Sky Butlers.

Back in 2019 I was flying back to Arizona after a job interview in California and at that point I had already not gotten several jobs I’d interviewed for and I was feeling pretty bad about myself. I ended up getting the job in California, it’s the one I have now. The plan had landed and we were sitting on the tarmac and I was sitting in the back of the plane because I prefer to sit in the back of the plane and I was watching over the top of the seats as the passengers did that slow and frustrating thing where they both take forever to gather their stuff and also try to push past the people in front of them. You can learn a lot about a person by watching how they behave during this small moment. You can learn who is organized or not, who is pushy, who is patient, who is kind, who is self-important.

I was sitting at the vert back of the cabin and I could overhear a couple of the flight attendants chatting about what’s next and what city they would end their day in that day and I thought for a moment that I would enjoy that life. The notion of spending the day hoping from city to city, looking at hundreds or thousands of strangers, getting to watch them all in these liminal moments, getting to study strangers for a living, that all seemed really appealing to me. Plus, it would be an excuse to live a slim and streamlined life, since my days would have to fit into a single bag that I traveled with each and every day. I imagined having a cool little studio apartment that I barely ever lived in. I imagined nights at odd bars in strange cities. Having friends in lots of places. Having a life that took place mostly in the air.

Obviously I’m romanticizing that life, but I was having a tough time then getting the kind of work that I wanted and so it was probably healthy to think outside the box of my own expectations. After all, people do live a life like the one I’d imagined. Probably it is more grueling and stressful than I’d imagined. I’d heard before that flight attendants are actually extensively trained and actually highly skilled and have to be knowledgeable about their aircraft, but that they spend 90% of their time doing 10% of what they’re trained for. Most of the time they’re sky butlers, but every once and a while they have to save someone having a heart attack. What a weird job.

That weirdness appealed to me and, if I’m being honest, kind of still does. I even looked into it some, but before I could spend much time on it, I was offered this job and then it was off to California to do what I am doing now. 

And lucky me, because a few months later Covid hit and lots and lots of airline employees lost their jobs and the ones that didn’t were hurtling around the skies in sealed steel tubes with strangers who were so poor at risk assessment that they were on the plane in the first place. It must have been complete terrifying hell there for a while. I really feel for people who had to do that work, it must have been a total trauma and I haven’t really heard people talk about that. Honestly, we have kind of stopped having discussions about the sacrifices that front-line workers made. Probably because as we draw nearer the end of the pandemic, if we talked about them more, we might be asked to actually reward them in some way, which I think we should do, but which this country will never do because we are kind of a nation of assholes. But I digress, that is a topic for another time.

As we creep ever so slowly back toward some kind of normalcy, I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air. My own employer has been making plans about returning to face-to-face work and there are committees and proposals and waivers and union negotiations and clarifications of terms and underneath it all is the implication that some work simply can’t be done from home even though that work has been getting done at home for 15 months. I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air perhaps because we are approaching a point where many of our lives will return to something like normal, like we are all coming in for a landing, or maybe we already have landed (I remember hearing the whooshing noise of a 737 engine when I got my second vaccine injection) and so now our whole society is just sitting on the tarmac and we are learning a lot about each other while we sit here waiting. We are stuck here waiting and thinking about all the things we’ll need to do once we deplane. We are thinking about the lives we live when we are not up in the air, we are getting ready for our return and so we are thinking about what exactly we are returning to.

It is good to think on what we want to return to and what we don’t

It is good to spend this time thinking on the other lives we could be living, it is good to think on the world of possibilities that will be opening to us as the world is reopening to us. 

A lot of lives will be completely different a year from now, not just because of the vaccines, but because of what coming back to life will mean for so many of us. A lot of marriages are going to end. A lot of people are going to quit jobs that they realized they don’t want. A lot of weird little businesses are going to get started because people will realize that life is brief and if they really do want to open that cupcake shop, they had better get on it.

I doubt I will become a flight attendant any time soon, but I’m certainly thinking on it. And that is a good thing.

.

.

. 

To Duvet or Not to Duvet.

I have a small and unimportant quandary.

So I’m a minimalist. I don’t actually enjoy using the term that much because it is ironically freighted with so much baggage as of late, but that is what I am. I am more interested in not owning much than I am in the austere aesthetic, though I do kind of like the aesthetic.

Over the course of the quarantine I have put more effort into making a comfortable home than I would have otherwise. So I probably do have more stuff in my apartment than I would otherwise and lately I have been feeling weird about it. So I have been thinking about going through everything again and doing a purge. So that is Data Point 1.

Here is Data Point 2: During quarantine I had to turn my guest bedroom into my home office and though it still has a bed in it, it isn’t really arranged properly to function as a guest bedroom because it primarily functions as an office and a cat napping area right now.

Now on to Data Point 3: Within the next few months I will be transitioning back to in-person work (though I don’t know exactly when that will happen). I am also beginning to hear from (fully vaccinated) friends and family who want to come out and stay with me, which is lovely and also something I had hoped would start to happen. After all, I live on the central coast of California and have an extra bedroom (because this two bedroom apartment is actually the smallest and cheapest place I could find. That’s a long story and not important right now).

So add all of that up and it means I have to start transitioning my guest bedroom back into a guest bedroom. Since I’d only lived here about five months prior to the pandemic and because the “extra’ bedroom was the last thing I was worried about furnishing, it was never really outfitted properly and was not a particularly pleasant room to be in, though people had slept in it.

Now I am beginning to think about how to make a pleasant and welcoming space for guests to stay in and almost without exception these will be people who are NOT minimalists and who — in some cases — actually think I’m kind of crazy for living the way that I do.

I’d like to provide a pleasant experience for people who come see me, because quarantine has left me feeling terribly lonely and there is little I’d like more than to see people, but, being a minimalist, I really bristle at the idea of buying a whole bunch of stuff I’m not going to use 90% of the time to cram into a room that I don’t use most of the time. I’m staring down the barrel of having to buy extra towels and bedding and probably some bins to organize the towels and the bedding and I need some more lamps (the light in the guest room kinda sucks if the sun isn’t out) and probably a chair and a rug and … other stuff? What goes in a guest room? I’ve never really had to equip one before. 

It feels like my natural inclination to make a bedroom look like a monk’s cell (that’s basically what my own bedroom is like) is probably not what a normal person would think of as pleasant after they had to take a weekend off work and make a long drive to come and visit me.

Surely there is a middle path here that I can find a way to navigate, but I simply have not yet found a way to navigate it. Probably this is what Pinterest is for, right? 

The other thing that bugs me about all this is that at least while the room has been my workspace, I was USING IT. Once I turn it back into a guest room, I will barely be using it most of the time. I would love to give it some kind of hybrid function, but I already have a dining room talke (where I am typing this right now) and a small desk in my living room where I also sometimes write. So I don’t need it to be a home office after Covid. I don’t have any other space-requiring hobbies. I don’t secretly make jewelry or anything, so I don’t know what hybrid function I would try to jam in there.

I also kind of hate how much time I am going to have to spend thinking about all of this. I’m going to end up saying things to myself like, “Maybe I should have a backup duvet …” and that is just going to make me go insane.

Look, I said at the top that this was a SMALL and UNIMPORTANT quandary. At least you know I am being honest with you.

.

.

.

A Pretty Silly Self-Reinforcing Behavior.

Throughout the pandemic, there have been occasional days here and there where for various reasons I had to go into the office to do something or get something. These always felt like lively events. Any valid non-grocery reason to leave the house was basically a field trip during quarantine. Yesterday though, I spent a full 8+ hours in the building working with people and around students (everyone is vaccinated and everyone was masked up) and it felt less like an exciting non-standard event and more like a preview of the kind of work life I will likely be returning to in the next few months and I have some mixed feelings about it.

This whole time in quarantine I have said that I am eager to (responsibly) get back to something that isn’t working from home. I have not really enjoyed it, but I guess I have become accustomed to it. It felt weird yesterday. It felt abnormal, because, of course, it was not normal.

Get this: I had to leave the house early because I had to GET GAS. I had to use my own time and my own money so that I could put gasoline into my little car SPECIFICALLY so that I could then spend MORE of my own free time driving TO WORK. I had to use MY OWN time and money in the service of a job that was not compensating me for any of that.

Now I know that I am simply describing the basic functioning of a capitalist society (ie: the exploitation of labor in every way that is still legal), but it felt unreasonable.

I already understand that I’m not going to get the system to change on this point, but I am describing how it FELT.

After 15 months of having to commit a lot of energy to drawing lines between what is work and what is life, only to have work consistently fail to respect those lines, it seems that as we begin to return to something like “normal”, all the little things from the Before Times are going to be thrown into a sharp focus as they start to return to our lives. I work to make money and then have to spend that money on a car and gas so that I can get to work so I can make money to pay for the car and the gas to get to work … etc.. That all seems like a pretty silly self-reinforcing behavior, doesn’t it?

I recognize that I’m not breaking any new intellectual ground here, and it isn’t even like I didn’t know any of this (I’ve read Adorno and Althusser, thank you very much), but it was just funny to LIVE it yesterday and — this is the important part — to be AWARE that I was living it as I was watching the gas pump tell me how much it was going to cost to get to work.

It gets even stranger when you zoom out to see the whole picture of the whole quarantine work-from-home situation. I have had two work computers plugged in and running for the last 15 months and I have used them both extensively in my work, but I don’t get a stipend in my paycheck to cover that additional cost of electricity. Meanwhile my actual office has been sitting empty with the lights off that whole time. The entire cost burden of what it takes to get my job done has been shifted from my institution to me. Multiply that amount of money against the number of people like me who have been paying it and I imagine you’ll end up with a staggering sum. An operational cost that has been forced onto the employee to ensure the continued operation of the institution. That just seems bonkers, right?

I want to be clear, I recognize how lucky I am to have kept a job this whole time and one that can be done from my apartment, but that being said, I still think these are worthwhile things to ponder. 

Don’t even get me started on the amount of additional work people have been doing either because working from home is less efficient (so they need to work more to stay on top of workloads that were never reduced or even properly adjusted) or because the complete collapse of the work/life barrier has made it easier (ie: basically guaranteed) that work will flood out beyond its confines and drown people’s lives. This is PART of what has happened to me, but only part. I do know anecdotally from others though, that when you’re “home office” is a laptop on your living room couch, then you’re never really “off work” because while you’re supposed to be eating dinner and winding down, it is just SO EASY to check your email, then respond to some emails, and then do some research for some emails, and then before you know it you have accidentally worked an extra three hours when you were supposed to be sleeping. All the things that were sold to use as improvements in connectivity — that were supposed to improve our lives — have made existing just terrible. Where is the stipend in our paychecks for that?

I didn’t intend to go off on a Marxist rant or anything this morning, I’m just beginning to do the math on what it will mean to return to something like a normal work life. This is a calculation that many of us are going to have to do as we emerge from our quarantine caves into the blinding sunlight of the world we haven’t experienced in a very long time.

I really do hope that some changes come out of everything we have been through and everything we have learned about ourselves, our systems and each other. I hope that happens, I don’t know that I have faith it will.

.

.

.

One Day I Got.

Yesterday I drank nearly a gallon of water and I ran eight miles. Those things did not happen simultaneously, but they did both happen yesterday. I only ate healthy things. I did not drink wine and I did not watch TV. So if I can just have days like that for the next month (or two or three), then I think I will end up in a situation where I feel better and look better and looking better will help me feel better. I’m kind of excited about the prospect of all that.

But remember how one of the key parts of this process (which I started yesterday) is keeping my job in its box? Well today I have to LEAVE THE HOUSE early so that I can PHYSICALLY go INTO WORK by 8am, which is half an hour EARLIER than my normal work day starts. So I got precisely ONE DAY where my job lived up to it’s part of the bargain.

All the people I’m going to be around today are vaccinated and we’ll all be doing the mask thing, so I’m not super worried about that part, but can we all just be like DAMN!

ONE DAY I GOT!

This should be recoverable though. Going in early means leaving early and so I should still be able to run later. I’ll take some healthy food with me and I’ll take a bunch of water (since communal things like water coolers are no longer allowed).

Within the next couple of weeks I will learn when I’m supposed to start phasing back into normal face-to-face work. My guess is that I will probably have to start going back in July, but that is just a guess. And believe me, I’m excited to go back, in theory. I have not enjoyed work-from-home, but after 15 months, I certainly have gotten used to it. So the transition back is going to be weird and is going to require me to again construct a whole new schedule and built a whole new routine. However, there is nothing I can do about that right now.

Right now I need to wrap up this post so that I can finish getting ready for an actual commute followed by a day of in-person work. My fear is that I will just be exhausted by the end of the work day, but there is nothing I can do about that right now.

Sorry, I know these posts about my boring ass life are boring, but it is good for me to write them and I don’t know why I am apologizing to you since no one reads this blog and therefore you do not exist.

.

.

.

Day 1 (For Real).

Okay, today is the day I am getting things back on track.

I have refined my daily schedule a little more. There is no junk food in my apartment. There is no wine in my apartment. I have pretty clean food to eat this week. I have vitamins and supplements on the way. I have engineered what should be a relatively low impact work week. My running gear is all set out and ready to go for this afternoon. There are books to read set out in my living room. More than all that, I have tentative plans to travel with vaccinated friends to a beautiful lake house in June, which means that I have a whole month to clean up my life and maybe even lose a little of this quarantine weight before I spend time around people again, so that maybe I don’t have to feel so terrible about my body.

So I have a plan and a goal and a timeline. 

Does it get better than that?

I even moved my dusty sit-up bench into my home office where I work all day so that I have to LOOK AT IT all day long. I know how I am and I can make myself do sit-ups if the thing is right there all the time. 

What I have learned over the last few months (having several bad moths and one good one) is that I do genuinely feel better when I living cleaner. I love me some potato chips, I love me some red wine, but I also love being someone who can go trail run a 10k without any real preparation. I like being someone who doesn’t pull their pants up over their little belly bump while they are sitting at the computer. I like being someone who can carry groceries up the stairs without feeling a little winded. I think that I would like being someone who is comfortable talking his shirt off around other people (a type of person I have never been even once).

I’m in my 40s now and this is when the decisions you make really make a difference. I was really fat in my early 20s and I managed to work off that weight. In my 30s I learned that I like to run and backpack and be outside and I learned how to eat better and pay attention to food and that combination of things helped me stay at least a little lean. Now though, I work an office job, I have weathered the anxiety and depression and loneliness of the last year, and I can feel all of that made physical in the way my body looks and feels and so I can’t just keep doing what I did in my 30s, this body won’t let me coast on that anymore, so I have to become actually serious about this stuff. So let’s consider everything so far this year as test runs; the good months and the bad ones, they helped me to figure out what I need to be doing.

Now is the time to actually do it all.

I need to use both hands to keep my work life inside its box and I need to keep myself motivated enough to stick with the clean living long enough that it becomes habit. That will probably take a few weeks to get rolling.

You want to hear something silly? I have even printed up little signs and posted them around my apartment. They are not motivational, so much as they are reminders that I have plans, goals, and a timeline.

Does it get better than that?

.

.

.

Obligation.

I’m short on time this morning (because work) and while I am trying to make that happen less (I’ll think on it some more this weekend), I don’t like not spending a little time in the mornings sitting with this keyboard. So while I don’t have the time to say much, I thought I would post this poem by Stephen Crane, because it is something that I think about a lot, especially when things are a little difficult. I have always found it to be freeing and stoically beautiful.

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

.

.

.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged.

 

Have you heard about this Supreme Court case where a high school girl got kicked off her cheer squad because she posted a Snap saying, “Fuck cheer”?

She said other stuff too, but apparently it was the “vulgar language” that got her in trouble.

Now it has made it all the way to the Supreme Court as a first amendment issue.

The whole thing is so dumb that it makes me angry. 

I’m not like some crazy free speech advocate of anything, but this is just so clearly a situation where a teenager was being a teenager and adults who are accustomed to having power overstepped their authority because what is a teenager going to do about it?

This is the kind of thing I think about in the mornings when I write these blog posts for noone to read. There was a time when if you Googled the phrase “Republicans are terrible” this blog would show up on the first page of results. I write about my life here and what it is like to live my life and I have always been comfortable doing that because I really don’t care. I know who I am and what I’m like and for the most part I am okay with all of it. I’m not really trying to hide anything and — as you can clearly tell by now — I’m not trying to make myself look cool.

I have always been surprised by the low key but ever present pressure of adulthood to stay quiet and to not confess to anyone that you are in fact a person existing in the world and not to admit that doing so is hard. This is especially present in professional life. More than once while job searching people have suggested I delete this blog and I was always of the opinion that, simply, I wasn’t willing to give up this part of myself for a paycheck. The first time I met my current Dean he said, “I’ve seen your website,” and I was all embarrassed only because I hadn’t updated it in a long time.

In all my years of adulting, if this blog or the stories I’ve published or the dumb cartoons I draw have ever caused anyone to look at me funny and say, “Well that is just not proper behavior” I have never heard about it. I have no doubt people have said such things, they’ve just never felt strongly enough about it that I ever had to hear about it.

So now imagine being this teenager who did — essentially — the same thing I am doing right now and having to fight that kind of lunatic idiocy all the way to the Supreme Court. I think her legal team should take a real close look at her cheer coach’s Facebook page, as it is a truth universally acknowledged that all gym teachers were present at the January 6th terrorist attack.

This is all a pretty roundabout way of saying that what we should all be doing in life is applying to those in power the standards that they seek to apply to us. I think everybody would calm way the hell down about basically everything if it was somehow clear that the same standard is applied to all of us.

Obviously the reason we don’t do that is because the same standard is not, in fact, applied to all of us. There are people with money and people who are pretty and people who are tall and people who are white and people who have power and the yardstick used to measure a person seems to shrink or grow depending on who is standing next to it.

So stay tuned to the cheer girl’s upcoming Supreme Court case, we might get to see if any of that will be changing anytime soon. I’m not going to bet any money on it.

.

.

.