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Archives from 2002-2006

My waistline and the state of the world aren’t really connected and yet I pretty much view them as one and the same: DECLINING INTO ENTROPY.

Probably if you boiled all the past entries of this blog/my brain into a condensed slurry it would have a depressingly high percentage of body image issues and yes I sometimes DO think about what it might be like to not constantly dwell on my own perceived faults, like maybe I could free up some neural space and actually remember some stuff and not be forever wandering around the house like Pulp Fiction Travolta going hmm, what’d I come in here for? And of course now that I’m nearly fifty (!) years old I think back on how eternally mad I was at my younger, less-ravaged body and I’m like oh HONEY, so you’d think I would be better at giving myself a motherfucking break, AND YET.

It’s just … there are *flaps hands* things happening. Thingsssssss. New things. For instance, I have gained some weight in the last couple years, no denying that. But instead of my whole self being, you know, proportionately larger, I’m kind of … a whole new shape? One that doesn’t actually fit very well into clothes any more? I’ve never had an hourglass body but nearly every extra inch now gets packed into my midsection. My waist is one clothing size, my boobs are another, and the rest of me is still another, are you feeling me on this? Like nothing fitted fits, because the size I am doesn’t really exist.

My hips don’t uniformly curve out any more, they have these poochy saddlebags. My jawline and neck are blurring and crumpling. My hair, my god: it wasn’t voluminous to start with but now it’s pitifully thin and dry, and when I put it in a ponytail you can SEE parts of my SCALP.

There are times when I feel closest to my best self, when I can neutrally acknowledge that I am an aging human. I can even feel gratitude, and maybe on a really good day, grace.

But most of the time I am a self-centered hot mess and going through Old Lady Puberty has been a real bummer on top of all the other more legitimate and important bummers.

The players:

• Me (47, vaxxed with Pfizer and boosted)
• Husband (48, vaxxed with J&J)
• 16yo (vaxxed with Pfizer)
• 13yo (vaxxed with Pfizer)

We all got COVID, one after the other. First was Dylan, who woke up one morning feeling “not right, but it’s hard to describe.” By that afternoon he was running a low fever and congested. About 2 days later John got sick, and about 2-3 days after that — after loudly and repeatedly celebrating my superior immunity, of course — I woke up with a scratchy throat and went, well sheeeeeiiiiiiiiit.

The outcome:

• Me: 4-ish days of feeling like I had a head cold, never had a fever
• J: about the same, but ran a low fever for 2 days
• D: 3-ish days of cold symptoms, cough that lingered a bit longer, had a fever for 2 days
• R: tested positive, never developed symptoms (the REAL Captain Immunity)

The worst part was the day Dylan first got sick, because of course we wanted to get him tested but there was NARY A TEST TO BE FOUND. The Omicron surge had emptied every store in town of the at-home tests, and testing centers were fully overwhelmed with zero appointments available. After a lot of running around looking for testing options (it did occur to me that ping-ponging all over town while possibly contagious wasn’t the greatest idea) we managed to get him checked at an urgent care and got the positive result we were mostly expecting.

(At this point Omicron is everywhere, but we do know where the most likely exposure happened: from one of the kids’ sports teams. Just about every player tested positive.)

I was so, so mad at myself for not having any tests on hand. I know they are imperfect (J tested negative with symptoms with one test, then positive the next day) but the fact that I had seen them in stores for months and never ONCE thought, oh hey maybe I should have a few of those? I don’t even know. I never considered the possibility that they might not be available when we needed them.

So that’s my assvice for you: if you haven’t already, get some tests.

We all obviously had very mild cases, but of course there’s no way to know that outcome with certainty at the start. There was a strange feeling of freefall to that first positive test: like all this time we’ve been slowly ratcheting our way up some stressful rollercoaster, and finally, in Pandemic Year 3, it’s time, we’re starting the drop. Where we’re all going, we can’t be sure.

(I think of COVID-19, the disease itself, being a little like that giant Plinko setup on the game show The Wall. Like if you’re young and healthy, your ball starts in a certain column and your odds look pretty good. But also that ball sometimes just goes way the fuck sideways for no reason whatsoever and you lose a million dollars/the ability to breathe without machinery?)

There is a forced letting go, I guess. And with that, an equally odd sort of relief: for once, I don’t have to worry about the thing, because the thing is happening right now.

I’ve been hugely curious about what COVID feels like (for mild cases), like is it exactly the same as a cold or is it observedly different? From my perspective, I felt very much like I had a head cold, classic congestion and general malaise, and towards the end I had a slightly juicy cough and a lot of headaches. I also felt very tired on days 2-4 but I’m not sure if that was standard cold-like fatigue or Something Different.

At one point, I decided I was feeling short of breath (oh no!) but then re-decided that what I was actually feeling was like I couldn’t breathe through my nose. There certainly was an element of being hugely fixated on every single physical sensation, which probably upped the overall discomfort factor.

My brain, for a week straight:

Anyway: hooray for miraculous life-saving vaccines, which helped our Plinko balls be in the right place. Also, god bless Instacart and the modern ability to quarantine without ever running out of Triscuits.

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