Fine. Everything is fine.

 Stress Dreams I've Had Recently

• The key to my office door broke off and it was my fault and I couldn't fix it
• I got Covid-19 again, but, like, super Covid?
• My mom tried to pick me up from the post office but just ended up dragging my around the parking lot and running over me, and I tried to explain that she was driving poorly and hurting me, but she kept saying she couldn't use the break or she would cause it to rain.  I called her irrational and told her I would drive but she refused and left me in the parking lot
• My brother hates me
• My family hates me
• I am in Thailand with my brother, boyfriend, and son, and we're trying to check out of the hotel and leave the country but I can't get my son out of the hotel room and they're cleaning it around us and my brother and boyfriends are disappointed in me and going to leave without me.
• My mom is mad at me for not having another baby
• My son runs into a parking lot and is almost hit by a car driven by my cousin
• and I am still married to my ex-husband
• and he is a dick, and leaves us to wait in the parking lot
• I am responsible for 8 other 5 year olds and we are for some reason at a warehouse, and some kind of big gun deal is taking place and I get captured by the bad guys
• I am responsible for a bunch of kids and they want a snack, which I make, but then they won't eat it. 
• I'm traveling to Europe with my boyfriend and another friend, and halfway there my friend says I am a bad friend and we are stranded in an airport.
• basically, I am a bad person.
  

Bigger Isn't Better, Actually.

 I lost a bunch of weight.

I mean, I gained a bunch first.  During Covid, switching from running around campus lecturing all day to sitting in a desk chair on Zoom for 8 hours straight changed my body, as did finding comfort in meal time. 

But then, after a summer of trying to make good food choices and incorporate more movement into my daily life (which did nothing), the weight started melting off.

I think it was stress?  First I stopped eating and enjoying food, and beer started to upset my stomach.  Then I became anemic, which somehow made food even less appetizing, plus I began throwing up occasionally.  Stress?  Maybe?  Who knows. The weight melted off, quickly enough for the uninvited comments from older acquaintances to pile up in one week.

Here's the thing folks don't realize.  When you say, "Wow, you look great, you've lost weight!" what I hear is, "We noticed you got fat and we didn't like it.  So glad you are back on team-thin, where we want you.  You are a much better person now than you were when your pants size was bigger."

more or less.

 At least that's how I feel.  I had close family members insist I was getting healthier, even though I felt tired, stressed, fatigued.  The connection between thinness and health so strong they could imagine that I hadn't taken up a secret gym membership somehow, or stopped gobbling pints of ice cream to lose the weight.  I haven't.  No one seems to care.

What they care about is that my body is smaller, more acceptable.  "Buying clothes will be so much more fun!" my mother exclaims, as if we have identicle preferences.  The feedback is consistent and omnipresent; I am better for my smaller body.  Everyone is proud of it, prefers it.  It is a great way to make people I'm not particularly close to happy with by existence.

 So, it feeds into my codependency nicely. 

What Isn't Owed, Actually...

 Just a friendly reminder that we are allowed to be depressed.  We are allowed to make space for our feelings.

We don't owe the world perfection while we glue ourselves back together.

So, ya know, give yourself time.  Nothing in nature blooms all of the time.  Be patient.

What makes you think...

 I think it is a uniquely feminine problem, exacerbated by social media and this perception that people may *always* be available, that men think they are entitled to women's time.  

What on Earth makes you think I want to be your Facebook pen-pal?!

I understand that you lonely old boomers are bored sitting on your piles of money and easily won prestige (it's a lot easier to compete when whole swaths of society are marginalized), but in what world do you think I have the time or inclination to carry on some "friendly chat" with someone I've never met!?

Fuck all of the ways off.

All of them.

This sense of entitlement, that you are entitles to the time of a woman because you find her compelling, even in a seemingly innocent way, is wholly toxic because it ignores the reality that she may have no time for you.  No interest in chatting with you.  My dear, I have enough friends.  I'm sorry your wife dies 14 years ago.  I hope you find some other poor sap to listen to your meadering stories and thinly veiled pleas for pity and attention.  I would rather work, or write, or talk to people I am actually interested in.  Or fucking sleep, frankly.  Watch TV?  Play Sudoku?  Yup.  Those all sound more fun.  Those are things I actually choose to do.

Talking to random men on the internet is not something I choose to do.  It is not my fault that toxic masculinity means you've never learned how to form emotional ties with another man and now seek out female friends to help you deal with your mountains of repressed emotions.  I am actively working to destroy the hetero-normative cis-gendered racist capitalist ableist patriarchy that made you, I do not also have time for you.  I have my own damaged men to deal with.

So please, kindly, fuck off.

Baseball

 The other day my roommate said to me, "I had no idea you were so in to baseball."

Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, baseball felt like an inevitability.  Wasn't everyone this into baseball? It felt like part of the fabric of daily life.  T-ball, Giants games at Candlestick, A's games with Grandma Kate.  Will Clark and the way he wound himself up when he really took it out of a ball, Jose Canseco and his legendary attitude.  The Bash Brothers.  The Battle of the Bay.  My Grandma Kate and my dad had a friendly rivalry as an A's fan and Giant's fan, respectively, and that felt like the only real rivalry in the world, to the point where I barely registered the betrayal when I moved to Los Angeles and started attending Dodgers games.  I remember even after the Giants moved, and I moved, going back to South San Francisco felt special because that was where Candlestick park was, and that was a special place.  

Moving to Indiana in the summer of 1993 meant going to Wrigley for the first time and watching our beloved Giants play the Cubs.  Learning that my dad could also be a Cubs fan, and watching him slowly disown our Giants felt like a parallel story to the one we were living; trading the Bay Area in for the Midwest, learning to see my father as a much more complicated person with desires that might be contrary to my own, or to our family's. 

I remember going to so many minor league games over the summer in Indiana, usually coupled with blues music and barbecue.  The baseball felt like a thin string connecting the past to the present, to some bright future I would have to imagine.  I did not always enjoy these games; triple A ball felt like a cheat, like a trick my dad was using to make things seem normal when they weren't.  It felt like having an off-brand Disney character show up to your birthday party.  But now I look back on those games with fondness, treasuring the idea that you could always see good baseball at great prices if you could find a minor league game.

When I moved to Arcata for college, discovering the Humboldt Crabs felt like a revelation.  It was minor league ball with all of the things I loved, was learning to love as an independent, individuated person.  Cheap tickets, cheap hot dogs and beer, loud local crowds and a rowdy band.  If felt like home on those aluminum bleachers.  The Crabs were an easy symbol of what made Humboldt County feel special to me; the quaint small town feelings wrapped up in hippie-dippie nonsense at a price I could actually afford.

When I started going to Dodgers games, it had been a few years since I'd been to a ball game.  I was responsible for teaching my immigrant husband all about the sport of baseball, why it mattered and how it was played.  He latched on to some of my favorite elements, the camaraderie found between neighbors, the bitter sweet of the overpriced beer, and the thrill of shouting at the great plays and terrible calls.  Dodgers games became part of our Summer tour for visitors, and I watched him teach his little sister about the game a few years later.

Last Friday I went to my first baseball game in 2 years.  I'd watched half of a Crabs game two summers ago, and it had been years before that.  But We got great seats at Oracle park and watched the Cubbies play the Giants in the chill of a San Francisco summer night.  I felt alive.  It felt like it was for me.  After the first few innings I barely paid any attention to Chris, because he didn't seem to care enough about the game and one thing I know from being a sports fan is that you have to care.  It's bad luck not to.  It felt good, like a homecoming.  The city has changed a lot, and I have spent a lot of very different times there under very different circumstances over the years, but it felt like I was where I was supposed to be.  And that's a good feeling.

I guess, in a way, that is my point.  Sometimes that's the way a good baseball game makes you feel.  It makes you feel like you're at home.  I don't get that 'home' feeling a lot, so I treasure it when it floats to the surface.

Things I would Post if I had a Finsta

•  I have decided to start making two breakfasts every morning.  It's more work, but it's worth it.  I've realized I no longer really know how to feed myself, just make elaborate feel-better meals and eat the leftovers from what I made my kid.  And I guess it's time to start feeding myself again.
  
• My kid is low key spoiled.  Every morning I get up early and make him a lovely balanced breakfast and leave it by his bed before I shower and get dressed for work.  It's an example of the little things I do to try to make him feel special and cared for, and it makes my morning a bit easier.  If I had more than one kid, I might not be able to do these things with the same level of care and thought, and while I am sure it would be fine, it would bum me out.  My son's father chose addiction over being his parent, so I need him to know every day that I am still here, consistently picking him.  Hopefully that at least gives him the chance of blaming his dad instead of himself.
• There will always be a part of me that wants a big house filled with lots of loud, laughing kids.  Desperately.  The other day my son ran off with some other children, and I waved the parents off to go corral the mini posse, and it gave me joy to laugh and play children of all different ages and stages.  That doesn't mean I will ever change my mind about my decision to only have one child.  It just means that somewhere, out in the multiverse, there's a different me with that life, and she is so, so happy.  But every once in a while she sits along with just one baby and thinks of what that would be like, or gets a night alone and wishes she had more opportunities for that.
• If you don't get the vaccine, or choose to ignore climate science or other generally accepted science, you should have to give up other technological advancements, too.  No more antibiotics for you, no more iPhone.  No more fancy fermented kombucha.  Go live with the Amish (who *are* getting vaccinated!) if that's how you want to live your life.
  
• My man.  Running off to appease my child at the second cry of "mommy",  he came back undaunted a minute later when he couldn't solve it on his own.  "Pacifier?  He can't see you, but what should I do?"  That's the biggest everything energy.  I know I can't do it all, but help me take it of you plate with out fucking things up for kiddo too much.  That's a real man.   That's some mother's day shit.  Leaving the fully packed pipe as he left didn't hurt.
• Several times a week I can't find my keys/cellphone/glasses/other essential item because my purse has too many tiny trucks and snacks in it.
• I have an idea for a game.  I'd call it "Kid, Dog, or Lover" and it would be people saying different things with the phrase "big boy" in it, and you have to guess if hte preson is talking to a kid, a dog, or a lover.
  

Post-2020, But Not All the Way

 How do you go through everything we went through, and not want to do everything possible to kept it at bay.

I don't know how anyone can have gone through any version of the last year and not want to do everything in ones own power to get the fuck back to normal.

The pandemic and the entire year have brought so much death and pain and struggle and torturous survival.  I watched children commit suicide, adults overdose, students drop out of school, get sick, and complete assignments between funerals.  We watched our children de-socialize, we de-socialized.  We gave up holidays, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations, and who knows what else.  Said goodbye to movies, concerts, sports....

And I don't get it.

How do you come through that *more* selfish?!?!  Less willing to work towards a world where all of that fades to black.  How on Earth is anyone saying no to a vaccine that can save lives and give us normal back.  I cannot tell what kind of human being would give up life, love, and freedom, health, the sanity of friends, family and strangers.

  Who the fuck is so selfish as to duck a shot and refuse the world that?  Risk that, leave that up to chance.

I am sorry, I don't want to be friends with those people.  If you don't get the shot stay the entire fuck away from me.