Weekly recap + what we ate: off balance

This was my first week back at work. Prep week, where we get things ready on our end for rehearsals to start. It was a little bit of a struggle because there were some childcare issues so the Husband and I had to split our time watching the baby for the first three days. Oh my goodness, huge hugs and props to all the working parents who juggled kids at home whole working… it’s all kind of a mess, and continues to be, I know.

I did make it back into the office. My desk was pretty much as I left it 23 months ago, including the above pictured joke pad that one of my colleagues left me. The last time we worked on a show together, we would read a silly joke page after every rehearsal day, one of those things we did so we would remember to laugh at least once a day. The pictures of my kids were still pinned to my cubicle walls, though they were all two years younger, the baby only five months old when we were all sent home from work. My pencils and post-its were where I had left them in March 2020, the binder of the show I never opened sat next to the groundplans for the shows that opened but never finished their run. My hot water kettle, waiting to be filled with water and be set to work burbling hot water for my afternoon tea. It was almost like stepping back and picking things up right where we left them, only we are now all wearing masks and a new sense of fragility and gratitude.

Working in theatre is not a normal 9a-5p job, and over the past months I’ve thought a lot about how I can do better at balancing the inconsistent hours with some consistency in the things that make make me feel human and not like a worker bee. The hours can be long and odd, and there is this notion that people should make sacrifices for their art, but I think that saying art is about humanity is pointless if I’m sacrificing my own humanity to help create it.

I’ve made a list of things that I want to make sure I find time for even when things get busy.
– Sleep. I’m a huge revenge bedtime procrastinator. Lately, though, I’m finding that maybe because I’m getting older or maybe because of the rhythm and demands of pandemic life, I really feel it when I only get 4-5 hours of sleep several nights in a row. One night of 4 hours might be okay, but more than that, and I crash hard on the subsequent nights. So yeah, asleep by midnight is my goal.
– Time outside. I don’t know that I’ll be able to make the 1000 hours outside goat of 2.75 hours outside every day, but I do want to find at least 30 mins a day to be outside. Hopefully I can still walk the kids to the bus stop and school, so that’s at least 40 mins. But the days when that doesn’t work out, I can take time at lunch. Last week on my lunch break, I sat outside to eat lunch and then took a walk around the block, which I thought worked out well.
–Communication with family/ the Husband. I think the person who feels the most pressure from my awkward hours is the Husband who is at home with the kids every single night. A lot of our stress comes from the evening hours being inconsistent – some weeks I’m home two nights a week, some weeks I’m home for dinner, some not…. I want to make sure I communicate with him ahead of time the expectations for that evenings and weekends. Also we need to set time to sit down and look at the calendar so that things don’t fall through the cracks. (hello, upcoming tax season!) And then remembering to call home on my dinner breaks to check in since the Husband is often asleep when I get home from the evening rehearsals.
– Meal plan and stock up on healthy snacks. We haven’t been great about meal planning the past few weeks, and I want to be more deliberate about it – particularly meal planning dinner with the Husband so that the burden of dinner doesn’t fall completely on him. Whenever possible, prep dinner before I leave for work so that dinner is simple when he gets home. Also having healthy snacks in the office for when the hours get long.
– Exercise – even if it’s 15 minutes of yoga in the morning, I want to have a more consistent plan. I also want to see if I can get a short run (not that I do anything but short runs) in when I have long breaks between rehearsals.
–Drink water – I realized last week that because I have to wear a mask all day, I’m not drinking as much water as I normally do. So I just need to remember. Maybe I can make it some kind of automatic behavioral thing…
–Making time to journal/write/plan/read. Activities to clear my head and help me keep things in perspective. Sometimes I can lose track of the world happening outside of the rehearsal room or the theatre

So that’s the aspirational plan to stay human.

This episode of the Happiness Lab about anger popped up in my feed Wednesday evening as I was making dinner. Somewhat ironically… I had had a tough ten minutes involving noodles and grocery resentment. The moment resulted in me throwing my favorite kitchen spoon in frustration and anger. And my favorite kitchen spoon broke. It was not a great moment and now my favorite kitchen spoon is irretrievably shattered. Something about the directions on the noodle being only in Japanese and then them turning into a gelatinous clump in the pot and dinner being jeopardized (of course my mind spun and catastrophized) and not being able to go to the store and choose my own noodles and n0 one coming to help me (though I don’t know rationally what anyone could have done to save the clumpy noodles)… anyhow. Not my finest moment of zen and calm, I am somewhat ashamed to say.

And you know what, it all turned out fine. I rinsed the noodles, pulled them apart by hand and they were delicious. I apologized to the Husband for yelling and looked sadly at the broken spoon. The Husband, very sweetly was already trying to find a replacement, but I’ve been trying to find a replacement for ages and have been unsuccessful. And this is actually the second time I’ve smashed a kitchen utensil in anger. So there is that.

Afterwards I was listening to that Happiness episode on anger, and something they said stood out for me – on the podcast, the therapist/expert Faith Harper said that holding in your anger is like pushing down a beach ball under water; eventually it will pop up and hit you in the face. So the trick is being able to take a step back and figure out what your anger is telling you because emotion is your body and brain trying to tell you something. I’m going to sit with that for a while. Because I think often I try to rationalize away my anger, and really the emotion can be more useful if it is accepted than if it is dismissed.

Two quotes from Harper that I really want to remember when I need to be forgiving of myself and of other people:

“You’re not responsible for your first thought. You’re responsible for your second thought and your first behavior.”

“We’re not perfect… I don’t know that we get better so much as we get better at it… Nobody has this down; we are all works in process”

Some hodge-podge bits from the week:

This lost doll at the playground, waiting for her owner. Kind of creepy, kind of whimsical:

It was the Husband’s birthday this past week. He has said he didn’t want a cake, or any celebratory dessert. But I couldn’t just let his birthday go by like that. So I made him a key lime pie. It’s one of his favorite desserts and it’s so super easy and only takes about 45 minutes to make. The ten year old made a slideshow presentation for him where she asked me and her siblings our favorite things about him and then compiled them into slides. It was so super cute and thoughtful and made me laugh.

I found myself downtown one day last week, and decided to pick up Chinese take-out from this place where we used to eat all the time when we were young urban city dwellers. The kung pao chicken is the Husband’s favorite, so much so that we ordered a tray of it for our rehearsal dinner even though we had moved into the suburbs by then. Much to our surprise, the owner himself drove the food all the way up to us in wintery rush hour traffic.

Anyhow, as I was waiting for our food to be ready, I wandered down to the used bookstore down the block. It’s the kind of place that has carts of books out front for $4/each. I found this book among the piles and it immediately took me back to my childhood:

It’s one of those books put forth by National Geographic in the 80s. We had a copy of this book when I was growing up, and I loved looking at the glossy yet raw pictures of life in the various parts of China. Even though in the book, Taiwan was included as part of China, I never felt any kind of kinship with the Asian faces in the pages; it all seemed so different and exotic. There was something odd, too, about my parents, who have always been staunchly pro-Taiwanese Independence, having a book that celebrated China.

For some reason the first line of the introduction have always stuck with me:
“When I was a child my mother warned me, as I dug a large hole in our backyard flower garden, that if I kept on digging I would end up in China.”
As a child, this idea was fascinating- digging a hole to emerge in a place so different from where I was… it seemed not like the introduction to a coffee table book, but rather the beginning of an adventure story.

And this week- the first glimpse of Spring. Is it too early? Will they make it? Stay tuned to find out….

What We Ate:

Saturday: Grilled veggies and pork chops using a bulgogi marinade. There is something really fun about grilling in 30 degree weather. I was always a charcoal grill person, until I got at gas grill and realized how much easier it was.

Sunday: Leftovers.

Monday: Chicken Katsu and Cabbage Salad from Dinner Illustrated

Tuesday: Breakfast Sandwiches

Wednesday: Orange Tofu and Sugar Snap Pea Stir Fry.

Thursday: The family had tortellini and red sauce and salad. When i got home from work I had half a pack of olives, croutons, and the leftover tofu from Wednesday. Eaten standing up in the kitchen while trying to urge the kids to get ready for bed.

Friday: Pizza and Frozen. It was the baby’s turn to pick the movie so we lined up all the animated dvds that we had and let her choose one. I think she picked Frozen because she loves snowmen.