eleven bee

i truly hate that expression.

“just.” what’s up with that? like friendship is a booby prize?

fuck that.

i have an interview question that i used to ask at almost every interview: pick someone who knows you well. who would that person be? if i were to invite that person in the room, and send you away, and then ask them to tell me about you, the good and the bad, what would they tell me about you?

i think it’s really interesting how people answer the question. it’s really just a variation of the “tell us a little bit about yourself” question, but with a few extra (bonus) pieces of information that can be gleaned. for starters, i like to reflect on who the person identifies as the person who knows them the best. your mother? your spouse? your business colleague. or no one at all?

for some people, the question really seems to throw them for a loop. that always makes me wonder. when someone responds with a version of “i don’t know… i’ve never really thought about it.” that gives me pause. the person who does not spend at least a little bit of time reflecting on how they are perceived by others – what’s that all about? maybe understandable in a younger person – doesn’t the world revolve around only us when we’re younger? but as one goes through life, that must change, right?

i’ve been asking this question for so long, but when i stopped this evening to contemplate how i would answer it, i realized i didn’t quite know how i’d even answer the first part. who knows me the best…? a lot of people know a lot of bits of me. but i’m not sure who knows all of me.

that’s a little sad, isn’t it?

i do spend time thinking about how others perceive me. so at least i get partial credit for efforts in self awareness…

there’s a timer running as i write these words. i’ve got fifteen minutes. i’ve left this to the end of the day (again) and sat staring at the screen for a minute before i decided to just say fuck it and see what comes out when i just start typing…

except i want to type about the people in my life again. and, again, that seems, um… problematic. i’m clacking away here at this keyboard and i want to describe how irrationally sexy i think fast typing is and how, when T mentioned the other day that at his height, he could type over 100 WPM, i was moved. (not even playing.) what an odd way to be woo-able.

i want to use this space to talk about me. (me me me, now now now, gimmee gimmee gimmee. it makes zero sense that that chant from my wackadoo drivers ed class teacher from my sophomore year in high school has stuck in my head for all these years.) but yes, this is my space. damn it. and part of me and my life, is the people in and around my life.

but i feel that reflecting on the people who are here today feels a little… disrespectful. and icky.

somehow, capturing snippets from my past feels safer. mostly. except that (as i’ve mentioned somewhere else in a post from way way back) i’m a bit of a friend hoarder. i tend to keep hold of people, even after most of our story has played out. i’ve got a metaphorical steamers trunk full of people to whom i once felt a connection, and i drag this ever expanding box of souls with me where ever i go.

i received a picture from J today. i have finally convinced him to send occasional proof of life selfies. the last two have been very serious beach selfies. my imagination works to conjure up the fuller scene around him – him, shirt off, sun warmed on the beach, listening to the waves, trying to ignore the distracting florida antics playing out around him – and i remember that i miss him.

C had been looking for a good senior quote for his yearbook. (he finally, on his own, settled on a david bowie quote, and i couldn’t be more proud.) but we were scanning through some kurt vonnegut quotes and one of them – that i don’t think i completely agree with, but that still seems relevant here – was this one: the purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

<beep beep beep> and that’s fifteen minutes.

i have an online dating profile that i created when i first got divorced back in 2015 that hasn’t been substantively updated since. i took a sort of stream of consciousness approach to throwing something together, with the idea that that would be the most honest (no editing) and then just left it.

there was one question that i misread when i put together my response, but even after discovering my mistake, i opted to leave my response as i had originally written it. the prompt was something like “name 5 things you couldn’t live without.” and i wrote: potatoes. (other people responded with things like “family! friends! music! books! sex! the mountains! my dog!”)

surprisingly, my professed love of potatoes might actually be the part of my profile that i’ve gotten the most comments on. who knew potatoes could be so universally relatable? such a reliable conversation starter?

honestly though, it would be difficult to overstate my affection for potatoes. there’s really no way to go wrong with ’em, as far as i’m concerned. yum.

but there’s “i’ve never met a potato i didn’t like” fondness for potatoes (and i’d put myself in this category), and then there’s “i think i’ll get a tattoo of a potato” fondness. that’s some next level potato love right there.

amirite?

I have gotten into the habit of waiting till the end of the day to jot down some thoughts here. In some ways that’s good because I have had all day to think things over, to contemplate what to write about. But on the other hand, I’m tired at the end of the day. And I feel it when I’m trying to remember just the right word and it stubbornly refuses to be conjured up, or when I’m trying to herd my jumbled thoughts into line and they just won’t be wrangled.

So I thought I’d give this a shot. I’ve just finished breakfast and am still sitting at the kitchen counter. I think I hear C waking up upstairs, so in a minute I expect to hear first the sound of some video playing on his iPhone followed just a second later by the sound of his footsteps as he gallops down the stairs. I also heard my mom’s alarm go off about half an hour ago so it’s possible that she’ll come shuffling out of her unit in her blue robe soon, scratching her head a little as she looks tentatively around before saying either “good morning” or “it’s cold.”

***

In the paper this morning there was an article reflecting in the Year of COVID series that included this quote: “People are learning the importance of touch and the importance of conversation. When we talk about basic needs, one of our basic needs is each other. And being social. And being connected.”

This is what drew me into city planning more than thirty years ago, this idea that fostering a sense of connection, to a place, to one another, is essential not just to maintain our physical and mental health, but really to preserve our fundamental humanity. And the way we shape the places within our communities can play a big part in this; we can create places that connect, or places that isolate.

This past year, we’ve all had a chance to experience what isolation feels like, to one degree or another. I’m working my way up into being a card-carrying member of the Introverts United club, and have benefited from having a comfortable home with family I love during this year of social distancing, and even I am feeling it. I can only imagine what this has been like for extraverts living alone in more confined living spaces. Zoom can only go so far in filling the gap.

I listened to this podcast a while back. It’s Brene Brown speaking with Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout, and one of the things that I took from it was the restorative value of human touch. (Hugs not drugs!) Here’s more on that:

Hug someone you love and trust for twenty full seconds, while both of you are standing over your own centers of balance. Most of the time when we hug people, it’s a quick, lean-in type hug, or it might be a longer hug where you each lean on each other, so that if one person lets go, the other person would fall over. Instead, support your own weight, as your partner does the same, and put your arms around each other. Hold on. The research suggests a twenty-second hug can change your hormones, lower your blood pressure and heart rate, and improve mood, all of which are reflected in the posthug increase in the social- bonding hormone oxytocin. Like a long, mindful kiss, a twenty-second hug can teach your body that you are safe; you have escaped the lion and arrived home, safe and sound, to the people you love. Of course, it doesn’t have to be precisely twenty seconds. What matters is that you feel the shift of the cycle completing.Therapist Suzanne Iasenza describes it as “hugging until relaxed.”

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/mar/complete-stress-cycle-emotional-exhaustion-burnout.html

I really latched on to this one thing and quickly instituted a daily 20-second hug routine with the boys, even bringing my mom into the practice with us.

The news about COVID vaccinations and the resulting decline of positive cases and hospitalizations is promising but for now it feels like we’re still in a bit of a holding pattern. These daily hugs won’t be enough for forever, but for now, at least, they’re something…

the other day i was hanging out with C and out of nowhere, apropros of absolutely nothing, he asked me if it bothered me that i was so normal, so basic. “i don’t know what you’re talking about,” i answered. “i’m fucking amazing.”

i’m a complex combination of well-founded insecurities and a healthy ego. (i think it just naturally comes with years of therapy and self-reflection.) i’ve got a solid grasp on my weaknesses, character deficiencies, but also think i have a least a little something unique to offer to the world. i am many things, but “basic” aint one of them…

^{image from From Wikimedia Commons}

that’s me. half and half.

it feels like now, more than any other time in my life, that matters. i read an older opinion piece about a woman who identified as black and who very much didn’t want a dna test to tell her just how black (or not) she was. those are my own dna results up there. i guess that explains the white skin and red hair. the freckles. i’m 0.5% more white than i am not. 1% more the other direction and i could have had a different experience navigating through the world. maybe.

listen. white people don’t go about their days, walking around appreciating all the ways that life is made just that much easier for the color of our skin. but it is, isn’t it? it’s repeated quite often but white privilege doesn’t mean that you don’t have challenges in life. if you’re poor. or have a rough family background. if you’re gay. or have a disability. or just … any number of things, really. there’s an infinite number of ways that life can be tough. but at least the color of your skin isn’t usually one of them… if you’re white.

so whiteness. yeah.

in some way it seems pretty straight forward. one’s whiteness is often defined externally, by others. by how they see you, and by the way the world interacts with you. the life experience afforded to you based on the color of your skin. but if we leave our racial identity to others to define, well, that’s gotten us in trouble before in a variety of ways. for example, historically, light skinned black people who tried to “pass,” who identified as white, ran the risk of being outed by others upon revelation of even one drop of non-white ancestry.

back to me. the world perceives me as white, so i am white. and there’s some superficial presumption of an understanding, at least initially, of who i am based just on that … wait. it just occurred to me: we’re all lazy, aren’t we? not necessarily in an intentionally malicious way. but we’re all looking for short cuts for ways to quickly understand the things around us, including the people around us. so we look for clues, and quickly piece together a picture. and then, with more time, more intel, we adjust that story to piece together a more nuanced, more accurate understanding of the people in our lives.

the problem is that building up that more three-dimensional picture of a person takes time, doesn’t it? and who has that kind of time? and we meet so many people, and with the non-stop whipped up pace of things…

when you meet me, when you see what i look like, you’re likely to make some quick assumptions just based on the color of my skin. it’s human nature. yep. i’ve skated by in areas where people with a few more percentage points of non-whiteness might have a more difficult time of things. so you’d be right about that assumption. but you might be wrong if you assumed, based on the color of my skin, that you could picture what my experience of family is, what it looks like, for example, when the extended family gets together. (think”my big fat greek wedding” but with more karaoke.) and this plays out in every direction, with every possible color of skin. skin color tells a part of someone’s story – and some important parts of that story too. but there’s more to us all.

i’ve been thinking about how all this matters in the context of conversations around social justice. i have gotten used to being lectured to by people of color on matters where race is involved, sometimes with literal fingers wagging in my face. it’s almost like there’s a sense of credibility associated with being not white. or maybe that’s not quite it. maybe it’s more that there’s a slight correction happening when it comes to that silent assumption of white privilege. maybe, in the context of conversations of matters related to race, we want to turn down the volume of that white voice that has been dominating all conversations for too long. shhh. it’s our turn to speak.

so how is it appropriate for me to interact in this space? do i sit quietly in my white skin, with my 49.5% non-white self, accepting that now is not the time to be tallying DNA markers, or attempting to justify my right to participate by virtue of having a life experience, and family history that is slightly more pigmented than my other equally white appearing cohort? or do i casually (or not casually) work into the conversation that i’ve got this other part of me..?

actually, the more time i spend here ruminating on this idea, the more it appears to me that i’m spending way too much time thinking about how i fit in to all this. it’s so very only-child of me (another equally – maybe more? – important part of the story that is me!). these conversations are about way way way more than just what-about-me...

i’m feeling annoyed today. probably not for any one reason.

i haven’t been sleeping well lately. pre-COVID-times i regularly slept between 5 and 6 hours a night. i didn’t love it, but i was used to it. for some reason ever since the collective societal tempo changed with COVID, i started sleeping much better. at least 7 to 8 hours — sometimes more! so slipping back in the 6 hour range for the past few nights has thrown me a little. i feel a little out of whack.

i had a difficult tough-love conversation at work today too. i know that the change we’re working on setting in place is the right one, but there are still some hurt feelings by good people along the way. it’s a process. it’ll be okay. but still.

and my 17 year old left the house this afternoon after his last final for the day (and turned off the driving tracking app we have for insurance) and isn’t home yet. i’m not really worried about him. but i’m annoyed. it’s so… rude.

so that’s it. today was meh for no particular reason. i’ll give myself partial credit for showing up *here* tonight, even if it was only to jot down a few sentences of grump…

p.s. i feel compelled to provide an update here. turns out he hadn’t turned off the tracker, i just misread the dates. and he was actually just at work. whoops. so i take it back. not rude after all.

but i’m still meh. hrmph.

i should have been paying more attention to NASA’s Perseverance rover. not because i’m a space geek (i’m not), but because this whole effort reflects a kind of seriousness and precision, of focussed industriousness with almost zero margin for error that is so rare in much of the rest of what we see in our current culture. this is what smart people are capable of.

NASA engineers probably tweet, and keep up with high school friends and family across the country via facebook just like the rest of us. but while at work, i’m guessing there’s a pretty intense attention paid to the accuracy of the work. do NASA scientists go online shopping while off-camera in Teams meetings? are specs hastily put together before being checked and then double-checked, their authors shrugging with a resigned, “it’s probably good enough?” do reports get published with avoidable typos, spelling errors, clumsy grammar?

imagine if this level of precision were more commonplace. i would expect, at the very least, that my microsoft office 365 wouldn’t be quite so glitchy.

on top of everything else they had to do, someone at NASA took the time to create a code used to hide an inspiring message in the parachute of Perseverance, proving that even in the midst of unwaveringly high standards, there’s room for creativity and delight.

it’s most certainly too late in my career to consider changing fields. but i can at least strive to bring a little more NASA in my approach to doing the work that i do.

back in 2019 i made headlines locally, albeit anonymously: i was patient zero.

just back from a family trip to the Philippines, i had returned back to work for one day and then later that evening started feeling a little under the weather. i went to be early, figuring jet lag or maybe that i had picked up a cold on the flight back. when i woke up the next morning i made the call to stay home and rest up. by the time the weekend rolled around i knew i would have to skip a community event i was scheduled to attend for work on Saturday. I ended up calling an uber to get a ride to urgent care, where a heavy-handed doctor stuck a nasal swab waaaaaay too far up in my brain and later declared that it wasn’t the flu, and i should just go home and rest it out.

on sunday it was apparent that there was something wrong. my friend J volunteered to drive me to the emergency room. i checked in, they looked me over, brought me pretty quickly into a separate room, and a short 6 hours later or so decided to admit me overnight. by then i had been shuffling back and forth to the restroom all day and on my last trip had noticed in the mirror that i had some spots. as freckled as i am, it takes a lot for new spots to be noteworthy. when the nurse came back to the room to get me ready to be wheeled upstairs, i pulled down the corner of my hospital gown at my neckline and asked, “is this something…?”

“hmm?” he was distracted trying to get the hospital bed wheels to unlock, and looked up for about half a second. “maybe. we’ll have the doctor check that out in the morning.”

fast forward through a profoundly sleepless first night in the hospital to the next morning. the infectious disease doctor walked in the room, took one look at me and said simply: measles.

this was, if i’m remembering correctly, just before the outbreak of US measles cases started drawing all sort of attention in the pacific northwest and on the east coast. and this was definitely before “contact tracing” was a part of everyone’s daily vocabulary. for the next four days my mom, bless her heart, shuttled back and forth between my home, making sure my teenaged boys were fed and going to school, and the hospital to keep an eye on me and to help with FMLA paperwork at work and coordinating with the good people with public health.

i watched the news on tv in my still-pretty-out-of-it state for the next few days and listened to the reports of “the first reported case of measles in denver.” i saw on social media the predictable exchanges that played out in neighborhood facebook groups, including a majority of outraged and – i’m just going to say it – kind of asshole-ish comments from those who assumed that patient zero was a willfully irresponsible vector for this pesky virus or at least an ignorant anti-vaxer.

actually. now that i’ve had some time to look back it all, i do have to cop to the “ignorant” label. i guess most people know that when they travel internationally – particularly to countries with less developed public health systems in place – it’s wise to get all one’s immunizations topped off? (did you know that?) i had had all my childhood vaccinations. i had been to the Philippines on three other occasions, and had done a bit of international traveling over the last few years without incident. i honestly had no idea that our childhood vaccines expire after a period of time. luckily, my mom had had the measles as a child, and both of my children had had both of their MMR vaccines (and they got the good stuff too – not the low grade vaccines of my youth). so at least my immediate family was immune.

i did feel super bad about the idea that i might have unknowingly infected anyone else. doing the math, i liked my odds: the window for others was pretty narrow. my friend J though, was counseled to get a booster shot, and to get his teenage daughter tested to check her anti-virus levels. (as it turns out, even though she had gotten two doses of the “good” vaccines as a young child, it was determined that she too needed to be topped off.)

there’s a not a lot of there there with this particular post, is there? except maybe a minor PSA about travel medicine? or a reminder about not judging others without knowing the full story? or an unsubstantiated plot twist from J who mentioned in an off-handed kind of way the other day that he understands that there is some evidence that his “fresh measles vaccine” may have primed his immune system against the current virus that’s making the rounds…

the measles sucked. but the good news here is that there never was another measles case identified tied to my lonely outbreak of one.

***

… just for fun: here’s a tiny clip of C riding the brakeless beater hotel loaner bike down a hill in Coron…