I am so mad at white people right now

This is my blog to attempt to make sense of what I'm feeling.

I am angry.
I am sad.
I am ashamed.

All of these feelings stem from the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
And they stem from the arrest of Omar Jimenez while trying to do his job.
And the video of Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper and her call to the police.
And the non-arrests or delayed arrests of Arbery's killers and Floyd's killers, as well as no-knock entries of police in the middle of the night.

But the cherry on top of the aforementioned shit sundae is the white people I know living in their white, upper-middle-class world and having not a clue that they don't have a clue.

I say this as a white person who knows damn good and well that I cannot possibly wrap my head around the POC experience.
Whatever I might think I know, I'm 100 percent sure I don't have even the slightest grasp.

"Violence doesn't solve anything" is the white person's lament that would be better said as, "I don't understand why black people protest and riot even though I did not say this same thing when armed white men went to the state capitol and screamed at law enforcement."
Unarmed POC are tear-gassed while white men with weapons that could reduce a crowd to dust are allowed to just hang out in the state rotunda.

"I don't understand why they're destroying their community" is another common refrain I've heard and seen. What this screams to me is, "I live on the other side of town than those people, and as a person who has been able to utilize business and economics to my advantage, I cannot imagine destroying something that provides me entertainment and a way to spend my disposable income."

How many freaking memes are about white women shopping at Target for fun while their husbands tailgate in the parking lot?
In the upper-middle-class white world, destroying a Target might get you a one-way ticket to hell assuming there is a hereafter. I like Target, but I know it screams "white person shopping place."

And just the fact that these statements say "their community" implies that you, as a white person, aren't a part of the person of color's community.
Even if shit is happening across your town, it is still your community.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention white people who do live all the way across town, some 15 miles from where protests happened in my city, commenting about gunshots at 3:30 in the morning near us.

I don't know how this appears to them; perhaps as concerned citizens of our little niche.
But in my frustration, all I hear is: "OMG, the chaos of the blacks is coming to our secluded little nugget of nirvana in the east end."

The comments of "This is horrendous" and chiming in on what you think you heard is the verbal equivalent of clutching your pearls.

Imagine hearing gunshots every night and not just on the night that a protest ended up in shootings?

Imagine being woken up at 3:30 in the morning because the police are ramming your front door down during a no-knock warrant? And then actually being shot?

Did you say "This is horrendous" when you saw the officer kneeling on George Floyd's neck?

What I want to say is "Will you PUHLEASE check your damn privilege at the door and quit freaking out about a non-event? You can walk down our street any time and rest assured that you are not going to be shot by anyone, and especially not a police officer."
Quit thinking about yourself when you have so many privileges you can't even begin to understand them all.

There are the white people who post a photo of an uplifting story about a friendship between whites and blacks and think this means they don't have a bias, implicit or otherwise.
Or because they have a black friend it means they don't have prejudices and don't have to do any internal wrangling and work about what racism is and how it impacts all of us.

If you have moved outside the school district or to another neighborhood in order to keep your kids at the "good" middle school, maybe you aren't as color-blind as you like to think you are?
(The whole notion of "Colorblindness" being part of white-people idiot-speak.)
Ahem, is the "good" middle school where there are more white kids?
Because while I'm pretty sure I don't understand the POC experience, I know white code when I hear it.
I have people in my family who stopped shopping at "dirty" Kroger even though it went through an extensive makeover and expansion.
I know what they meant by "dirty" Kroger.

This blog post was me reacting out of anger and frustration, and it is a terrible mess of lashing out and perhaps hurting the feelings of my white counterparts who read it.
Is it any wonder that the anger and frustration of POC has resulted in fires and looting.

Or does it explode? 
(White folks, this is code. Go Google it.)

25 years of togetherness

I can barely get it together to remember our wedding anniversary for which I have paper documents to remind me of the specific date.
We never exchange gifts and mostly don't bother with cards.
Never having to please me with a special gift is one of the things D likes most about me.
When we began dating, he specifically mentioned to his mom, "She doesn't like to shop."
Our relationship has never involved me dragging him out to the mall.

Next month marks 25 years of togetherness for us.
I don't remember the day of our first date, but it was 1995, and I'm pretty sure it was June, and I know it was a Sunday.
I think we got engaged at the end of May 24 years ago.
It may have been today, but I'm not 100 percent certain.

Those little details never seemed important.
What was important was that we took a walk in the park on our first date.
On that first date, he asked me out for the following weekend, a full week in advance.
I used to be the type of person who thrived on making all of my plans WAY more ahead of time than I do now so this impressed me.

On that second date, he barely talked at dinner but then opened up during a nighttime walk.
We both liked the film version of "Orlando."
He didn't like sports.
We went to see a play called "Angry Housewives," which was prescient although neither of us knew it at the time.

D knew me before I was medicated for anxiety, and if he can handle that gauntlet, he deserves the peace that comes with me being far more chill now.

This isn't to say our marriage is perfect.
We've gone to therapy.
I'm not as huggy as he'd like for me to be, and he can't locate a single thing in our house without requiring my involvement.
We both hold our tongues.
I'm sure there is resentment underneath the surface for both of us. Small little grudges we've never quite let go of.
There are things he does that drive me crazy, and I know there are things I do that drive him crazy.

But we generally like each other.
We make each other laugh.
Even during pandemic quarantine.

I know he's got my back and supports me.
He lets me do my own thing.
We both have a live-and-let-live philosophy for each other.

I tell him all the time that I don't know why he has stayed in our relationship so long especially since he is the type of person to believe "There is a BEST whatever out there."
And I know I'm not the best.
If the BEST woman ever knocked on our front door (preferably naked) and offered herself to him, he might hightail it out of here.
(He really doesn't like to socialize which is probably the glue that holds our marriage together most.)

I think we're both proud of the life and family we've built together.

Last night we discussed how 25 years feels like a hella long time, especially because neither of us feels especially old.
(Although our knees and backs loudly disagree with that assertion.)

How childhood returns when the old folks pass

My uncle died last week; he was 94.
He had been wanting to die for a year since his common-law wife died in February 2019; he was simply undone by regret and grief.
With a long life behind him and a desire to die, I cannot possibly be sad for my uncle.

What I have felt is a profound remembrance of my childhood of which my uncle played a strange part.

Both my mother and father came from large Catholic families.
My mother was the youngest of six children; my father was the second youngest of seven children.
Both my mother and father were older parents; my mom was 35 and my dad was 31 when I was born.
This means that most of the cousins whom I remember as a child, the ones I played with, were actually the grandchildren of my aunts and uncles.

My uncle who passed was divorced from the mother of his children and lived with my grandma when I was a kid.
What this meant is that every visit, every week, to grandma's house was also a visit to Uncle Ed.

I remember the shed behind the house that we weren't supposed to go into but that held a magical allure for us because Uncle Ed kept his gardening stuff there (and maybe dangerous stuff, or at least that is what we surmised.)
I remember watching my dad and Ed work in the garden together.

While they worked, my brother and I regularly jumped in the compost bin that was behind the garden, right by the fence that demarcated grandma's property from the drive-in where my dad had worked as a teenager.

I remember thinking my Uncle Ed was old then.
He was in his 50s, I guess, but he had lost his hair, and he just kind of always had a grumpy personality.
(Although given what his childhood home had been like, I suppose that isn't so unexpected.)

He drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and would give me and my brother sips of the last dregs of it, which was always a thrill when we were kids.
(Now, in the midst of a pandemic and given my germaphobe OCD, the idea of drinking my uncle's backwash is almost more than I can stand.)

I remember not fully understanding the situation between Uncle Ed and Aunt Louise when I was a kid. (Aunt Louise the girlfriend and eventual common-law wife, not Aunt Louise the sister of Uncle Ed who was my actual by-blood aunt.)
But I didn't spend a whole lot of time wondering about it.
She was just always there if there was any kind of family gathering or fried chicken dinner.

(Of course, I didn't fully understand that Ed's ex-wife lived one house away from my grandma. I remember being a little confused because in my head, I always thought of Aunt Louise as his wife.)

Next to my grandma's house was a run-down shack in the midst of overgrown weeds and grass that we were not allowed to enter.
One time, Uncle Ed put a sheet on and ran out of it to try to scare us kids.

My dad and uncle owned rental property when I was a kid, so we often saw my uncle when my dad cut grass at the apartment.
It wasn't uncommon for them to work on a project together.
Uncle Ed helped my parents finish the basement in my childhood home.
They bought a home together to rent that had at least seven layers of wallpaper on the walls.
I can still smell the heady mix of vinegar and adhesive when we went there to attempt to scrape it all away.

I don't know that I thought much about how he and my dad were brothers, despite a 17-year age difference, but I can still hear him say my dad's name.
Usually, it seemed like he was saying, "Now Donnie," as the preface of something my dad was doing in a way that Ed didn't agree with.

When I was older, in college, my parents would take me to eat at a VFW Post, where we would often eat dinner with Uncle Ed and Aunt Louise.
I spent many a Friday night in their company during college.

I can't think back on my childhood without Uncle Ed feeling like a pretty significant part of it.
And that doesn't sadden me as much as make me realize how much further it is in my past than what I'm usually aware of.
It is like a time period stays the same in my memory until someone from that time period dies, and then that time period somehow destabilizes.
The memory is still there, but slightly more fuzzy, the edges a little blurrier.

The funny youngest child

Poor M.
The youngest child gets no respect.
When I search my blog labels, I find 193 entries about the oldest.
Due to G's challenges and my need to stew over them in writing, he has 181 entries tagged as middle boy.
M's entries stand at a measly 86.

So this post is for M, who has been especially funny during the pandemic.
Rockin 87 now, baby!

There was the night he asked for leftover pizza for dinner.
His brother asked for scrambled eggs.
(We are not one of those miraculous families that all eat the same thing, as much as I would love for us to be. My sons come from a long line of picky-ass eaters.)

I promptly forgot what M said he wanted and fixed both boys eggs.
When M sat down at the table and saw his plate, he said,
"I give this place 1 star. They got my order completely wrong."

This, of course, made us all laugh uproariously.

The next night, when I did remember to give him leftover pizza for dinner he said,
"The last time I was here, somebody got my order all wrong."

And then yesterday, M choose to write a book review for his NTI work.
He picked "Diary of an 8-Bit Warrior," a series of which he has read the first three books.

He sat and stewed and stared at the screen.
"Do you not know what to write?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said.
"How about if you say, 'This review is about Diary of an 8-Bit Warrior?" I suggested.
He sat and stewed and stared at the screen.
He said something about needing a hook so I suggested: "I'd like to tell you about Diary of an 8-Bit Warrior."
He sat and stewed, finally placing his head in his hands.
Then he said, "I can never be a teacher because I'll just sit there for 15 minutes, trying to think of what to say, and the kids will be going crazy."
He eventually settled on an opening line that he liked and apparently had a "hook."

Tonight at dinner, he and his siblings were decorating cookies, and he was trying to make a Sonic the Hedgehog on his.
He narrated as he added legs and a body.
Finally, he said, "I'm going to add soulless white eyes" which caused all of us to promptly crack up.

All of my kids are quirky as heck, but M has been on a roll of late.

My George Bailey moment

I subbed for about 5 weeks in an 11th-grade class in November/December 2018 at EHS (my daughter's high school).

(This is the same school that I went ape-sh*t about over the dress code in fall of 2019, so I'm not really a sought after sub there anymore, but I digress.)

I loved that long-term sub job; I loved the kids.
It reminded me of all the things I truly miss about teaching--the connections, the chance to make students excited about being in a classroom.
It also reminded me of the PITAs about full-time teaching--the grading that never ends, mostly, since I didn't have to participate in all the meetings and rigamarole.

Before my last day, I gave my email to the students and told them they could contact me at any time for help on papers or to ask questions.
An exchange student from Brazil took me up on this and has emailed me occasionally over the past 16 months.

Today, I received this message from her.
It reminded me that there is something to that quality over quantity idea.

How covering the plants for a frost is just like COVID-19

I like to garden.
I mean, I'm not a full-on fool about it; I'm what you'd call a "sweet-spot gardener."
I garden when it is cool, usually in the evenings.

I'm generally not gonna go out and mess in the garden when it is hot as Hades.
But I enjoy growing plants and flowers.

There is something very Zen about it.
To garden means to be hopeful and to be rewarded for that hopefulness when you see young shoots peek out of the ground after winter.
To garden means to be willing to let go because there are some plants you can't save.
You have to watch and accept whatever nature intends.
To garden means to surround yourself with beauty.
A beauty that is delicate and hardy at the same time.
A beauty that isn't perfect or matchy-matchy.

But last night, as I tried to cover my plants with sheets and towels and blankets in preparation for a hard frost, I felt the absurdity of tending to plants, trying to keep a virus at bay, and generally living life.

It all seemed so pointless.

The wind just kept blowing.
Gusting, really.
At one point, while trying to cover my Japanese maple that had been hit already by an earlier frost, the blanket blew up and covered ME from head to toe.
And I just stood there, both enraged by the wind and sad.

Because I was trying my darndest to take care, to protect what I could, to keep something from being harmed and dying.
And nature was making it not just difficult but impossible.

I felt like a character in a Samuel Beckett play.

I still did it because I couldn't just do nothing.

Dunder Mifflin and the conspiracy theory

I am old enough to have worked my fair number of jobs.

There was the ice cream shop when I was a teenager which was owned by a skeezy dude who made inappropriate remarks to his all-female staff.

I worked at the grocery store that went out of business because it was so poorly fiscally managed.

I worked at an online publishing company that had some cool people but also a manager who wrote soft porn and shared it with his employees as well as another dude who lived in his mother's basement and was so socially inept he would lecture his same-level peers on their work. There was the office worker whose skin was yellow because all she ate was fast-food.

I worked in a public school that had drama queens and unusual relationship triads/dyads and a whole lot of dysfunction.

There is no place I've ever worked that has been run so seamlessly and with 100 percent coordinated effort and enthusiasm on the part of every.single.person who was employed there. There were rumors and backstabbing and disaffection.

Last year, I subbed on a team that was completely dysfunctional. During a meeting with the principal to discuss why the kids were off-the-chain, one of the teachers admitted (this was in March), that he had never bought into the team incentive and hadn't been doing it the entire year.

I thought to myself, "I feel like I understand why this is all a train-wreck."
Everyone has to be on the same page, or at least within the same chapter for things to operate smoothly.

When I think about companies that are in operation now, I am sometimes astounded by the inefficiencies and general stupidity.

For example, I am a regular Kroger customer who has been using the Clicklist since quarantining began. I make my order, pick it up, and receive a receipt showing I spent $87.65.

However, on my credit card, Kroger shows anywhere between 4-8 DIFFERENT transactions adding up to $87.65.

And I ask myself, as well as the Kroger customer service when I email, if they can have 1 amount given to me on a receipt, why are they unable to give me 1 charge on my credit card?
I have yet to receive an answer.

Clearly, something is not right.
The left hand and right hand, somewhere along the line, are not speaking to each other.

And this is seen over and over again in each and every business, organization, or government agency in the world.
They are all flawed; sometimes outlandishly so.

With that in mind, I cannot really believe in most conspiracy theories, especially as they concern one-world coordinated entities that prey on people.

Is there corruption?
Of course. I don't deny that.
Might there be coordinated efforts to try to fool people?
Sure.
But are they successful to the extent that we are all puppets being manipulated by them?
Throughout the US and across the world?
Think of how many people would have to be involved for that to work?
Every single person would have to be equally intelligent and secretive.
And for there to be some kind of one-world-order, there would have to be thousands and thousands of people all coordinating to the letter.

Does anything in my own life experience, be it volunteering on the PTA or at church or working at a business, make me think this is realistic?

The short answer is no.

It's surreal in all kinds of ways

I often read historical books and think to myself, "I wonder what it was really like to live during whatever horrible event occurred."

My 4th grader and I just finished Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, and so my thoughts have been on life-altering, catastrophic events because I've been reading about them fictionally and non-fictionally (every time I read the newspaper).

This pandemic is surreal to me.

I generally always think that people experienced "the worst possible," but that is not the case, and I sometimes need reminders.

When 9-11 happened, it was life-altering for me, but I didn't experience the worst of it. New York City, both then and now, has been hammered.
There are degrees of experience.

Apparently, the country is anticipating over 134,000 deaths, more or less.
With states opening back up, that number is likely to increase.
What I wish I knew is how many people test positive who are completely asymptomatic.
That seems important but not included in the stats I'm seeing.
I see how many people test positive, but I don't know are they mildly sick, hospital-level sick?
There is so much we still don't know or understand about this virus.

There is economic fall-out no matter what course states and governments take.
If we close for longer, people suffer.
If we open back up, people suffer.
I think only hindsight will tell us in which scenario people suffered more.

What reading the aforementioned children's chapter book has made me notice and feel a little mystified about is the whininess I see, at least among the people I know and who post on social media.

I, too, want life to return to normal.
I, too, would like a haircut.
I, too, would like to take my kid to his orthodontist appointment.
I don't love substitute teaching but I would LOVE nothing more than for life to return to normal when I could substitute teach.
I would love to feel comfortable going to the grocery without a mask and browsing (and I hate to shop).

But my basic needs are met.
I have food, water, shelter, and prescription medication.
Everything else is an inconvenience.
It might be an inconvenience that makes me wanna cuss, but it is an inconvenience.

I have recently seen a petition going around with folks whining about maybe or maybe not being able to go to the pool which seems like a whole lotta privilege making its way to social media.
I both get it and hate it at the same time.

The petition itself doesn't make me cringe; it is the comments that go with the petition like, "How will I live this summer without going to the pool?"
And I'm struggling to know whether such statements are hyperbole especially after reading my fair share of books about people who lived during circumstances and times when even walking down the street put them in the range of a Nazi's gun.
When a hunk of cheese was a luxury and treat.
For some individuals right now during this pandemic, a hunk of cheese is a luxury and a treat.

And there are people in our city whose pools were shut down ages ago for reasons I don't even know. Because of the expense?
Because the pools are in the West End which has been redlined to death?
Because the pools were for the poorer and blacker segments of the community?

Also surreal to me is seeing the same folks who make the argument that women shouldn't have abortions even though pregnancy has severe financial/economic implications also argue that people should be allowed back to work because the pandemic has severe financial/economic implications.

How is the right of one person to control their body and what they do with it because of finances not the same as the right of another person to control their body and what they do with it because of finances, especially when harm to others' lives is the result?

Is it because harm to the fetus is a definite and harm to someone else (an older person/medically fragile person) because of COVID-19 is only possible?

It is surreal that individuals worship a Jesus who is compassionate and empathic and yet also support a president who hasn't the ability to offer true compassion and empathy to others, a man who has a necrotizing case of "it's all about me."

It is beyond bizarre to me.
And I guess it always has been but I didn't have the unfettered time to think about it almost constantly.