Category — Uncategorized

When someone tells me that there is a meeting, I show up for the meeting, which is how I found myself in a school library with two other parents learning about the sex education program at the school.

There are probably many good, individual reasons why people didn’t attend, but collectively, it was a pretty pathetic showing.  3 out of 300?  1% of the parents?

Anyway.

All week I joked about how I had to attend a meeting and learn about sex, and I cannot tell you how many people responded seriously, pointing out that of course I knew about sex because we had two children.  In their mind, sex may not always produce a baby, but babies are always produced through sex.  It meant that I spent a better portion of the week educating people on fertility treatments.

I can’t say they were awkward conversations because the other person usually responded, “Oh!  I didn’t think about that.”  But it was just eye opening that regardless of how much the media covers the topic, regardless of how often it appears in People magazine or the New York Times, people still make the assumption that children come from sex.

In the middle of the Mitzvahmoon, I walked down to the water with my phone and filmed the waves for a minute.  I thought I would put it on a loop and then upload a half hour version to Youtube so I could let it run while I worked once we were back home.  Feel like I’m at the beach.  But then I got home and didn’t have time to actually complete the task.  So much for bringing the vacation home.

The New York Times had an article about the optimal length of a vacation, and research puts it at eight days.  I mean, you can go beyond eight days, but the average person receives most of the benefits in the first eight days and loses them within one day back at work.  One day.  That’s all you get.

I actually read the article because of the Mitzvahmoon video: this idea that we can remember and revisit the vacation through photos when we get home.  It’s sort of true in my experience — ChickieNob and I love to sit with albums, remembering trips, and I carry about a dozen pictures of Chincoteague on my phone and look at them when I’m feeling stressed.  But this thought jumped out at me from the piece:

My patient had no pictures or videos to show me, just a sharp and indelible memory that e carried with him. And that I suspect is key to a great and long-lasting vacation: He allowed himself to be open to the unforeseen and immersed in his experience … It made me wonder whether in the attempt to record and preserve our pleasure, we become observers of our experience rather than full participants in it.

“Preserve our pleasure” — I love that because why else would I point my camera at a random stretch of ocean?  It’s to try to capture the wonder we felt staring at the water while it exploded into tumultuous waves due to a hurricane still several days away and the relaxation it brought to stare at sea foam instead of a computer screen for a few hours.

At the same time, it wasn’t a profound enough thought that I’d ever leave my camera at home because I love looking at the pictures when I get home.  But it was definitely food for thought.  When am I taking a picture I’ll use in the future, and when am I taking a picture just because I think I should take a picture?

Do you look at your vacation photos enough to make them worth taking?

Last week we took a Mitzvahmoon.  It’s okay if you don’t know what a Mitzvahmoon is.  I Googled it and couldn’t find it, but the ChickieNob informed me that just because no one else has done it yet, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t a very good idea.

I’ll attest to that: It turned out to be a very good idea.

We have been knee-deep in prepping for their B’nai Mitzvah, and we had a bunch of things we needed to write.  They both needed to work on their d’var Torah (a speech about their Torah portion), Josh and I needed to work on our speeches, and we had a bunch of quatrains to write for a candle lighting ceremony.  The ChickieNob suggested that we all go to the beach and take the weekend away from home to write without distraction and relax at the same time.  Sort of like a honeymoon or a babymoon but with an emphasis on the productivity side with the relaxation mixed in.

So we drove to the beach.

It was exactly what we needed.  We ended up doing a lot of the writing beforehand at home because we wanted to do more relaxing, so we got the work accomplished.  The beach was mostly empty because the waves were rough and it was the off-season.  But that just made us love it more.  It was sunny and quiet; and we all read and took breaks to write the quatrains while on the sand.  We ate ice cream at night and watched Guardians of the Galaxy 2 back in our hotel room.  I think we all left recharged so we could power through the rest of what needs to get done.

*******

But there was a moment in the weekend.  We drove into town after 8 o’clock, and it was dark as we made our way down the main street.  When we got near the pharmacy, we saw an elderly man had somehow driven his car over the six-inch high barrier that lined the parking lot.  His front wheels where over the barrier, but his back wheels were still in the lot, and he was stuck, revving his engine as he tried to go forward and get free.

Our car, stopped at the traffic light, was perpendicular to the front of his car.  If he went forward, he would smash into my door.

The man was clearly panicked and confused.  His windshield wipers were moving at high speed even though there was no rain.  We light changed and we crossed the intersection to get to the pizza place so we could call the non-emergency police from the counter and they could come and help him.  We never found out what happened to him, though his car was gone by the time we drove past the area again a half hour later.

I don’t know why this story is noteworthy except that, at the time, I saw it as a portentous sign that our Mitzvahmoon was a doomed idea.  That we got over the first hump but would ultimately get stuck.

It’s nice to be proven wrong by the universe.  Sometimes an elderly man driving over a barrier is just an elderly man driving over a barrier.

I clicked on this Science of Us article because I also feel exhausted after sitting in front of the computer all day.  Like disproportionately tired considering I haven’t done much more than think and type.

The article outlines how your brain uses up enormous quantities of oxygen; how it requires 20% of the energy in your body as a baseline and then thinking hard uses even more energy.  It totally makes sense, until it doesn’t make sense.

Because here is the thing: if thinking hard makes you tired, then why am I up all night, unable to sleep because I am THINKING?  Shouldn’t the thinking be wearing me out and making me sleepy?  Shouldn’t it be using up all of my energy and tiring me instead of making me feel more awake?  Surely worrying burns through energy faster than, let’s say, writing a blog post.  Bedtime is when I am doing my best, anticipatory stress work, much more so than when I’m in the zone and think that I will accomplish everything on my to-do list.

I need to poke around through some of the links in the article.

I told you that I had four thoughts that came out of reading Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays.  You can go backwards to the first thought, even if you haven’t read the book because these thoughts aren’t tied to the text but rather float above the page.  In other words, reading these posts will not ruin the book, and at the same time, they’re not (I think) confusing.

Next thought.

As I said, at its heart, this book is about Mastai processing the loss of his mother at an early age.  It’s science fiction, but it’s really about how we live and the meaning of our relationships and the impact we have on one another.  At least, that was my take-away.

On page 301, the narrator is talking about the aftermath of a death, when you reach a moment where the pain of the loss can turn you in a multitude of directions:

You love someone for fifty years and then they die. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have. How do you keep five decades of love from souring into a snakebite that makes your own heart the threat, drawing the poison up and down the length of you?

How?  I’m asking this literally.  How do you keep from drowning in anger at the world after you lose someone whom you have loved for fifty years?  Or, really, five years or five months or five days?  We’re a community steeped in loss.  We know how much loss can change a person.  That loss hurts because it stems from love; whether it is a cluster of cells or an unborn fetus or a person walking around on earth.

There is a lot of anger in this community that bubbles up from time to time, more so years ago when everyone knew everyone else and less so now that the ALI community has become scattered over time.  It’s not anger at each other but more anger at the situation.  You have love.  You want to give it to another human being.  The universe is working against you, thwarting you from giving that love to another human being.  It hurts.  It can become an internal snakebite just as easily as it can fuel your passion in another direction.

Even outside of family building; everyone has people that they love that they ultimately lose.  How do you keep your anger at the situation — at being furious with the world for taking someone you love from you — from poisoning you?  Will everyone get to the point where they’re not sad it’s over but smiling because it happened?  Because I don’t think that’s true; I don’t think we all get there, every time.

Your thoughts?