Autumn 2020 Keeping Warm Enough

It's autumn here.  Cold, dark, brittle, rough, sharp, raspy, and dry in every way.  Through my windows, I can't tell if I'm hearing music from forgotten summer wind chimes or bare tree branches.  I am craving tenderness, reading and watching the equivalent of blankets and sweaters, fuzzy socks and warm tea.  I want kindness and gentleness, and I feel repelled by rage and stupidity, sound and fury, and all the vague and unformed fear people are radiating like the coming the winter.  I am reading about/watching people making food for others (What Did You Eat Yesterday?, Sweetness & Lightning), making art (Barakamon), learning to connect and grow despite trauma / mental illness (Natsume's Book of Friends, March Comes in Like a Lion, Fruits Basket, A Man and His Cat, Solutions and Other Problems), and growing up (Honey & Clover, Yotsuba&, Penric, Silver Spoon).  

I'm not looking for escape, I don't think; I'm not craving Aria or Strawberry Marshmallow.  Many of these works I'm currently drawn to are not anything like escapist.  Many of them are hard to watch/read.  There are stakes.  Bad things happen.  Some things cannot be fixed.  Some wounds cannot be healed.  Some hurts are terrible.  There are tears.  (Sometimes even cried by the characters. : ) Despite that, all of these works have something in them (their tone?) that makes them like hugging and being hugged, a feeling of relief and warmth and comfort.

I refuse to completely be directed by my desires.  I am reading hard things, too, like *Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?* and *All American Boys*.  But I am reading them slowly, and I am watching myself and stopping when I start to get overwhelmed.  I refuse to stop learning altogether, but I also refuse to grind myself into the pavement in these Unusual and Hard Times.  It's okay to take a break.  It's okay to get warm if you're cold.

I am tired and thirsty, and we are in a pandemic where I have been prudent and have not hugged anyone in half a year.  If you were around me when my health was at its worst and I was in pain most of the time and had such a wacky immune system and I had stopped hugging, you may not think this is a big deal.  But I had a friend at work, and we hugged all the time, and it was a kind of lifeline.  And at least once I month I would visit with friends, and there would be hugs.  And before all that, before my brain's response to pain signals started to go more haywire, I was a hugger with people I was close to.  So much that it used to annoy some other people I was less close to. : )

I am okay without hugs.  Really.  Even if, as seems likely, it's another year before I get to even cautiously return to them.  Being okay without them is not necessarily a good thing in my case, since it seems to be based in an emotion-dampening trauma response, but right now I think it's quite useful that I don't need hugs because I live alone and work from home and can't have any.  

It's also quite human to want the thing you can't have, so I want to hug people.  But I don't do it because not hugging is a way to be kind right now, to help show my neighbors love and help keep them safe.  Also, I don't have many opportunities, but even when I spent time with folks over the summer outside and at a safe distance, I did not hug even when I wanted to and when I would have Before.

I want to be After, where I am making up for lost hug time, where I feel more like I'm whole instead of holding it together, where I can rest and recover, where the shattering doesn't feel so close to the surface.

Until then, it seems like I'll be drawn to Fafner over Eureka 7 and A Bride's Story over the Way of the Househusband (I'm stretched thin enough that sometimes my laughter has a more disturbingly hysterical edge than my silent tears).  And impulse is just fine.  

I have enough blankets and sweaters and fuzzy socks to wear and read, and I will be okay.  I hope you feel the same.

What she said and what I saw

"We have to send anyone with any upper-respiratory conditions there," she said when she refused me treatment at the urgent care for an ear blockage because I have asthma and allergies.

"Because there are so many pregnant women at this clinic," she said.  

In the 30 minutes I am there waiting, I see no pregnant women.  After 30 minutes, her superior comes to answer my question about why I have been allowed into their other clinics for physical therapy and orthotics appointments with the exact same answers to the screening questions for the past few months.  She glares at the lady who denied me service, and I sense that she would have let me in, but since the first lady said no, she can't contradict that.

I drive to the city half an hour away.  To "there."  The first person I see at the entrance is a pregnant woman. She is Black.  

Inside at the screening desk, I am required to take off my well-fitting, three-layer cotton mask and put on a uselessly loose, cheap, one-layer mask. There is no hand washing available before I put on my new mask. When I ask about it, I am told there is a small, enclosed, poorly ventilated bathroom I can touch a door to go into or a hand sanitizing dispenser I can touch. I'm told to proceed down a number of hallways.

Everyone I see, patients and staff, are people of color. A number of them are pregnant Black women.

When I find the correct desk, I am told the wait is 90 minutes, or I can schedule an appointment, drive home, shower, do a little bit of work in great discomfort, drive back, wait an unspecified amount of time, finally get treated, drive back home, shower, and finally focus on work. No appointments are available around my work meeting. The ones that are, they cannot guarantee I would actually be seen at those times.

I haven't slept. I think hard. I ask for a number to call and schedule, and I take it. Then I drive to the place I should've gone first. They don't even ask screening questions. After several hours, and three sets of exposures to whatever is floating around, I get home and wonder why they don't care about people with chronic upper respiratory problems being around the very real pregnant Black women in the city but do mind us being around the theoretical white pregnant women in the suburbs.

August 2020

On resuming writing after a major hiatus

It's been a while.  You made some rookie mistakes.  You forgot to put the speed to fast/ draft / ink saver and had to get more ink in a pandemic.  Forgot to put in page numbers for the first several chunks.  Forgot to print in reverse order.  You did finally use up a lot of that case of paper you accidentally bought, what, 15 years ago?

Seeing this stack of some of the things you blogged from 2009-2017 (even though there is so little after 2014 when I moved for real), you feel inspired.  Organize them.  Connect them with clips.  Read them in chronological order, a time machine to a decade ago.  Look at all these things you thought about, crafted into a rough shape, and launched.  Some of them are even good.  Look at the pile.  Just look.

And do it again.