Creativity and Me

Creativity is the holy Grail of writers and all artisans. In fact, we're sometimes called "creatives." However, creativity comes with being human; it is as inherent as our ability to breathe. In the beginning, God created humans in the divine image. All we know about the divine at that stage of the story is that it creates. Ergo, what we humans share with the divine at the very core of our being is the ability and urge to create.

Fine, but tell that to the empty page that sits there smirking at me. Tell that to my legs that take me away from that page more often than not, Tell that to the perfect blank that appears in my mind when I reach for the pen.

Well, creativity can be drummed out of us or suppressed, or ignored because it doesn't feel right, because it comes at an awkward time, or because it doesn't seem good enough.

How to encourage myself to just write something? The word "discipline" comes to mind, but I immediately push it away - it just makes me sad. The concept of motivation works better for me. I find that I am motivated to write by a group of friends who are expecting me to write something to share with them next week. Best of all is sitting down with a group of friends and writing with them. Their creative energy mingles with mine, and it's magical.

Darkness at Noon

 Although I use blackout blinds in my bedroom, I can tell when morning has come by the light entering at their edges. If I can’t see the lines, it’s still night and I can go back to sleep. Wednesday morning, though, I couldn’t see the lines but my body was telling me that my sleep was complete. I looked at my iThing, and it said 8:30am. That seemed weird. I went into the back hallway, and it was still dark out, but the sky was poisonous shades of orange. I checked the clocks in the kitchen, and they said 8:30. I was pretty sure it was not evening, but not sure of anything else. Finally, I checked my wristwatch, and it agreed on the time. Looked specifically for the “a.m.” on my device, then grudgingly decided it was indeed morning. But what a damn weird one! The sky was wrong, wrong, wrong.

This whole year is an adventure in wrongness: plague, economic collapse, racial strife, wildfires, and now something took away our morning! I was freaking out. I wanted to talk with another human being and see if she also noticed how weird this was. I contacted a friend, who kindly heard out my venting and confirmed that it was weird out there. This calmed me enough to seek enlightenment on FaceBook and check my email. FB was full of pictures people had taken to share how dark and orange the Bay Area was this morning. It was very comforting that others had experienced the same apocalyptic vibe. Then I opened an email with a satellite photo and explanation. A major pall of wildfire smoke had arrived in the Bay Area. At the same time, Mother Nature’s Bay Area air conditioning, the marine layer of fog and cloud, had come in overnight. It scraped the air clean near the ground, pushing the smoke and ashes up into the sky, where it filtered out the sun and all colors but the orange. So, it looked like midnight on Mars out there, but the air quality where we stood was not too bad. Goody.

My email also revealed that my doctor’s office had received this year’s flu shots, and I could drop in to get mine. My interior committee weighed in: the majority opinion was that I should get back in bed and stay there until true daylight. The minority had it that hiding out from the weirdness wasn’t worth screwing up my sleep cycle; I should just suck it up and go get my flu shot. So I did that very thing, walking a few blocks to the office on 24^th street. The last time I remember leaving my home in the dark, I was headed to a medical building for a sleep study.

It was very strange. Cars had their headlights on; streetlights were on. Lights inside buildings made it seem like late evening. The people I encountered in the office and the shops all commented on the apocalyptic look of the sky. Plague, famine, fire; every time we think we’ve hit bottom, things get worse.

Best to stay in the moment, and not borrow trouble. But the crepuscular world out there is awfully damn creepy!

A Covid Introvert (?)

When the Covid lockdown began, I thought that my introverted self would be happy and relieved to be ordered to stay home instead of being guilted to get out already. In fact, staying home is now my civic duty—to protect myself and others from this plague.

My BC (before Covid) habit was to attend events every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Nowadays, my formerly built-in excursions have turned into Zoom sessions.

Thus, I have to take responsibility to make plans if I want to get myself out of my house. Because of my introversion, laziness, and tinge of agoraphobia, I need motivation to leave the house. Towards the beginning of shelter-in-place, I was going into my backyard to harvest fragrant lilac blooms. Since then, I made arrangements to meet a friend who lives nearby to walk around our neighborhood once a week, and I’d usually pick up some tasty food while we were out and about.

I tried to satisfy my need for connection by driving to another neighborhood and walking six feet away from another friend. Then I met two more friends on one’s back deck, but couldn’t bring myself to eat, drink, or remove my mask.

After three months of sheltering, my hug hunger has grown immense. I happily chanced upon a New York Times article about how to hug safely in a pandemic: outdoors, wearing masks, pointing your faces away from each other, and briefly.

Shortly thereafter, I went to meet members of my Tuesday brunch group on a patio outside the Randall Museum. We bought coffee and pastries inside, then went to eat them on the patio. For the first few months, my mask stayed on, even outside. I raised the bottom just far enough for each bite and sip through a straw.

I saw and hugged friends I hadn’t seen in person for three months. The first drops of rain hitting my dessicated ground were ecstasy.

It’s a shame that something so nourishing is still risky, but the risk is very much worth it for me. I tell myself that this nourishment builds me up, making me less depressed, less apt to fall sick, and more willing to reach out and encourage these women and other friends who are suffering in their own ways from the plague.

What’s surprising about this? Maybe how the calculus of risk versus benefit kept me alone at home for so long, and has now begun shifting towards acceptance of more risk as we elders settle in for the long haul.

 

Carousel

According to Holly Near, Merry-go-round gonna make you smile. Hot clam chowder gonna drown those sea bottom, you got ‘em, blues for a while. Go to the slide, dime for a ride, and slide, slide, slide. Playing at the pier, the Santa Monica Pier.

I spent lots of time at the pier when I visited Santa Monica as a child. My favorite spot was the penny arcade, but I also rode the carousel’s brightly painted horses, sea creatures, and carriages. Some of the animals moved up and down while the platform circled; they were the only ones worth getting on, even with the seat belts to keep their little passengers safe. A marvel of mechanized instruments produced jangly music redolent of cotton candy and sun tan lotion.

Family lore was that my grandparents had a connection to the owner of the carousel; my cousins were allowed on special occasions to ride for free. There used to be a dispenser of brass rings suspended above the ride, and catching one would entitle you to a free ride. My cousins’ ride was already free, but they kept grabbing for the ring to show their prowess. I don’t remember the rings, and wouldn’t have been able to reach them with my stubby little arms anyway.

I could have reached the rings if the horses were like those in Mary Poppins that broke away from the carousel and cantered off into the landscape. This doesn’t happen in real life.

Carousels entertain by moving in circles without going anywhere. Our planet also moves in circles. The seasons cycle through and all of us travel through space only to return to roughly the same place a year later and a year older. Things that happened before happen again; the same, but a bit different. As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. We address the same situations and problems over and over and over again, but each time with a little more experience, a little more perspective, a little more wisdom.

That’s what I think on a good day, anyway. May it be so.

Fading Truths

There are three propositions that I know are true, but have to keep learning over and over and over again. Somebody on my interior committee must find them inconvenient, and she somehow persuades the other members to keep forgetting them. Maybe writing them down can help?

The first proposition is that the universe is perverse. This means not to count my chickens before they are hatched, because there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. For example, if I happen to notice that a particular symptom hasn’t been bothering me lately, I can be confident that it will act up shortly. In more positive terms, to bring about a desired result I should consider acting as though it won’t happen any time soon. My mother used to light a cigarette while standing at the bus stop to make the bus come. I usually lose myself in a book.

This aversion to chicken counting may trace back to a time when school friends told me that I had achieved a much-desired honor. This turned out to be an April Fool’s trick. My heady exultation made the following disappointment twice as painful, especially when I also blamed myself for falling for the ploy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So I adopted a protective stance towards potential good news and general pessimism.

The second proposition is that postponing a chore makes it more scary and makes my postponing it more shameful. But doing even the smallest part of the chore feels good, and can give me more impetus to tackle another piece of it. And the doing is usually much less painful than cringing beneath the pending chore’s Damoclean terror. The barrier between me and getting the chore done looks like a brick wall, but every time I dig into the chore, the wall is revealed to have been a sheet of paper. I know this, but I keep forgetting it and hunch in a corner hoping that the chore will just go away. Most chores won’t just go away, but some can be put off nearly indefinitely.

Finally, I am not the most compliant of patients, but sometimes I remember that if I do follow a doctor’s instructions long enough, they usually work. Experts in general give good advice, by definition. Whence springs my tendency to ignore advice? Pessimism, laziness, the sense that many situations will resolve themselves over time? Stubborn self-reliance? Past experiences in which following advice made things worse? I don’t know, but I have lively arguments with myself about which advice to follow, and in what way, and for how long before giving up.

So, these are the truths that I have the hardest time remembering. Ideally, I could track down the committee member who is each truth’s strongest opponent, and negotiate her into some kind of détente. But that sounds like a lot of work.

Captain Sashay

 Captain Sashay is a voluptuous merperson with long hair and a full beard. A sailor, confused by these clashing gender indicators, says to them, “Hey sexy fish person, I can’t tell what gender you are.” Sashay replies, “That’s the point.”

This cartoon urges people to accept types of gender beyond male and female. Gender is based on our chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, and upbringing, at the very least. Just in terms of chromosomes, there are many variants beyond XX and XY. Looking at genitalia, we have male, female, and many varieties of intersex. Beyond biology, we have people’s internal experiences of gender. Looking at these additional factors, Norwegian sexologist Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad adds the categories of trans, non-conforming, personal, and eunuch. After finding no English language versions of their work, I must leave the definitions of these categories to your imaginations.

I believe that people have an inherent right to define their own gender for themselves. [Please note, in this regard, that one’s gender identity is entirely separate from one’s sexual orientation. For example, some transwomen are lesbians, others are straight.] Nobody wants to be slotted into a box and be limited in how they are treated. Too many people have different behavioral styles when dealing with a man as opposed to a woman. They take gender as determining the acceptable range of behavior for each type of person. As part of the sexual revolution, though, many people seek freedom from gendered expectations. We wish to identify solely as persons, with no limitations imposed by our perceived gender.

Captain Sashay delights in keeping their bodily gender a mystery. That’s fine by me. I’m even getting used to using the pronoun ‘they’ in the singular, to cast off the gender marker of language. Nobody needs to know what organs are inside another person’s pants, most of the time.

However, a queer, trans, or intersex person who contemplates a sexual or romantic relationship with someone else owes that individual a discussion about their respective genitalia before clothes are removed. A surprise reveal has been known to result in homicidal violence. At the very least, it can really derail a sexual encounter.  

A Symphony of Sounds

 I was walking to my car this morning, and noticed a symphony of sounds. My new shoes had been squeaking incessantly ever since I bought them, despite two applications of baby powder. However, their sound was nearly drowned out by the other sounds I was making.

The back brim of my sunhat was brushing against my corduroy jacket, creating a loud, rhythmic, otherwise indescribable sound. Since it involved my hat, which was on my head, the sound reverberated into my ears through my skull; that’s why it was so loud.

I was carrying a plastic clamshell containing mini-cupcakes, and the edges of the clamshell created a rhythmic squeaking when they rubbed together with the motion of my walking. The squeaks may have been amplified by the shape of the container; they were also quite loud.

Then I thought about the other sounds they were competing against – a faint whisper of wind, children’s laughter, engine noises, the miscellaneous sounds of city life.

The sounds of outdoors are very different from the sounds inside my home – the sounds of a heater, refrigerator, plumbing. When I’m not playing music or the TV, I can hear my own personal, internally produced noise – tinnitus. For the last few years, I have been hearing a persistent hissing, staticky noise, mostly in my right ear. I had it checked out by my ear doctor, and alternately try to ignore it and feel grateful that it’s white noise rather than a musical tone, which I’d find nearly impossible to ignore.

That’s the soundscape I’m living in today. Could be a lot worse.

 

 

The Doorway Effect and Me

Scientific American on the “common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you’ve forgotten what you went there to do,” usually because we weren’t paying enough attention, too much time has passed, or it wasn’t important enough. Another factor, “walking through doorways causes forgetting.” Scientists have shown, at least in the context of a simplified video game version of real life, that people forgot which object they had picked up more often “when they’d walked through a doorway into a new room than when they'd walked the same distance within the same room.”

This may be related to the fact that “memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning.” However, walking back to the room in the video game where the person picked up the object should have boosted recall, but it didn’t. Instead, the doorway effect seems “optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff.” In other words, the purging process preserves limited memory space for more important things, like the sabretooth tiger that may be hiding outside the cave.

My doorway experiences are mixed. When I return from the kitchen without accomplishing what I went there to do, the usual reason seems to be that I immediately saw other things I wanted to do and got distracted doing them. I don’t often step into the room and wonder why I did so. On the other hand, sometimes I get the same forgetting experience without the doorway; I turn towards a different part of the room (the refrigerator, the pantry) and have to ask myself what I was planning to do there.

The fact that these kinds of forgetting seem to increase with age is, I think, Nature’s provision that we get more exercise retracing our steps to accomplish these forgotten objectives.

 

Doomscrolling

 Ever since the election of Trump, I have spent much more time watching TV news and reading Twitter to keep up with matters that threaten our democracy or way of life. Since COVID, I have added medical and epidemiological sources to my Twitter feed.

Enough others have similarly increased their online news consumption for a new word to have been coined: doomscrolling. It has been variously defined as: 1. “spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news”; 2. “the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing”; or 3. “where you constantly scroll or surf through social media and other news sites in order to keep up with the latest news – even (and, it seems, particularly) if the news is bad.” The term is thought to have been coined sometime in 2018 on Twitter, and to have picked up steam after the start of the COVID pandemic.

The motivation for this habit is evident: my inquiring mind wants to know – what’s being done to protect our country and its vulnerable populations from the MAGA phenomenon, and what level of risk we face from COVID and how to lessen that risk. More recently, I have added sources on Russia and Ukraine to my studies, because of my Ukrainian grandfather.

For me, the point of scrolling negative subjects is that I can learn something useful: some evil I can act to help prevent, better COVID avoidance techniques, where to send money to aid Ukraine. Also, I quickly learn any good news on these subjects, such as the local level of COVID risk, new vaccines and treatments, or Ukrainian battlefield gains. Every now and then, I bump into something that is positively life-enhancing, like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s message to his Russian fans or the 7-year-old girl who sang “Let it Go” from a Ukrainian bomb shelter later singing the Ukrainian national anthem for thousands in Poland.

As a died-in-the-wool pessimist, I justify doomscrolling as protecting me from unpleasant surprises. It gives me a probably spurious sense of, if not control, then at least knowledge about what slings and arrows outrageous fortune is readying for me and the world. More importantly, it also keeps me on top of hopeful developments in my chosen subjects. Learning about them is, to me, worth the grief of doomscrolling. In other words, occasionally it becomes hopescrolling.

Mature Speech

 I recently listened to a presentation sponsored by JFK University about the war in Ukraine. It featured a political scientist and a historian. I paid it rapt attention. Not just because the subject was important to me, but also because of the character of the speech. Each sentence was complex yet clear, compelling, and nuanced. The purpose of the presentation was to inform, not to entertain, indoctrinate, or persuade. I found it strangely refreshing, and reminiscent of a time long ago, when I first participated in a discussion of similar intelligence.

I must have been in my early teens or so when I had dinner with my Aunt Mary’s family. This may have been my first discussion of current events, at least the first not circumscribed by the presence of small children. I don’t remember the specifics, but I was very impressed by the vocabulary, knowledge, and confidence of each person’s contribution. I felt myself getting smarter just by listening to them. It was a revelation compared to the low-knowledge, high opinion and prejudice talk I was used to.

Some discussions at my college and law school approached similar heights of intelligence, but not often.

In the Trump era, opinions and prejudices have been elevated into alternative facts that the speaker expects to have taken as true. This cheapens all discourse, and makes it impossible to learn new information or to solve actual problems.

Pretty Feathered Thing

I, Misty the Brave, have spotted a beautiful gift for my Mom, a Pretty Feathered Thing. I crouch, stare, huff a little in my excitement. I see it preparing to take flight, and I pounce. Got it! I toss my head, and it stills.

I prance up the stairs and through the flapping entryway. I break into loud cries of triumph. Mom, see what I brought you! Look at it! See my prowess! See the beauty I bring! Look at me! Look at me, Mom! Here it is for you! I, the mighty huntress, have brought you this gift! Look at me! Look at this! Look!!

I keep up my triumphant boasts until Mom stirs on her bed. Slowly and crankily she stands up and puts that weird metal framework on her face. She steps into the hallway and looks at me and my gift. I cease my boasts; she sees my gift.

Dammit, she says. She picks up my gift and I start purring. She gets a white sheet and wraps the gift and puts it away. I don’t see where it goes, but do notice that it is no longer there. I search around where it was. I still smell it, but I can’t see it anymore. What has she done with it? I scratch and claw at the place where I last saw it. Not there. Hunh. My triumph was brief, but satisfying. Must do this again sometime.

 

Choosing Life

 I wrote the following in a sermon for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in 1986:

“Choosing life, then, involves growing: intending to grow, seizing opportunities to grow, making changes, trying experiments, admitting defeat, and trying something else. I think God wants us to grow up: to become more and more mature, honest, compassionate, trustworthy, appreciative, courageous, creative, alive. … Spiritual growth is like traveling to a distant city. I can get there in many different ways: I can go by car, skateboard, taxi, train, plane, or hovercraft. And even if I go slowly, or take a detour, I will still get there sooner or later. … As long as I’m trying to grow up, and trying to make choices that affirm and enhance my life and the lives of those around me, that’s enough.”

These are challenging times. Warfare, gun violence, and people’s apparent appetite for authoritarianism are reasons for outrage and despair. I waver between anger and depression. If a teeny wisp of hope breaks through, I try to comfort myself and my friends. Then I might try to change some small piece of the horror in a better direction. I’m mostly still at the ‘trying to comfort’ stage of response, with the occasional gentle donation, retweet, or share to express whichever emotion is topmost.

Noom encourages its members to view failures as feedback, information about what doesn’t work that may help suggest different approaches. They also recommend replacing thought such as “I can’t do X” with a less absolute and more optimistic “I haven’t been able to do X yet.” With the unstated hope that I can learn how to get myself to do X sometime, or that I can find a variation of X that I can do that will work well enough.

I tell myself over and over again that viewing anything less than perfect success as abject failure creates a false binary. There is a vast range of possibilities between perfect adherence to some shining standard of perfection and not making any changes at all. That’s when I sometimes remember my sermon about life as growth. As long as I’m trying to mosey in the direction of improvement, I am enough.

 

My Postman My Lifeline

My letter carrier is the only person from before Covid who is still in my life in the same way. I live alone. So, when I retired, he became the person I saw most often. And he still is.

Our relationship began this way. My living room is near the mailboxes, and I could hear him opening them. I got to and opened the front door once or twice after he had put the mail in my box. After that, he started knocking on the door so he could hand me the mail directly. When my cat or I hear him approach, I like to surprise him by opening the door before he knocks.

I learned that his name is Tim, which I find easy to remember since my cousin Tim was also a mailman before he retired. My mailman Tim knocks on my door and hands me the mail. If I’m not home and Tim has a package for me, he gives it to a neighbor or puts it somewhere safe and leaves me a note of its location written on the back of an envelope. We greet each other if our paths cross outside my home. When I caught him at his truck once, he remembered that he had a package for me and handed it to me. I give him a tip at Christmas.

Post-Covid, he still knocks on my door and hands me the mail, wearing no mask. His cheery smile is the last lingering piece of interpersonal normality in my life. All other encounters take place over the internet or from six feet apart.

I ran across him the other day while walking six feet from a friend. I hailed him with “There’s my man Tim,” and we smiled at each other. I cherish his presence in my life, my last link to the Before Times whose loss we all grieve.

What Makes Me Happy

 Tasty food digesting well

Waking naturally from sleep

Sweet-smelling flowers

Technicolor sunsets (I’ve heard of sunrises; rarely seen ‘em)

Accomplishing something, nearly anything

I wish I could say that good news makes me happy, but I’m too cynical to believe that most good news won’t be almost immediately overtaken or countered

Sometimes good developments in something I’m watching or reading can touch me, but not often

Once in a while, I remember the generosity of a friend or some glorious achievement of my past

And in between the moments of happiness, I settle for being content

 

Trump News Trumps Again

 

Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. Because his Apprentice show had given him an undeserved reputation for business savvy (which is belied by his many bankruptcies and fraud convictions) and because he was so entertaining, TV stations rushed to give him millions of dollars worth of free coverage during his candidacy. That, plus racism in reaction to the Obama presidency and misogyny towards Hillary, not to mention Russian hacking of the DNC and Jim Comey’s blather about the Hillary’s email investigation while remaining silent about investigating Russia’s involvement in the Trump campaign, all saddled this country with a dictator wanna-be who is bringing us to the brink of civil war.

His superpower has been to commit crimes, insults, offenses, and horrors so constantly that nobody has the time or energy to investigate and prosecute him for any single one of them. It’s like fighter planes of old that ejected a cloud of metallic chaff to muddy up the skies as camouflage. His superpower, plus the dubious doctrine of absolute presidential immunity, has protected him so far from criminal prosecutions worth decades of prison and millions of dollars in fines.

Now that he is out of office, The Big Lie notwithstanding, he is as subject to prosecution as every other citizen. Even Senator Mitch McConnell has said so.

Last weekend, President Biden achieved passage in the Senate of landmark legislation to address climate change, health care, and the deficit. We should have had a few days at least to bask in this achievement, but no. Instead, all the news channels spent the day covering the fact that the Department of Justice obtained a search warrant and seized more boxes of government documents, including highly classified ones, from Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. The DOJ did this quietly, but T himself complained publicly about the search. At least the San Francisco Chronicle put news of the search on page 8, which is all that most Trump news deserves.

Now, T is the subject of so many federal and state criminal investigations that it was not immediately clear which of his many crimes the judge who issued the warrant found probable cause to believe he had committed. It seems to have been his many failures to keep public records safe and private, and his failure to deliver boxes of them when requested, and even subpoenaed, by the National Archives after his term.

I hate news about Trump. When his voice comes across my TV, I leap to mash the mute button. But this news about the search and its results makes me very happy. I rejoice at signs that he may finally be held accountable for some of his many offenses. While president, he believed that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5^th Avenue with impunity. Now that he’s a private citizen, it’s time for him to pay for his crimes.

Not the least of which are refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, pressuring states where he lost to ‘find’ votes for him, choosing slates of fake electors and sending their names to Congress, and firing up a mob of armed supporters and sending them to the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power to the validly elected President.

That occasion, January 6 of 2021, also trumped good news that we should have been enjoying for weeks. On January 5, Georgia elected two Democratic senators, giving the Democrats the slimmest possible majority in the Senate, and kicking Mitch McConnell out of the majority leader’s seat. This victory has enabled the passage of much-needed pieces of legislation, including the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the ‘once in a generation overhaul of climate and healthcare policy’ that we should be celebrating this week. Instead, we are transfixed with this investigation of T’s cavalier (at best; possibly even corrupt) treatment of public records and classified documents (which, incidentally, has probably harmed our national security far more than any of Hillary Clinton’s alleged missteps with email).

So, yeah, the DOJ has never searched the home of a former president before, but we have never before had a former president who has so far gotten away with so much crime and wrongdoing.

My Theory of Personal Change

 

Question: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Answer: Just one. But the bulb has to want to be changed.

 Many times in my life I have tried to give up a bad habit or form a new one. And many times I have failed. Thus, for most of my life, my theory of personal change was that I didn’t. At least, not permanently.

 Then I started the Noom program for weight loss about a year and a half ago. They used the system of SMART goals; goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. I had tried to formulate and reach SMART goals in the past, without success.  I now realize that I hadn‘t chosen goals that were attainable by me.

 This brings me back to the psychiatrist and the light bulb. If the bulb doesn’t want to change, it won’t. Over the years, I have discovered that my decisions are based on the deliberations of my internal committee: its members currently include my inner couch potato, the introvert who prefers books to people, the hunter-gatherer who enjoys walking the neighborhood and bagging bits of food in between picking off chores, etc.

 If I try to achieve a goal that isn’t supported by at least a majority of the voices on the committee, it ain’t gonna happen. So, attainable means not only physically and logistically doable, but also acceptable to a majority of my committee members. My members get sad when I am deprived of pleasures, so it really helps if a goal is intrinsically somewhat rewarding.

 Thus, when I came to choose my first goal for Noom, I chose to add a piece of fruit to every meal. Since I enjoy fruit, I would look forward to each meal. This added to my nutrition without depriving me of anything I enjoyed. The idea of a diet in which I could never eat any particular food makes me sad, and would never be attainable. But adding a fresh, tasty, nutritious item several times a day improved my outlook and energy, and made it easier to choose suitable goals going forward.

 Approaching two years on Noom, I am so close to my initial, somewhat conservative, goal weight that I’m considering whether I should adopt another goal weight that is 10 or 20 pounds lower. However, I don’t so much work with particular goals any more. I have developed a set of customary meals that keep me within my calorie budget while providing a constant flow of small pleasures. And when I get a yen for a particular baddie, like donuts or ice cream, I can indulge in reasonable portions without major regain or guilt.

 Thus, making small life changes that don’t outrage members of my committee works for me. Slow but steady is effective, and – more to the point – a way of life I can live with.

 

 

Coping with 2.0

 Here we go again. Again the thrill of a well-qualified woman running for president is squashed by the victory of a horrible man.

And this time promises to be worse than the time before. We know more about his complete corruption and proud vindictiveness. Our resistance the first time around helped keep him in check, as did the utter incompetence of him and his pals. This time their experience better equips them to bring their nightmarish plans to life. Moreover, there are fewer of the guardrails that constrained them last time.

So it’s time for the resistance to pull together again. Time for us to join the organization of our choice, get back into signing petitions, phoning our Congresspeople, and attending meetings and demonstrations. Our efforts will help us cope with these times, and also help us to pay as little attention as possible to the lies, venom, and outrages he spews every time his mouth opens. Instead, let’s save our energy for finding one or more issues we care about, finding out what hostile actions the administration is taking about them, and fighting against those actions as best we can.

As the old saying goes, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And we start out traumatized by the election. Our hopes were dashed; our fears are growing; and so grows our rage at corrupt people and fools who believe their lies and vote against their own interests. We gaze in horror at responses to his encouragement of bigotry and misogyny, including domestic terrorism.

I am a female, Jewish lesbian, and life under his administration has been awful on all three counts, and is likely to get worse. I was gutted by the demise of Roe v. Wade, and am dreading further legislation curbing the rights of women, queer folks, and Jews. Not to mention people of color and undocumented immigrants, and the parts of our economy that depend on them.

My own trauma and dread I try to address by limiting the amount of political news I consume. I don’t want to waste my outrage and fear responding to some of his crowd-pleasing bon mots that don’t change anything. As Rachel Maddow tells us, ignore what they say, but watch what they do. My goal is to tune into the least amount of news that keeps me aware of major threats concerning my chosen issues.

Marinating in a stew of outrage and dread is not good for anyone. I have noticed that the lingering post-election trauma has made my friends and me more easily triggered by relatively small things. For example, I got outraged last week by a fellow student who kept sharing in class when it wasn’t his turn.

Coping with this fraught time will look different for each of us. For me, I seek to find many things to enjoy each day, in the hope that I’ll be more able to endure whatever comes. Also, I need to be distracted now and then, so I don’t obsess over past outrages or coming horrors. But at the same time, I need to do the work of resistance to the extent of my ability. As Rabbi Tarfon said, more or less, it is not up to us to complete the task, but we can’t just give up either.