The Pre-Release

 I am always meaning to write more. It's in my to-do list to spend a little bit of time writing every 3-4 weeks or so.  I know many writers (the ones with a capital W) actually challenge themselves to write something every day, no matter how good or bad.  I like to write about the goings-on in my life and the feelings I have when the ons are going.  I give myself a few weeks for things to happen and for feelings to develop about those things.

Unfortunately, lately, the goings-on have been pretty mundane.  I can't go anywhere or do anything worth chatting about.  I spend most of my days in a pretty same-y routine; wake up, work, go for a walk, do some yoga, begrudgingly complete a trx workout so when I go back to the gym I can tell my trainer that I did things, read internet articles and cross chore-type things off my to-do list, watch some streaming serials, fall asleep to the sound of a headspace sleep story followed by white noise.  It's been this way since Christmas...and probably before Christmas.  

I'm not looking to change it up.  I'm pretty comfortable in my routine.  I'd love to be able to break it up with visits with friends and family, but I'm not going to bemoan our current situation any more than this one point: it doesn't make for good writing...at least not in the way that I write.

ANYWAY...One of those articles included 52 creative writing prompts.  Normally, I would read through such an article, deposit the gems in my mind palace to collect dust, and delete the tab forever.  But this time I saved it.  I thought that, given the current climate and the very likely likelihood that my routine is going to be pretty much the same as I described above, the pre-selected prompts might give me the opportunity to search my mind palace for dusty items I could reflect upon.  

The first handful of prompts were fairly lacklustre, although I am using one right now, so perhaps they're not as bad as I'm making them out to be.  The one I chose was about releasing resolutions; I was supposed to write about a resolution I did not reach.  I looked back in my blog history to find a New Year's Resolution-type entry.  I could not find one in the last five years.  This is not to say that I haven't made resolutions, nor is it to say that I have reached all the resolutions I've made.  I recall resolving to learn to play the guitar some ten years ago.  Turns out, the unprecedented times of 2020 provided exactly the environment that would allow me to finally make some headway on that resolution.  I'm not campfire-good yet (which is to say, I'm not very good at all), but I can string a few chords together and my husband can sort of tell what I'm playing. I found an app through an(other) article I was reading that broke it down in a way I could understand and internalize. I find that habits are made when intention and environment meet serendipity.  Possibly more on that later.

But back to the writing.  When I first started blogging, I had a small cult following.  They were mainly friends and frenemies engaging in a certain degree of schadenfreude as my main focus at the time was to turn my sometimes disastrous navigation of the single life of my mid-twenties into comedy.  A few months after I started writing, I moved to a new city to start a student work experience placement.  I recall, sometime in June, receiving a message from a friend/fan looking for my next entry...it had been weeks (WEEKS!) and surely my next one was due soon.  What I knew and know, both then and now, was that you can't force your particular art.  I couldn't make my life, which at that time was a combination of learning-to-be-a-professional by day and trying-not-to-die-of-boredom-in-a-strange-town-with-no-car-and-no-money by night, into something prose-worthy.  

I guess, with the writing prompts and the scheduled writing time, I'm trying to go against what I know.  That I can't force good prose about my life when my life is on hold due to a worldwide pandemic.  I read another article (I found it in a dusty room of my mind palace just now) about setting intentions for 2021 instead of resolutions.  I'm not going to link the article because it described intentions as mini-goals to set for yourself on the road to completing a major goal, which might be useful for many people, but when I read the article's title I had thought of intention in the more woo-woo meditation/yoga sense and that turned a light bulb on for me.

Instead of setting a resolution to write more, I'm setting an intention to write more.  And in the woo-woo meditation/yoga tradition, I'm going to go about my intention without judgment of the outcome.  Sometimes my mind palace will be empty.  Sometimes the thing I find and dust off might actually be kind of junk.  The point is just to try to write more.

My New Year's Resolution

This year was a dumpster fire.

In truth, the year featured a lot of actual fires: Australia, California, probably other places I don't know about.

But the general consensus I'm gathering from my various social media feeds is that this year was a particularly hard one, and that is the truth for me too.

Aside from having to completely rearrange my life around a global pandemic and then watch tens of thousands of people die because of people who would not do the same, concerning myself with the business of extinguishing the world's actual fires, and experiencing the collective stress of extremely publicized race-based violence, the sadness that goes along with that, and the inherent discomfort in reflection about my own contributions and participation in systemic racism.  Aside from all that, I enjoyed some significant personal struggles through 2020 as well.

And I see many of you out there starting that inhale so that in just over 12 hours you can let it all out in a collective sigh of relief.  

I won't be joining you.

Though I have often felt in the past that flipping the calendar year over has signified some new beginning, this year, I'm not holding my breath that moving from zero to one is going to make any impactful change in the problems I've been facing, some alone and some with the rest of the world.  In fact, I am confident that I will still experience strife through 2021.  

So, if there is a new me in the new year, it's not one that is going to start losing weight or eating better.  It's not one that's going to be more fun and enjoy life more.  Truthfully, I spent a lot of 2020 losing weight, eating better, and stopping to smell the roses when I could find them.  I'm going to keep doing that stuff.  And that's really what the new me will be all about.

My New Year's Resolution this year: I'm just going to persevere.  I'm going to resolve to have resolve.  I'm going to just keep going.  Because 2021 is going to come at me with all the same challenge as 2017, 2018, 2019, and yes, even 2020. All I can do is keep going.

Having said that, I acknowledge that there may be those of you out there reading this with worry that I've given up on life or that my outlook has darkened.  It may be the case that I'm approaching the coming year with a certain level of resignation.  But if it makes you feel better, take heart.  I assure you: if 2021 has roses, I'll smell them.

The Longest Day

 It's my birthday this week.  I had a dentist appointment recently that got cancelled.  2020 has been the longest day ever.

I say that because it really feels like yesterday that I was turning 36, and I don't mean that in an "Oh, time flies!" kind of way.  It literally feels like it happened yesterday. (Time does fly, though.  I accidentally wrote 26 there instead of my actual age and then felt wistful when I realized I was 10 years wrong).  My cancelled dentist appointment was a yearly follow-up which I recall was followed closely by a root canal, the pain from which had been necessitating that I consume several bottles of ibuprofen every week.  I only just realized that my back bottom right molar has been in its current state of endodontic repair for almost a year and not, as I had previously believed, just a few weeks. I have this terrible feeling that I blinked and I'm a year older.  While most years feel like a whirlwind or a rollercoaster, this time it just felt like warp speed.  Like we started in March 2020 and now it's November somehow.

At the same time, I feel like we've been doing this quarantine thing since forever.  

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Anyway, around my birthday, I try to set some goals.  

This past year I've been working on getting my (figurative) house in order. I've been prioritizing better sleep, meditation, yoga and exercise and I think its made the quarantine more manageable.  

With the hope of a vaccine coming sometime in the next 6 months, I think this is time to consider how I want to fill the time that's been vacant (or, more accurately, filled with extra work) all this time.  Normally, I feel like my life is a whirlwhind or a rollercoaster.  It's thrilling, but I when I get to the end of the year my brain feels pretty jiggled and my hair is in a crazy windswept beehive.  This year moved equally fast, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction as far as stimulation goes.  I think what I'm after is some kind of metaphorical rail journey.  There's no slowing the speed of time, but at least this way I get to enjoy the scenery without accidentally swallowing a bug.

I Needed a Win

 It's been a hard week.

The second wave has finally arrived in Niagara and it's raging through one of my long-term homes like a wildfire.  You know what that means.  I'm feverishly refreshing my referral page to get food, fluids and supplements into sick people in the hopes that maybe they make it through their illness.  The guilt that I get to do this from the comfort of my home is palpable. I can feel the cortisol coursing through my body right now.  

Between trying to extinguish a COVID outbreak with jello and supplements and an email from a senior colleague at another job letting me know about some documentation I missed from a client interaction several weeks ago, I haven't felt like a particularly competent dietitian.  

Because I'm fighting those fires I mentioned above, I haven't really had time to do the other things I find rewarding.  Exercise and leisure pursuits have been difficult to get to and difficult to enjoy when I do have time for them because I feel guilty that I'm not doing more for the people I work for.  Even though I objectively know that I can't pour from an empty cup, taking the time to refill feels like time I should be spending pouring.  

Tuesday rolls around and I realize I'm also experiencing the collective anxiety of the unknown that awaits us as millions of people head to the polls just to the south of me.  I recall the morning of the first Wednesday in November 2016, driving to work at the southern tip of the Niagara Peninsula looking at the Buffalo waterfront some 1000 meters across the Niagara River from me and thinking how lucky I was to be living on this side of that water where the Great Pumpkin could never hurt me.  How wrong I was.  Though his governance hasn't had a direct impact on me (in any way that I could quantify here, anyway), I hurt from the divisiveness and hate of which he is a symbol and which he seemed not only to condone but also to incite.  It's been a hard week, but it's been a hard four years.

Point is, I needed a win this week. I got one yesterday.

I'm not foolish enough to think that this solves everything.  I'm almost ready to begin my relaxing bedtime routine so I can be fresh to keep fighting that COVID fire.  That's not going to go away tomorrow because a few states turned blue.  And neither is the divisiveness and hate that's made me and millions of others feel so hopeless.  But watching the results roll in from Tuesday to Saturday at least made me feel like the hearts and minds of a few more people have changed enough for me to hope that there might be a few more wins to come.  Time to fill my glass.

Sick

 Remember when having a cough was something that just happened randomly from the months of October to April?  Your friends might bring you soup if you were really laid up.

Now we're in this weird place where every sniffle is an alarm bell that we might be ground zero for a super spread.  My husband developed a cough on Thanksgiving weekend; we had felt safe visiting with our relatives that we had included in our bubble throughout the pandemic because we generally have been maintaining a pretty consistent bubble, social distancing, and masking.  Nonetheless, my husband started with this croak-y cough on Saturday evening.  I was mortified.  If I think about the real, non-COVID world, this seems like a really trivial thing to be mortified about.  How many times had I gotten the flu over the Christmas holidays when I was a university student?  But now, it's not.  It could be life and death.  Luckily, my husband was able to get a same-day COVID test as soon as we got back and the next-day results were negative  We had only passed on a minor virus to my mother and her husband to battle in the following week.

This week, it was my turn.  I started Monday with a sore throat.  It was my only symptom, one which is a classic sign of a week-long sinus infection for me, and the pre-screen for work told me I should still attend, although I did get a call from infection control on the way to tell me I had to get a COVID test ASAP.  I already had one pre-booked for another job.  It took longer for my result to come back. It was negative, as I suspected it would be.

But the wait period in-between onset of symptoms and when I finally got my test results back was odd.  Messaging people with whom I had pre-planned meetings and appointments to discuss my symptoms and the likelihood I would have my test results back by meeting time seemed like the right thing to do, but also seemed like a strange conversation to have in the context of a non-COVID world.  I wonder if it's something we'll continue to do when this whole weird world eventually resolves.  

What I have learned: wearing a mask with a head cold is harder than wearing a mask without a head cold, sneezes have smells and they're not great, and most people are appreciative of a pre-meeting symptom discussion.

No News

 I've added writing to my to-do list lately.  I'm finding it somewhat challenging to do this regularly because life has been so stand-still-ish so it doesn't feel like there's anything much to write about.

Way back when I was trying to be hot person, I would sometimes look at situations and think to myself, "Will this make a good blog post?"  Often, it meant subjecting myself to some small (or large) degree of embarrassment in the name of entertainment.  I never really became a hot person.

I was visiting some friends in pre-COVID times, and despite not having seen them in over a year, neither of us had much to report.  Then we talked about some friends whose marriage had fallen apart after a failed attempt at opening it up.  And we all agreed that we've come to the point in our lives when no news can be good news.

So life is pretty ok.  I work.  I go to the gym. I meet with friends for outdoor/socially distanced activities.  I go on baking and cooking adventures on the weekend.  I read books. I ride my bike.  I knit and sew things.  I play the piano.  I teach myself the guitar with limited success.  My husband and I play boardgames once or twice a week.  Life is ok.  And that's nothing to write home about.

Moving On

Anyone else feel like they're on a hamster wheel right now?  Like you're working really hard to get somewhere but the scenery hasn't changed a bit? 

I remember talking to a friend via messenger back in March or April and talking about three months from that point and thinking this would all be over.  It's been almost 2 months since that future we were dreaming of came and went and there's no real end in sight without a vaccine that may or may not be available within the year, and even if it is available, to whom?  How safe?  How effective?  

In the meantime, we're all trying to fit ourselves into a new normal without really knowing what the new normal is yet.  Though we've all had our moments over the past several months, I think our nerves are fraying and the walls are wearing thin.  Despite the separation and isolation, we're really starting to see some people for who they really are.  We just aren't as polite as we should be because it's just really hard to deal with constantly trying strike a balance when the scales keep moving.

I think we'd all like to be able to move on with our lives, but it's difficult to know how to do that without knowing what the new normal is really going to look like.  Many of us had set the ball rolling on major life plans that had to be put on hold when the world shut down and it's still not clear if we can pick up where we left off or if we have to abandon that ship and start building a new one out of what materials we can find lying around.  

I'm being deliberately vague, but that's because every story is different and also because energy is scarce to lay it all out.  But we're all waiting and seeing.  For the border to open.  For a vaccine. For a bigger bubble.  To go back to work.  

There's nothing for it but to keep moving on, but it's hard when we don't know where.