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.