WHAT IF GAME, NEW LEVEL

Chad and I stood outside a ramen shop in Falmouth MA, waiting for a to-go order and talking about all the stuff. At one point, confessions were made. I confessed to just not caring for or about anything right now. Chad’s response to this was “I’m just dancing to the music until the Titanic sinks.” I nodded my head in agreement. At the time of our conversation it did feel a bit like being on a sinking ship without adequate life rafts, surrounded by the chaos brought on by panic. It’s sort of an out of body feeling, doing nothing or feeling like you’re doing nothing while watching people fighting over life rafts and flotation devices. I could easily picture Chad in a tuxedo, holding out a glass of champagne with his other arm wrapped around an imaginary dance partner, obliviously dancing and swaying to the songs playing in his head.

I could easily see myself tapping the imaginary dancer and asking if I could cut in.

A few weeks later, things shifted and I woke up feeling hopeful. I texted Chad with “What if the Titanic didn’t sink?” Chad thinks the Titanic is still going to sink. My response was “Okay, but what if we build more life boats?” If he was in the room with me at this moment, he would have patted my head and told me that I was adorable. Instead he just texted that appreciated my earnestness, but then the idea of the Titanic not sinking got stuck in my head. I started falling down the paradox rabbit hole not unlike the one I still sometimes travel when I think about what if Chris hadn’t died. What ensues is a fictional wonderland where nothing bad has happened in the last fourteen years. I’ve never attempted to extend this thinking game beyond one human, but why not?

There were 2,224 people on board the Titanic when it set sail for the United States. More than half of those people died. Three hundred and eight seven of those people were in third class, planning to immigrate to the US. In the grand scheme of tragic mass deaths, this isn’t a huge number. Though it is still a larger number than the third class passengers who died on the Lusitania. Except not by much since the Lusitania was a smaller ship. See how easy it is minimize large casualties of war and incompetence? Any way, to play the What If game, you have to image what today would be like if none of those people had died, the rich ones or poor ones.

There’s a paper that came out in 2023 from the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research that used US patent applications to look at immigrant contributions to innovation in the US. Between 1990 and 2006, nearly 880,000 people patented inventions in the US and 23% of those were issued to immigrants.

The average immigrant is substantially more productive than the average U.S.-born inventor - SIEPR Senior Fellow Rebecca Diamond and colleagues

My first thought when it comes to inventions and patents is mechanical inventions, but that’s a limited view. Inventions and patents are applicable to medical discoveries, life saving technologies. We’re talking about inventions that make our health better, our lives better and easier. So, it’s easy to say that this administration’s attack on immigrants is an attack on innovation. They are not just forcefully dragging people who are any shade of brown from their cars, homes and jobs. They have made it more expensive and difficult for foreign students and postdocs to be here to do innovative work. People I work with are stressed and worried because they’ve been put on a very short timescale to wrap up very complicated science experiments before their VISAS run out.

Innovation is a chain reaction that leads to jobs and an improved economy. But it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

It’s not hard to feel like I am currently on a sinking Titanic. Instead of playing a game of What If in regards to a sinking Titanic, I am now playing the game of How Much. How much can we get accomplished before it sinks? How much can we save before we have to jump ship? I joke every Saturday with the cashier at Trader Joes about how much I can fit in my reusable grocery bag and I how I end playing pack mule to get it out of the car and into the house. I can carry a lot. I can hold a lot. But I can’t hold onto everything. In four years and with some hope, this will be a salvage mission, skimming the waters for all the things we can salvage from a sunken ship.

Maybe I’m better off just dancing to the music.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

There is a new commercial out for Macs that starts with a blinking cursor in the midst of large white space. Then the late Dr. Goodall, starts narrating about the potential in that blinking cursor.

Every story you love, every invention that moves you, every idea you wished was yours, all began as nothing. Just a flicker on a screen, asking a simple question: What do you see? - Dr. Jane Goodall.

Every time this commercial pops up onto the TV, I whisper to myself “Fuck you” which I recognize as not a nice thing to whisper to the voice of the late Dr. Goodall. It’s not even a nice thing to a (flawed) computer company who’s computers I’ve been using since 1998. What can I say? Their operating system doesn’t make me want to scream with rage. I live in a computer world and my job requires me to be a computer girl. I have chosen the computer that doesn’t make me want to throw it out a window everyday. So I am not whisper swearing at Apple or Dr. Goodall. I am whisper swearing at the potential of a blinking cursor.

All year, I have struggled to have an iota of creative feelings. I am not enthusiastic about any of the photos I take. The creative writing practice from journal prompts that I do on Saturday mornings and the sketches on pictures for the In My Coffee series, all feel like forced activities. I think about those years where I was forced to sit on the hard piano bench and practice scales until the kitchen timer went off and I have to remind myself that these activities are not the same as learning piano at the age of five. I will admit that I have been considering taking up piano again since we have one in the house for the Cabbage, but I’m not five and sitting still at the piano sounds almost relaxing. Whenever I think about hobbies to dabble into, I keep coming back to music. No one from this current life knows that I once had a very nice singing voice or could play everything in the percussion pit and a cello. But no five year old wants to sit at a piano for thirty minutes. Well, at least five-year-old Cindy most certainly did not want to sit still on a piano bench, plunking away at scales.

The creative writing practice and the sketches on photos are of my own making, design and desires.

When I sat down to write today’s post, I stared at the blinking cursor on my screen for a really long time. The only thing I could think to write, or want to write, is an essay centered around some thoughts I have floating in my head on hurricane names and grief. It is a post not quiet fitting to a weekly practice of gratitude. So I watched the cursor blinking on my screen and tried to think of something about this week that is not just something I am grateful for, but something I feel worthy to share, something that’s not a list. And I just keep coming back to that damn blinking cursor. Except my feelings of angst and frustration of not being able to move that blinking cursor along, is beginning to shift.

Recently, I went back to a bit of fiction I had started writing a couple of years ago. It was something born from a very vivid dream and once I wrote down just the dream part, the story started to grow. But, like most of my potential book writing pieces, it got shoved aside for further pondering or for lack of spare time. More lack of spare time than pondering, if I’m honest. Any way, something nudged me to go in and look at this piece and add a few bits here and there. And it felt good. It felt fun. Because the piece is frivolous. It’s magic and mystery and romance. It’s entertainment.

And this is why my attitude towards the blinking cursor has shifted.

By setting my angst and frustrations aside, I can clearly see the potential behind a blank page with a blinking cursor. I can even be grateful for it. As a kid, heck..even now, when I received a new sketch book or coloring book and new colored pencils, I would hold off using them for ages because I was enamored with the blankness and the pristine state of pencils. Eventually I would and do give in and use them as intended, but sitting with the blankness of the page is a comfort. There’s no reason a computer screen with a blinking cursor can’t also be a comfort. It is, after all, just another potential for creativity, for crafting messages of joy, for bringing dreams to life. If you were to ask me today ‘what do I see?’ while staring at a blinking cursor, I would say ‘rhythm’. There’s a beat, a cadence, and it is begging for a dance partner.

And I need to dance.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

In my Self Care Circle group, we’ve talked a lot about ways to incorporate movement and cultivate joy in our every day lives. Roze gave us all the gift of the one song dance party where for one whole song, you dance with abandon, like no one’s watching. I’ve never been shy about moving my body to a beat, but I did find it important enough to remind myself to get up and dance. So I put it on my calendar and every day at 2:00pm, I get an alert that it is time for a dance party at my desk. I scheduled it for this time because I start to get sluggish and sleepy in the mid afternoon. It might not make sense to force myself off my butt to dance when I’m slumping, but dancing is an energizing exercise. So at 2:00pm, I can be found shaking off my mid afternoon slumps by wiggling my hips and flailing about like a wacky wavy inflatable tube guy.

There’s a scene in Beetlejuice where he makes a group of people at a dinner part start dancing. I’m sure you are familiar with the scene, but the dinner party guests all start involuntarily moving their bodies to the beat of the Banana Boat song and looking all confused. I become one of those dinner party guests, except with less confusion, whenever a song with a good beat starts playing. I can’t help myself and do not ever wish to help myself. At concerts, I will look around me while I’m flailing about and see most of the audience just standing motionless. I want to grab ahold of the nearest person and yell “MOVE YOUR BODY! HOW CAN YOU STAND STILL TO THIS BEAT! I MEAN, CAN’T YOU FEEEEEL THIS MUSIC?!?!” That’s the thing. I don’t just hear music as much as I feel it physically inside my body.

Every morning when I get out of the shower, I poke my head into the living room and say “Alexa, play some music.” Because there are three of us on this music account with various listening preferences, I usually have to poke my head out into the living room again and say “Alexa, play a different station.” This week, I told her to play songs by the Scissor Sisters. I have danced every morning this week while brushing my teeth, putting on makeup, drying my hair and getting dressed. Then Josephine and I dance while I’m getting her goodbye treats and I pretty much dance right up until I ask Alexa to stop so I can leave the house.

This simple act of adding music that makes me dance to my mornings is what has made this generally normal, just a week kind of week, more than just a normal week (side note: on two separate occasions this week, I had at least one article of clothing on backwards). I often sneak vegetables into our meals because getting Michael to eat something other than corn is challenging. Well, adding dance music to my mornings is like sneaking in vegetables, except in this case joy is replacing kale. I have been sneaking joy into my life each morning with dance music.

I highly recommend it.

Also, I highly recommend kale.

THE TIME BETWEEN SECONDS

Michael and I rode our scooters out to Lees Summit on Sunday to get our hairs cut. It is not a particularly far distance, maybe fifteen minutes from the house if you are taking the highways, but I don’t do highways when I’m on the scooter. We stick to the smaller side streets, which turn into back country roads. There is a lake and plenty of forested land between our house and our hairdresser’s. It’s a nice scooter ride. As we made our way home, I noticed a doe and her fawn bounding across a yard to my left. They reached the road just as we were nearing and we had to stop so the two could cross. When they reached the edge on the other side, the doe paused, one foot hovering and her head turned looking straight at us, while her fawn darted into the thick brush. Once he disappeared, the fawn quickly followed after. The whole moment was just mere seconds, but the seconds felt stretched out and everything was crystal clear. It was like a dance of quick, quick, slow, slow.

That evening, I wiped off my dry erase calendar clearing away the month of July. Michael moaned as he saw what I was doing and said “Not August! Not the end of summer!”. He goes back to school in few weeks and only has a week and half left to sleep in late and do what he wants. It’s funny to hear him say that summer is over when we are still having hundred degree days. Our August calendar doesn’t look too different from July’s. Still busy. Still filled up with events and appointments. A little bit of travel. Most of the things have been clustered into that week and a half. Then we are back to our regularly scheduled program.

When Josephine and I leave the house in the mornings for our walk, the sky is now dark with only a hint of light in the East. The sun is shifting and preparing for the next season regardless of temperatures. Tuesday morning, as we started onto the side walk of the park at the end of our street, I saw a fox sitting on the side walk at the bottom of the hill. He turned to look at me and then darted off into the tall brush and trees that line the park. Quick, Quick, slow, slow. Slow, slow, quick, quick. These are the dance steps of August and I’m in the process of modulating the music to slow the speed of the song that we dance to. We are traveling to St. Louis to see Andrew Bird next week. I am stuck with the idea of slow dances, the kind where you rest your head on your partners shoulder and just sway gently from side to side.

That’s how I want summer to end, in a gentle swaying motion. I want to ease into our regularly scheduled routine, like maybe getting up an hour later to go grocery shopping on Saturday mornings. Maybe I will get organized enough to start doing weekend chores on weeknights. I want to gradually need to add layers for warmth. No sudden movements, just a gradual shift onto the next season.

Quick, Quick, slow, slow.

PARTLY CLOUDY

Web dancer

I started a new journal on my iPad which I titled ‘The Happiness Journal’. I haven’t written much, just a few lines really. I asked myself questions on wants and what it is about this current life that is keeping me from at least feeling content. I made a short list of ways to remove or lift this cloud of negativity that seems to just hover and envelop this body. There are three actions written down.

1. Move away from the negative energy coming from others.

2. Salt baths.

3. Spend at least five minutes at the end of each day acknowledging the good moments of the day.

I’m already changing number one to ‘Dance away from the negative energy coming from others’. The idea of busting a crazy dance move or shuffle ball changing away from someone complaining or bitching about something is hilarious. It's making me laugh right now and I haven’t even had a chance to implement it. I’m scratching ‘salt baths’ from the list because I hate baths. Number three is a work in progress. I have not bothered to answer the questions I asked myself, partly because I don’t know. Partly because I am not ready for the answers or the consequences of those answers. I look at my paltry journal entry and think about all of the beautiful journaling I see people doing. Doodles and colors. Neat handwriting. My journals always end up being unreadable. If you can decipher my hieroglyphic penmanship, you will be privileged to reading a dry, straight forward accounting of the day. Even my personal journals end up reading like one of my scientific journals where I write the details of implementing an experiment.

My day, my life, ends up as another protocol.

That seems fitting.

I am trying to be less clinical and scientific with this particular journal. Today’s entry was a description of the view out my office window. I drew a an orange leaf in one corner and a green and brown acorn. This entry was more of building a set and less experimental design than my usual efforts. It is a work in progress. Maybe it will help me answer the questions I asked myself earlier. Maybe it won’t. Maybe my handwriting will improve to legible. There are a lot of possibilities. The best possibility is that it will end up being a nice distraction from the daily COVID case numbers (y’all know I still have access to that data, right?).

Wear a mask.

Wash your hands.

Be like that Police song Don’t Stand So. Except in the non-creepy teacher kind of way. Don’t be the creepy teacher.