Recently, I ran away to my best friend in Seattle.
Part of the rider of good friendships include remembering your worst moments, but never bringing them up unkindly; knowing your secret tells, for better or worse (for instance, if I spend any considerable time listening to Linkin Park, there’s a 96% chance I have something on my mind); and knowing your favorite caffeine and calorie choices.
I spent 48 hours in Seattle. A weekend away. It wasn’t so much running, I suppose, as it was a reset. When you call IT, or the cable company, or Verizon, the first thing they ask is whether or not you’ve rebooted. And as infuriating as that initial question is, it’s often effective (unless the words motherboard are uttered, and then it’s just time to call it a day).
But it takes time to shut down, reboot, wait while the security and Windows screens come back. And all the while, you can’t be sure this is going to be the solution. Often, because I know it’s going to take time I know I don’t have, I delay the IT-recommended reboot. I Google the problem. Then Google the thing that might be the secondary problem, based on my first Google. I consult topic-specific chat rooms. I send an instant message to my in-house expert. I whine a little. And once I’ve exhausted my patience (and everyone else’s), and burned some additional time, I give up and reboot, anyway.
Lately, I’ve been restless, unproductive more often than I’d like, and sometimes straight up irritable. I want to feel better, although I also want to whine a little first, but instead of doing the things I know lead me that direction, I actively choose to just Google the problem. A clean diet, some exercise and a consistent bedtime will solve at least 80% of my problems. And yet… it’s hard with Easter upcoming not to eat the pastel wrapped candy overflowing on the desktops at work. And it’s hard, after a long day, amidst all that candy, not to come home and pour a glass of wine. And it’s hard, after a glass of wine, to think about taking that after-dinner walk.
There’s a song lyric by my favorite college band, Bare Naked Ladies, that says, “There’s nowhere else I would rather be, but I can’t just be right here.” Restless, too much candy, not enough exercise. I bought a book on calligraphy and calligraphy pens. I thought it might be a calming hobby to take up. I follow several Instagram calligraphers who create flowing watercolor creations of affirming and favorite quotations. I could do that. In a quiet room, alone, with good light. I felt calmer already. Before looking through the instructional book gave me performance anxiety. I haven’t uncapped the pens.
Every day, the nation seems potentially posed at the brink of war. We have several crises to choose from, so the odds seem good. Or bad. Clever acronyms – MOAB – not just a Western state desert vacation spot, but the “mother of all bombs” flit across our television screens. If we avoid war, we stand on the edge of a whole bunch of social backsliding. That accomplished, we stand with a box of tinder and an open flame at the base of the few remaining arctic glaciers.
The emperor has no clothes, and we know it; we elected him that way, so it’s hard to say we couldn’t, didn’t see it coming.
This week, my troop of 9-year-old Girl Scouts talked about Title IX (i.e., No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance). We focused on sports, as that’s an easily digestible part of the statute for 9-year-olds. To tell young girls who, for years already, have been playing soccer and training in martial arts, that before Title IX, only 1 in 27 girls played sports inspires mostly polite confusion, which I think is great.
For my generation, Title IX was already a fact of life. Girls were swimming and playing volleyball and basketball and running track. We had Gabrielle Reese and Michelle Kwan and Jennifer Capriati in our corner. In 2011, under the Obama administration, sexual assault and harassment was explicitly noted as a barrier to free and equal access to education for women (and men – just statistically, less frequently). This heightened awareness and additional responsibility should have been the new Title IX our daughters took for granted. And yet our nation’s secretary of education was unable to say, when asked, that she would adhere to that guidance; in fact, some Title IX protections were rolled back within a month of the new administration. How does that happen in a society with 51% women?
I wore a three-seasons jacket all winter. I really like it, actually. It’s cut well and makes me feel pulled together, whereas my traditional winter coat does not. That sucker makes me feel like it’s winter all of January, straight into February. I’m a few layers deep, with no figure to speak of, and can’t wait until spring. And as much as I appreciated being able to wear a slim-cut jacket from November through March, it was a little worrisome. Is winter one of those things that, like emperor penguins and polar bears, we’ll tell our grandchildren about with photos – maybe holograms by then – and National Geographic channel special retrospectives?
We are canaries in a coal mine. Which is ironic analogy, since one of the campaign promises kept by the new president was rolling back environmental hassles that made it harder to deal with coal sludge, ostensibly saving thousands of coal jobs in the process.
Traditionally, canaries sang until the conditions of the mine overtook them, letting miners know that they, too, were in a toxic atmosphere. The canaries were victims of their circumstances and their cages. For all I know their song was a beautiful, even frantic, but useless mourning of their plight. But for us, the cage is psychosomatic.
It’s stressful, watching toxicity spread. And it can bleed from the red scrolling headlines we see on the news, to our dinner tables, to our overfull candy bowls and heavy pours of now daily pre-dinner/after-dinner drinks. Can you picture the Fidelity Investments commercial with the green line? The green line leads you. You simply follow your personally created green investment guidance path to your stable, comfortable retirement goals. Easy peasy. These days, I can picture the same slightly Pink Floyd The Wall, pied-piper follow-me path, but with a tension-headache red banner, leading us from hot spot to pothole to exhausted canary.
We need a reset.
When we start to live in a constant Wag the Dog moment, eventually none of it seems real. We lose our ability to react to the toxicity because it becomes permeating. It’s a slightly rancid strawberry we keep eating because it looks red like it’s supposed to, and it’s summer. It’s a cloudy glass of water we drink anyway, because it comes from our safe, suburban tap. We delay rebooting because it’s a hassle we don’t have time for. But in fact, like penguins and polar bears, we canaries are in trouble.
I ran away for a weekend. When I was coming back to the airport, my driver lamented the deaths of 44 Egyptians during holy week celebrations. “I hadn’t heard,” I said. “I’ve been on vacation and off the grid.” And the red scroll of headline news flickered, stabilized, and was back.
It’s not all bad news. We are canaries in a coal mine, but we aren’t actually caged. Just as the emperor has no clothes, we have no bars save the ones we insist upon.
So, while we can’t commute 1300 miles every weekend for fresh seafood, local wine and steaming mugs of white pomegranate tea shared late at night with far-flung friends, probably a clean diet, some exercise and a consistent bedtime wouldn’t hurt.