Do not go gentle into that Teams meeting

Every Christmas of my childhood and beyond, we listened to a record of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales." 

It's a short and charming tale, if you're not familiar with it, and the way he reads it is marvelous.

But some Christmas Days, probably at the surly teenage ages and up, we just wanted to read our new books or play with our new toys or just retreat to our corners and not all sit in the living room together next to the record player hearing each other breathe.

Did we eventually have it on tape? CD? We must have. I just found it on YouTube.

Christmases were hard for my dad, and he was always melancholy, but because we weren't allowed to talk about it I don't know if it was family trauma, or abuse by Catholic priests when he was an altar boy, or Vietnam, or seasonal depression or regular depression or possibly bipolar disorder. 

I feel the weight of these less and less as I heal, but so often I have questions I'd like to ask...and there's nobody to ask.

My Uncle Jack passed away a few weeks ago. He was the last of that generation on both sides of the family, for me. 

I didn't know him growing up, but I'd gotten to know him a little as an adult. Donna, his partner after his wife passed away, was a dear childhood friend of my dad's, and they and my parents would get together.

A year or two before my dad died, he and Donna decided to go skydiving. Something he'd always wanted to do. He was delighted to have a partner with equal enthusiasm.

My mom and Uncle Jack stayed on the ground, while Dad and Donna soared.

But losing Jack felt like losing my mom all over again. She was the only person in my family who would keenly feel this loss.

Grief is endlessly surprising.

Anyway, from teen years to medicated years, for ol' Dylan Thomas, I was fully in the throes of seasonal affective disorder—except when we had Christmases south of the equator in heat and sunshine, which in my opinion is the way to go.

So surely I was rage raging against the dying of the light and it had nothing to do with my family or Thomas—who I adore as a poet and storyteller and as such, feel a little guilty for bastardizing his beautiful lines.

But clearly not guilty enough!

I don't know much of anything about the Welsh, except that Wales looks so beautiful and Fiona studied there and the Welsh were very fierce though unsuccessful in their uprisings. 

And also, after watching Doc Martin, I really want to go to Cornwall.

If you like the British murder villages but get tired of death, I highly recommend Doc Martin. 

I do realize they're not interchangeable. But apparently the Cornish were problematically fierce for the English as well.

Anyway, the main point of this story is that I had to be on a Teams meeting with Jordan's school.

Microsoft Teams hates me. The feeling is mutual.

If I try to attend on my phone, it says I have to download the app. But I deleted the app, because I never had the correct login information. So I thought I could get around it by getting rid of it.

No.

It knows that you're on a phone, and you can just go to the app store. So it's like, bitch, get the app and then come talk to me.

So now I make sure I'm on a laptop. But it has to be my mom's laptop, because the sound on mine is broken.

So I logged in 45 minutes ahead, just so that I knew I could. Like getting to your gate at the airport to make sure it's there, and then you can get a snack and use the bathroom.

Teams meetings derail my entire day up to the point where I successfully (or not) connect.

When we had meetings with India's teachers, I did everything right—right time, right laptop, right link—except it was a link for a teacher whose class she no longer has.

So then Nick called and I said, "I went to the fucking link they sent us but it's a link to the Chinese teacher and why do we fucking have to use fucking Teams I hate Teams so fucking much..."

And he said, "Dear, we've started the conference and I've got you on speaker, and two of India's teachers are on the line."

I apologized profusely for the profanity. They both laughed (I think) and said no children were present.

Apparently a couple minutes before they'd asked if they should wait for me to start the conference and Nick said the odds were I was struggling with Teams, and I'd be along shortly swearing about the platform. 

Which just confirms what I've long believed: people don't change as they age. 

They just become more so.

This was, you understand, prior to my Tabarnac Era. Also, my friend Brian recently reminded me of my interest in "What the Dickens?"

But Teams gets the full extent of my profane wrath.

Which is to say that on the whole I'm fine, and in this photo, I was in Puerto Rico with my children for spring break.

The day we got there, I was inhaling humid tropical air, and reveling in the foliage of my childhood. Bougainvillea always makes me happy.

Sometimes I think things but am not sure if I said them out loud, and so I ask if I said something out loud and people will tell me I did or didn't.

But in this case, I said, "When you guys are gone, I'm moving to the tropics." And my kids were all, WHAT? 

And I was all, oh did I say that out loud?

I said it out loud.

And so then I was like, OK, not really, haha I just love tropical weather. 

And now it's 90 in DC, thank goodness, because I was pretty sure it was going to be cold here for the rest of my born days.

All good. Carry on.

Just don't make me attend a Teams meeting.