Cover Your Bases 15
Nov 1, 2020, The election is scarier than Halloween
This week: A reflection on something personal and reflective. Like how the election is so much scarier than Halloween.
It’s terrifying to consider what I will know in a week that I do not know tonight. The election is in 3 days, COVID-19 is spiking across the United States, and NPR reports that gun sales are soaring--especially to liberals. Here I am in Oakland, California, still employed, still healthy, still over 60, and trying not to succumb to either despair or COVID-19 fatigue.
Some of the things keeping me going include the following:
A 4-day visit from my son and his wife, whom I hadn’t seen in person for 9 months. We tested, got together, had a great time, and it’s filled my heart ever since.
Sessions with a new personal trainer. I was considering therapy, for low-grade anxiety, and decided that upping my fitness focus would work better. Meeting outside in the park once a week, and planning to do the workouts at home 2-3 times a week as well.
Pilates. I love my zoom pilates and it is keeping me sane, 3X a week.
Family: My partner is the best, and everyone else is pretty great as well (only farther away). Leaning into caring for the people we love is happiness right now.
Work. So grateful to have a sense of purpose in what I do. Making a difference makes a difference.
Anger: I am not going to let this fucking fascist grifter government take away my country. Screw them and their awful values.
Cooking and baking: Making healthy food, much from the weekly CSA box, is fun and relaxing. Also baking: French Farmhouse breakfast Cardamon Cake, oatmeal apple crisp, and challah bread puddings have been extra treats for the family--and I’m doing okay on the portion control.
Of course, I’m also reading, watching, and cooking.
Along with the rest of the country, I binged on watching the brilliant series The Queen’s Gambit and had annoyed feelings as I sopped up the sophomoric Emily in Paris. If you haven’t seen it, the documentary on Slim Aarons, the photographer, is a brilliant escape. I also watched The Descendants (2011) by Alexander Payne (Sideways) and enjoyed every minute.
I’m also reading a ton, because why not. One of the best books this year for me was The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel’s glorious novel about, what--consciousness, time, trauma? The novel begins in an altered state and ends the same way, and it is so amazing. Even better than Station Eleven, a book that still haunts me.
Leave the World Behind, the third novel by Rumaan Alam, is also brilliant. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when an Upper West Side comedy of manners begins when it’s almost the end of the world, this is your book. Devastating by the last chapters, the book has a hopeful ending that made me thrilled I was not going to go down into the same vale of tears I experienced at the end of The Road (and that I have to block myself from experiencing when doom-scrolling.)
I went back to my favorite Korean market, KP Plaza, last week and snagged some Thai Red Rice, and some 12-grain mixed rice, along with a big jar of kimchi, and came home and promptly started making versions of one of my most loved comfort foods, Kimchi Fried Rice (with a fried egg on top). One round incorporated some chopped up turnip greens and shallots, another had some seaweed, and both were sooo good.
SHARE IT OUT: What are you watching and reading and cooking right now that is helping you stay steady? Love to hear.
Making: The joyful OCD of reorganizing the spice jars. In the past three months, we’ve reorganized all our closets, thrown out 11 bags of momentoes and old paper, moved bookcases from throughout the house into one upstairs room (hello, study!), fixed all the broken toilet paper holders in the bathrooms, painted the downstairs white, and sorted and given away a third of our glassware and half of our pots and pans. My new best friend is our Buy Nothing List, which empowers sharing the goodies out with people who might want them, and our local Goodwill, which we thank daily for all they absorb.
Today’s Sat morning OCD reorg gave me particular joy: Going through our spice cabinet and straightening it out. First, I sorted the containers so that we had the herbs on one row and the paprikas and Southwestern spices on another (for example). Next, I consolidated--taking the half-filled jars of certain spices and combining the ones that were the same into one bottle. There’s no real need for three jars of cinnamon or cayenne, is there?
One special joy to all this was putting all the herbs and spices I merged into our more stable glass spice jars. Getting stuff out of the cheap and easy to tip plastic ones that fall off the rack every time I put my hand on them felt really good. ( As did all my re-labeling, thanks to a roll of blue painters’ tape and a black Sharpie, which made the contents of the jars so very, very clear.)
What are your fun OCD coping behaviors right now?
My plans for election day are to go to work and buy everyone I work with enormous quantities of pizza, so we can drown our sorrows with socially distanced pizza dough. I’m also going to try very, very hard to stay away from the news, so when our current president declares victory for his side hours and hours before all the ballots are counted (and/or declares the election a complete fraud), I’ve missed at least the first 10 hours of what is going to be an extremely emotional shit show. Haven’t identified what I will binge-watch though, so welcome thoughts and suggestions, but NO POLITICAL CANDIDATE NEWS.
Okay, hope you and your family and those you love are well, housed, safe, healthy, and happy. Send me updates on how you are please--I am so terrible at keeping up, I am sorry--and let’s talk soon.
Best, Susan
Bonus video, my friend Lauren’s nephew Nick Reeves, performing a cello piece composed specifically for him. The piece is called, “Some Mornings Need Lullabies” and is part of the Musaics of the Bay “Stay At Home Symposium.”