Category — Uncategorized

We are at the point in the pandemic where I spend inordinate amounts of time dissecting the words to children’s songs. A case in point: The camp song, “Sippin’ Cider.”

The cutest boy I ever saw
Was sippin’ ciiiiiiider through a straw

So we have a cute boy. He’s sipping cider. The singer of the song asks the boy if he’ll show them how to sip cider because this is apparently a very difficult task. And he shows them:

First cheek to cheek then jaw to jaw,
We sipped that cider through a straw

Okay, so they’re sipping cider, and we are to imagine their faces smushed together—cheek-to-cheek. Not facing each other, right? They are side-by-side, drinking what amounts to thick apple juice.

Once in a while, the straw would slip,
And we were sipping lip to lip

Not sure how the straw slips enough to drag their heads down, but we’re not told their bodies turn towards one another, correct? They were drinking cheek-to-cheek, and now their heads are lower to the glass, and they are drinking lip-to-lip.

Yet the very next lyrics imply that they are now drinking cider facing forward (when did they turn?), with their head near the glass, and this is the REASON THE TWO PEOPLE HAVE SEX.

That’s how I got my mother-in-law,
And 98 kids that call me ma

Wait. Let’s just pretend almost every single pregnancy is a quadruplet pregnancy, and there is one pregnancy per year. That means drinking cider next to this person caused them to have sex at least 25 times AND each one yielded a quadruplet pregnancy. This was followed by three pregnancy-free months and another pregnancy. Provided the person stopped having children at 42—a highly realistic age to not be able to conceive regularly anymore—they were 17 years old when they first started having four children at a time.

Who is parenting this teen who apparently does not know how to (1) sip cider OR (2) use protection?

Maybe I have too much time on my hands.

Months ago, I thought COVID-19 was easier than infertility in the sense that everyone was going through it. There was no sense of otherness; no isolation from everyday experiences or navigation of triggers from an otherwise that you really really wanted.

The pandemic is clearly a lot more deadly than infertility and steeped in inequalities, but the coronavirus affects everyone. Therefore, everyone understands. We all know the people around us are impacted, too.

I take that thought back.

I fear I’m hitting a grief saturation as I process upsetting news after upsetting news. People’s parents die from COVID-19. I have seen announcement after announcement of major health issues. Job loss. There is no place to catch your breath. It is like walking down an unending receiving line of individuals, abiding with grief, acknowledging each loss.

When grief happens on the personal level, there are the people in the center of the grief, surrounded by people who are leaning in to abide and need support from people who are not grieving. The rings of the circle ripple outward, feeling gentler the farther you get from the center.

When grief happens on the community level, a large group of people are left reeling, but the same formation happens again: center, inner rings, outer rings—just on a larger scale. A community is in grief, and it is surrounded by a state or by a country or by the world.

But what do we do when grief is happening at the collective level? When the number of the people in the center outnumber perhaps the number of people available for the inner and outer rings? What do we do with grief that large?

It is very easy to play armchair problem-solver, especially in retrospect, but… I’m going to play armchair problem-solver because we have a current problem—vaccine rollout—that could have used a known system—grassroots organizing—and unfolded differently.

If you want, let’s say, a group of people to vote, you don’t throw up a website, tell people to register themselves, and hope for the best.

You organize at the hyperlocal level. Get all people in this neighbourhood registered. Do not trust that they will register themselves. Make it as easy as possible to get them into the system. The team leader of that neighbourhood effort is looped into a town leadership team, who is looped into a county leadership team, who is looped into a district leadership team, who is looped into a state leadership team. Hyperlocal ripples outward, encompassing a larger and larger area until everyone is included. We know this works because we use this system over and over and over again.

We had about nine months to prepare for the vaccine rollout. Since that was always the plan—build a vaccine—we could have assumed that it would happen and started building that grassroots system of getting people signed up for the vaccine before we ever had a vaccine. Last March, we could have been figuring out the leadership at all levels, and that leadership could have been people who were already in leadership positions. For instance, our county council could have been a great starting point for leading the county-wide leadership, and they would have had to get volunteers or employees (hey! There are a lot of people out of work who could have done this work) for the neighbourhood and town levels. Again, not difficult because we already have systems in place. Time-consuming or costly, perhaps. But not difficult.

Yet that’s not what happened. At all.

Our county rollout is a goat rodeo, and it’s not clear if/when they will ever get to my group. Or what I’m supposed to do once they get to my group. We have eight separate places to check for appointments.

There have been plenty of times when I’ve been confounded during the pandemic. People dead set against wearing masks—why? People ignoring the advice of experts—why? People going on vacation because they feel so stressed—having COVID-19 or knowing that you participated in a chain of events that harmed another person seems a lot more stressful. But the vaccine rollout has topped the list as the most confounding part of the pandemic.

The article stated: “You know that thing where you stubbornly stay up late for no reason because you feel like you didn’t get any time to yourself?” Um… yes. Like what I did last night? And the night before that? And the night before that? We always stay up too late because I work too late (or to-do-list-checking-off too late), and I end up feeling like I didn’t get down time. So we stay up and read a few chapters, even though we should be sleeping.

I feel seen.

I don’t necessarily feel like I don’t have control of my daytime hours:

Learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.

— Daphne K. Lee (@daphnekylee) June 28, 2020

But I definitely feel like my daytime hours are too full, and I really really really want to read a few chapters in a book.

The solution? “Ryan and Shapiro both recommend carving out breaks while it’s still light outside—calendaring them in and taking them seriously. Ryan, knowing that later in the evening she’ll be busy with her kids, builds 15 minute segments into her workday. ‘I shut my office door, I put my music on, and I just breathe,’ she says. But it would be okay to use that time just to watch half a TV show, she adds.”

I’m not sure that will work for me because I already take 15 minutes to myself at the start of the day. Maybe it’s enough to know other people are doing it, too.

My cousin has gotten me into Romance books. Before the pandemic, I wasn’t really a Romance book person. I didn’t know the genre well, and I also didn’t give it a chance. I thought I liked my book relationships messy.

And then I spent Christmas with a Jasmine Guillory book, and I realized how relaxing it was to know—without a doubt—that everyone would get a happy ending. There was no stress. No tension. It was such a happy experience.

My cousin suggested that I watch Bridgerton, and we gave it a try because everyone was giving it a try. And we got hooked. I decided that reading The Duke and I would be a perfect second foray into classic Romance. AND IT IS. (Plus the rest of the series.)

I realized something that I’ll take with me into future books and shows. When I watch the television show first and I read the book second, I go into the pages imaging that the characters look and sound like the ones in the show or movie.

The problem is going the other way around: I think I want to read books first, but what happens is the characters on the screen don’t match the ones in my head. And I ended up feeling like the movie or show ruined something. This is especially true when I care deeply about the book. I don’t want the versions in my head to be replaced with the actors on the screen.

Though I don’t think it will bother me to read the rest of the Bridgerton books before seeing them on the screen. Many of the characters are already established, and the new ones will be mentally incorporated far after the reading experience if they haven’t even started filming Season 2 yet.

Does order matter to you? Do you prefer to read the book first or watch the show first?