A delight (#10)

Yesterday I ran some errands and happened to notice that an Indian grocery has opened up near my home.

So I picked up paper clips and copy paper and proceeded to meander for a few in the grocery aisles (which I haven't done in a very long time in my regular grocery because there are far, far too many people there). 

This grocery was small and pretty nondescript. No super creative decor. Not a huge selection.

But there was enough here to make me feel like I'd stepped one toe into a different world. A world where I could find spices I don't normally see. A world where I could see vegetables that look nothing like the vegetables I usually cook.

Bins full of bittermelon and Thai green eggplant. 

Shelves with ghee, Rusk Elaichi, masala chai, and ribbon pakoda. 

It provided a brief venture from my world, which has become so isolated and quiet these past almost 11 months, into a place that felt new and exciting. 

A delight (#9)

I'm not a "stuff" person, but I'm definitely a "spend money on travel" person. 

That travel has been far (Greece, Italy, Iceland) and close (Cumberland Falls and Land Between the Lakes). 

I keep several large scrapbooks of the places we have traveled since becoming a family of more than 2, and they bring me incomparable delight. 

Last night, I spent time scrapbooking our within-state trips in 2020. 

I didn't feel comfortable last year traveling outside the state, nor do I feel comfortable doing that now. Our small trip scheduled for this coming summer is to a spot two hours away from home. We have invited my parents, my MIL, and my niece (which, if all are able to come, will be the same makeup as our trip in June 2020). 

Looking back on these trips brings me the delight of seeing my loved ones spending time together without masks and concerns for our safety. 

(Empire Bluffs Trail, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan)

We have been supremely lucky to have traveled several times with my brother's family and our parents--to Michigan, to Colorado, to the Smokey Mountains. 

Upper Peninsula, Michigan

We have photos of the kids doing very simple things, including playing cards with their Nana. 

Hilton Head, SC

It is a joy to see the kids when they were little; when their hair was in different styles; when N still wore glassless glasses. 

 Grand Lake, Colorado 

These photos remind me of aggravation because G has never gone on a trip that he didn't do something that drove us freaking crazy. In the moment, it was supremely aggravating. In retrospect, funny and delightful. 

Forest Park, St Louis MO

These photos remind me of the locations we have taken our children to educate them both historically and empathetically. 

Martin Luther King National Site, Atlanta, GA

These photos remind me that even when we were within our house on our devices completely neglectful of each other we also had times when we are completely in the moment with each other. 

Cape San Blas, FL

Inconsistency and/or illogical thinking drives me bonkers

When I think back on why I completely lost my shit and ended up on the news in 2019 after the homecoming dress code debacle at N's school, a large part of it was because of the utter lack of consistency of the school. 

The year before the school didn't enforce its own dress code. If the school administrators aren't going to be consistent, you cannot expect the students and parents to be. Why would they think that suddenly in 2019 the dress code is REAL and ENFORCEABLE when all other previous years it was not.

While I definitely think women's bodies should be not policed, that fact was almost secondary to my main issue which was the utter inconsistency (and the administration calling the cops on their own students for whom they are supposed to be responsible). 

I've had two recent consumer events that have been inconsistent and forced me to write emails with CAPITAL LETTERS.

The first was with Shutterfly.

D has an account on which I log onto and order our pictures. I had gotten some printed at Walgreens and they were blurry. So I contacted Shutterfly customer service via chat (while logged on) to see if there was a remedy. 

The person was very helpful until she requested the name and email of the account. When I said it is my husband's account but the VISA is mine, she said he had to go on the chat or call in to verify. 

At this point, it occurred to me although definitely not this person that I, me, the person currently logged into my husband's account, could type in the chat or even in a new chat: This is DL. Yes, you are talking to my wife. Please give us a credit.

It also occurred to me that Shutterfly has, perhaps, excessive security requirements. I mean, I've had to have my husband verify me on health insurance and his investments, but Shutterfly? 

So my husband had to call in and talk to a different customer service rep who had NO FUCKING CLUE what he was talking about. 

It was an utter joke. 

The second inconsistent/illogical consumer situation is with Ibotta, the online coupon place. 

Now, I have been ordering my stuff online at Kroger and Target and everywhere since March 2020. 

I have been submitting online receipts to Ibotta for the past 10 months.

But apparently, an online receipt from Total Wine is a problem. 

So getting this email forced me to write a customer service letter IN CAPITAL LETTERS in which I said something on the order of

1. Hello motherfuckers. There is a global pandemic and tons of people are ordering online and doing curbside pickup. This is a really stupid time to be sticklers about in-store receipts given fucking current events. 

and

2. You took all my online receipts for the past 10 months and now SUDDENLY you have a problem.

I am not anti-rule.

I am anti stupid rules that companies and schools and governments and organizations don't even follow themselves.

My 13-year-old, after the school dress code incident, told me "You're a Karen, but a good one."

I can be a Karen but I generally won't be one over simple human error. I tip well for pickup orders and generally try to offer grace to others. 

But over things that are probably written in the "rules" in some binder and don't make a lick of sense, those I will go all Kareny over. 

A delight (#8)

I don't send many snail-mail letters, but when I do I like to put a fun stamp on the envelope, a stamp that has a little personality. 

During these past 10 months, I have sent more snail mail than when life was busy. 

N started sending letters to her friends, too, as a way to pass time and stay connected that doesn't involve a screen. 

I have taken to perusing the USPS site more frequently, being sad when new cool designs aren't available yet, and snatching up the ones I can get that aren't your usual flag or flower.

For this round, I ordered Gwen Ifill, Scoob, and Maine. 

But my favorite so far has been the Ruth Osawa stamps. 

One the one hand, this interest in stamps--their colors, designs, and meanings--could be seen as a pathetic way to find entertainment. 

But I like to think of it as an opportunity to notice. 

A delight (#7)

M and one of our cats have a special relationship that is adorable. 

No matter where M goes, Slips is right there with him, meowing and curling her body around his legs. 

She is his good morning greeter, meeting him at the bottom of the steps when he descends with his retainer case in his hands. 

She is his bed buddy when he watches YouTube or listens to music or looks for memes during the day. 

She is his reading pal at night and sometimes steals his pillow. 

During online school, she is his supervisor. 

When he plays video games, she is there. 

She loves to lead him into the laundry room where she jumps on the washing machine and gets lovings (I don't understand that, but cats are weird).

I have taken a crap ton of pictures of them together because they are almost always together.

And every time I see them, I am delighted. 

A delight (#6)

No one loves the pandemic. In most ways it has been gradients of awful. 

It has threatened people's physical and mental heath and livelihoods. 

But it has led to a pocket of delight for me that is, in truth, not always delightful; but overall, in its most fundamental way, it has been a delight because it was unexpected and something I would not have asked for but appreciate in a deep way. 

N will soon turn 17 and is a little over a year away from high school graduation. To have as much of her presence these past 10+ months has been a rarefied gift. 

The same is true with the boys.

That hasn't meant that it has been fun or easy.

There have been crying fits and complaints and angry voices. 

But there is delight in sustained togetherness at a time when, under normal circumstances, we would not be together. 

Under normal circumstances, we would all be, more or less, in our own busy directions. 

I don't cling tightly to phases in most cases. After three children, I have been downright happy to be done with much of raising them---the early mornings, the potty-training, the constant neediness of children. 

I was happy to rediscover myself, my talents and my interests. 

It is a reward to see my children become independent and not need me as much.

But I have found that the pandemic and its enforced togetherness, even when it is annoying or cumbersome, has in its own way been a delight. 

A delight (#5)

I am generally not a person who engages in schadenfreude, but sometimes...I can't help but enjoy it a wee little bit when someone who has a reputation for being a complete asshole gets a little taste of comeuppance. 

You see, I blogged about a situation with a certain school's band director who was an unmitigated dick to me in 2019. 

My better angels did not send a letter to his superiors at the school because I determined that it was unlikely to make a bit of difference. He had been working there for years, I reckoned. And his reputation suggested to me that he likely treated most everyone that way. Why would a letter from me make an ounce of difference?

Imagine my surprise when I read news reports today that the district fired him "on the basis of insubordination, immoral character or conduct unbecoming a teacher, and inefficiency, incompetency, or neglect." 

Sometimes it is a little delightful when what someone reaps gets sowed. 

A delight (#4)

The older I get the more I love sleep, and perhaps that is why death doesn't quite scare me as much as it did when I was younger. 

It is the great not-being-conscious anymore, and no consciousness means no pain, no worry, no frustration. 

Sweet oblivion.

But this morning, I experienced the delight of slowly, deliciously waking up before my alarm went off. 

My brain was awake enough to know it was waking up, but it felt relaxed and not fully "on." 

It wasn't "go time" quite yet. 

For about 20 minutes I fell in and out of light sleep with occasional blips of barely awareness.

My brain was awake enough to enjoy the sensation and to note it as a delightful sensation and then it would gradually fade into haziness. 

Given the events at the US Capitol this week, it was a special and much-needed gentleness to and in my brain. 

A delay in full consciousness when full consciousness feels so unsettling was much-needed. 

We don't know people

I am not a sentimental person at all, but I have realized today that I think I have allowed some form of sentimentality to dupe me. 

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has done this. I think it is probably a human trait that many people share, and it is the idea that if you once knew someone, you know them still. 

The truth is that I don't know anyone completely, not even myself. 

Even though I think I know my husband (whom I've known for 25 years), I don't. Not completely. I make an assumption that I know what he would do and how he would act based on my experience with him and how he has acted in the past. 

But people change, don't they?

And often people do not change. 

It dawned on me today that someone I have known for many years in a cursory way but who I used to be good friends with three decades ago is both very different from what I remember and also not different at all. 

With social media and our insistence on calling people "friends" who really aren't friends, I forget that very few people I'm "friends" with are deep friends. They may be people I know or have worked with. They may even be people I really, really like. They are friends "lite." 

[I'm having a mother memory here whereby I recall my mother lecturing me on the difference between acquaintances and friends, and I think I rolled my eyes a lot, and yet...here I am.]

And having these friends "lite" is not a bad thing. These people make up a community, and there can be fun and support there.  These people can be a network of advice, connections, business opportunities, education. I am in no way suggesting the camaraderie isn't real or important. 

But the downside is that we can feel betrayed or angered or astounded when friends "lite" seem different from how we knew them or what our perception of them was because they are part of our community. 

Social media makes us feel compelled to sound our barbaric yawps (present company included). And when someone yawps in a way we didn't expect, we feel confused at best. Betrayed at worst. 

My memory had sentimentalized my friendship with this person and smoothed its edges with nostalgia.

But what I remembered today is that my friendship with this person ended because of a poor judgment this person made that could have put my life in danger (drunk driving in high school). 

And then I remembered that this person recently made another judgment that ended up in a very public and embarrassing loss of her career. 

And now this person is trafficking in conspiracy theories. 

I say now, but maybe I should not be surprised. Maybe this is a pattern of poor judgment that has only now become apparent to me. 

Maybe this person has changed?

Or maybe this person hasn't?

Maybe I have defined this person based on simply having "known" her (or maybe more correctly, known of her) since I was a young teenager. A long lens facing backward is sometimes fuzzy. 

I generally try not to hold people's stupid teenage decisions against them as adults because I made MANY stupid teenage decisions. I did many things that were idiotic or cruel, and it saddens me sometimes to think that somewhere people may have an idea of me as being idiotic or cruel because I try very hard not to be either now. 

But even if I were to eliminate the teenage poor judgment event, I still have two poor judgment events in the past six months that make me realize I don't know this person and shouldn't be surprised by anything simply because she is part of my social media community. 

Perhaps the only thing we share is that we are each people on the periphery of each other's social media community. 

And momma, I'm sorry for rolling my eyes. You were right. You were right. 

A delight (#3)

I continue reading Ross Gay's The Book of Delights which is delightful. 

When there is a pandemic and you're a compliant person who really doesn't want to have her go with a virus of new origin and are staying home virtually all the time, it makes it slightly more difficult to find delights. 

Did I mention it is winter, too?

However, I did purchase a Christmas gift for my cats, and by my cats, I mean mostly me. 

The room formerly known as dining has become my office and a sitting room for the family, and in this room is a large window. I have placed air plants on it and near it because I'm not a very good plant mother when it comes to soil and indoors. 

The window provides me some distraction during the day, and it occurred to me on a quick run to get cat litter and kibble sometime in early December that the cats would probably love to sit on the chairs (which they already do) and sit on the table (which they already do) and look out the window (which they already do) but have something new outside the window of particular interest to them. 

And it occurred to me that not only would I be entertained by watching the birds who might flit by the window when they visited the feeder, I might also be entertained watching the cats watch the birds. 

A twofer!

And I have been entertained in a quiet way by these feathered visitors. 

I have wondered which ones will be able to squeeze their bodies through the metal rectangles and which ones will be thwarted. I have noticed their sizes and shapes and the colors of their bodies. 

Of course, this is the kind of thing that I would find fascinating before a pandemic, but I wouldn't be quiet enough or home enough to really have it make a difference in my day. 

Life would be too chaotic for me to take delight in a visiting avian friend. 

A delight (#2)

The other day, while a passenger in the car with N on the way to her job, I noticed what I assume was a red-tailed hawk flying to the right of my line of vision.

I don't often notice these birds of prey, but when I do, it thrills me. 

I typically see them more in winter when tree foliage doesn't keep them hidden. There is less visual stimulation all around in winter, which other people hate but I like. 

The starkness of winter is beautiful in its austere way. 

This hawk outpaced the car, and I wasn't sure if it was flying so purposefully to attack or just make it to whatever outpost it had in mind. It landed on a utility pole amongst a large group of small birds. I wondered whether it intended to grab one, but it didn't, at least in the moments before the intersection light changed and we turned. I wondered how the other birds, who sat huddled together, felt to have this strong, regal feathered friend (or foe?) nearby.

Sometimes I see these hawks, or perhaps peregrine falcons, as I'm driving along the interstate roads. Days after seeing this particular bird, I saw another on the ground in the grass. Had he or she just killed an unsuspecting mouse? 

Many years ago, when we still had a swingset in the backyard, I saw a predatory bird of some kind eating a smaller bird. Apparently, our neighbors' bird feeder had served as a buffet that day. I watched the hawk or falcon tear sinewy strands apart and watched feathers fly. 

It feels like a treat whenever I get one of these unexpected bird of prey sightings, a reminder to me that I live in the wild, a wild that we humans try mercilessly to tame.  

A delight (#1)

While I am a Debbie Downer and put zero stock in much of arbitrary New Year's Day nonsense, as a diehard introspective person, I do like the act of reflecting. 

I have just started reading a book of essays by Ross Gay called The Book of Delights, and it has inspired me to try to find more and write about, however, briefly, things that delight me. 

A delight (#1)

For several years now, M is a commando kid, and that is fine. He has recently discovered the joy of really, really soft pants. "Santa" brought him a pair of size XS women's super soft lounge pants, and lounge he does. 

These last ten months or so, M has also decided he likes going shirtless. The hazards of quarantine and online school, I guess. Although he does put on shirts for his classes, virtually all other times, he goes without. 

It is the combination of the soft pants, no shirt, and M's itchiness when he tells a story that offers me delight. I'm not sure if he is actually itchy or if he just needs something to do with his hands when he talks to me and the rest of the family. 

He puts his hands in his lounge pant pockets and moves them in a circular fashion, while also twisting the pants around his waist. As the story continues, he then moves his hands up the sides of his chest repeatedly. 

He isn't actually scratching himself the way one would an actual itch or mosquito bite. It is more just a fiddling, a movement, but it is a regular occurrence that both makes me laugh and also distracts me from what he is saying. M is a fast-talker and often tells me about things that I have no context for (like video games or YouTube videos) so it doesn't take much for me to lose fast track of what he is saying. 

I find this immensely delightful, but it is also easily ignored. Not "important" enough for me to remember much of the time. 

But I think that is how most delights are.