Uncategorized – Page 7 – Life Off Headset

Weekly Recap + What we ate

One week of distance learning in the books! I have to say, it wasn’t as difficult as I had feared. This fall is has had a much more structured and supported learning environment than what everyone (students, parents, teachers, administrators) were thrown into last spring. I felt last spring that there was a lot of independent learning expected from the students. Our school district still has implemented a very long day of distance learning (9am – 3:15pm), but the day is built so that the kids are usually never on Zoom for more than an hour at a time. The one exception is when morning meeting runs into math period – so a 1h 20 m session. But it’s the first period of the day, so not horrible. There is an hour and a half for lunch and two 10-15 minute breaks – one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It seems to be much closer to what I had when I was growing up, where there was lots of outdoor play time.

Wednesday afternoons are designated “independent study.” I’d love to spend a few hours either going on an outing or tackling something the eight year old is independently interested in learning.

I do feel like in person learning is probably more effective for the 8 year old, but at least I am able to be home and support her. I know that this is a luxury that not all families have, so I’m trying to see this as a side benefit of this period of unemployment. All in all, however, the week of schooling went quite smoothly. There were a couple of incidents of accidentally logging out of the Zoom waiting room before class, but hopefully we are turning it into a learning experience on how to tell time.

(Speaking of which – are kids still expected to be able to read analog clocks and watches? I feel like all the clocks on our walls are analog, so this is indeed a good thing to teach the kids. Also is a good lesson in how to count by fives.)

This week was a bit of disaster for the younger two kids’ routines because I was trying to make sure the eight year old got where she needed to be virtually. School started right around the baby’s nap time, making a bit of a mess out of that. I’ve never been one of those people who are slaves to a baby’s nap times, but I do think the day goes more smoothly when the baby has regular naps. I’m hopeful, that having the eight year old on a schedule will be helpful in giving the rest of us a rhythm to the day eventually, though. I can try to fit naps, nursing sessions, and structured activity time for the baby and the three year old around the eight year old’s class, and we can all have recess together. New school year, new patterns for everyone, I guess. It is an ever evolving thing.

Other highlights this week: The baby has figured out how to drink from a straw. At least she figured out how to suck the water up. She still is working on swallowing the water that she fills her mouth with. Half the time she sucks up a great big mouthful and then lets it just dribble out the sides of her mouth.

She has also figured out how to climb up on low chairs. She’ll climb up on them and stand, holding on to the chair back as if at a lectern, her face glowing with pride and accomplishment. It is cute but so scary.

We didn’t get out for as many long walks as we used to, but on Thursday there was a giant downpour and both kids took great laughing delight in running in the rain. It’s funny how these kids don’t like to bathe, but love running outside as the heavens open and unleash sheets and sheets of water.

Two food highlights this week:

The Husband brought home a watermelon from the grocery store. I love watermelon but it does take a while to finish. Now that we have a new full size fridge in the basement, there is not as much urgency to eat it all in one day, which is nice. I’ve been enjoying watermelon, feta salad – something my friend Lizzie introduced me to. Watermelon, feta, a sprinkle of basil. That’s it, simple and tasty.

Leftover rice and salmon, with avocado, umboshi paste and cucumber.

Also – for lunch I’ve been making sushi rolls with leftovers. It’s not true sushi rice, so things fall apart a little bit, but it’s still a tasty way to eat things up. A couple years ago, I picked up a packet of umeboshi puree from a fancy grocery store just outside of Philadelphia. It’s one of my favorite ingredients in sushi; there used to be a Japanese restaurant that had a Ume Shiso roll – just ume paste, and a shiso leaf wrapped in rice. It was the most delicate, delicious thing you ever tasted. I don’t actually know of too many other ways to eat umeboshi puree, so it’s been sitting in our fridge for a while. Surprisingly, though, it is still good, and really made these rolls special.

This Week’s Menu:

Saturday: We had Indian take out from the local Indian restaurant.

Sunday: Lasagna. This was the lasagna the 8 year and I were supposed to make last week, but had to postpone. It was her idea and she helped me make the sauce, mix the ricotta and layer the lasagna.

Monday: Pork and Green Bean Stir Fry. From Dinner Illustrated.

Tuesday: Cauliflower Tacos with Mango Cabbage Slaw. From Dinner Illustrated.

Wednesday: Green Curry with tofu and veggies. I used this new curry paste from HMart and it was definitely spicier than the Thai Kitchen brand that I usually get.

Thursday: The Husband made dinner. Breakfast sandwiches with bacon.

Friday: Pizza and Bend it Like Beckham. The eight year old has been listening to the Aru Shah series and it put me in the mood for this movie, though I hadn’t seen it in a while. It mostly holds up in its story of being stuck between two cultures, as a child and as a parent. The soccer bits and the wedding scene are pretty fun too. (“That’s not football!” the kids said.) I’d forgotten how cringe-y the romantic subplots were, though. I think there are a lot of romance storylines that are not aging well in the wake of the MeToo movement. The realization that power imbalances are not really healthy foundations for romantic relationships certainly has me seeing these plotlines with a new awareness. I don’t think those kind of relationships are necessarily something that is impossible to have now, I just think it needs to be navigated in a more conscious way.

Stage Management Skills in Real Life: Tape, Cardboard, and Creativity

On the radio the other day, there was a discussion about recycling, and they said that cardboard recycling has gone up during COVID. We are no stranger to this phenomenon, having more than done our part to contribute to Jeff Bezos’ wealth. The real cardboard goldmine, however, came courtesy of the new fridge we bought for the basement.

“Make sure to tell them to leave the box!” I said to the Husband when he told me that the fridge was being delivered.

The day the fridge arrived, as the delivery people were trying to figure out how to take the door off the fridge, I waved them down, pointing at the box. “Can you please leave it?” They delivery guy looked at me and laughed.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, and dragged it to the far end of the driveway.

Immediately the kids were entranced and set up shop inside, among the Styrofoam and packing materials. It made a shady little hideout from the 90 degree weather.

“We can’t just leave it here,” I said. “Let’s have a plan.”

The next day, I was playing in the backyard with the two younger kids when I heard scraping and thumping and heaving. I looked around the house, and saw the eight year old trying to heave this box, this very big, refrigerator box, over the front gate and into the back yard.

I wasn’t quite sure what the plan was. Just that it was a big box. When I was little, I read a book called Christina Katerina and the Box by Patricia Lee Gauch. It tells the story of a little girl’s endless adventure with a large cardboard box. Ever after, I saw cardboard boxes as full of infinite possibilities and mutations, and even now I have a hard time throwing large boxes out. “It is going to be something!” I tell myself. After all, the cardboard box was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2005.

The eight year old decided that the refrigerator box was going to be a clubhouse/ lemonade stand. We painted it with some leftover paint from painting her bedroom (turquoise) and the dining room (yellow). Holes were cut to be the service window. The kids moved in and started to play in it, running in and out, serving lemonade, using other boxes to be a pretend counter.

Then rain was forecast and the box was brought inside, much to the Husband’s chagrin. I mean the thing is huge. We folded it up and tucked it in the play room, and the eight year old continued to plot and design. Eventually she fashioned a drink dispenser out of a smaller box and some paper and we slotted it into the side of the larger box.

Inside of a lemonade stand. Yes, our living room is impossible to navigate these days.

The cardboard creative bug was unleashed.

A few weeks later, I saw this DIY large object permanence box on a Montessori website, and decided to make one for the baby. Mine is not as neat and tidy as the one featured, but still, the baby has really gotten into dropping a ball into the hole and looking for it at the bottom where it comes out. She has actually now moved on to dropping cars in the hole and watching them come shooting out the doors. The three year old, too, has really gotten into this.

“More! More! Cardboard creations!” a Gollum-like voice inside me insisted.

Which brings me to yet another stage management skill that has been languishing during COVID: making rehearsal props out of tape and cardboard.

I remember during my first stage management internship at a regional theatre – a production of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians – the props mistress was so excited to have found a set of ten carved Indians on eBay. She was rhapsodic about the ease with which she was able to find these things, and now we just had to wait for them to be shipped to us from across the country. The idea that she could find such a specific prop without having to visit fifteen antique stores or hand make it herself was intoxicating.

The patience and wonder we had with the way the internet made propping a show much easier has worn off a little these days. Now we take it for granted sometimes that things can be clicked upon and delivered the next day. Like on those days when a director demands that the prop he added five seconds ago should have been in rehearsal yesterday.

So what is a props ASM to do when the need is immediate and the Props Master needs at least a couple hours to produce something? Well, if it isn’t readily at hand, you decide that, yes, the performers need something to put in their hands. Right. This. Minute. No, they can’t mime it. So, okay. What are we going to give them? (At one theatre I worked at, the Prop Crew had a tongue-in-cheek rehearsal prop request form. One of the questions on the form was, “Please explain why a piece of 2×4 labelled with gaff tape will not suffice in rehearsal.”)

So you root around, take stock of what there is, scavenge a little, do some magic with scissors, some origami with unpliable objects and then wrap it all in yards of tape to keep it all together.

I have crafted many a rehearsal prop in my time. Janky rehearsal prop construction out of minimal materials is definitely a job skill. You have analyze how the “improptu” is needed to function in rehearsal. Does it need to work or move in a certain way? Is it something that has to be thrown? Sat upon? Exchanged between singers? Does it need to just be the right size and shape to fit in someone’s hand?

Next, you have to balance aesthetics with the function. So you don’t want it to look so ugly that it is distracting in rehearsal, but you also don’t want it to look so good that it becomes the real prop. This is where wrapping the creation in black gaff tape is helpful.

Then you look at what is available and get to work.

Things that are helpful to have for optimal rehearsal prop creation:

Tape
Dowels
Handkerchiefs, or fabric
String or Rope
Paper
Cardstock
Wire
Scissors, or Box Cutters
Tape. Gaff Tape, Spike Tape, Clear Tape. A wide variety of tape.

With those things, I figure you can make just about any rehearsal prop you need. I mean maybe not things that are bigger than a house cat, but really most things. It won’t necessarily be pretty, but it will get you through til the real thing comes. Or until the director decides that was a bad idea after all and cut the thing.

“Improptus” I or my colleagues have constucted: jewelery, cigarettes, cigars, globes, reticules, pocket watches, wands, butterfly nets, miniatures in frames, large pictures in frames, brushes, hand mirrors… the list goes on.

So back to COVID present times and the carboard box city growing in our house – or as my husband calls it, “The Warehouse”. I asked the three year old what he wanted. And he said he wanted a UPS truck.

My friend Kristen had recently gifted us a large box. Originally I had promised this box to my husband to use as cover in the garden later this year, but I figured that there would be no shortage of cardboard in our house, and that a UPS truck was a worthy project for such a large box. So I wrestled the box inside the house and started cutting a front window.

“It needs to have a sliding door,” the three year old said.

This is when I have to start breaking things down in my head. What exactly are the essential elements of a sliding door? Well, a door. And a track. And a handle.

A door is easy – a large rectangle. I cut out a window on that as well.

And a handle is easy to fashion out of a strip of cardboard, though it does take a lot of tape to get it to stick.

Which leaves a track. And I think what is a basic track? Well it’s a groove, I guess. So I cut two long pieces of cardboard to run the back length of the box, bent them to form a place for the door to ride, and taped those to the box. I slid the door in and voila!

I drew a UPS symbol on the box… amazing how much authenticity a logo can give a confection of cardboard and tape.

Next, turning out attention to the inside – some knobs and a steering wheel, all made to turn on cylinders made of more cardboard.

“And it needs buttons,” he said.

Well, that was beyond me. But not beyond that other Stage Management magic weapon…. the Sharpie.

He is delighted with it. He sits in it and drives, “pushes” the buttons, turns the knobs. He fills it with more, yes, cardboard boxes, and delivers his packages around the house. I almost need to find him brown pants and a brown polo shirt.

I’m not sure how long these cardboard creations will last. But, as with improptus, longevity isn’t the point. Even though these things aren’t the real thing, they serve their purpose. There is joy and satisfaction in their creation and there is joy and satisfaction in seeing them put to use. They are perfect for the now. They don’t have to be perfect for the forever.

Musings on a garden haul

This cheery sunflower greeted me this morning when I wandered into the kitchen. The husband had been out early today doing some garden maintenance.

Our garden is, unequivocally, his garden. He pours over seed catalogues, chooses what to plant. His basement work room is part grow room where he makes things sprout from seed and keeps plants alive. In the spring, he plots about mulch and stakes and growth. He drives great distances to garden centers, and brings home succulents on trips. (The domestic trips only, of course.) He devotes a lot of care, energy, and thought into what we can do with the beds of dirt that surround the house, and how they can be cultivated to make our lives better.

I am not a gardener. It can get quite buggy here, and I am a mosquito magnet. Digging in dirt while being eaten alive in eighty degree weather is exactly zero amount of fun for me. Also, I’ve never understood flowers. Sure they are pretty. But then they die. And I think, “Well the flowers are dead, but there’s still greenery – maybe they’re still good!” And I have to agonize about throwing them out and wonder what else I am symbolically throwing out. It’s complicated. I’m probably overthinking it. It also makes getting flowers on opening night a much more wrought experience than it needs to be.

Sometimes I will pull a weed or two from our garden. But only in the shade of early morning or late afternoon. And I have been known to mow the lawn. Actually I don’t mind mowing the lawn. But the Husband actually seems to like it, so I mostly leave him to it.

I will, however, happily cook what he grows. And I will make suggestions as to what vegetables I think would be interesting to have.

This weekend, these appeared on our counter:

And tonight they became this:

There is something very satisfying about consuming vegetables that months ago were just tiny seeds in the palm of your the Husband’s hand.

One year, we had a huge tomato crop and I learned how to can tomatoes. That winter, having summer tomatoes in the midst of cold and snow was magical. It is a little unclear as to whether we will have a bumper crop of tomatoes this year. There are cherry tomatoes on the vine. The kids will pick them and pop them into their mouths. I hear there is a melon or two coming up. The Husband seemed surprised at that.

We are very fortunate to have a yard, especially this year when stay-at-home orders has made the options for spending time away from home fraught with choices and risk assessment.

I do like the magic of seeing things grow, though. Earlier this summer, I did that grade school experiment of growing a squash seed in a jar with a damp paper towel. It was neat to track the progress and watch it sprout.

I get a lot of pleasure from the small joy of noticing that one of the Husband’s plant looks different today. I know, objectively, that things grow and time marches on, but change seems magical sometimes. Especially gradual change – the kind where you don’t see something is changing until you look again. You glance at something one day, and it’s different, somehow. And you ponder why it looks different, and there is a new bloom, or a new sprig or a plant is three inches taller than the last time you really took time to notice. And you think, “What happened when I wasn’t noticing?”

Useful Stage Management Skills in the Real World: Lightwalking

Usually I’m the one who puts the 3 year old to bed and the Husband puts both the baby and the eight year old to bed. Last night we decided to switch and I put the baby to bed. I haven’t done this in a while because it doesn’t go well for me. My method of putting her down involves nursing her to sleep and then being stuck underneath a sweaty sleeping baby because a) she is super sensitive and wakes whenever I move, b) I am too short to reach over the crib railing for a smooth baby touchdown to the mattress, and c) she has my nipple firmly clenched in between her teeth.

The Husband, however, has some crazy daddy magic technique that gets her to go down with minimal amount of crying. Except in the cases where I let her nap too late into the afternoon or she falls asleep during her post dinner nursing session. Then all bets are off and the baby gets to hang out and watch 30 Rock with mom and dad. These incidences are very rare. Dad is that good.

Anyhow, last night, after the Husband explained his flip and settle technique of getting the baby into the crib, as well as his very precise 10 minute walk, 10 minute rock routine, he left me with the baby.

So I got to do something I haven’t done since last October. I got to walk aimlessly around in the dark, trying to keep a little tyrant happy as I watch the minutes of my life tick by. Also known as lightwalking. Okay, so I wasn’t really lightwalking. But it sure felt like it.

Lightwalking, for those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, is when, during the technical period of a show, people stand onstage so that the lighting designer and the director can have bodies to look at as they create the lighting looks. Now who these bodies are vary by company. Sometimes they are volunteers who come and do it for cookies, coffee, and dress rehearsal passes. Sometimes it’s an intern or two or three. Sometime it’s a stack of chairs. At my home company, it’s the assistant stage managers.

Now, I love my job. But there is one part of it I don’t love to do. Okay there are two: 1) I hate having to tell the chorus to be quiet, and 2) I really don’t love light walking. It is physically tiring to have to stand still for minutes (or hours) on end (though a lot of stage managers are good at letting the light walkers know when they can relax and sit down for a second). Also, while often I bring a book or something, a lot of times I can’t really do much while light walking because someone is looking at you – or rather what the light is doing around you – so if you move, a voice from the darkness of the theatre will say, “Can you please look up?” Mentally you have to keep yourself engaged because once in a while the stage manager will send you on an errand to find the crew, or make some photo copies, or some such. So you stand there, a human mannequin, and just let the thoughts run through your head. It’s usually some monologue like, “Do I need to update the paperwork for this evening’s rehearsal? I should follow up on that note. Did I move that Post-It in my book? What’s for lunch in the Canteen? I forgot to tell the Husband that there are diapers in the wash. I have to pay the bills. Hmmm … what is this spike mark here and do we still need it?” and so on.

Faust groundcloth. Look at all those spike marks! Yes, we need all of them.

So over the years I have learned to embrace the special part of my job that is lightwalking. I’ve learned to enjoy my book one page at a time. Sometimes I’ll bring a crossword puzzle, or my fellow ASM will bring trivia cards which we can read to each other over the special ASM channel on our headsets. That latter is actually a fun bonding experience. I’ve learned how fun it is to get to be on parts of the set and recreate stage pictures (Tosca jump, anyone?), even to pretend to be a chorus of sixty with just two other ASMs. I’ve come to love the quiet of lighting session – this loud quiet of work being done, punctuated by the tapping of buttons as the electrician programs the light board, the gentle murmur of voices as the artistic staff contemplates the visual details, the quiet conversations of the crew as they wait in the wings for one of us to ask them to move a chair, or a wall, the soft scratchy brush strokes of the painter as they do touch up on the set, with their softly apologetic reminders of where not to step . I’ve learned to delight in looking up close at our sets – marveling at how the peeling painted foam looks like beautiful medieval rocks from the audience. I’ve learned to brace myself when someone calls, “Going dark!”, ready to have the lights all go out and be enveloped in velvety faux night. And I’ve learn to be really Zen about standing in the dark, to savor being onstage and looking out and appreciate how fleeting the work we do is. The gentle knowledge that standing on this green spike mark, this is where I am meant to be now, and this is what I am doing now, and there is nothing more important I can be doing for the show right now than standing right there, looking into that blinding light.

And last night, as I was trying to get the baby to sleep, I had this realization that this was my COVID version of lightwalking. This walking back and forth in the dark, the quiet murmurs of night time, this holding something ephemeral yet full of life in my arms, this protective possessiveness, this opportunity to be in the moment, in a walking mediation, even this living in fear of failure and tears while being slightly bored… this was where I was, and this was where I needed to be at that moment.

I guess I’m not going anywhere at the moment.

Tough Monday

Yesterday was hard. I was trying to get the kids out for a walk before a 10am online camp for the 8 year old. There was much resistance from the 3 year old who didn’t want to go but also didn’t want to be left behind. There was probably a good deal of exasperation, cajoling, and yelling on my part. Finally, when we were literally half way out the door, the 3 year old desperately wanted his hat. So I locked the stroller on the steps and turned back inside to get it.

Only to see out of the corner of my eye as the stroller slowly rolled off the back steps, tilt backwards and crash down the three steps, landing on it’s back with the baby still buckled in. It was horrifying. And scary. And there was screaming and crying from everyone – baby, 3 year old, me.

We didn’t get out on our much needed walk after all.

The baby was fine. She has a doozy of a scratch on her head. But she nursed and we called the pediatrician and they told us what to look out for and gave us some good reassurances. Basically if baby vomitted more than once and was lethargic, we should call back. Also if “she just doesn’t seem like herself.”

There is something reassuring in this last directive – it reminds me that ultimately we as parents have to learn to know our child and trust our instincts about them.

The baby is fine. She is back to being her happy exploratory self. A little clingy and needy, but that is who she is at this stage.

The stroller is also fine. I was really worried that it wouldn’t be fine. This is actually the second time I’ve had it go down some steps. The first time, when the eight year old was a baby, there was no one in it and the frame broke. But the folks at UppaBaby were able to fix it up. Our eight year old stroller, bought as a steeply discounted floor model, continues to be a workhorse for our family.

And then the rest of the day happened. The eight year old went to online camp, the three year old ran feral. I fell asleep, sewed some masks, made dinner while the Husband watched the kids. The rains started. We got dinner on the table early, the kids helped Husband clean up, and we had time to play UNO before bedtime.

So then in the end it was a pretty ok day. I read somewhere that all that matters about a book is how the last chapter makes you feel. I guess some days are like that too. Funny how at 9:30am the day was the worst day ever. And by 9:30pm the kids were in bed, and it was a pretty good day.

Ten Months

The baby turned ten months old last week.

She is happy and curious. She stands independently and can toddle while clutching someone’s fingers. Her siblings love to take her little hands and walk her around, and it especially warms my heart to see the little human chain of three toddling slowly. The older kids seem as enchanted by her development as I am. I wonder if watching a baby learn to walk ever gets old?

She is starting to get into things, and loves to unload – laundry baskets of folded clothes, drawers of measuring cups, recycling bins of paper and empty containers. The bathroom trash bin. Yeah, that last one grosses me out a little bit. The other day, when my back was turned, she went into our CSA box, found a peach and devoured it, leaving a clean little pit on the floor. It made her so happy and I was somewhat delighted and proud of her ability to forage. With the other two kids, I installed cabinet locks at this age, but I haven’t done that this time around. I think I’m just wondering if I can get through this phase without the extra work…. (We do keep under the sink locked, though.)

AAAAHHHH! I blame her for this too. She clearly does not understand the value of TP.

She eats fruit endlessly and nurses constantly. I think she might be teething. She hates being in the high chair longer than it takes to stave off hunger.

The Husband is the only one who can put her to bed. But she sleeps mostly through the night -meaning 6:00am now, sometimes 6:30am. (Through the night used to mean 5am. It’s funny how relative it feels. Like how last month five hours of straight sleep felt substantial!) This last week there have been a few night wakings, but perhaps, again, related to teething.

I’ve been thinking about where each of the other kids were at ten months, and how each of our kids have had such different experiences with childcare, mostly because of the different work/life situation we had each time. Someone once commented told me that even when you say children grow up in the same household, it’s not really true because a family’s situation changes and every child is at any given age, in fact, growing up in a different household than their siblings had at that age.

The oldest was in an in home daycare starting at 11 weeks old, transitioning to a larger daycare center when she was about a year and half old. Through all that, I was still travelling for work, and she periodically had a patchwork of care when she travelled with us. Usually in Colorado my husband would be able to telework and he came out too. Or one of my parents would come. We also found a daycare in Colorado that had drop in days which we used and there were a handful of sitters. She also spent a couple weeks in California with my parents and went to a daycare by them. It was definitely stressful to figure it all out.

The middle child was just starting daycare at ten months old. Before that, my parents watched him, flying in from California to help when I was working. There was one period when we hired a sitter for a couple weeks, the one time I took him on a gig out of town. Just this past year, when he was 2.5 he started at a larger daycare, but that only lasted seven months before COVID sent him home. We declined to re-enroll him when his child care center opened back up.

And the baby… well I’m not sure when she will get to see daycare. So far, my parents watched her while I was working, and we hired nannies for the few weeks that we didn’t have coverage from my parents.

What to do with our children is foremost in a lot of people’s minds these days and there is no real good solution. In a way, I’m glad that being unemployed has taken away the need to do the risk calculus of sending a three year old to daycare. The financial math of day care costs is so much easier to figure out than trying to weigh what our personal risk tolerance is with the need to work. I’m sure that in the long term being unemployed is going to more detrimental than safely sending our kids back to school, but I feel oddly lucky that the financial choice is easier to make than the health and safety choice as I see other parents grapple with the choice.

Dinner this week – 7/27

I spend a lot of time thinking about food. If you look at the back of my notebook that I keep in rehearsal, you will find lists of food and meals – breakfasts, lunches, and dinner. This is what I do when rehearsals are slow sometimes – I meal plan.

Aside from the inherent nerdy satisfaction of planning, plotting out our dinners is a practical consideration for me. For one, I hate that forlorn 5:00pm look in the fridge when you wonder how your are going to pull dinner out of your rear with a jar of pickles, a block of tofu, and some shriveled carrots. Also – when I’m working evenings, I like to prep some kind of dinner in the mornings for the Husband and kid to eat when they get home – one thing to take off his plate and a way to make sure vegetables get served (if not always eaten). Another thing – I hate food waste, and if I take the time to look through the fridge and plan the week around what’s in there, less food ends up in the garbage or worm bin.

The meal planning has certainly ratcheted up since quarantine. We are avoiding excessive trips to the grocery store so Husband does the grocery shopping once a week. On Saturday mornings, we sit down and figure out what we need to keep ourselves fed for the week, then off he goes to the store. There is something hunter/gatherer about it to me.

It goes like this (as seen in my notebook above). First I write down what we need to eat up at the top. Then from there I figure out six meals for the week. My two main cookbooks are Dinner Illustrated and Indian Instant Pot Cookbook. I like these books because the recipes are for pretty complete meals; I don’t have to try put together this main and that side with whatever starch. We also keep a running list of favorite meals that I’ll look at too. Friday is always pizza. These days it’s take out pizza since our oven is less than reliable. Then at the bottom of the page, I write what groceries we need.

Once I have the meals picked, I assign them to a day. Monday is usually the least desirable meal – this way, the “meh” meal is early in the week. The Husband makes dinner once or twice – usually on Wednesday or Thursday. Then I try to alternate vegetarian meals and meat meals. Sometimes I also look at the weather so we aren’t running the oven when it is 98 degrees outside. Pre-COVID we also looked at when kids have activities and that would be something fast and simple like an Instant Pot meal, or sandwiches.

So this week:

Saturday: Chicken Salad Sandwiches and Cucumber Tomato Salad

Sunday: Potato Salad and Sausage

Monday: Cauliflower Tacos

Tuesday: Broccoli Chicken Stir Fry

Wednesday: Paneer Birayni

Thursday: Green Beans and Tofu

Friday: Pizza

Of course, some days, things go off the rails and we do plan B. Plan B is usually sandwiches. Sometimes breakfast sandwiches. Which the 8 year old can make. On those days when I feel like I just can’t with the dinner plan, I tell her she “gets” to make dinner (yay!). I turn on the stove for her and go pour myself a cocktail. Ok – I don’t drink, so the cocktail is only metaphorical.

Saying Nothing or Saying Something

There has been a lot of talk lately about race in America. Or maybe that is just my left leaning NPR, NY Times, Atlantic Monthly media and social media diet. Also, completely randomly, Robin Diangelo’s book White Fragility came off my reserves list about the time Geroge Floyd was murdered. So I guess I have been spending a bit of time contemplating ideas of what is systemic racism in America today, and my part in it. And wondering if I have anything to say about it. And so I wrote a post about how I felt so very complicit in the current racial climate. How being a “model minority” allows me to reap the benefits of a system that has denied so much to people who aren’t white.

And then I had a conversation with a friend about the idea of White Fragility, and decided to write a different post.

It might have also started with me reading a thread on NextDoor where, in response to a post about speaking to White people about race, someone posted the following:

“I predict … that this thread will turn into another dumpster fire of sincere but mindless regurgitation of “White fragility”/systemic racism talking points from those on the left (with a fair bit and either self flagellation or self righteousness), and then maybe a few angry and exasperated voices from people on the right who will denounce everyone else as “woke” morons. Commenters will be deemed either racists or a idiots.”

And then a couple days later, I spent a morning talking to a good friend about the nature of trauma, and how it can be perpetuated in a way that is difficult to overcome. How trauma can have repercussive effects through generations. And I realized that all my self reflection about my role in systemic racial prejudice in this country is not helping anyone. That my own realization of how lucky I am as a person and as a parent, is a personal journey, not one to proselytize about.

I’ve taken to listening to some more conservative podcasts lately. Initially I was curious how those outside my leftist echo chamber were reacting to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and outrage. I wondered if something truly different was happening, or if this was just another incident in a news cycle fatigued by COVID reporting, an incident amplified by a country worn down by quarantine conditions. And I realized that there are large swaths of the country that do not see value in having a conversation about systematic prejudice and privilege in this country. Some deny it is even a thing. Some think that it obfuscates real issues. Most people really don’t like being told what to think. But one thing is that most people realize that there is a lot of hurt and division in our country. And perhaps that will never go away, and is just a fact of America.

So there’s that. And what to do from here? Or, rather, what do I want to do from here? For all the eye-opening nature of reading White Fragility and the discussion rampant these days about privilege, and how to raise children who are anti-racist, it still seems to me like a lot of jargon. I’ve never been one from protesting; large crowds of people make me very uncomfortable, regardless of whether or not there is a pandemic.

I read this essay by Obama, and it reinforced to me that the most meaningful impact is at the local level. I know the presidential election is the glamorous one, but the County and State level are where most of the real work is done. To that point, this work is not just political, but also economic and social. I think I would like to spend more time thinking about what that means. More action, less analysis. I’m kind of an overthinker, so this might be difficult for me. But I’m going to try.

Books Read in May 2020

Homework by Julie Andrews – 7h 57 m. Technically finished it in April.

Favorite Quote: “I spent so much of my early life trying to unify my need for home with my commitment to work. These days, I’ve come to realize that home is a feeling as much as it is a place; is is as much about loving what I do as being where I am.”

Truthfully, I preferred her first book, Home, to this one. The first book had more details about theatre life and her work. This one felt more like her datebook, regurgitated.

Unnatural Selection: Choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men by Mara Hvistendahl – 9h, 53m. Hvistendahl writes about the deep seated mind set behind prenatal sex selection, and delves into the repercussions of unbalanced birth ratios. Her research focuses on the issue primarily in China and India, though I wished that she had spent more time unpacking the issue in America, especially in the world of fertility treatments. (She does have a chapter about it, but I wish it had been more in depth). As a pro-choice person, it is hard for me to condemn abortion, but there is something really disturbing about sex selection. One of the ironies Hvistendahl points out, is that there is so much pressure for sex selecting for males that even well-educated women do it; technological advances that allow for sex selection do not translate into advances in gender equality. The book touches on the idea of what value do we place on women, and how imparting value translates into objectifying them. When gender ratios are skewed towards men, traditional gender roles are even harder to break.

Memorable takeaway – comparing sex selection with another atrocity: “The most obvious problem with [Female Genital Mutilation] is that is constitutes a human rights abuse. But beginning in the 1990s activists managed to elevate the issue beyond the realm of injustice by arguing that it threatened women’s health.” That is to say health is an effective platform for change. Human rights is not.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai – 11h 41m.

“Everyone knows how short life is… But no one ever talks about how long it is … Every life is too short even the long ones, but some people’s lives are too long as well… If we could just be on earth at the same place and the same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But liste: You tow are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That is a miracle.” -Julian’s soapbox towards the end of the book.

This was a beautiful, beautiful book about love, memory, living, and the people in our orbit. I know it’s about the AIDS epidemic, but the passages about a mother trying to figure out how to be with her daughter, really struck a chord with me too. It was striking to be reading about AIDS while living through a global pandemic. There is the same sense of fear and the same list of medically recommended behavioral shifts. Indeed, I would get their epidemic and our current one mixed up in my head and then feel jarred when there were scenes with crowds of people. I very rarely cry when I read books, but with this one, I came pretty close. Life is too short not to move on. It’s also too long not to move on.

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel – 8h 20m.

“Henry didn’t think Jana was a mean person; he thought she was a good person, with a meanness problem.”

It took me a bit to get into this novel which follows the members of a string quartet from when they are first founded to when they break up, many years later. I felt some of the parts about music were overwritten, but then again, very rarely do I like reading descriptive passages of music; it makes me realize how very personal one’s reaction to music is. Also none of the characters were very sympathetic in the beginning. But 20 somethings rarely are in literature. The got better as they aged.

Twenty-One Truths about Love by Matthew Dicks – 3h 29m.

“Given my advantages, nothing I do will ever be as amazing as an octopus opening a child-proof bottle.”

Pithy, breezy, a fun, fast read. This books was told as a series of lists. I always like books with non-traditional narrative structures.

Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman – Audio book, narrated by Michael Sheen. I

I listened to this as I sewed masks for a church project and I found myself staying up late to sew so that I could keep listening. It was gripping, and Malcolm and Alice were such real, brave characters. I find Pullman’s books make good audiobooks for me because there is a lot of plot, despite it’s big ideas. Spoiler alert: I’ve never been so sad by the destruction of an inanimate object.

The “I Voted” Sticker

Today is the Maryland Primary. It was originally slated for April 28th, but because of COVID, the state moved the election to June 2nd, and made it a “vote by mail” election. I deeply appreciate that the ballots were automatically mailed to registered voters so that I didn’t have to even request one. Voting should be as easy as it is important.

As I’ve watched the Democratic Primary process, with candidates dropping one by one, I came to feel that voting in the primary was going to be a wash. But then I looked at the ballot and reminded myself that there is more than just national politics. There were some local level elections as well. Also, to be honest, I am still somewhat confused by the process of electing delegates to the national convention. I tried to read up on that, but it seems a convoluted system and requires an advanced degree in statistics and probability.

Growing up, my parents often took me to the polls on election day. Now, since my children have been around, they come with me to the polls too. I want them to see how simple, yet important the process is. I want them to see that a lot of people do it, and realize that everyone should do it. This year, we didn’t have a polling place to go to — well, technically there are polling places open, but Maryland has set things up so that you don’t have to use them. Instead, we all walked to the mailbox down the street and dropped the completed ballot in the mail.

There was no election worker to smile and check my ID. And there was no one to hand us our “I Voted” sticker at the end. So after we came home, we made our own sticker.

Afterwards, I sent to it several of our elected officials, with a note asking them to please remind their constituents to vote. I’ve never written to my elected officials before, and I was a little nervous – I mean, I’m sure they get a lot of mail, and this seemed frivolous. But I thought that no one is handing out “I voted” stickers this year, and I wanted to see if I could get ours out into the world. I’ve always loved seeing the wide array of “I Voted” stickers that come across my social media feeds on election day, and this was my tiny way of trying to replicate that.

There is a lot going on in America right now. Certainly the outrage and civil unrest is compounded by a nation of people housebound and living under government mandated constraints for two months. I think that we are feeling particularly helpless and at a loss as to how we can make this country a more equitable, compassionate place. I’m at a loss too. I worry about not knowing what constitutes effective change and what is just lip service, albeit sincere lip service. I worry that I can’t perceive current events as relevant to me, when I know they are. I don’t want to read more media to try to sort this out for myself, so I think I need to delve into some more longform writings on race, class, and privilege. In the meantime, I voted.