Month: March 2020

quarantiny starter day #1

Posted on by metaphlame

I hate sourdough, but beggars can’t be choosers when there’s no bread anywhere. Nor yeast, apparently. My friend whose boyfriend has done his own starter for bread for years sent me this way for a small, less flour-intensive starter session. I only have flour through a delivery accident so it’s precious to me.

Once I have a starter, though, I plan on using cornmeal for bread, thanks to Bow and Arrow. Because again: no flour. (For more indigenous foodstuffs, check out Uproxx’s list of examples.)

Per the Cook’s Illustrated article, people are apparently coming up with punny names for their starters (since they’re all unique to the environment that spawns that specific yeast culture; for example the hallucinogenic yeast that grows in Massachusetts and could have influenced the Salem witch trials). Vincent Van Dough, Jar Jar Stinks, etc.

Mine shall be Robert Breadford.

quarantine brownies

Posted on by metaphlame

So a good way NOT to sleep train your kid is to start it, then have a sick husband, then get sick yourself then have a pandemic sweep the globe. I spent the hours of 2-6am, this morning and last, with the baby asleep in my arms, in a chair, because I thought if he got sick I’d never forgive myself for letting him scream when I could have held him. If they even had NICU beds for him, since apparently they are emptying those in favor of more adult ICU beds.

So we have little sleep and less chocolate in this house, and I couldn’t fix either one but I could at least make the latter stretch a bit more. Hence this recipe, made for the very last chocolate in your house: chocolate sauce.

I don’t actually like chocolate sauce all that much, and wouldn’t have had it in stock had not one disaster after another last month inspired my husband to come home with ice cream, but all they had was vanilla-based which is never enough chocolate for me, so he brought sauce too. And it sat in our fridge for a month after that, until now — another crisis. However, it turns out that getting large amounts of chocolate sauce out of a squeeze bottle is an exercise in futility.

Drastic measures must be taken.

Anyway, I didn’t add the frosting the recipe calls for, both because it would be needlessly messy and because this was the very last chocolate in the house. Nor did I add nuts, because I don’t like crunchy stuff in my soft stuff. And these are still surprisingly chocolatey, for brownies with only sauce to provide the brown part. One of the recipe commenters complained that it was less like brownies and more like a Texas sheet cake. I have no idea what a Texas sheet cake is, but these are perfectly fine brownies, elevated to hallelujah status given our limited quarantine supplies (so many beans…so many lentils…) Chocolate doesn’t fix everything or even, well, anything, but it can make your late nights or early mornings huddled over the doomsday articles on your phone a little more bearable.

valley of enchantment

Posted on by metaphlame

Really kind of glad on the timing with our exercise bike purchase. Again, this is far less of a disruption for my daily routine than it is for most — no kid yanked from daycare, no formerly face-to-face job juggled over conference calls — and we are lucky enough to have outdoor space we can spend time in safely. We are not locked up on a ship or in shoebox of an apartment (like the one I spent H1N1 in, hurgh.) We are lucky.

But it’s not like we own a farm or a forest or anywhere large enough to get a decent workout in. And being able to expend yourself physically matters so much. Especially when you are mentally exhausted by the dissolution of so many familiar things. By the need to badger people you love into taking care of themselves. By the fear that your son won’t grow up properly socialized because he wasn’t allowed to. By the truly cretinous behavior of the people in charge of this mess.

Everything that needs to have been said has already been said, thousands of different ways, by people who suddenly find themselves with far too much time in which to say it. I just want to work my body until it lets my brain rest. I’m grateful that we have equipment that lets me do that.

Maybe one day I’ll actually get to visit Patagonia, whose greener parts in this ride by Nicole Meline (who, on the trip, IS reading To Wake The Sleeping Self, ha!) remind me of my favorite parts of Montana and California.

But the way things are going, I don’t think I’m going to make it down there anytime soon.

hunkering

Posted on by metaphlame

dock

My husband did not have coronavirus. He had the flu. I know this because I didn’t catch it (and I already had the flu last fall).

What I did catch was a shitty, noncommunicable infection that rushed me into urgent care on Sunday. I did not want to be there and arguably…should not have been? My healthcare system has the capacity for telemedicine. They advertise it! Yet when I called in saying “hi yeah I know you probably don’t want me in there because I have a fever and chills and muscle aches,” they said I was fine. Because I hadn’t been to China, Italy or Iran.

THIS WAS SUNDAY. SIX DAYS AGO.

If you wondered how hogtied health systems were by slow-to-evolve government guidelines, this is it. They knew we had community spread at the time. They KNEW it. But they could not act on it. So — and I actually tried two health systems, because mine didn’t do urgent care on weekends so they sent me elsewhere — two different health systems had to give me the same line. As I sat there wobbling in my seat, pale as a sheet and in a great deal of pain and with a fever that jumped from 96 to 101 in four hours (do not recommend!) I asked if they wanted me to at least wear a mask.

“Up to you, really,” said the woman behind the desk. “You won’t be waiting long, if that helps.”

Yeah, well. I didn’t take a mask because I  was the only person in the waiting room, my [assumed!] disease wasn’t communicable, and because I didn’t want to be robbing them of a mask they might seriously need later. But it still seemed kind of…shitty? I had a lot of problematic symptoms from the COVID-19 list and if they believed so much that mastitis was what I had, why couldn’t they goddamn videocall me to confirm it, rather than making me come in? If they had to SEE me to confirm it, shouldn’t they have made me, with my fever, chills and muscle aches, take a few more precautions? But nope, they were still operating tethered to the travel advisory warning, which meant that as a non-traveler I was not a risk.

Kiiiiind of bullshit.

Anyway that was days ago. Now everyone is (understandably) panicking. Husband still sounds like a chainsaw in his post-flu coughing, which does not bode well for a potential NEW respiratory infection. Fuck. And as we discovered earlier this week, two sick people trying to care for an infant fucking sucks. At least we already stocked up on supplies two weeks ago, before everything sold out. So while grocery stores were full of endless lines yesterday and everything from toilet paper to poultry vanished off the shelves, we were already hunkered down with our combined bodyweight in beans, rice, oats, lentils and canned vegetables, plus a month’s worth of baby food so the little guy doesn’t lose his exposure to (and thus, gastrointestinal tolerance of??) solid food during this debacle.

Every so often — so, several times a day — it will feel familiar to me, and not scary, all this prepping. It will feel like prepping for so many hurricanes as a child. Filling the tub, buying the food, stocking the batteries, then walking across the street to the dock and watching the water rise higher and higher, up through the wooden slats to lick your feet. Dad always had to take the ships away to safety in the Gulf of Mexico when that happened, so it was always just Mom and us and I can’t imagine, now, how she didn’t project fear onto us. It always seemed so controlled — exciting, especially at the thought of having to (I childishly imagined) bundle everyone into the car and drive inland to some bed and breakfast in the hills where we could become farmers if the hurricane took away our house and all our stuff — but never scary.

It’ll feel familiar like that, and then the vastness of the thing will hit me — the fact that schools are closing all over the country, that people who have no connection to each other are doing the same panicky things, sharing the same panicky advice; people around me are getting tested and so are relatives on the other side of the country — and none of it feels liked charted waters anymore. And I mean it isn’t, I know that.

I am relieved — obviously first and foremost — that it doesn’t hit kids too badly. But I am also relieved my son is so young I don’t have to explain any of this to him. Or reassure him. Or hide my own concerns from him at length. I was always afraid of that part of parenting — of having to bury your worries and frustrations so that they don’t harm your kid. Obviously sensible explanations and discussions of fears are called for, but I mean…no child of mine should feel the way I do when I sit there scrolling through pandemic preparedness articles, or those noting how ill-prepared we all are. You have to suppress that. I’ll take up that burden of parenthood when I get to it, but at the moment, I’m glad I don’t have to. He doesn’t understand any of this, and so his delight over blocks or new food flavors or birds hopping around outside is untainted by fear. And we never go anywhere anyway, so he’s not about to feel constrained within our four walls or — thank god — our fenced yard. His world continues on as usual, albeit with his dad more visible for awhile.

Hopefully that is all he takes away from this.

stop selling me the chance to become you

Posted on by metaphlame

yoga

Okay, so, I consume a lot of wellness media. My immediate impulse is to apologize for that, or to explain it, because people in the midwest generally just…don’t. And, by and large, they aren’t well, either. Not that more meditation or yoga or something is going to fix them, of course, but mostly they are interested either pretending that everything is fine or in medicating the issues under the rug and out of sight, rather than fixing the life that led them into those dark pits.

I don’t listen to podcasts, subscribe to yoga apps or buy pseudo-bullet journals (I have a real one; I don’t need one flavored in wellness) to avoid the midwestern fate, precisely — I was arguably, although not particularly knowledgeably, into this stuff during the last New Age wave in the 90s, led to it through innumerable childhood writing workshops, Pure Moods, and the persistent juvenile need to feel different — but I did have to some reckoning when I came back here from California. There — albeit, of course, with the occasional too-deep dive, funded by too-deep pockets, into navel-gazing ala life coaching and Goop — it’s not out of the norm to be pursuing wellness. No one looks at you askance, or feels like they need to chime in on whether or not they approve, of you making time in your schedule for exercise, yoga or meditation. It’s just a thing enough people do where it’s unremarkable.

Here, that is not the case. Here — especially at this time of year — it seems like people pursue misery…aggressively. “Ha HA, functioning mind and body! I’ll show YOU how to slam on the brakes!” Obviously no one is doing this consciously, but Not Giving a Shit is very much in vogue here. About others, yes, but more about oneself.

All of which is to say that yes, I do perk up like a meerkat on the savanna when some new wellness trend comes across my radar, because there isn’t a damn soul I can bounce such ideas off of out here, and I don’t want to abandon all the wellness goals I reached out in California just because I’ve returned to somewhere having goals is viewed as, somehow, embarrassing.

But there’s a rising trend even among the people I’ve been following that is frustrating: the idea that in addition to whatever one’s followers follow one for (yoga, athleticism, healthy eating, you name it) one must also market the ability to become a wellness entrepreneur.

Gag.

ayurveda

“Become a yoga instructor! Sign up for my YTT class for just the low low price of $500!” “Join my community of like-minded women who want to become their best selves AND make money doing it! Come to my entrepreneurial retreat in Bali for $7000!” “Learn how to sculpt your body AND your social media profile!”

No, no, and no!

Obviously I think it’s great that these people came into the power to become who they are, and to reach their audiences — which include me. I say obviously because I mean, here I am happily following their workout plans, taking their courses, listening to their podcasts, etc. But I don’t want to be them. In the last year it seems like everyone became more interested in helping people become wellness personalities than in helping people become well. 

And that sucks! I don’t want to be an entrepreneur! If I did I’d go to business school or audit marketing classes or something! What I want to do is stretch my muscles, still my mind, and build my post-pregnancy body back up. Not into some Instagram wellness goddess, either — just into me. How can you be taking yourself seriously when you proclaim to your followers that you have the ability to help them become their highest selves, when your idea of their highest selves appears to be you?

There’s so much wrong with that! The vanity, the manipulation, the slimy salesmanship. Obviously you’ve got to make a buck to survive but let it not be by telling me that I need to be you. I don’t want to be you! I want to be me! Just a more limber, flexible version of me! I don’t want to lead a class, I don’t want to be a leader of any kind! I’m quite happy being an eternal student. Let me be that. I will throw money at you to let me be that. I was throwing money at you to let me be that.

influencer

It feels like a shitty thing to resent, especially when the vast majority of these personalities — at least those I’m interested in; I read John Updike’s S. and know the Bikram fallout, I’m justifiably skeptical of the good-faith non-creepiness of male gurus of any kind — are women, whom technology has enabled to reach innumerable people they couldn’t have from whatever tiny studio they would have been slotted into on either coast, even just ten years ago. I’m sure they’re excited about what they’ve been able to achieve and want to share it with others. But…if it would be possible to save that hustle-based mindset for some separate space, that would be great. I don’t want to be an influencer, I don’t want to be coached on how to acquire sponsorship deals…I just want to do yoga. Or ride a bike. Or eat good food. Let me be the student in that. I neither want to be the teacher, nor asked to.

“Just stop whining then and don’t watch/listen/subscribe to those parts,” is the kneejerk answer. And it’s true, I don’t sign up for those parts — which is easy, since they are there to make money and cost a fortune. But it’s not their existence that bothers me — it’s the framing around them. Over the last year, all of the wellness people I follow appear to have adjusted their outlook such that becoming a disseminator of wellness content — Content with a capital C — is now the highest end goal. Not personal growth or improvement. So many people want to talk about their enlightened moment when they realized how to link business with wellness and this is the moment we are coached toward. The message is now about finding your brand, rather than finding yourself.

And that’s kind of bullshit.

If you are purporting to help people value themselves, you need to be sending the message that they are worth valuing, above and beyond their ability to ascribe a monetary value to the time they spend parroting your dogma to others. Acting like the most well you can be is when you’re making money off of telling someone else how to be well is…shitty. Like a vast wellness ponzi scheme. It will never pay off! Accept that people don’t need to become you for their wellness to be worth your time. And if that doesn’t ring true for you…maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.

one of those weeks

Posted on by metaphlame

In the past week:

  • both dogs almost died
  • one of those almost-deaths was my fault
  • my father fell for an obvious social engineering scam, such that
  • my son’s information went for sale on the dark web
  • I obsessively read about COVID-19 with all the fervor I used to reserve for natural disasters as a child
  • I congratulated myself on already living a life of such comparative isolation that two weeks of quarantine didn’t sound that different than usual
  • I stocked up on mountains of dry goods, canned goods, and disinfectant

And today, my husband sent me a text of his fever temperature from a Walgreens parking lot where he’d stopped to (out of character enough to be cause for concern in itself) check on his way home.

Now I am buried in a pile of dogs next to a crib in a house where every doorknob, handle, flat surface has been gone over with disinfectant wipes, and where I have left food on disposable plates from our wedding (still!) in a lockdown zone outside husband’s door. I hope bone broth is as magical as they say it is because I have lots. This one in particular got rave (texted) reviews from my patient. It smelled like Thanksgiving.