• Previous posts

  • Two new delights
  • Less noise, more me
  • Good times
  • Not Ken’s Dream House
  • The joy of different
  • This must be the place
  • All of the feels
  • Life update: endings and beginnings
  • Adapting to the lasts
  • At the same time
  • Take a picture it’ll last longer
  • Horsin’ around
  • Surrender, Dorothy
  • College let-go
  • End of summer this-and-thats

Archives from 2002-2006

I have a little paper journal that I’ve been writing in for several years now, ever since my first hospice patient told me she regretted not keeping a diary and advised me to do so. Every few days I update it with a few random sentences about daily life: Went to D’s 8th grade bball tournament. Driving practice with R. Currently watching ‘Billions’.

The last couple years I’ve sprinkled in inadequate pandemic updates, jarring little segues from Did a workout with Jodi! to 800K people dead. In the same way, I have now documented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; while it felt almost sacrilegious to try and condense the horror of it to a few words (adjacent to the thrilling mention of an orthodontist appointment) it felt equally impossible to make no mention of it whatsoever.

It is of course a privilege to be pondering such things instead of, say, being actively shelled by tanks.

There’s a particular mental loop I’ve found myself in, over and over throughout the pandemic: feeling deeply affected by everything that’s happening, then berating myself for feeling anything other than gratitude considering my relative good fortunes, then going back to feeling terrible because what kind of monster just is grateful and enjoys life right now when there’s so much legitimate awfulness going on, and so on.

The main problem, although I suspect there are many additional downsides, with swinging between doom-wallowing and self-flagellation is that it’s hugely ineffective and really good for nothing at all except spiraling into paralyzing anxiety.

The only thing I’ve found to help with the onslaught of bad news is to detach from it. I don’t mean ostrich-style and oblivious — as you’ve probably noticed, it’s actually damn near impossible to opt out altogether unless you’re in a tech-free silent retreat or something. I just mean scanning the news a few times a day instead of installing a powerful and continuous IV drip of it directly into my amygdala.

Still, it’s hard to know where to send one’s despair these days. Is it over the lingering spaghetti-stain of a global pandemic? The endless shitshow of staggeringly fucked-up politics? Actual warfare footage being turned into upbeat TikTok content?

Sometimes it’s all about bringing myself back to the minutiae of my diary. Haircuts, sports practices, dinners, all the tiny moments that make up a life. Life goes on, whether or not you’re paying attention.

We are back home after a week in Kauai, and I could regale you with vacation slideshow descriptions of melting orange sunsets and glittery blue tropical waters and obligingly dramatic whale breaches, but do you want to hear about how amaaaaazing this getaway was OR how it almost all went to complete shit in the Lihue airport?

Travel woes tend to be more memorable than travel wins, which is why I’m sure the beach times will fade all too quickly but I’m not likely to forget the visceral flop-sweat sensation of our vacation being waylaid by quarantine exemption rigamarole and it was ALL MY FAULT.

If you haven’t traveled to Hawaii post-COVID, there’s a fairly involved process in which you must apply for quarantine exemption, either by providing a negative test or showing that you’ve been vaccinated. This is all done via the Safe Travels website, which is not technically a complete piece of shit but is definitely shit-adjacent, particularly when it comes to mobile access.

I’d done all the prep for me and the kids weeks before we left, laboriously filling out the forms and uploading vaccine card images, but for whatever reason when we arrived in Kauai only my own vaccine info was there. This we discovered after being shuttled to a special line for people who hadn’t been greenlit prior to departure; your special QR code gets a green checkmark once you’ve been approved, and most folks were cleared before the flight and had wristbands to prove it. (I had of course noticed this, in a hmmm kind of way, but figured it was like the TSA line: sometimes you sail right through, sometimes you get the intimate muffin-top pat-down.)

Inconvenient and irritating, but not a complete disaster since we all brought physical copies of our vaccine cards, is what I thought. The person checking for the GREEN CHECK could surely just verify the children’s actual irl cards with her own eyeballs and issue the check RIGHT THEN, is what I thought. But instead we were booted from the (increasingly, worryingly long) line and told to re-upload the images before we could try again.

So while many many many minutes ticked by and we all came to deeply regret the various February-in-the-Pacific-Northwest outfits we had worn on the plane, I entered into the fight of my life with that goddamned website and my phone. I re-discovered how well I function in stressful situations, which is not very well at all, and of course I could not get over the fact that I had already uploaded the images weeks ago and kept loudly mentioning that as though anybody cared, as if one single overworked and over-it airport employee was going to be like, OH WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY, right on through with you guys then!

Anyway, it all eventually worked out, the images got saved in the right way and despite no one actually checking our physical cards, I guess that was good enough and certainly not a pointless bit of bureaucracy that could easily be circumvented with a free image editor, and on we went to baggage claim where our suitcases had been forlornly rotating on the belt for so long they’d been placed in the lost and found.

Everything else was mostly smooth sailing and it was a lovely and peaceful stay. Our last trip to Poipu was in 2017, and while of course traveling now is different and vacationing with teenagers is uhhhhh different and I’m different (for instance, more prone to having a sagging body part rudely squeeze itself out of its Miraclesuit confines, ruptured-Pillsbury-can-style), there was a lot of fond familiarity.

We booked this trip so long ago, far enough back that it felt safe to make the commitment — surely things will be okay by THEN — and then of course things remained uncertain and Not Okay, and pretty much until we had cleared the Green Check Big Boss I was more than half-convinced the trip would just … evaporate, to be filed into the bottomless pandemic bucket of Let’s Keep Perspective and Gratitude (But Also Wow This Fucking Sucks). It felt like a dream being there, the good kind that I want to try and hold onto.

(I know, right? How did they get this BIG, and how is Dylan serving such strong ‘I had to find a Halloween costume at the last second so I guess I’m a tourist’ vibes?)

← Previous Page — Next Page →

• My product review site:

  [Older recommendations]