissa on a Thursday evening? Yes please. Yoga on Saturday mornings? My mat is already in the car. I’m going to turn my focus to the daily feeding of a sourdough starter. I am scraping out more time for yoga and while Michael and the Cabbage take their train trip to Saint Louis, I’m going to clean behind all the furniture. Okay…that’s a chore, but I want to do it and I’m doing whatever I want.

I’m going to poke a needle and thread into bits of fabric, making flower and bee shapes.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Short weeks are the hardest weeks and we are in the thick of it here in this household. Both Michael and I have full schedules with work and after work appointments. My calendar is so confusing and jumbled, I’m not doing a great job of keeping things straight. I thought for sure I had a bachelorette party to attend on Saturday, but I met Jen (the bachelorette) for lunch this week and she reminded me that the party is on the 30th. I blinked like a deer in headlights because now I have a Saturday of no obligations. Michael will be gone for a leadership conference, which leaves me to my own devices for tonight and tomorrow. The very first thing I thought was “I’m going to clean my house!” I’ve thought of nothing since but clearing out some clutter and unused things, pulling furniture out from the walls and cleaning out the dust and cobwebs.

The thoughts make me giddy.

I understand the necessity for keeping a calendar, but sometimes those calendars can be deceiving. My calendar feels cluttered and clutter stresses me out. It is also making it difficult for me to keep track of the appointments I can’t miss. So I end up scheduling something on top of something else. Then I have to figure out how to be in two places at the same time and this leaves me gasping for air. All of this stuff to do crammed onto the day makes it hard to see the space of time that exist between the things that need to be done.

I’m really grateful that I got to have lunch with Jen this week. First, getting a chance to see my super cool, tough as nails, take no bullshit friend during a week day is better than therapy. Her energy is the boost I needed to get me through the week. Secondly, I’d be showing up for stripper pole dancing class tomorrow wondering why I’m the only one there or who all these other women are and how do they know Jen if I hadn’t met her for lunch. Thankfully I was made aware of open blocks of time and that awareness really helped to deflate this panic bubble in my chest that just seems to get bigger every day. I spent some time today decluttering my calendar so I could visually see the blocks of time that exist between obligations. I have things to do, but I am not obligated to do all of the things.

This weekend, I’m only doing the things I want to do.

TALK DIRTY TO ME

We recently watched Nick Kroll’s latest Netflix standup special, Little Big Boy. It was the kind of comedy special that had something for everyone and one of the few that the Cabbage has watched all the way through with us. Usually they disappear around the half way mark because usually that’s when the comedian choses to use their sexually explicit material. I don’t blame them. There’s many a comedian that Michael subjects us too that I don’t think is funny, but Nick Kroll’s special was pretty funny and relatable. He has this bit where he talks to himself using what he likes to believe is Jason Statham voice. He has these talks while staring at himself in a mirror and one would like to think they’re pep talks, but they are not. His inner Jason Statham says the most horrible things to Nick. It was so bad that at one point I looked at Michael and said “I thought I trash talked myself, but this guy wins in self trash talk.”

Really, I was appalled but also very impressed.

This week, I’ve been working on my color coded Google calendar in attempt to make it a little more honest. The 5:30 AM wake up call is not happening right now because it’s cold and dark and I’m in full on hibernation mode. When the weather changed over to not bearable outside weather, I kept the dog walk time on the calendar thinking I would still get up and get on my yoga mat. That hasn’t happened except maybe once or twice. Did I mention that it’s cold and dark and that I am a hibernating animal? As I removed that color block from my calendar, I expected to hear something from my inner trash talker, but instead another voice spoke up and said “remove something else!” Then I just started deleting all of the things that are on my calendar that are intentions and added the things that are set in stone dates, like doctors appointments and planned weekend events.

Then I took it all one step further. There are large salmon colored blocks on my calendar for Monday through Friday labelled ‘work’. That’s it. No details about what that ‘work’ is or scheduled work related things. Just work. Last year I noticed that I was double booking myself for things at work, scheduling training times for people when I had promised to help someone else on a different microscope. That kind of thing. Part of this has something to do with microscope availability, but a lot of it has something to do with my inability to say no. I’m all “no worries, I can do it all.” This is false. So, I looked at my week and the actual scheduled things in my work day and started making more salmon colored blocks to overlay the work block. Salmon is the color I’ve chosen for work related things. I don’t know why. It is not my favorite color. I’ve saved that color for things that I really like doing, not that I don’t like my job. I like my job about 90% of the time. I enjoy the color of salmon about the same amount.

This isn’t about colors.

This is about recognizing the time spent doing things, and by golly, I do things. Lots of things. I think I’m doing nothing or very little, but I am doing a lot of things. Sure there’s a chunk of time between 5:00 PM and 8:45 PM that has nothing scheduled, but I haven’t gotten around to adding ‘make/eat dinner’, ‘clean kitchen’, ‘get lunch together for the next day’, and ‘sit on my butt on the couch watching TV’ to the calendar. It’s not always TV; sometimes I’m reading. Anyway. I haven’t added ‘free time’ to my calendar and I look at those empty time slots and see them as moments when I can do what ever the fuck I want. And this is where my inner trash talker wants to start in.

Who do I think I am to think I have time for sitting on my butt doing nothing?

I’ll tell you who I think I am. I am the person that had to explain to someone that they cannot use this particular microscope to image 560 and 594 at the same time because they cannot be spectrally separated. I am the person that sat down with a graduate student and confirmed fluorescent signal before setting up a twenty four slide batch imaging run. I am the person who taught a chair yoga class during lunch and then ate lunch at my desk while reading an article titled “Integration of whole transcriptome spatial profiling with protein markers”. I was the person to clean out the pool of oil someone left in a 20x air objective so someone else could actually use it. And if you don’t understand even half of the things I’ve just listed above, then at the very least you understand that ‘work’ means WORK.

My inner trash talker barely even exists.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Our current task for Self Care Circle is to create a color-coded time map for our calendars. We’re using Google calendars and we’re supposed to add events and color code them to our liking. For instance, everything that is exercise related on my calendar is basil green, work is yellow, stuff like my yoga practice and building walks are red and education stuff is purple. I’ve been adding events to my calendar all week and at one point I paused and looked at ALL OF THE THINGS and I started hyperventilating. I took a screenshot and sent it to my friend Sarah. I told her that my calendar looks unrealistic and insane and I haven’t even added everything yet. She said “That’s why you’re doing it.” She then praised me on the amount of exercise I have on my calendar and told me that she thinks I do a pretty good job with the whole self care thing. She reminded me that I exercise, I write, I make art, I do that crazy Spelling Bee game in the NYTimes, I cook and I clean.

I do a lot of stuff.

Then she said “I think you should focus on positive self talk.” and I said “I think you need to shut up.”

No. I did not say that.

When I look at the weekly view of my calendar, here is what I see. I see a lot of red and yellow. So much so that it looks like my calendar is on fire. I was thinking about this during one of my building walks, the yellow and red waving around like heat waves in my head, and the first edit I am going to make is to change those colors. I do not need to look at my calendar and feel like my life is on fire. The next changes I plan to make is to add some events. One day this week, while standing out on the work patio at tea time, I watched a young man with a backpack, wearing headphones while roller skating down the sidewalk. Actually, to just call it roller skating is an injustice to what this young man was doing. It was a ballet on wheels. He roller danced his way down that sidewalk with ease and confidence and I knew right then and there what event needed to be added to my calendar. I am replacing my usual Wednesdays at Heather’s (she’s leaving today for her new job) with Roller Skating Wednesdays. I am also adding some rest events because if you were to look at my calendar now, you would say “Cindy! When are you ever still?!?!?” Events like ‘sit on the couch for an hour and squeeze my dog’ seems like a necessary item to add to the calendar.

Really, I need to remember that all the things in my calendar are intentions. There were only three days this week where I crawled out of bed early enough to do both thirty minutes of exercise and walk the dog. The intent was there; the body just wasn’t willing (probably because I never have an intention for resting). My personal yoga time happened twice this week. I am super busy at work right now and I just could not carve out extra time for my mat. Hey, but here are the things I did do. I walked the building multiple times a day. I did my job and I did it really well (science is hard). I spent time with friends in the evenings. That wasn’t on my calendar at all. I did some writing. I made some art. I checked in with some friends I hadn’t talked to in a while. I rode my scooter. I made Queen Bee four out of five days this week.

Why is it so easy to fall back into a mindset of only seeing the things one didn’t do? Today, I am grateful for all the things I did do.

ROLLER SKATING WITH PANTHERS

I was roller skating through a park and at was marvelous. I was swaying and grooving, doing turns, and moving my skated feet in fancy moves. To the left, I saw a panther or a mountain lion, a very large cat. He was crouched low preparing for a sprint, looking for a chase. I picked up speed as the path curved this way and that way. Then I saw another panther crouched in a tree up ahead of me. I skated past as he leaped from the branch. Now I had two large cats chasing me as I continued down the path. I started to seeing more mountain lions and panthers crouching under bushes, near trees, in trees and all of them joined the first two so that now I had a herd of large cats chasing me through the park. Even though I had picked up my pace and was staying ahead of all the big cats, I was still swaying and grooving, doing an occasional turn and moving my skated feet in fancy moves.

I have gotten into the habit of sitting down on Sunday mornings and filling out a calendar for the week. This was a practice I started doing way before the pandemic. It got put on pause for a while because of the pandemic. Now that I have figured out a way to live a life during a pandemic, I have picked up the habit again. I write down what exercises I am doing on what days. I schedule the dog walks and my yoga time, what days I am in the office. I write in meeting times and seminar times and COVID testing times. Somewhere in the margins, I write down a couple of personal goals for the week. Things are written in different colors. Gray for exercise. Orange for work. Purple for all the other stuff because I like purple. I write all of these things down and then I never look at it again.

Not once during the week do I open up this calendar and review the things to be done or check off things that have been accomplished. It seems that just the act of writing it all down is enough. Some of the things on the calendar are just things that I do anyway. There isn’t even really any reason to write them down. It’s like one of Chris’s daily lists that included things like ‘take shower’ and ‘brush teeth’. The exercise. The dog walks. Those are things I just get up and do. I don’t need to write in a yoga time because I just always make space for my practice. That work meeting I have every other Thursday? I have to write that down because I forget about it every time. I cannot commit to daily journaling or a traditional meditation practice, even though both of those things have made an appearance in the ‘personal goals’ section of my calendar. This Sunday morning practice of writing down what I should expect for the week seems to be something I can commit to doing. It is something that makes me feel more focused for the week ahead. It establishes my intentions for myself for the week to come. Even if it is the same intentions from the week before and the week before that.

I believe it is this simple act of weekly planning that keeps me skating ahead of the large cats. I believe that in time, I will not just be skating ahead of the panthers and mountain lions. I will be skating backwards while I take pictures of those beast chasing me.

GOALS

First day of Fall

3 Likes, 0 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "First day of Fall"

Every time someone reserves time on one of our microscopes, I receive an email informing me of their reservation. The reservations coming into mailbox this week are for dates in October and it keeps freaking me out. First of all we have a two week rule. You cannot book earlier than two weeks in advance. So I see that reservation and start to yell “Hey! You can’t reserve a microscope two weeks in advance!” and I’m all ready to send out a polite but severe email. Then I pause and go “oh….wait…”

October is next fucking week, people!

What happened to summer? Or spring for that matter? How is it the first of Fall and the leaves are suddenly changing colors and it’s cold enough in the mornings that I have to wear a jacket and gloves on the scooter? What do I even do with my time? I feel like I’m wasting so dang much of it on all the wrong stuff. I’M WASTING MY LIFE! I feel like I’m not tapping into my full potential and so I started looking into some sort of daily planner. I found one that I like that has a digital format that I would be able to use on my iPad. This would allow me to use my Apple pen to write and color in stuff. There’s a place at the beginning of each month to write out your goals for that month. The calendar opens for the week with a section for writing out tasks for home and work. Then at the end of each month, there’s a place to evaluate where you are with your goals. Did you accomplish them? If not, why? What can you try differently? That sort of thing.

There’s a lot of appeal to having a digital planner like this. First of all, I would have it with me all the time. I carry my iPad with me most days. I’ve gotten in the habit of writing out my yoga classes in a notebook app and I use the meditation timer for both class and my own practice. The digital planner/calendar would encourage me to use my electronic device in other ways. Other than the yoga classes, the iPad is basically a glorified e-reader/TV. I could be doing a lot more with it. The downside is that the digital planner is not free. It is a one time fee and not a subscription, but it’s still not free. I am hesitant to purchase something I may not use. Then again, I might see it as I would a gym membership: if I’m paying for it, I will use it. Maybe that’s the real reason for hesitating. If I buy it and use it, then I will actually have a written record of the things I’m doing or not doing. Most importantly, a record of the things I failed to do each month. A record of failure. Do I need to spend $40 on that? Or can I just drag out my high school yearbook or all those 4-H record books and throw a pity party for one? Actually…I can’t do that because I threw all of that stuff away when we cleaned out the old house.

I could spin this argument of for and against into a tangle.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period. - Brene Brown

I’m getting the damn planner. Sure, it might end up as a record of my failures, but it will also be a record of all of my success.