Category Archives: life

where did all the trains go?

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

America really needs to put back all the missing trains. I’ve played Ticket to Ride! I know this entire country used to be nothing but trains, trains and more trains! The entire Gilded Age is based on train-made fortunes. And where were all those trains this week when I needed to get from Chicago to Pittsburgh during a storm and thought my flight was going to be canceled? They were NOT AVAILABLE. In fact, there was one train available and it was sold out from Chicago to Pittsburgh, even though I would absolutely have taken it as an overnight sleeper if I’d had to.

However, this is not actually a blog post about how America is, in general, devoid of trains. It is rather a post about how I had to go to Chicago this week, and then to Pittsburgh, and I had to take two planes, one train and a lot of automobiles to do so. Still, I am actually beginning to prefer trains: they are more sustainable in terms of carbon output, and also make me far less nervous. My anxiety over the impact of late-stage capitalism on the safety of a plane to fly gets worse every year, as I worry that a plane will be improperly maintained due to airline cutbacks on service costs. I also worry that the pilots will be over-exhausted and overworked as their pay is cut and they have to fly more hours to maintain a decent wage. And in the last couple years of this New Gilded Age, as inequality becomes more extreme, I am more anxious as a plane takes off and lands than I have ever been in the past.

And yet, it’s a necessary evil. There is no other real way to travel for business, and we’ve set up our society so that planes have made distance less relevant. The expectation is, once again, that we meet in person when possible, with clients or with colleagues. And so, I am back on the road, and back on planes, worrying quietly in my seat that I won’t be on one of the planes that collides while taking off from an overscheduled airport, or is hit by lightning flying in unsafe conditions. I am more comfortable on the ground, in a train, where it may derail but I’m less likely to actually die if it does.

Still, I survived all the transportation this week, and now I’m back home, able to sleep again. It was actually a worthwhile trip, and I had such a nice time seeing all my colleagues in Chicago and in Pittsburgh. I so rarely get to actually be in an office with people I work with anymore that it feels so special when I’m in a room, not a Zoom, for even one day – and I had three days this week in real space, plus a dinner with my team on Monday. I suppose I can get used to travel again for this reason, in that I just like working in person with people, and these are my chances to do it.

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dance party weekend accomplished

Posted on January 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

I have slightly trashed knees. Turns out I’ve been hyperextending them for years! So now I have a slight cartilage issue in that they hurt when I use them too much. I’m forty four and have a long time to live in this body so this is of slight concern. Enter the collagen and the joint supplements and lot of care when I walk.

But right now I’m really feeling my knees because I actually went out two nights this weekend! I went to Vortex with Paul on Friday and then went to an 80s dance night at the local music hall with a mom’s group I joined on Facebook and aside from my stupid knees grinding when I was trying to do squats this morning in BodyPump class, I actually feel like myself more than I have since we left NYC six months ago.

Not only did I go out, but I spent time with new friends! I went for a long hike and pho yesterday and then a shorter walk and a chat over coffee with another friend today and I am starting to actually settle in here and make connections, which feels okay. Like I did it! I moved somewhere and didn’t need a chance encounter at a grocery store to plug into a friend group right when it was forming!

I admit, I did need a lot of Internet. I have met a lot of friends through a Facebook moms’ friend making group. I mean, the loneliness epidemic is real when you have two thousand women signed up for a Facebook group as a solution to dealing with their sense of isolation. And I’ve become more deeply entrenched in two sub-groups of that Facebook group: my speculative fiction book club, and a Moms of Teens spinoff. And through those sub-groups, I feel like I’m making actual small connections every time I meet up with them. Which is how these things are supposed to work, right?

It was that latter group, the Moms of Teens, that I coordinated to go out to the Ardmore Music Hall for 80s night last night, although I had a couple members of the book club show up too. I am a relentless promoter of parties when I’m socializing, and I sold that New Wave night through hard. And even though the DJ was MUCH too young and also did not manage to curate the waves of requests being thrown at him by drunk middle age people (Tiffany is not New Wave), everyone still seemed to have a fantastic time. We all left our houses at least, and went out with other people, and genuinely enjoyed ourselves dancing as a group, knees be damned.

So I have a lot of gratitude and a small amount of pride in how I’ve handled this challenge. I didn’t have my original Los Angeles crew to lean on. I didn’t have Brooklyn Scouts to help me find like-minded parents to connect with. And I still managed to go out and make new friends and coordinate a night out to an 80s dance party less than six months after landing on the Main Line. I still managed to make solid enough connections with people to spend hours in their presence on a regular basis.

And most importantly, I went out dancing two nights in a row this weekend, and I have stamps from two different clubs on my hand still, and I am proud of myself for that. Yes, I am feeling going out today. Yes, going out two nights in a row at 44 is very different than it was at 26. But I did go out two nights in a row to dance parties, and I’m so happy I’m at this point in a whole new city. This transition wasn’t ever going to be easy, but I can at least try to make it more fun.

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sixteen years later

Posted on January 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

I am far too fond of visualizing a cut-over and a “[x] years later” overlay as a visual of my life. I’ve had to move and reboot so many times that I lack continuity. It’s hard sometimes even for me to piece together my own narrative. And lately, the cut-over I’ve been visualizing is a hot take from January of 2007 to January of 2023. This is because the common thread from my twenties is that I have to make new friends based on my own merits, as opposed to just having a kid born in 2008.

This is the weird thing about making friends as an adult who chooses to reproduce. You have a period of time where you make your own friends in your 20s, based on your college circles, or based on the people you meet randomly in your life if you move away from your college circle. Then you reproduce and suddenly, all your friends are people who had a baby around the same time you did. Then your kid becomes a teen, and suddently is an independent person, and you’re making new friends based on your own merits for the first time in decades because your identity is less about your status as a parent. Your life phase governs your identity, and your identity governs where and how you bond with other adult humans.

This is where I, and a lot of people my age, happen to be at this point in our social journeys. We’ve got teens who are their own persons. And we may have our fellow parent friends, but after a decade and a half, we may also have lost those friends to moves or personal differences or other changes that happen with time. We may have our pre-parent era friends, but similarly, they may have been lost as we went through our own life changes. So here we are, having to meet people who have to associate with us based on more factors than just their kid’s birth year. It’s terrifying.

The last time I had to make friends based on my own merits as a person and as a human was in the mid-aughts. I was in my mid to late twenties in Los Angeles, far from my friend circle in Vancouver and my family in Victoria. I had gone to seek my fame and fortune in digital media buying. And after maybe ten days in the Westside, I ran into a girl in the grocery store who kindly passed forward her own good fortune in meeting people, and invited me to meet her friends…and the rest is history. I met new friends, introduced them to other friends, helped to make connections, and always, always had something going on. My blog from that time is a never-ending whirl of work, socializing, and anarchist bike rides…which it continued to be right up until I left the Westside in January of 2007 to move in with that guy I met at Bar Sinister out east of Vermont.

And here we are sixteen years later. If my time in NYC was all about being a parent (in probably one of the least practical cities to be a parent in), then my time in Pennsylvania is going to be about the transition back out of being a parent. Ben is large! He is as tall as I am and is becoming more independent every day. He’s going to be driving in less than two years. I’m no longer making friends with other parents I meet through his school or through Scouts. I’m making friends with other humans based on being my own person. I have not had to do that for the better part of two decades and it is a very terrifying thought.

If I have a point of consolation, it is that I was still learning how to be a human in my twenties (late learner, okay?) and had yet to develop the empathy and social skills I worked on more consistently in my thirties. I have more faith in myself to be a less self-centered and insecure person now. In my twenties, I worked on blind ego (“of course people like me!”) combined with then crushing despair when I wasn’t to everyone’s taste (“there’s something wrong with me”). In my forties, I am trying to work based on self-confidence (“I am a great person to be friends with because I am kind and considerate and try my best to truly hear the people around me”) and rational consolation (“not everyone has to be my BFF and that’s okay!”) This doesn’t always mean I’m going to function without insecurity as years of exclusion and bullying are always going to be embedded in my foundations. But it does mean I’m able to identify my own insecurities and try to move past them as much as possible.

The other motivation I have to make friends is that I need to set an example for my kiddo. Just because I’m not socializing entirely based on being a parent does not mean that being a parent is no longer a factor at all. I have to demonstrate to Ben that friendships are built a block at a time. This does require the core friendship skillset I learned in my twenties in L.A., which is:

  1. establish contact and common ground
  2. ask if that person would like to hang out sometime
  3. get that person’s contact info
  4. follow-up with hang out details
  5. if hangout goes well, send follow-up note expressing how you enjoyed getting to know them
  6. repeat steps 4 and 5
  7. (optional) include that person in other aspects of your life, like double dating or bigger get togethers
  8. build friend circle and throw monster house party (okay maybe replace this with “quiet adult cocktails and appetizers party”)

So here we go, with a cut to 2023. I have to reach back through time and lived experience and remember what it was like to connect with people in an authentic and genuine manner. Thankfully, I am good at the Internet so I’ve been able to use that as a springboard to make new friends so far. But it’s still a major shift and change in my life and one I have to commit to. As does Ben. Sixteen years later, I’m in a different place both in my mental health as well as my physical location and life phase. Lets see how many of these old social skills tactics still work.

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where is my training montage?

Posted on January 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

Paul and I are officially in training for Wave Gothik Treffen! We have just 19 weeks until we go to the largest goth festival in the world, in Leipzig Germany. We’re celebrating our 15 year anniversary, and what better way to do it than to spend a long weekend immersed in the subculture that brought us together?

However, we’ve been assured that WGT is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. Four days with 200 bands, meetups, picnics and marketplaces spread out across an entire town is going to be exhausting. It’s going to require actual physical training for us to not only get through the days, but also be able to stay up late to go to shows. And everyone knows that when you’re in training, you need a montage, right?

Now that we no longer live in NYC, my step count is down significantly from where it was, even post-COVID. Pre-COVID, I’d do 10,000 steps a day without thinking twice. To/from work via subway plus an errand or meetup after the workday always meant four or five miles of walking over one day. Here in Suburbia, I barely eke out three thousand steps, even with a walk outside and a huge (okay huge to me) house that I am always wandering around. My endurance is way down. Combine my physical fitness deterioration with generally Being Old And Unable To Stay Up Past Midnight, and it is a bad combination to be taking on four days with fellow Children Of The Night.

I have therefore embarked on a multi-part training regiment to get ready for WGT. This consists of:

  • 10K steps per day, either outside or on my new awesome “treadmill desk”
  • Going out to clubs and staying until 1am. Break out the caffeinated drinks!
  • Enrolling with Weight Watchers so I am no longer carrying the equivalent of a fully loaded backpack all the time
Behold the glory of the treadmill desk!

Therefore, in the interest of Training for Treffen, we will be going out tomorrow night to a club in East Passayunk. Of course I am actually in an office tomorrow and will not be coming home between work and socializing, so this means I will have to wear an outfit suitable for the office that also works for the club. Which means that I’m going to have to look a little more authentic tomorrow at work. And while I have not exactly hidden my goth side from this set of co-workers (my corporate headshot is fairly Wednesday Addams down to the bat shaped circle pin on my collar) it still surprises people a bit when I show up in person in anything that goes beyond CorpGoth. But I keep getting messages to be more authentic when I read my Tarot cards, so authentic I shall plan to be authentic and just maybe keep the bat shaped necklace in my purse to put on during the train ride home.

It’s that need for authenticity that is really motivating me to become more comfortable bringing a more honest version of myself to multiple situations. It takes a little bit more vulnerability on my part to remain myself, instead of changing who I am to the environment. But one of the lessons I learned in NYC was that everyone is actually a little bit weird in their own way, and the city especially attracted people who had that extra-weird and often creative dimension. So even out here in the suburbs, I have to start acknowledging the potential for weirdness in others by being a bit more vulnerable and exposing my more quirky goth side.

Finally, I know this is the right track for me, not just because it keeps my sense of self intact, but because my subconscious keeps telling me so in the form of Tarot cards. When I did the full moon reading suggested by my Daily Tarot Planner, the final question was “What new approach can I take to support my emotional well-being”. The card I got for this? The Devil. Some people may choose to interpret this card with its usual meaning: hedonism, lack of restraint, short term pleasure at the expense of long term pain. I choose to interpret it as be more goth. It has a whole slew of the symbols that show up in goth culture: bat wings, pentagrams, performative fetish displays. The Devil card looks like it’s the inspiration for how filmmakers depict the “bad club” in every movie or TV show, including Quagmire’s in “San Junipero“. And the “evil club” always manages to look like Bar Sinister.

Ergo, the Devil card? Be more goth. Wear more bats and pentagrams. Lean into all that electro-industrial and post-punk and goth rock. And make that part of how I train for Treffen.

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oh hai there 2023 i can has future?

Posted on January 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

My brother in law said last night, we’re at the point now where all the years look weird and science fiction-y. 2023 is no exception. The years now seem like they should be in science fiction, probably because we grew up on the mid-20th century sci-fi where this century was science fiction. It isn’t that 2023 is that far from 1993 or even 1983, it’s that 2023 was so far from 1953, when so much of the sci-fi that would define the genre was created. It’s given us the perspective that 2023 should be the future, and yet it feels like we’re still stuck in the past in more ways than I like to think about.

Take, for example, where I am now, the Main Line of Philadelphia. I’m starting 2023 in a new home, in a suburb not that unlike where I grew up. Yet this area is mired in the past in completely non-functional ways. Instead of moving into the future of non-vehicular transportation, it lacks sidewalks, bike lanes or direct routes to shopping and stores. The trains only run once per hour into Philadelphia from here, even though the SEPTA line is perfectly serviceable. Coming from New York City, it feels like I’ve moved into the post white-flight suburbs of 1973, a place designed to give every little traditional family unit their own Pennsylvania stone house, surrounded by exactly 0.27 acres of yard, with a shared driveway in which to park their individually owned vehicles. It’s a very twentieth century vision. It doesn’t feel 2023 here.

Living here has, however, given me an entirely new hobby. In many women moving to the suburbs, this would be baking or gardening or crafting, hobbies that take advantage of the space differential between an apartment and a full sized house. My new hobby is instead just complaining about the suburbs. It’s not necessarily a productive hobby, but it does seem to be getting me through the first few months of this very different existence. I’ve spent the last twenty years since leaving UBC campus living in cities that acknowledged the existence of the future, even if they didn’t fully embrace the change that will be needed to meet it. Cities are places of ideas, after all – they exist to provide a physical space for abstract concepts like trade or art. I do not feel like the suburbs – especially these well established and well heeled suburbs I live in now – acknowledge a future. Instead, these townships would very much prefer to keep everything as much the same as possible, on behalf of the same people who have benefited from that sameness for the past century, and I will complain endlessly about feeling like I’m locked in the past.

The move to the Main Line has made my life easier though. There’s a dozen little ways every day that I find myself marveling at the sheer ease of existence. This house feels huge to start with, big enough that we were able to host my sister and her family and it was still comfortable for seven people to be here. We can park in our own driveway so we can use the car consistently to grocery shop. We don’t have to hear noise from outside our own home, with the exception of a rare truck or low flying plane (no more cars with jacked up sound systems! no more cars with ringing phones hooked up to those sound systems blasting the T-Mobile ring jingle at 3am!). The house has all these storage spaces so I never open a closet to have five things fall down on me. The house is only 72 years young, not over a century old, so the pipes allow for a “garburator”. I have my own washer dryer in the basement along with a second fridge. The list goes on and on.

I therefore have this fantastic opportunity to shift all this extra energy into actual hobbies and self development, instead of just using it to complain and mope. So I shall consider what I actually want to get out of 2023, and how I want my first full year in this new existence to go. I know I want my life here to be more authentic, to start with. I want to build off the sense of self I’ve been working on for the past decade, and go into this change with that intact. I was so insecure when I moved to NYC and kept feeling like I needed to change myself to fit in with other “grownups”, and now I’m realizing that being myself is what makes people want to engage with me (whole other post, I know). So how do I extend that concept of “being myself” into this whole new existence and lifestyle?

And how do I apply all the time and energy that is no longer going into just living in NYC? Before COVID, I looked outside my home for my day to day existence. Now, I actually live in a place which is designed for me to look inward. Combined with my permanent work from home status, I’m in a completely different mental and physical place and will need to adjust for that.

This is what I am kind of working through, these first couple days of 2023 and last couple days before I resume work full time again. Does a re-assessment of how I engage with my existence include writing and resuming this blog, for example? I haven’t been terribly regular here since 2007, back when I had this whole thing on the Livejournal platform. It’s been a while. But hey, I live in the future now. Maybe using this platform to sort out my thoughts is a step in looking forward.

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for bringing me here, for showing me home

Posted on August 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

Tonight, in the car, riding back from Vesuvius Beach with my family, I realized my brother in law listens almost exclusively to 100.3 The Q, The Island’s Rock….which means my nieces can sing the Thrifty Foods jingle on command (The smile’s in the bag for you….at Thrifty Foods!). These same nieces, along with their big teenage American cousin, spent an hour at the beach tonight pushing lumber mill driftwood logs into the water and then wading out to play on the barely buoyant wood, as the sun went down over the perfectly smooth Salish Sea. These kids are literally living the childhood my sister and I shared, a very specific Pacific Northwest existence, in the magical days of summer when the sun just never seems to go down. My sister has somehow managed to move her children back and then give them a way to create memories similar to our best recollections of childhood.

My gratitude for being here, so close to home, is off the scale. I’m so glad my sister actually did decide to move back here. After all, I’ve been Off Island since 1998. That’s more than half my lifetime out in the Wider World. And yet, I still come back consistently to the Salish Sea, and feel something in me release every time I do so. I felt myself breathe more when I drove out to the ferry at Tsawassen today, like something around my heart had loosened a bit. I am out there taking on the world and all its uncertainties every single day, but when I get back to Victoria or the Gulf Islands or the Lower Mainland, it’s still the place I’ve always known. The certainty of being able to come home to BC because my family re-settled out here resonates deeply with me, and the relief of getting here is indescribable.

Even after almost eighteen years in L.A. and NYC, I still respond with this flood of relief when I get to the Pacific Northwest every year. One year, I burst into tears seeing the metal salmon set in the floor of Seattle-Tacoma airport, because I was back in a region where people understand the importance of a salmon stream. This year, I started crying with joy and sheer relief when I got to the end of the Tsawassen causeway and pulled into the ferry lane, knowing I was going to make it onto the next sailing and that I had finally almost completed my journey back to an island.

It isn’t as if I’m fleeing my existence in NYC or Philadelphia exactly though. It’s more that somebody told me this is the place where everything’s better and everything’s safe. When I get to the Northwest, I feel like I have a respite from the fears I have living in the wider world. My son and I are here, safe and loved, in a place I know by heart. Being here means I can put down the mental defenses I have to keep up every day to survive in the Wider World, and just lean into a place where everything feels familiar and comfortable. I’m so grateful to my sister that we get to come back to the home she’s created out here and that my son and nieces are able to experience the best parts of our childhood as a result.

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where is my robot assistant?

Posted on August 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

Since the 2020s in general have been so utterly terrible, I like to focus on the smaller disappointments, like the fact that I do not have a robot assistant. At this point in the future, should I not have AI that can assist me in handling my day to day? I want a virtual assistant that will not only tell me my agenda for the day, but will also tell me what I need to prepare for each meeting. There are many current trajectories that tell me I’m living in the wrong timeline entirely, that history has gone off its rails since the hopeful decade of the 1990s. Today, however, I’m choosing to focus on the lack of actual helpful AI assistance as the proof that this is a wrong tomorrow.

I find myself instead imitating what I think my own robot assistant would sound like sometimes, a weird idiosyncrasy that helps me externalize my priorities and my thinking. What would an AI assistant tell me my priorities were? If I am overwhelmed by everything happening around me, how would an external rational program help me identify what I really need to know for a day?

This is why I sometimes talk to myself in the shower while on business trips, especially at times like these when I have been through five states in three weeks (Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, New York and today, Florida) and need to remember which corporate hotel I am staying in, and why. I’ll start reciting to myself, in a virtual assistant voice sometimes, as if I am trying to add very concrete rationality to what could otherwise spin into a series of existential questions:

Good morning JILLIAN. Today is AUGUST 10TH, 2022. You are in JACKSONVILLE FLORIDA. The weather today is VERY HOT AND MUGGY. You have meetings with [CLIENT NAME REDACTED] AT 10:30AM. Your top prioriy tomorrow is to GET YOUR SLIDES DONE BEFORE THE 8AM MEETING WITH THE GROUP IN THE LOBBY. Your next flight is to CHICAGO AT 4:52PM AND YOU NEED TO BE AT THE AIRPORT BY 3PM AS IT DOES NOT HAVE CLEAR. Your top priority today is to REVIEW THE MATERIAL FOR THE NEXT PITCH. Your next priority is to PREPARE FOR MEETINGS IN CHICAGO.

There’s a very structured rationality to how I imagine an AI assistant would give me information, which I lack in my day to day. If I was giving myself information, I’d immediately get sidetracked by a zillion details. Did I book the dog’s daycare? Did I reply to a Scout email? Have I texted my friends to make vacation plans? Do I have time to get my nails done? I’d go down rabbit holes of tasks that aren’t time sensitive or aren’t important. Whereas when I imagine an AI assistant giving me information in the morning, I assume that program is set up to only give me information that is in the upper left quadrant of the Eisenhower matrix.

Also, sometimes, I just think it would be cool to have a robot me that could help me prioritize and sort through my thoughts. It’s very Black Mirror, the idea that I could have an artificial intelligence so close to my own, that it could know and understand all of the thoughts and resulting to-do items that flit through my brain. In the interim, pretending to be my own robot alter ego sometimes serves as a useful thought exercise. Maybe that’s a self-help book idea to be published. Maybe it’s just me being tired at the end of a long day, in JACKSONVILLE FLORIDA.

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the beginning of the after times

Posted on May 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Well, that’s it: the CDC must have had one too many White Claws this weekend, because the masks can come off for the fully vaxxed.

Unless you are on public transportation.

Or you don’t want your neighbors to think you’re a science-hating conservative.

Or you just don’t want to look like an asshole who doesn’t care about public safety. So I guess the masks cannot come off and I will be matching my masks to my outfits for a little while longer. (Everything I wore in Summer 2020 was black and white polka dotted for a reason.)

I still feel like we’re in the Beginning of the After Times. When we visualized this moment, back in the spring of 2020, when the first wave was subsiding, we thought we knew what the After Times would look like. We thought one day, the schools and theaters would open, the streets would fill with tourists, and NYC would throw the biggest party since VE Day.

Now, we’re not so sure what the After Times look like. The day to day life of Brooklynites seems to be coming back tentatively, as the city creeps up towards the halfway point of vaccinations. Some night, like tonight, I walk through Prospect Heights, and there’s a quiet sense of jubilation in the streets, like everyone considers it a small victory just to be out on a nice night in May.

I hope we don’t lose that sense of gratitude as we slowly inch back towards the normal pace of life in the city. The theaters and the schools are the last two major areas that remain either closed or reduced. But those will be both open by September: there are opening dates for Broadway now and the schools are holding parent forums on how to safely reopen at full capacity. (TAKE MY CHILD NOW NYC) The restaurants and bars have been spilling into the streets for weeks. The subway is going back to 24/7 and actually has people on it again. Everywhere I look, I see the city slowly regaining the sense of self that really only comes from its citizens.

Still, we’re not quite in the After Times. I’m not sure what will even define the After Times: will it be when we end the restrictions put in place to reduce the spread of COVID? Or will it be when we feel like time passes normally again? Right now, I still don’t feel like time passes the same way it did in the Before Times. It seems to pass too quickly or not at all. My perception of time stops and starts in a way I haven’t experienced since I was home on maternity leave. I still have a sense of being disconnected from the world that causes me to either look up and realize it’s May 14th already, or wonder why last May seems like it was three years ago. Time is hard to measure right now because we don’t have all the little differences from day to day that we used to have two years ago.

I also won’t feel like we’re in the After Times until I’m able to go out in a group of people again without completely freaking out. I just spent the past twenty five years re-wiring my brain to not short circuit in large groups of people. But now, the sensation of being in a large group of people I don’t know is overwhelming. I feel simultaneously invisible and vulnerable, and it’s challenging to remain calm and present in a large group. Maybe this will change over time, or maybe it will vary with my comfort level with the environment. Would I be okay in a goth club because that is my habitat? Is this a wiring left over from a childhood fear of rejection by groups? Do I now have to put the time and effort into actually figuring this out and trying to calm my brain like it’s a spooked horse?

So, I walked home tonight, past clusters of people out carousing on Flatbush. I took my mask off when I got to Grand Army Plaza, so I could smell the greenery in the park, and so I could actually feel air on my face. And for the first time in a year, it felt like the After Times were actually approaching, and in fact, might already be here for some people. I expected that the After Times would be like the Day the Rain Stops in Vancouver, when we all agreed, usually in early April, that the rain had stopped. It would rain again, but the winter rain, the Long Rain, was over. Now, I’m realizing that we will not have a consensus like that when we come back from COVID. This is a once in a century experience, not an annual change in seasons that every Pacific Northwesterner is attuned to. There are still people grieving those lost to COVID, for whom the impact is forever. The symbolism and the milestones may also be different for everyone, as we look to regain the parts of our lives that are most important to us. But we’re at the beginning of the After Times now, and it’s a time of cautious optimism trending to all out joy I’m grateful to be here for.

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will we all be ourselves again in 2021?

Posted on December 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

Ben and I are back in Canada again. We put in our 14 days in self-isolation before moving over to my sister and her husband’s multigenerational home. We were welcomed with open arms after our two weeks in the AirBNB we returned to for this second quarantine, a few minutes away. However, unlike the last time we were here, this lockdown took place during American Thanksgiving. I took the part of the spirit of the holiday to heart, and opted to catch up with friends and family. And even in conversations that might have otherwise been awkward, given how many years have gone by, this year there is no shortage of material, because in 2020, we have COVID-19. Even for my friends and family who have not had direct experience with the disease, the impact of the pandemic on society is the common denominator for everyone I know.

I tell the same stories repeatedly with regard to the pandemic, all of which end with “…and we were so lucky.”. We were lucky that neither Paul nor I ever got sick. We were lucky that no one we knew who had the disease actually died from it (although we do have friends who sustained serious lung damage.) We were lucky that neither of us lost our jobs. We were lucky that I was able to work from home at a time when Ben needed me. We were lucky that Ben was in middle school and able to manage remote learning (mostly) by himself after the first few months. We were lucky in that we had almost no direct, personal losses from this horror show.

And most, if not all, of the people that I talked to last weekend have similar stories. In Vancouver, the lockdowns and closures have been similar to Toronto and New York for the past few months, even if the infection and death rates are lower. All of us, in our major cities, have all transitioned to outdoor activities and social distancing. Coming from New York, I have a slightly more extreme story, from the first few months of illness, when the numbers skyrocketed and it felt like an apocalyptic event. I can tell the story of that shared city-wide trauma when we all helplessly watched the hospitals fill with the most vulnerable and committed New Yorkers. As an individual though, my story is still one of privilege.

Still, this shared event has impacted us all. And in the US, we had the pandemic coupled with the presidential election, a season of stress and fear that the very fabric of democratic society was going to tear out from under us. Canadians watched the election with only a small amount of emotional distance, fearing an overflow of white nationalism or the economic and cultural impact of seeing the United States tear itself apart. And so, the twin fears of the pandemic and the end of democracy loomed over all of us this fall to some extent, as we all struggled to keep ourselves going with our day to day. I feel as if everyone has been in their own personal struggle, together and yet alone, knowing we were all impacted, yet being unable to pull back from our own individual degrees of madness.

Now, we’re seeing the first rounds of vaccine coming out, and have hope that after a very long winter there may be a suggestion of normalcy on the horizon. The election is settled and we are almost at the end of the lawsuits that the outgoing president seems determined to inflict on the country as part of his final grift before leaving. And once these two terrifying crises are over, will we all be able to be ourselves again? How do we go back to the people we were before everything fell apart?

For most of 2020, I don’t feel I’ve been myself. I had to narrow my field of vision, keeping myself focused on just getting through each day, unable to look up or around for fear of being completely overwhelmed by just how much of a dumpster fire America has been. For four years, we’ve gone about our daily lives, all the while with the vertical shadow of Trumpism over us, a giant sun blocker set up exclusively for the personal profit of its enactor:

If there was a way for the president to profit from it, I’m pretty sure this would have happened IRL

Then, we had the horizontal landscape domination of COVID, which took over every aspect of our lives. We’re still watching our city slowly falling apart under the strain, with so much of what makes New York wonderful cancelled in order to save the lives of more New Yorkers. The impact of COVID is overwhelming when I look outside my own little family. This is why I feel like I’ve been wearing horse blinders for the past nine months. Seeing too much of the world would have kept me from going forward.

Blinkers (horse tack) - Wikipedia
We all needed some sort of blinders in 2020

So as we wrap up this year, and as I talk to friends, I have to wonder whether we will go back to being ourselves in 2021. Who are we without these two huge, overshadowing disasters? Who were we in the fall of 2016, before nationalism put a would-be oligarch in office? Who were we even in February of this year, before we began to live under the impact of COVID-19? Can we go back to being ourselves in 2021 and if so, what will we even talk about without these all-encompassing disasters?

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the junk drawer of the brain

Posted on September 26, 2020 | 1 comment

I’ve had a lot of metaphors for how I’ve felt since the COVID-19 crisis started. The most frequent I use for myself is an image where my mind is clogged with short pieces of thread, a drifting mass of incomplete thoughts that I am constantly trying, and failing, to braid together into coherent strings. This is often at its worst when I have not taken the time or headspace for myself, which I need in order to focus on smoothing all those little pieces of thread out. Once I parse through my thoughts, I can often transform all those incomplete fragments into substance that can be subsequently spun into extended threads of consciousness. It’s a new condition for me, because while I am used to writing to make sense of my thoughts, I am not used to having my thoughts this fragmented.

My brain has become a junk drawer.

This isn’t a new condition, but seems to be worsened by two separate factors, both circumstantial from the pandemic. The first is from my professional sphere, combination of task switching and call overload that is killing my discipline to focus. My job often requires a lot of task switching, but the virtual nature of my team has resulted in a substantial uptick in how many times I am task switching per day. With a dispersed team, we are all IMing each other instead of engaging in person at the office. This results in more interruptions and task switches, as we can no longer rely on the visual clues of a person at work to better time our messages with their breaks from flow. We also IM much more because of the lack of hallway conversations, an inability to chat with each other in natural conversations that would be far more efficient than the all-day random Teams chats we use as a substitute. The result is a constant switch between Microsoft applications. I feel my ability to focus on just writing a PowerPoint is deteriorating as a result.

Eliminating Task Switching to Improve Productivity of Teams
The knowledge worker at the best of times.

The second factor is from my domestic sphere. It is the nature of being the person at home, working, with a child in the house. Let me preface again here, I have a child that requires far less effort than he would have two years ago. He’s able to log himself into Google Classroom and Hangouts and get through his own day. He sets up his own playdates in the afternoon and bikes (or scoots) to play dates and sportball practices all by himself. He logs himself in to his online activities: D&D, comedy, guitar. But even with all this, I am still constantly identity shifting throughout the day between Boss Lady and Mama. I’ll come out to refill my water bottle and find Ben sitting on the couch, camera off, reading instead of participating in class. I’ll find him procrastinating assignments or playing Words with Friends during school hours. I’ll realize that it’s 2pm and while I have been eating protein bars and leftovers at my own desk, he has not eaten lunch yet because he was too distracted reading to eat. And while he tries not to bother me, if I am not in a call, he will come in to ask for permission to watch TV or shift his Fortnite time from the weekend to a weekday.

Fortnite for Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Game Details
“No, child, you may only pursue your highly addicting game on weekends”

All of this is exhausting and is training my brain to expect to go from one task to another instead of remaining in flow. Flow is that state of being on which I wrote a solid blog post a couple years ago, the week before I started my “new” job at OMD. Here is the TED talk that also summarizes this state:

I need the efficiency from a flow state to get through my day as a knowledge worker. Being in flow is also where I really create the work that shows the talent and intellect that powers my career. Like much of my childhood, my career is partially built on a reputation for being “smart”. The pieces of work that showcase my intelligence are built in a state of flow. Without being able to go into that state, where my ideas come together into a narrative and where I’m able to put something together that ties together all the tech and details that go into the back-end of my job with the concepts that make up the front-end of it, that is where I excel.

Transforming knowledge workers into innovation workers to improve corporate productivity - ScienceDirect
Insight, information and knowledge all require focus

Where I am struggling now is that all of this disconnect, all of these short attention activities, do not deliver the value to my work that just being present and paying attention does. It’s multitasking on calls, it’s spending more time flipping through emails, it’s being unable to work consistently without getting distracted doing stuff that is kind of worthwhile but not worthwhile in the context of interrupting my workday. Part of this is just having too many things to do (did Anthem process the claim for Ben’s doctor visit? is OptumRX sending my prescription?) but part of it is that the quick tasks feel easier than the longer tasks, and surfing for weekend getaways or quarantine AirBNBs feels easier at any time than working. Now that my brain is in this horrible place of constant disconnect and short-term procrastination, it’s exceptionally hard to be present in ways that reinforce my value at work, much less get anything worthwhile done…and those are the losses and misses that are ratcheting my anxiety up…and anxiety is exhausting.

I could now go into all the ways I am going to fix this, but I think instead of that, I am going to process this for the weekend and re-set the habits and behaviors. Maybe it’s just putting a “BE PRESENT” post-it on the wall behind my computer. Maybe it’s resuming meditation. Maybe it’s focusing on goals, not tasks. I am pretty sure it is all these things and more, but something has to change to combat the clutter that I feel my head is just constantly stuffed with every day.

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