Suffering Fools (But Not Gladly)

I don't have the patience for this.

Look, those of you who have read this blog for a while know me well enough to know that I am generally a pretty forgiving person. I historically have assumed that people just don't know any better or are working on it. And goodness knows I understand the importance of that over there → It's important to take joy in the little things as well as the big; as the pic says, "Folks can care about important social issues AND frivolous distractions simultaneously. Most do, in fact. It keeps us sane." 

It does help keep us sane, and that's good and valid and kind of awesome, honestly.

And then there are the other people. The hypocrites (do as I say, not as I do), the concern trolls (but what about the children?), and those who constantly harp on a single topic that has little-to-nothing to do with reality (like the folks who complain about our state's mask mandate on every. single. post by the governor, even if it's about, say, the death of a Supreme Court Justice). (The folks who just rant to huge groups that can't help about their own problems while not providing solutions or even ideas (especially when they don't say it's a rant or they're just looking for sympathy) aren't my favorites either. If you want to complain, do it to someone who can do something about it. Or state that it's just a complaint. But I digress.)

Example - most of the population of my state is fairly liberal - I live in Seattle-ish. A friend who lives the eastern half of the state said that one of his coworkers (they're much more conservative as a group on that side of the state) was complaining about the "liberal agenda" the schools are pushing...

His example?

His son had an assignment to write an essay about how the students could give grace to other people.

Now, I have issues with this term in public schools - giving grace - because to me it has religious overtones. But a lot of people understand it where they might not grok terms like "empathy" or "compassion." 

Apparently not this person though.

So I was ranting about this today to my therapist (because it's her job to listen to my rants and give me ideas on dealing with them). And she suggested I set a timer.

Huh. Whut?

"Set a timer. When you find yourself engaging in these ah... discussions... set a timer, after which you will not engage anymore."

Oh. Why.

"Give yourself some grace. You don't have to suffer fools gladly."

More was said, but it was along the same lines. Cut yourself some slack, give yourself some grace. Whether it's negativity or toxic positivity or just all the 2020 out there, there is only so much I can do. So I do it. And then I stop. Take a break. Chill.

I can do that.

Fine Lines

Mind you, I say this as a fifty-something, widowed, fat, neurodiverse, straight, white, cis, female,

culturally-but-not-actually Christian, agnostic-but-leaning-Deist, live-and-let-live parent of two... so your mileage may vary. And face it, I like people; it's why my degree is in intercultural communication. I want to like everyone (and the inverse is true) but that's neither practical nor likely. 

This picture (of Abby, at about 2 1/2 years old) is pretty much how I'm feeling these days. 

And quite a lot of that feeling is down to those fine lines. 

There's a fine line, for instance, between advocating for something you believe in and supporting that belief past all reason. 

American politics is a good example of this: there are people who will not under any circumstances vote for a Democrat because "Republicans are against abortion." It is demonstrably true that the Republican party still says that, and they'll do their damndest to overturn Roe v Wade to make you think they still believe that, but that abortion rates actually go down during Democratic administrations because the Democrats don't just forbid the behavior; they provide the tools to make it a moot point. People like this take illogic to whole new levels - they're the sort who believe that a bunch of old white men should control women's bodies but that mask mandates are government overreach.

Inversely, you have the "Democrats are too far right in this country so I'm skipping the vote/voting third party/writing in my favorite candidate" brigade. American democrats are pretty far right by world standards, it's true. They are also not trying to actively kill you as a group, whether by shooting you in the street for walking while black or beating you up for your gender or just letting everyone die from climate change. People like this are whining because they aren't getting their own way. At least, because they aren't getting it right this second. Yes, we know you've been waiting a long time. You could maybe shorten it by doing the practical thing at the upper echelons and doing the progressive thing lower down.

Of course, US politics is not the only example. There are the exciting folks who don't seem to understand that advocating for their specific circumstance - whether gender, disability, color, whatever - does not automatically make them an expert at everything even remotely related. For instance, just because you are an expert in your own child's special needs (as I am in mine) does not mean that you have special insight into what's best for even all children in that group, much less an entire school district full. You are (probably) not an epidemiologist. Would we all prefer it if it was safe to have the kids in school full time right now? Of course we would. But it's not.

And some of that is down to people taking those fine lines and turning them into big, tall, Mexican-border walls. It's no longer a topic of discussion; it's the hill you'll die on to the point that you don't even think about it anymore. Assuming you ever did.

Baby Steps and Paternalism

I have an analogy in my head using baby steps was regarding US politics, and it goes like this:

As a country, we're like babies taking baby steps toward equity and have been forever. Equity for Black people, Native American people, other people of color, women, LGBTQ+, the neurodiverse, folks with disabilities, people for whom two or more of these converge, etc. Sloooooow baby steps, falling down often as babies are wont to do. But we're getting there. Far too slowly for most of our taste.

Then this bully moves into the neighborhood. We've heard of him; he used to live across town but he was notorious for many reasons, very few of them good. We thought this other kid might move in - her family has been here before - but some rumors started flying around about Bad Things and a lot of the neighbors believed them, plus Bully Boy's friends worked really hard to mess with everyone involved. Bully Boy moves in, brings some of his friends (or whatever you call people who hang around bullies) along with him, and he starts pushing the babies down. Then his hangers-on do. Then they get the other neighborhood kids into it, anyone who can't see that all the bullies are doing is pushing other children down, or who have been taught to dislike or distrust other children. 

Some of them honestly think this is for the babies' own good for whatever reason. Some are trying to hang on to their own neighborhood status. A few really loud ones believe that the whole reason Bully Boy moved in was a sign that better things are to come for everyone, so they'd better push down the little kids as much as they can, and faster, to show their enthusiasm for the cause. 

And now here we are. We have a chance to move Bully Boy Number One (or 45) out of our neighborhood, and to take his bully posse with him. But we don't really like the kids who can do this for us. One is almost to the age where he doesn't understand kids anymore, and his partner has a history of trying to protect the babies "for their own good" that has sometimes been detrimental to them. And neither of them will even listen to Old Man Sanders, who has seen all this from his front porch for decades, but who has a reputation for being too old and cranky and hard to work with for the other neighbors to take him seriously. There are some awesome people living down the block, but they're too young for the neighborhood to take them seriously yet. Not until they're 35, anyway.

So here's my thought: We grit our teeth - yes, even those who have been sitting at the feet of Old Man Sanders as long as he's been in the neighborhood - and we allow the paternalistic, barely-center kids to move into his old house. And then we enlist the awesome people down the block to keep a sharp eye on them and keep them honest.

Paternalistic of me? Probably. I grew up in this society too, after all. But I just now realized how paternalistic and condescending the term 'baby steps' can be when referring to situations outside of oneself. Using it to refer to my own self - or I suppose an actual baby taking their first steps - is fine. It's encouraging development and that's okay. Using it to refer to groups outside myself (even though I'm a member of at least two of those groups) is most likely problematic on my part, as a white person with a fair amount of privilege.

But if I can get even one person with even more privilege than I have to listen... then I guess I'm using my own privilege for good. 🤷

Screens (I'm For Them)

Yes, there is probably more screen time than there needs to be in our house - if only because it takes away from moving-our-bodies time - Wii Fit and the like notwithstanding. This was true even before distance schooling, but I maintain that content and parental involvement outweigh the minutes.

Same - although in the inverse - is my opinion of the butts-in-chairs philosophy of schooling, but that's probably a separate post. Summary - Lizzy actually does pretty well in distance schooling because she's allowed all her ASD and ADHD quirks, like origami and drawing on her arms and chewing gum; if she's not sitting in a classroom, her behavior isn't distracting other kids. As long as I help keep her organized, she does okay.

The first week of September was all getting-to-know-you at school, as was most of the second. I wasn't on top of her, and so Lizzy (just 13, so add adolescent-know-it-all-ism to the rare mix that is our Liz) assumed that "soft start" was the same thing as "optional" as far as assignments go. It wasn't, it was just that they were working more on the getting-to-know-you social-emotional learning (SEL) than on academics, and the due dates were extended to allow for transitions and technical issues and all.

So we came to today, the third Wednesday of the school year, and bunches of things are marked overdue.

Liz, being Liz, is panicking and stating that it's all stupid and science is supposed to be science, not emotions and stuff, and I ask her to hang on and I can walk her through it after lunch. I have the privilege to do this; I'm not working until a) the folks who do DOT physicals call me back, and b) the district gets all the way down to me on the seniority list. She eats lunch, I pull an extra chair into her room, and we start on the four things marked "overdue."

One she can't do because it involved a class discussion the first week that she missed due to technical difficulties, and one she had meant to ask me to print for her (we don't have her Chromebook talking to the wireless printer yet), but had forgotten. This left one survey (done in about three minutes, although it's not showing as complete yet) and one "make a slide describing a character or a real-life person you identify with."

Ah, there's that social-emotional thing she loves so much. Other kids in her group did people like Michelle Obama or favorite Marvel characters or whatever, but Lizzy thinks SEL things are “stupid” unless she’s got someone to hold her hand and make her see the social connections. Enter me.

She wails that she doesn’t identify with any and challenges me to find one.

“L from Death Note,” I say, and her face lights up.

“Oh! And Light!” (I mean, okay, so my kid identifies with Mad Scientists from anime; she hasn't read the manga. All righty then).

I nod. She proceeds to craft a slide complete with images and descriptions of both these characters, explaining that they're both protagonists (I tried to explain deuteragonist but she wasn't having any) including that one is a good guy with no social skills, one is a bad guy who thinks he’s a good guy with lots of social skills. 

Note that she hasn't read the manga. She's seen (most of) the anime. That's screen time. But thanks to parental involvement (we talk about tropes and literary stuff and so forth all the time), she is able - with a little hand-holding - to extrapolate to characters she identifies with. That's remarkable for a person who is both on the autism spectrum and has ADHD.

Living a "natural" life is all well and good. You do you. But if you think screen time is intrinsically bad all on its own? That's mistaking the medium for the message. 

Just One

All I did was drive to the middle school, wait for Lizzy to get her school pix taken and get back to the car, and drive home. Masked w/filter, closed car with recirculated air. Total of 22 minutes. And now I need a hit off my inhaler and my headache is back.

Our nearest sensor is about half a mile away as the smoke flies and it has us at AQI 250 (Very Unhealthy for Everyone). This is north and a bit east of Seattle.

And that's about half of what folks in Portland OR and Central & Eastern WA are experiencing. In some places, they are actually OFF THE CHART. Even places where the (existing) fires themselves are not a danger (like here) can have AQIs of over 500 right now.

This is exhausting, and in my opinion, it's all down to the entitled "just one" philosophy.

"Oh, come on, it's just one gender reveal party; what could it hurt?" (leaving aside the huge fallacies involved in that statement; genital reveal is more accurate... but that's another post).

"Oh, come on, it's just one kid going to school sick, how much harm could they do?"

Some times it's "just a few" instead - when people try to justify their thinking as encompassing more than themselves.

"Oh, come on, it's just a few fireworks to celebrate a victory."

"Oh, come on, it's just a few bad cops..."

Here's the thing. It may be just one. Or just a few. 

But that doesn't matter.

Because they're causing damage. Serious damage. 

To all of us.

And they don't care. 

"All lives matter" my ass. These people don't believe that. To them, their lives matter, and apparently the potential lives of fetuses matter. But no-one else's lives do, not really.

That much is evident from their continued actions.

String Theory

Or Newton's Cock-up; take your pick of titles.

One of the gifts I got Lizzy for her birthday yesterday was this very cool Newton's Cradle - for those who can't see the picture or have never met a Newton's cradle, it's a set of parallel bars from which are suspended five metal balls in a row. When you pull one metal ball to the side and let it go, the resulting ping against the next ball in the line causes them all to move. Newton's Third Law of Thermodynamics: the equal and opposite reaction, you know?

Anyway, this one has a pretty holographic base, which adds incentive to newly-teenage pink-fluffy-unicorn science nerds to Do the Science Thing. And we got it and opened it yesterday at her birthday dinner. 

It went tango uniform immediately upon exiting the protective plastic clamshell it came in.

So we spent a fair chunk of the past 24 hours, in between cupcake delivery and sleep and the like, trying to disentangle the damn thing.

Yeah, no. 

We appear to have made it worse, because in attempting the disentanglement, we have managed to tie one of the fishing lines used to suspend the balls in an actual knot, not to mention eye strain, stretching of fishing line, and wear and tear on my nerves.

I was prepared to replace it at my own cost, but thought I'd ask Amazon customer service if this is a common issue with this sort of thing, or was it just Overenthusiastic Unboxing on Lizzy's part. I didn't even get that far, as the chat dude, said, "yes, sure, please just take it to UPS and we'll send you out another; here's a mailing label. Also free next-day shipping on a replacement."

All righty then.

But be assured that Mama will do the unboxing with the new one when it arrives tomorrow.

Not As Bad As Expected

The first day of (virtual) school went surprisingly well for us.

Senior Sunrise was gorgeous. Can't involve the school or the PTSA because of pandemic gathering rules. A local church offered to host because they have different gathering rules than public schools do: we did it outside in a huge field, 10-foot distanced, groups of five or less, and masked. My job was to distribute blueberry muffins, Sunny D, and masks if needed. I don't know exactly how many kids of the nearly-400 seniors at our school showed up (I think it was approximately half) but I only had to give out two masks, so they did well.

That was sunrise though, which is not my best time of day. SO MUCH CAFFEINE on board yesterday! 

So we got home, got everybody fed and watered, took a couple back-to-school pix, and had at it. 

We had a couple small glitches - Lizzy discovered that if one logs in too early, Zoom will time out, and
then you'll miss the all-hands assembly entirely, derailing another class in the process. Abby had a form for one class where another student's contact info showed up instead of her own. Neither was a big deal because they're calling this a soft start - like the soft openings one sees in retail to work out the kinks before the grand opening.

Still can't get any mic but mine to work on Abby's computer. Not sure why. Also no big; she can use mine unless I need to be in a meeting too... which isn't all that frequent.

So like I said, it went pretty well. And my Fitbit claims I slept extra well last night!