WTFness of 2021

Many of my friends, perhaps including you, expected 2021 to be a fresh new start.

Goodbye 2020 Dumpsterfire! Hello, 2021!

WTF, 2021? 

It's like Dante's Beatrice ushered us in, and we all popped pomegranate seeds.

I won't recap the terrifying goings-on in DC. But I will say that Nick's office is near the White House, and I was super twitchy about him biking to work because roads were closed and we'd all been asked to stay out of downtown. 

And he was all, "Lisa. I look like one of them."

Which...is true. 

In angry moments I sometimes remind him that he's part of the patriarchy.

---

Sometime in December, I read this article, and I decided that it was time for me to get my nutritional house in order.

My sleep is never restful, and much of this, I am afraid, is age and hormone related. But I was also eating like a kid in a candy store.

When I tell you that all through December I had peppermint bark with breakfast, and cookies and pastries all day long, and more treats well into the evening, I'm not exaggerating. Sugar and sugar and sugar.

So I decided that in January I would limit myself to sugar in my morning tea. 

Nick decided to do dry January, and I've since learned there's a term: Dryuary. Apparently scads of people do this after the excesses of the holidays. So I figured I'd join for support.

Alcohol, fortunately, is not one of my problems. It easily could be, as we have alcoholism on both sides of the family.

I think if they'd been medicated--or properly medicated, or willing to stay on meds--it could have been different. There was a lot of self-medication going on.

But I don't need to get all heavy here.

I had a tiny glass of prosecco on the first, really a few sips, to usher in what I believed would be a good year. I had a hard kombucha on the sixth, to celebrate the wins in Georgia and to recognize the terrifying nature of the attempted coup. 

I haven't yet turned to sugar, my preferred comfort, my snuggle friend, my favorite nighttime dance partner.

Honestly, I'm not looking for perfection; I'm looking to break habits and head toward healthier eating.

This is happening. We are having more vegetables--although let me be honest, anything is more, because many days in December we had zero, much to my shame. But we're again having vegetables at dinner, sometimes with lunch, sometimes as snack.

Friends suggested monk fruit and allulose as sugar substitutes. So far I've only tried the monk fruit, and it is the best not-sugar I've tasted. If allulose is even better, I'll be delighted. It's very very close to sugar and almost not at all weird.

I've kept to sugar in my tea, because milky sugary tea is a pleasure. I'm just lessening the amount of sugar in a teaspoon. Friends had warned that this would be a gateway to sugar cravings, and maybe it has, but I've satisfied them with fruit or dried fruit.

And maybe it's the dried fruit, or the upped vegetables, but something has been seriously giving me crazy gas. I told Nick that fortunately all these farts aren't all that stinky, and he was like, uh, yes, they are. 

Oh.

I guess this means I could live up to my imagined porn star name.

Anyway.

My sleep is still fairly fractured. So far I haven't started sleeping solidly and waking refreshed and ready to charge into the day. 

But it's like Nick says: "You never wake up and regret not drinking." 

This is how I feel about sugar. 

---

And I had an appointment with my psychiatrist last week. A check-in, since he'd upped my medication dose in the fall, after a long struggle with insurance to allow it.

(Can we get rid of for-profit healthcare already?)

Shortly beforehand, I asked Nick if he had anything he wanted me to tell my shrink. He and my mom keep an eye on me, as I recognize I'm not always a good judge of the state of my mental health. I know this, even though I forget sometimes.

And I still have to really think about how I'm doing instead of just automatically saying, "fine" when talking to a mental health professional. I believe I no longer have the urge to lie, but that could be because I haven't ditched my meds lately. 

Which I hopefully will not do again. 

So Nick, my beloved, said, "I think you're doing better."

I'm well acquainted with The Better. The Better annoys me. He'll say better as a compliment, which, I mean, it's preferable to worse. But it's something I don't know what to do with.

Now, the man was not raised with compliments or praise. It was more like criticism to motivate improvement.

As such, he's pretty reserved with praise. And I love to dollop compliments on people. Sincere ones. It just feels good to me.

So knowing our differences, and wanting to report accurately about the state of my mental health, I said, "Do you think I'm doing WELL? Or just BETTER? Because better than terrible might be better, but still is not so good."

He said, "You're definitely doing better. You can still be pretty sardonic sometimes."

I said I didn't really know what sardonic meant, and he said extremely sarcastic. And I was like, well, yeah.

So I said, "OK. I'm going to tell him I think I'm doing pretty well and you said I'm doing better but still a little too sarcastic for your taste."

At which point India piped in with, "Mama. You're getting so much better at driving! I'm very proud of you! You're less anxious about parking!"

I laughed and thanked her. Sincerely. I have tremendous anxiety parking our new car in the garage and I do think I've gotten better.

She added, "And you're very good at sarcasm, Mama! I'm working on it, too!"

May 2021 get so much better for all of us!

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night 2020

As we here in DC wrap up 2020, I know many of you are already happily in 2021.

I don't know anyone who isn't glad to see this year put to rest.

For me personally, it wasn't the worst year of my life. 

But honestly, that's because it's very hard to compete with a year in which your dad dies by suicide. And you buy a house with no ground floor kitchen, have an emergency C-section and can't do stairs, have very limited support because your mom is understandably having her own breakdown, *and* you have post-partum depression.

Otherwise, this would totally have been the worst year of my life. I mean, let's be honest: it was a super suck-ass year.

Collectively, I think it was the worst year of life for our family.

We are all healthy, but we lost people we dearly loved. 

We've been out of in-person school since March. In October, India left DCPS to home school, because she was so unhappy being online. Jordan has been struggling with online school.

We agree that we love each other and have gotten closer, but we are also pretty sick of each other. My kids cannot wait to be back in in-person school.

Recently Jordan suggested that we regularly have days where we all do our own thing inside the house and don't really spend any time together.

This sounds good to me.

As I mentioned, I've been home schooling India and we spend A LOT of time together. And I don't know if 8 is a particularly hard age for everyone but I will say that India's age 8 is a brutal one for the rest of us.

Jordan, thankfully, has been incredibly sweet.

Also fortunately, Nick has gone to the office daily, which is safe because he is one of maybe four people who do, and he spends his days entirely alone.

If he were staying home, one of us would surely have stabbed the other by May at the latest.

I'd hate to go to prison, and particularly in a Covid time.

I don't have anything profound to say, but in this time I have learned something about myself.

First of all, I was quite sure that I'd be fine staying home all the time. I love staying home. I'm an introvert.

Well.

I'm not as much of an introvert as I thought.

Yes, I need alone time to recharge. But oh my gosh, as it turns out, I love a lot of people. 

I had so many more daily interactions than I thought I had, until I didn't have them anymore.

I missed greeting the school crossing guard and the guards at the door. I missed my yoga group. I missed the parents I would chit chat with at school drop-off and pickup.

There are more, and I won't go on, because I know you all have your own people, and it super sucks. 

I don't know how this has affected the non-huggers, but as a hugger, I hate it. In normal life, hug practical strangers if we make a connection. And I have made connections in the aisles of Trader Joe's.

I only recently shopped at Trader Joe's for the first time since the pandemic began.

But anyway. I learned that I need and enjoy so many more people in my life than I thought I did. This was a huge revelation for me. 

Also, and this did not used to be true of me, I can spend two to three days in the same outfit, unbathed.

Although now that I say that, I do recall that week closest to Everest base camp, when all I did at night was take off my boots and unhook my bra. Because it was just so cold. But that was an anomaly.

I used to be rather concerned about my appearance.

I wonder if that will happen again.

Anyway.

We are lucky lucky that Betty lives with us, as otherwise we'd probably never see her in this fucking wretched pandemic.

We are blessed to be able to stay home and away from others, and fortunately we have been healthy.

We see our good fortune, and we recognize our blessings. 

We've done a crap job at eating fruit or vegetables, and have kind of descended into a junk-food laden kind of debauchery.

Which ends tomorrow.

I decided to do a sugar-free January to hopefully help my sleep and my mood. Nick decided to do a dry January, so I am joining him in this. Also, he's going to try to lose weight.

The kids decided they were on board with no sugar. This will be a shock when they actually live it.

And Betty recently got diagnosed with high cholesterol, so I proposed she ditch the sugar and join us. So she's joining as well.

She and I are the biggest sugar fiends. We'll see how this goes. I think it will be good.

And January 20, which is marked on our calendar and toward which we have been counting down, is allowed as a bacchanalian day, should we choose. I imagine I'll mainline sugar and then do naked backflips down the sidewalk. Unless it's really really cold.

So, that new regime starts tomorrow. In whole new year!

Right now Betty and the kids are watching Stranger Things and Nick and I are sipping beverages and listening to music in the living room.

On a Stranger Things note, earlier today India and I were watching together. There’s a line where a dad says, “This is our government. We have to trust them.”

India looked at me, rolled her eyes, and said, “As if.”

Jeez, is she growing up way faster than I did.

Anyway, I have a Zoom with some of my dearest friends from my youth at 9:00 pm.

Thank you for living through the hellscape that was 2020 with me. I wish you all such joy, laughter, connections, and good fortune in 2021.

Love love love,

Lisa

The one for the strong of stomach

This is a rather revolting tale, so if you don't like reading gross stuff, stop now.

Really.

If, on the other hand, you enjoy schadenfreude, scatology and/or emetology, then do I have a gift for you!

You've been warned. On with the story.

The other morning I walked into the kitchen to find Nick shaking his head and scrubbing his hands with scalding water.

He said, "That dog is so disgusting."

Wanda, our scroungy hound, will lunge for any old rotting piece of pizza, tail of shrimp, or whatever else she may find in the park. Regardless of how well fed she is here.

She just can't resist the crust of an old bagel. She will not drop it on command. 

Nick or I can generally pry her mouth open and pull out whatever it is. One night she got something she really wanted and absolutely refused to open her jaws. So Nick held her head and I put my fingers over her nose until she had to open her mouth to breathe.

Ha.

Yah, so on this particular morning, she stuck her head into a bush and pulled her head out chomping something. Nick prised her mouth open to remove...poo.

That dog was eating poo.

Which he was vigorously scrubbing off his hands on that fateful morning.

And then he left for work.

Jordan went upstairs to get online for school, and India headed to the living room to open her books while I made tea.

And suddenly she yelled in utter panic, "MAMA! MAMA COME HERE MAMA!" 

I started running towards her.

"WANDA THREW UP!"

On the whole, I'm terrible with vomit, but dog vomit, I've learned, tends to not be so bad, because it's mainly a big blob of dog kibble. It's pale, easy to clean up, and doesn't soak into the rug.

Unless.

Unless your fucking dog has eaten poo.

I grabbed some paper towels and headed into the living room to find that Wanda had puked on my favorite carpet. One my parents bought in Tehran in 1979 while my brother and I climbed on piles of carpets as tall as mountains to us.

We spent the day in a carpet store, eating biscuits and drinking tea while our parents perused carpets and bargained.

I approached the vomit to find that it was larger and more spread out than normal. 

And. It smelled really, really bad.

For this I would need gloves. And way more paper towels. I ran to the kitchen and returned with such items.

I started working on the mess and immediately began retching. I got up, and, realizing I wouldn't make it to the bathroom, headed for the front door.

Yes. There I was, running for the door trying to hold in my vomit, clutching paper towels soaked in semi-digested, regurgitated poo.

I didn't make it.

However, I did manage to mainly vomit into my hands.

When India realized what was happening, she began to retch.

I yelled, "TAKE WANDA OUTSIDE!" Figuring that if there was any more puking done by anyone, at least it would be outside.

Then I yelled a bunch of profanity just to make myself feel better.

Jordan came running down the stairs to see what the commotion was. 

He, too, is a sympathy puker, and I was not about to add him to the mix. So I told him Wanda had puked, it was terrible, we were fine, and to go back upstairs.

Then I cleaned up my vomit and went back to work on the rug.

Some people, maybe most people, might be more concerned about the state of their dog than their rug. But I was mad. Ooh, I was so mad.

If you're going to be an asshole and eat poo, you'd better not puke on my carpet.

I was blotting and wiping with wet paper towels, and then I recalled that soda water takes stains out. I looked, but we didn't have any.

We did, however, have white wine, and I remembered reading that white wine will take red wine out of a carpet.

So I poured a bunch of white wine on the stain.

And it was only 9:45 in the morning, but I also remembered that 7:30 am is 5:00 pm in New Delhi, so that would make it whatever time of the evening there. 

I poured myself a big damn glass.

Then I let the dog back in.

13: The fire you like so much in me is the mark of someone adamantly free

Thirteen years ago tonight I had my last first date.

It was a Tuesday that year. It was damp and warmy-coldy like today. That evening, my glasses fogged up when I got into the heat of the Tabard. 

(Now, in the pandemic, my glasses fog up when I go outside because of my mask.)

My expectations were low. I don't think Nick was quite as jaded as I was.

--- 

The other day I referred to him as a control freak. He took offense. 

I meant it as a descriptor. For me, it's just a fact about him. Not an opinion, not a judgment.

Apparently it sounds judgey.

Although now I wonder if maybe he judges me for my lack of organizational skills. When I see them as an unfortunate weakness, but, like math, just something I'm not good at.

The more I read about executive function, the more I'm like, gee, I think I've been compensating for a long damn time.

---

I've been taking a walk through the November 13ths of the past 13years.

A year after meeting, married, we met at the Tabard. We'd make it an annual date. We saw a woman get stood up, and our hearts went out to her.

This, I think, is my favorite meeting anniversary post.

The following year, we brought Jordan along.

Year three, it seems, we stayed home.

The following year, I was pregnant and not drinking, but we still celebrated at the Tabard. I see in the photos we are tired.

I find myself surprised to note that in 2014, we kept our date, and I think that was our last outing to the Tabard.

Which is not to say that I don't love this day, because in some ways it feels more momentous to me than our wedding anniversary.

Every year, I commemorate it. Anyway, I thought I did. Apparently 2015 was a not so much year. Same with 2018. But in 2016, 2017 I remembered to voice my thanks. And last year on this very day, we got Wanda.

---

For the first I don't know how many years, every time we had a big fight, I expected it to be the end of our relationship.

I didn't expect permanence from much of anything in my life; why would this be different?

And finally, at some point, I realized we could have big angry fights and then get past them. We could disagree vehemently but still agree that we loved each other. And still agree on our shared goal of staying married and maintaining general harmony.

It probably helps that we can both fly into a rage and then apologize and be fine.

It surely helps that we make each other laugh.

Because on Tuesday when Nick got mad at me (because I was mad at him), and refused to help me navigate the car in the alley, I screamed that he was a selfish fucking asshole. I meant it about the larger issue but it also applied to not helping me with the gigantor car in the chaotic alley.

This kind of thing stresses out my conflict-averse mother. We drove away and I turned to her and said, "Don't worry. We're fine."

And we were.

Last night Nick got mad at me because I hadn't scheduled a trash pickup that he'd asked me to schedule. Quite frankly, when he asks me to do something, he expects me to jump.

He married the wrong person for this expectation. 

And yet somehow, if I don't take action on his request within a 4-6 hour period, it's an affront.

Whereas when I ask him to do something, I just mean, when you have time. Not now now now right now.

He was mad at me, and I was mad at him for being mad at me. Because bulk trash pickup is not a fucking emergency. (Neither, may I add, is routine goddamn dry cleaning.)

So last night I sat there accumulating my litany of complaints about him.

And then was like, all of this is fucking hard. We're all struggling.

So I got on 311 and scheduled the pickup and then said, "Please don't be mad at me. I'm doing the best I can."

At that point he wasn't angry. It was over.

Nick is a human who gets a lot more done in a day than I do. He shovels through a ton of work and home projects.

I currently spend a lot of time tending to the emotional needs of our little humans. There's less concrete to show for it, but it's a great deal of effort.

I'd like to be as organized and efficient as he is, but I'm not. I don't know if he'd like to be as empathetic as I am. I should ask.

---

Yesterday Nick suggested that as we can't go out, perhaps we should order a special dinner for tonight.

The kids apparently overheard this and got very excited about the special dinner. So did my mom.

Last night they wondered aloud what our special dinner might be. Exciting!

I'm not yet sure what our special dinner is going to be.

But we'll be enjoying it together, as a family.

---

And family, after all, was the outcome I was hoping for when I embarked on that first date 13 years ago tonight.

It is an ancient Saab, And it stoppeth one time of three...

In 2013, I inherited a 2003 Saab from Nick's dad after he passed away. 

Until this February, when Nick's car basically died, it was our "new" car.

As it turns out, Nick and I are both people who keep things we like forever. I still have boots I bought at J Crew in 1998. Which makes them about the same age as Nick's old car, now that I think about it.

But back to the Albatross.

For a few years, it was great. To start with, it had so much power--so much more than my Civic. There's this terrible coming from the left side merge onto the GW Parkway, and in my Civic I'd have to really gear up for it--vrrooom vrooom--and make sure there were absolutely no cars in sight.

With the Saab I could just hit the gas and it would fly.

It also had lots of automatic things and buttons for functions I didn't even understand. (But honestly, I was coming from a manual window roll up car.)

It also had a tape deck, which was kind of awesome when I unearthed to mixtapes made by long-ago paramours.

It was all fabulous. Until that day it just plain stopped in the middle lane of Rock Creek Parkway at rush hour. You may remember my complete and utter hysteria.

We had it towed. We took it to a Saab repair place. They couldn't make it stall. They ran it for days and took it out in the hot heat and still it would not stall.

They ran through several tanks of gas. No stalling. 

They found things to fix, however. There were always spendy things to fix.

But it was still cheaper than buying another car.

Eventually the Saab people decided that it was bad gas. Like, there must've been some water in the gas and it turned into steam and stalled the car or something like this. 

I didn't have a better explanation. And because I had called the engine light the yellow submarine light. and don't have car vocabulary, I also didn't have a lot of credibility among Nick and the Saab fixers.

Anyway, they "fixed" it. Except.

Some months later, on I-95, that Stygian place, happened again. I determined that it happened when it was very hot and we stopped the car and then started it again without having given it a chance to cool down.

And it happened another time.

Basically, I stopped driving it when it was hot.

I took to calling it the Albatross. Which initially insulted Nick, as it was his dad's car and all. I decided there was some emotional attachment.

Since I rarely drive, it was not such a big deal. I'd take Nick's car to Costco.

In the summer of 2019, we embarked on a big Midwestern road trip. In the planning phase, Nick suggested we take the Saab, driving from DC to Minnesota and back. Since, he contended, it was fixed.

I said not one chance in hell was I going to risk being stranded in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana or anywhere else, thankyouverymuch...

So 

We flew to Minneapolis and rented a terrific car, and had a great time. And somewhere in the Midwest, where precisely I cannot recall, I received a call from my husband.

See, after we left, he took his own old car in for a big service. And that weekend he had a rowing race in Philadelphia. So he drove the Saab to Philadelphia. Or rather, he attempted to drive the Saab to Philadelphia.

Because in fact, he got stranded somewhere near Bel Aire, MD.

That quitting thing the Saab would do? Where the yellow submarine light would go on and you would push the gas pedal and it would go "Rrrrrrrrr" but just not go?

It did that. And he was stuck.

And then boy howdy did he agree that there was something very wrong with the car that new gas wouldn't fix.

But as luck would have it, he was stranded near a service station owned by a man who loved Saabs. And who fixed it.

Yah.

So that was a year and some months ago. Then this summer, juuuuust as the hot hot DC fires of Mordor  heat kicked in, the air conditioning stopped working. As did the anti-lock brakes.

They were going to be expensive to fix. So we didn't.

This unfortunateness happened just before Betty, the kids and I loaded ourselves into our brand-new family SUV and toodled off to Michigan.

Ordinarily, Nick would take the bus to work. But with Covid, he was driving. So he drove back and forth in a sweaty little hotbox.

We continued to use the car as needed, but really as rarely as possible.

Until one afternoon I had to take my mom to an eye appointment with a specialist in Friendship Heights. I told Nick I'd take my car.

We were driving back with all the windows down for breeze, less than a mile from home, when the car made these CRRRRSHHHSHSGGHRRR RGRRSSHSH SHSSSKRUNK kinds of sounds and became practically impossible to steer.

I pulled over to the side and called Nick, and he asked what I wanted him to do. And I said, "COME GET US I AM NOT DRIVING THIS AGAIN!"

He drove over and we swapped cars, and he managed to get the car parked within a couple blocks of our house.

I opened the trunk to empty it, and found, among other things, my lovely Spanish sunbathing mat. I'd forgotten about that old friend!

I said it was time. I called the NPR vehicle donation line.  

When they asked how they could help me I said, "Please come tow my car away!" 

It was going to be a few days until the tow truck could come.

As this is the way street parking invariably works, the day after Nick parked the car, no-parking signs went up because of street repair or something. So I had to move it.

It took all my strength to parallel park it, fortunately at the end of a row of cars. No way I could've maneuvered it between two cars.

I was overjoyed when the tow truck came. I had to meet him at the car.

Actually, they told me I could just leave car unlocked and put the title and keys in the glove box...and I said, "Uh, it's parked on the street in DC."

I mean, I didn't have an entire wheel stolen and not learn anything.

The tow truck driver had two large super intimidating incredibly barky dogs in the cab of the truck and also it is Covid times but honestly I wanted to give him the biggest hug.

I did not. I handed him the keys and the title. He pulled off the license plates, which Nick had loosened, and gave me a receipt.

He asked if the car functioned to drive onto the truck and I said yes but it was hell to steer. He was unconcerned.

I practically skipped all the way home. I called Nick to say it was gone, gone, gone!

Nick was all, "Wouldn't it be great to see Kojo Nnamdi and Kai Ryssdal drag racing in our old Saab?"

I'd pay cash money to see that. 

I'd even give them the sunbathing mat for extra joy.