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.