The Masked Mom

I'm so damn tired.

I'm tired of the restrictions, of wearing masks everywhere, of not going anywhere, of not being able to do my job, and of trying to get Lizzy to do her distance school work in a timely manner without either of us losing our tempers on the regular. But I do what I'm told to do - by actual experts - because I care about people.

If we had behaved ourselves early on - all of us - we might be able to have schools open, at least a little, to a few people at a time, so these things could happen.

I'm tired of the people who want to "open the economy" so badly that they completely ignore mask mandates (or requests; our governor should've been tougher from the get-go), and thereby consign us all to longer restrictions. Dead people can't stimulate your economy.

If you really cared about getting the economy open, you would wear the masks, wear them properly, wash your hands, not try to deflect every damn thing against disenfranchised people. It's a similar mindset to the "pro-life" brigade; if they really cared about babies' lives, they'd be all for socialized medicine and sex ed and birth control and paid maternity leave and subsidized child care. It's what people who actually care about other people do.

I'm tired of masks and not seeing my friends and not getting a massage/mani-pedi/haircut as much as antimaskers are. Really not a shut-in here, not by choice. I am a social creature and I would really love to have a conversation - maybe even with hugs - in person, with someone who is not either of my children or my mother. Or a night of nerdy board games with my friends, when the biggest thing we had to worry about was not bringing people's allergens and whether the kids heard that one round of Cards Against Humanity. But guess what? That's right, I'm forgoing these things because - all together now - I care about other people.

We can't have those things, because some of you think that you know better than actual experts in the field, or are miserable and want the rest of us to be miserable too, or you just don't give a crap about other people. 

You know who's really in a bad place right now? Public school teachers. They're doing their best to learn new systems, rework plans, and do everything online. Or they're forced to work in unsafe conditions. Or some unholy mixture of the two. But some people are so wrapped up in their own needs that they don't even see other people unless it's to denigrate them for not doing the impossible, and doing it well. 

And it makes me tired.

Old Surprises

Not a Political Post™ - and I just realized that I'm using this in the same way that I used to write Not a Cancer Post™ when Laston was sick. Interesting; I guess it's just a way to say that the little things still happen (and should) even when the world is falling apart around us.

Anyway...

A couple weeks ago I wrote on a social media platform about finding a gift card to Torrid I had forgotten about. I got this pretty little flowered tank top.

Several years ago I wrote on this blog about the amazing plethora of stuff I have found under the couch or in filing cabinets or what-have-you over the course of almost a decade. Honestly, it was like playing Hidden Object Games all the time - I'd find mismatched socks and hair ties and LEGO bricks and gum wrappers and endless juice box straw covers... you name it.

But today I've spent a fair bit of time going through clutter in two spaces - the living room and my bedroom. Most of this can be either thrown away, stored in the correct location, or put in the laundry - the bulk of it is things like socks and shoes and the price tags from clothing or used dryer sheets or little-kid jigsaws missing half the pieces and that my kids have long since outgrown anyway.

I cleared out the storage ottoman and found a few missing holiday decorations, as well as storing my tiny TV and DVD/VCR in it since they have been on the Table of Free Things™ for months and no-one wants to take them.

Made a sign for Lizzy to hang on the porch so random delivery people know that the Table of Free Things™ is intended for them as well.

Then I tackled my room. Again. Although at least it's not getting worse, so there's that. In addition to the hair ties, used dryer sheets, mismatched socks, out-of-season shoes, and broken hangers, I came across a few old purses that had ended up on my closet floor. Now, the expensive purses (I have three) have been hung up this whole time, but the cheap ones (I had eight; now I have four as half of them were falling apart) were on the floor and full of forgotten stuff. This is just forgotten stuff in the purses, mind you, not including the stuff on the floor... which has been accounted for above.

• $1.53 in change
• Three lip balms - one of them tinted
• A bottle of Benadryl knockoffs with one tablet left
• An empty travel-size tube of Advil
• Two expired inhalers
• A travel pack of facial tissues
• Assorted (unused) menstrual supplies
• A barrette
• Two binder clips
• 
  A small first aid kit
• An empty phone case from my old Windows Phone
• Seven paper clips
• Two mechanical pencils
• One dry ballpoint pen

This isn't weird, right?

Now all I want is this frame so I can hang the pic of the characters from the Anime Black Clover that Abby drew me for my birthday and I'll be good to go!

Owning the Libs and Other Acts of Mean Spiritedness

Look, I get it. This is some serious stuff. Lives are at stake, hundreds of thousands have been lost, and this election is extra-important.

And I've figured out one very important thing. Mind you, this is all based on what I see online, as I am in fact currently insulated from real-life interactions with most people, given the pandemic and all. I get my groceries delivered or curbside, I order not-groceries online, and my work (where we really don't discuss this anyway) is a little light right now because I'm pretty far down in my employer's seniority list. I have also learned not to watch the news. I don't have regular TV anyway, but I haven't been watching it even online. 

I know. You'd think that by my age - I'm 52 - I'd have figured that out long before this. But I hadn't until a couple weeks ago when I told my therapist I was seriously considering just skipping the presidential debate and she more-or-less (figuratively) whapped me upside the head and told me to do it; it's not like I would miss anything but theatrics.

Anyway. For most liberal types whom I see online, it's not about scoring points on the competition. Oh, we're always up for a good fly meme, or a sarcastic bit of snark like the Shower Thought I had this morning ("It's Betsy DeVos, It's Betsy DeVos, Oh she has some yachts so she thinks she's a boss..." to the tune of Cruella DeVille) but mostly we're just trying to - you know - keep the planet from falling apart.

But the allegedly conservative (I say "allegedly" because I don't see them conserving much of anything except straight white males' feelings), it seems to be a matter of Owning the Libs. They may say it's about the unborn babies or the second amendment, but if it actually were, they'd do the logical thing and provide education and birth control, or regulate guns or enforce the regulations that are already there.

Seems they'd rather Own the Libs.

For a group who largely profess to be Christian, that seems mighty unChristian of them. 

My Executive Function Isn't

And frankly, this seems to be a common pattern in many people I know right now.

Even my mom, who is generally a bastion of the Just-Do-It (not in the Nike sense) school of philosophy, is struggling with it this week.

We are all just so tired of the constant crap. 

I keep seeing memes going around to that effect, including this one posted by my mom. For those of you using readers, it is (probably) a tweet that says, "I'm just so tired, so terribly tired, so utterly, totally 100% exhausted of thinking about him. I want to start thinking about other things, like all the major problems on the planet we've been ignoring by servicing the black hole where his soul is supposed to be for the last four years. @stevesilberman"

Another friend described the news cycle as "drinking from a fire hose." She's not wrong. I mean, I've learned to roll with the punches but they just. keep. coming.

And it makes us tired.

People think that executive dysfunction only applies to non-preferred tasks, like folding laundry (for me) or taking notes in school (for Liz) and that it only applies to ADHD or ASD  folks. But that's not true. It also applies to traumatized folks, which at the moment, most of us (at least those who do not share in the delusion) are. And it's affecting everydamnthing.

We kind of love decorating Grandma's house for Halloween/autumn, for instance. It's traditional in our family, we can still do it because her house and mine are our pandemic pod, and it just sort of kicks off fall. But we can't seem to work up the energy to go to the storage unit to get the decorations. The mere concept seems completely overwhelming. 

Now, some of this is other stuff - like the pandemic itself - that isn't directly caused by the Black Hole Who Cried Wolf but has certainly been exacerbated by him. I mean - if he hadn't downplayed the virus, left the states to fend for themselves, blah blah blah - we might be in a better frame of mind, because we would be expecting trick-or-treaters, for instance. But because he did all those things, especially in addition to all the other nationalist-racist-everythingist narcissistic bullshit, we just have no spoons left for fun. For anything but bracing for the next blow.

This is not healthy. 

And yet, here we are.

Can't Buy Me Love

Well, you can't.

Money can't buy love. Or happiness. 

It can buy peace of mind, which is a separate issue, and one I have brought up more than once. But that's not the same thing.

But the sort of people who think money can buy love?

They're sitting in the highest echelons of our government.

They're hiding their taxes.

They're denying others the things they themselves have, just to scrape out a few more thousand bucks.

On the backs of the people who they're supposed to represent.

That few thousand bucks - to the Trump and DeVos and McConnell (and a buncha business ones as well, but this post is about gubmint) types - is a drop in the proverbial bucket.

To me, a few thousand bucks is a lot of money.

Mind you, to me even the infamous $750 is a lot of money.

And they expect us to buy their bullshit, even after they've made it clear that it is bullshit. Then they try to gaslight us into thinking that we're the problem with society.

Some people are lapping it up.

Some of us are just trying to have a civilization here.

Andplusalso, as I was writing this, Himself got released (or bullied them into releasing him) from the hospital, where he got experimental treatment on the taxpayers' dime, is probably infecting everyone in his circle including perfectly blameless Secret Service agents, and is now telling everyone (again) that Covid-19 is no big deal.

THIS IS DANGEROUS.

Karma (Or Not)

So, as a rule, I grew thinking of the concept of Karma as the sort of "what did I do to deserve this?" thing in a cosmic sense. Whose dolly did I bust? What did I do to deserve - say - a spouse dying of cancer?

Nothing. I did nothing to deserve that.

But I see people - including myself until I was gently corrected by people who actually grok the concept - referring to 45's getting Covid-19 as karmic retribution in that "the universe is out to punish me" sense.

In one sense, this is BS; it doesn't work that way. The universe is not out to get us, no matter what we've done, and it is a particularly Western way of looking at it.

On the other hand, according to friends who are Hindus (where Karma as a concept is from) have said that what's going on with 45 is Karma at it's best; Karma is the natural consequence of one's actions.

In other words: 

Don't wear masks = catch Covid.

That's Karma.

My friend Vijay said it this way:

Thank you for checking yourself with regards to the usage of Karma. Love you for doing that. ♥️

The definition of Karma in the west ha gotten twisted and has gotten totally associated with bad action.

Karma in its simple definition is “act or action or doing”

The principle of Karma as taught to us in Hinduism is purely a cause and effect phenomenon. Consequences of ones choices or action is to be faced then. Choices and actions, no matter good or bad, we must be ready to face the consequences in the current life or in the next life. Hinduism believes in concepts of rebirths. The luxuries and difficulties we have been experiencing since our birth is a result of our actions in previous life.

Also, the beauty of Hinduism is flexibility. There is no dogma. You are able to customize it to your way of living. There have been several variations of how Karma is defined.

Thank you for reading through my comment and letting me ramble.

So yeah. Not wearing masks? check. Getting up in people's faces? check. Having other risk factors? check. These are actions that have the karmic consequence of getting Covid.

Being a general asshole and some of the other awful things this "president" has done? These are choices, but they do not result in the karmic consequence of getting Covid, not directly. 

The "president" claims to have the Christian God on his side; maybe he can take the other behaviors up with Him.