This is a sleep book by a woman, for women. (Take ‘women’ to mean ‘people with proportionally more estrogen, progesterone, etc.’) Shelby Harris is a psychologist and sleep expert, and also a mom of young kids. She gets all the social, parental, and technological pressures that impact our sleep. The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia may actually help where nothing else did.

I read a lot of insomnia books because I have a parasomnia disorder, and I’m always looking for new tips. Not every insomnia book mentions more serious problems like mine, and it did come up, but I will give the caveat that what worked for my night terrors isn’t really addressed here in explicit detail.

The basic idea behind this book is that changing any one factor will not solve sleep problems by itself. That is 100% true. The premise is to use tracking methods and very specific behavioral techniques to improve the ratio of time spent in bed to actual time asleep.

This stuff works. I know because many of the things I did to resolve my sleep issues show up in here.

I kept meticulous records of my sleep - with more detail than the sleep diary in the book - and I am sure that if I hadn’t done this, I never would have figured out the root cause.

I became very careful with the timing of when I ate and hydrated. Start early and cut off three hours before bed. (If you get night terrors, or your kid does, please don’t eat anything right before bedtime!)

I ruthlessly eliminated naps and forced myself to go out in bright sunlight and stay awake if I needed to.

I took up running, dropped my extra weight, and got fit.

I cut out soda, anything with high fructose corn syrup, and basically all junk food. Then I increased my vegetable consumption fourfold.

One of the most important points in the book is to distinguish between sleepiness and fatigue. This would have been really helpful for me to know 15-20 years ago. “Tired all the time” doesn’t always mean insomnia or a sleep issue; it may be fatigue, and fatigue may be a sign of something else.

I encourage anyone with sleep issues - which is apparently about 2/3 of all women - to read The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia. Take its recommendations seriously, do all the steps, and keep records of your results. If you respect the process, you can free yourself of the problem.

Favorite quotes:

Even as a psychologist and a sleep expert, I’m not immune to a poor night’s sleep now and then. I just know how to prevent it from becoming a regular occurrence at this point in my life.

One of the goals of insomnia treatment is to have you think less about your sleep overall—just as you probably were not too focused on it in the past, before your sleep problems began.

We built a thing. I’m calling it a hummingbird tower. It’s both a fun and pretty project, and a direct example of how manifesting works.

(Or does not work).

I have a friend who has lived in California for many years, but she and her husband both grew up in different parts of the country. Apparently they don’t have hummingbirds in those areas, because my friend had no idea that you can get hummingbirds to fly right up to your window throughout the day. If you live in a hummingbird area, nothing could be easier.

I looked them up out of curiosity, and it turns out that in North America, they live on the West Coast. That means if someone lives far outside the region, say, Maine, a project like ours would be unlikely to work.

First rule of manifesting: Start with something simple and straightforward that has a high chance of success.

What I wanted was something nice for a wedding anniversary gift for my husband. He is notoriously almost impossible to shop for. (When in doubt, may I recommend dried blueberries). I wanted to get him a hummingbird feeder, because he had been commenting on the one bird that occasionally showed up in the tree outside our apartment.

There are some constraints with our current apartment. We can’t drill into the stucco and we can’t hang anything from the roof. I would have to find something that either clamped to the railing or stood on its own.

As I looked at free-standing hooks, I stumbled across one that also had rings for flower pots. It looked sturdy and had good reviews. Great, I thought. I can get him the hummingbird feeder, and then he can pick out some hanging baskets and some flowerpots of his choice for the rest of it.

Then I ordered it and somebody broke into our building and stole it from the lobby, which was very annoying, and the company refused to replace it since it had been delivered inside our locked building. All I can do is hope that young thief didn’t throw it away, since it was fairly expensive, but rather gave it to an unsuspecting older relative. If someone somewhere is enjoying it, I suppose I can tolerate that.

I ordered a second one and fortunately got an email notification when it was delivered. By that time, our anniversary had passed, and the moment was somewhat spoiled, but I handed it to him and told him what it was.

He set up the plant stand that weekend and immediately mixed up some hummingbird food and hung the feeder.

This is where the manifesting part works.

I had two wishes. One: More hummingbirds! Two: Make man smile!

I had strong reason to believe that I could do both, attract the hummingbirds and please the man, if I took action. I was right.

There he was, hanging around the window, looking around, waiting and waiting for the hummingbirds to come.

It took about six hours before one came to take a drink.

By the next day, there were three distinct birds quarreling over the feeder, chasing each other out of the tree and buzzing around from early morning until sunset.

The next thing that happened was that my man took me up on my offer for the rest of the gift. Let’s go to Home Depot, I said, and you can pick out any flowers you like. Having known him for fifteen years, I was 100% certain he would enjoy this.

This is one of the secrets to long-term love - and friendship, too. Understand what the other person truly loves and facilitate it as often as possible. Usually it’s a very modest, easy, and inexpensive thing. Sometimes it’s the opposite of a thing, like knowing which people hate having their birthday acknowledged or don’t like listening to talk radio.

I happen to know that gardening is one of my husband’s very favorite things, something he misses keenly and something that is hard to do on a small, shady, rickety balcony.

We went to Home Depot, somewhere we used to go together all the time when we lived in a regular house. I knew it was going well when he got a certain bustling manner about him, and we left with a cartful of plants and pots and a bag of soil.

The first thing he did when we got back was to pot everything and arrange all the flowers. Almost immediately, one of the hummingbirds came out and sampled several of the blossoms, even though the feeder was hanging inches away.

The next weekend we went back, to get a few more pots to put around the base of the hummingbird tower. I laughed to myself, because this gift was going even better than I had hoped, and the entire thing was less expensive than, say, a new electronic gadget.

The hummingbird tower has turned out to be a really great anniversary gift. It’s something we both can enjoy. The hummingbirds are endlessly entertaining, and my little parrot likes watching them too. The flowers have utterly transformed our dinky patio, an area we didn’t use at all last year, but which is now the highlight of our apartment.

Best of all, something about this gift really seems to have touched my chosen mate after all these years. He has been extra-sweet since then. He’s also picked up something like 20% more of the housework, with no discussion.

I offered to get a second one, but we decided there wasn’t really enough room. It’s just right.

Now, there’s something missing from this story. I mentioned my friend who didn’t know that in California, you can basically snap your fingers and have hummingbirds start hanging out in your yard all year round. Her birthday is in a couple of months and I secretly got hold of her mailing address. For about ten dollars I can send her a hummingbird feeder. Her husband likes to garden, too, and I have a pretty good feeling about how it’s going to turn out.

I’m sharing this as a COVID survivor, so if you insist on finding a way to associate my personal story with body image issues, I guess I can’t stop you, but that is not what this is about.

I started 2020 with the declaration that I was going to “get my body back.” At the time, I meant that I had gained weight and it was getting in my way. I had no idea that just a few months later I’d be fighting for my life, and that “getting my body back” would include the ability to walk across the room without hanging on to anything.

Maybe some people can put on weight, and it’s mostly muscle, and it gives them power and vigor. I’m guessing. That was only ever the case for me for a couple of months out of my life, when I was training hard four days a week, right before I got my orange belts in Muay Thai and Krav Maga. I could do fifty burpees!

Usually, on my body and in my life, extra weight represents fatigue and illness.

One of those unfortunate signs has been respiratory issues. At one point I wound up coughing up blood, had to use an inhaler for months, and the nurses kept asking if I was sure I didn’t have asthma. (If I did, nobody told me). I was at least 30 pounds overweight back then.

I made the connection when I was sick with COVID. I spent a lot of time feeling very low and mopey, very much in the mood to blame myself for everything I ever did wrong in my life, wondering how I had brought this on myself. (By going to stupid brunch, that’s how). It occurred to me to wonder if I would have remained asymptomatic if I hadn’t put this extra weight on in the past year.

What the average healthy person does not feel is the sheer weight of having stuff on top of your lungs. It doesn’t matter what it is - a bag of flour, a book, a hefty cat, a pile of laundry, or an impressive pair of bazongas. When you’re having trouble breathing, you feel it. Your chest muscles start working much harder to get air into your lungs, and *shrug* weight-lifting is weight-lifting.

Same with the throat. The single biggest risk factor for sleep apnea is neck circumference, and that is probably why it is common in professional football players. Big necks.

Nobody ever says, Hey, if you drop some weight, your sleep apnea might go away, your asthma might improve. But they probably should. It makes me angry whenever I find out that a doctor has been withholding information from me that I could have used to make different choices.

Anyway. I’m finally starting to feel well enough post-COVID that I decided to try to drop some of this extra weight again.

I resisted Doing the Obvious, which I usually do because The Obvious is always annoying. Otherwise we’d all do it right away. In this case, I knew that keeping a food log was the only thing that ever helped me reach and stay at my goal weight. I did it for an entire year, and maintaining a steady weight was simple and easy. Then I figured I knew what I was doing, so I quit keeping the food log.

Then I started boxing, and I would need a three-hour nap after training, and my husband said, “You need to eat more, babe, you’re putting on muscle.” Nobody ever needs to tell me twice that I need to eat more! Almost instantly I put on 15 pounds.

Almost instantly, I started having health issues. Even as I was kicking butt (literally) in the mat room, working out harder than I ever had in my life, cranking out pushups like a teenage athlete, I started getting every cold and flu. Whatever I was doing, it was demonstrably not helping my immune system.

What a food log would have revealed at the time was a series of double helpings of oatmeal, two-hander sandwiches, energy bars, oh, and, a lot of pizza and Mexican food and donuts.

I’m not eating that way anymore; haven’t been since I quit the martial arts gym. As the months went by, I was stuck at a plateau and I couldn’t figure out why. Surely I eat sensibly!

I had gained ten pounds since I contracted COVID and I had no idea why. It wasn’t like we were going anywhere. No travel, no restaurants.

This is what I found out. It’s easy when you’ve done it before and you’ve learned the basics. It’s easy when you have a sincere desire to learn the truth and you know you are ready to make a change. That readiness usually comes out of frustration, annoyance, and maybe even a certain level of disgust with the current situation, such as: Why do I keep getting sick??

I was eating too much for breakfast.

I was eating too much for lunch.

I was eating an afternoon snack that I probably shouldn’t have been.

I was eating too much for dinner.

I was snacking too much on the weekend.

There ya have it. Same story as last time. Eat 5% too much at every meal and any mammal will steadily gain weight. Will a hummingbird or an iguana do that? Not sure.

I rolled my eyes, sighed passive-aggressively, and determined that I knew what to do. It’s straightforward when there is consistency across a day and across a week. I learned several years ago that it’s a lot easier to do body transformation if you eat basically the same things for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and beverages every day.

I cut back the double helping at breakfast. I cut the afternoon snack. My hubby and I both agreed, since we take turns making dinner, to add in more greens and cut back a little on anything that is not green. I’m giving a side-eye to our weekend popcorn and what exactly goes into Fancy Breakfast, but I’d rather make adjustments on the five days than on the two days.

Sure enough, I finally broke through the plateau that I’ve basically been stuck at since January.

I was so excited that I jumped off the scale, my mouth hanging open. What, already??

Body transformation projects will be different for different people. Mine is mostly about my lived experience, my mood and my energy level and my health results. It’s somewhat about awareness. It’s also about bodily autonomy. This is my vehicle to do with as I will. When I pay more attention to what I’m doing in default mode, I like my results better.

For complicated reasons, we had brief access to a car. We were going to have to return it, obviously, and I wanted to use the opportunity to drop off some donations at Goodwill. There is one about a half mile from our apartment, quite close in walking terms, but only if you’re not lugging a 15-pound box of stuff.

I checked the website in advance, because these places are notorious for having different hours and rules of operation. Five p.m. Great. It was not quite three.

We pulled up at 3:05 pm. I got out with my basket.

NOPE.

Apparently the donation hours had changed the day before and they were now closed at 3:00 pm.

Uh, but, I’m standing right here, and the door is still open, and it’s now 3:06?

NOPE.

I felt wilted and humiliated and frustrated. Now what was I supposed to do??

Of course none of that was the fault of the young employee who relayed this message. It was probably not her policy and she was probably quite tired of getting pushback from people about things that were outside her control.

I’ve been that person, berated by hoi polloi because I wouldn’t sell them alcohol during prohibited hours or take returns without a receipt, among other crimes against humanity. Far be it from me to ever be the worst transaction of someone’s day.

Still I was pretty cheesed off.

We wound up still having access to the car the next day. I thought, what the heck, let’s give this another shot. I have zero closet space, and this box is taking up valuable real estate in my tiny apartment. I recalled the hours of drop-off as 10 to 3, so I called ahead to triple-check.

Oh, we close at 1:00.

What?? Okay, seriously.

I kept those thoughts to myself and simply asked, “Is that every day?”

“It depends.”

It was noon, so we hustled it over there, hauling the big clunky box back down the elevator for the second time in under 24 hours. We weren’t convinced they would actually take it off our hands until the trunk was slammed shut, at which point we did a victory dance.

Then we took the borrowed car down the street and had it washed and vacuumed, because that’s how we roll.

It remains a mystery how these charities that exist on donated goods and volunteer labor can pick and choose what they take and when they take it. This experience of being sent away with my attempted donation has happened more than once, in multiple cities. That’s why it’s good to do a bit of research ahead of time. Who takes what?

There are some surprising items that most charities won’t accept.

Plastic garage shelving

Furniture of any kind - depending on location - but especially not glass furniture

Baby stuff like high chairs, cribs, or strollers

Electronics - and this completely depends on size and type

We tend to give things away rather than sell them, even if they might fetch a decent price, because my patience has been completely worn away by dickering with cheapskates. I mean, I’m a tightwad, but there is an ethical code to this stuff. Don’t ask for an 80% discount on something that is already 80% cheaper than retail.

I’ve used Freecycle, Craigslist, and Nextdoor to give stuff away. Each of these services has resulted in a barrage of frantic emails and texts asking if they can get whatever it is, only to ghost and not pick it up. After a certain amount of time, I’ll move on to the next person. It has taken as many as four tries to get someone to actually pick up the thing they wanted. This is true when it’s listed for free, and it’s also true when it’s something for sale. I can only guess that some people get that eBay-type thrill of winning an auction, without any real desire for the item in question.

There’s a limit. There are only so many individual listings that I have the patience for. I’ll usually only do it for large items I know I can’t donate, like a table or a box of Mason jars.

That leaves smaller, random things. Clothes, old housewares, maybe books. I’m not going to sit around waiting for my neighbors to finish fighting over a lamp we bought at IKEA for $10.

It would be nice if there were somewhere in the neighborhood where we could exchange stuff. We have a few “little free libraries” where the trade in used books is brisk. They really aren’t big enough for other types of items.

In other neighborhoods, people have been known to leave free stuff on the curb, or set it on the ground next to the dumpster. Neither of those things are an option where we live right now. Logistically I can’t imagine where we would host a yard sale, either, even if it weren’t a pandemic and even if I hadn’t sworn off them several years ago.

Throwing stuff in the dumpster and sending it to the landfill, when there’s nothing wrong with it and someone could still use it, is the line I just can’t cross. Landfills are a pretty extreme problem even when they’re filled only with useless trash - why make it worse?

Also, I remember the long years when thrifting was my best option. I wonder what all the young families and student households would do if there were no thrift stores?

Things are weird due to the pandemic. There are millions of people looking for work who will be feeling the financial effects for years to come. There are also tens of thousands of people who have used the stay-at-home order to declutter their homes and garages. News reports have shown donation centers packed full with lines of cars waiting to drop stuff off. It will take a while before it starts flowing out again at the rate it went in.

In the meantime, I’m thrilled to have two square feet of space back in my little apartment. Here’s hoping I won’t have to arrange another drop-off until the next time we move.

I have some stuff to figure out. Don’t we all?

I work 8-6 at my new job, and it’s been hard to find the time to write my blog five days a week as well. Essentially all I do is work, try to put together a blog post, do chores, and sleep.

I hate the thought of just... having a job... forever and never doing anything else.

Also I’m like: ‘side hustle’ - on what side?? There are no sides??

I’m tired all the time.

(Isn’t everyone though)

But most people aren’t post-COVID tired, which is a different order of beast.

My big logistical plan for the past couple of months has been to brainstorm a list of blog topics, and then “catch up” on one of my three-day weekends so I can free up some time in the evenings.

But then all I do on the weekends is sleep.

I’m barely even reading any more.

Worst of all, I feel absolutely starved for alone time. I’m not an introvert, I’m a shy extrovert, but introverts will recognize this problem. I’m in meetings for as much as 7 hours a day. I have to be “on” and listening and ready to be called on at any moment. While it’s exciting and interesting, it’s also pretty draining. Sometimes I shut off my computer at the end of the day and just walk into the bedroom and sleep for two hours.

At the beginning of the year, what I thought I would be doing was finishing my book proposal. I had an outline and a lot of material, I was jazzed and productive, I was “in talks” about it with a publisher...

And then COVID happened and the entire premise of my book kind of just blew away. The world changed and my book was for the old world, the world that was.

Gosh. I’d love to write a new book for the new world... but when? When exactly is that supposed to happen?

I’ve always felt that the fountain is ever flowing and that the ideas are always there.

That, though, requires carrying the bucket to the fountain and hauling it up.

When though??

Maybe all of this is just because I’m so physically tired, and still trying to heal my lungs and my heart after nearly dying five months ago. Or maybe it’s just reality.

Maybe most people really can’t have a challenging full-time job and write books at the same time. Maybe it really is a zero-sum choice, one or the other but not both.

Or maybe I’m just tired.

I hope that this dilemma speaks to you. As you read this, I hope you recognize where you have challenging choice points in your own life and that you’re able to make more time to think them out than I have been lately.

I’m not a caregiver, I don’t have kids, I don’t even have a commute right now. I don’t need an excuse to be tired, though, or to feel like I have trade-offs that I don’t want to make. I don’t need an excuse to feel like there are demands in my life that have me spread thin.

I certainly don’t need an excuse to feel like I often create my own issues in my life.

This is where strategy is so important. This is where it’s so important to pull away for an aerial view sometimes. We say, “This is how it is right now, this is the situation. Now what?”

What if it’s still just like this a year from now?

How about three years?

Nothing changes if nothing changes, and then nothing changes.

I’ve just come out of a three-day weekend, where I did almost none of the things I had planned to do, including writing in my journal and resolving some of this stuff. Where did the time go? It seems to have elapsed in long conversations with friends and family. That is a trade-off that definitely should not feel like a trade-off. I can’t very well say, “Will you please give me back that hour so I can do some writing, because I’m parched for time to myself right now?”

What would that become? Me at the end of my life, in a stack of journals and books, alone?

What I’d like is a day to literally sit inside of a closet, on the floor, with the door shut, and just have... nobody call me or talk to me or ask me questions or task me or assign me anything. Or look at me.

That’s why I’m going to bed now, facing another busy working week packed with people and conversations, not “caught up” (whatever that means) and still with nothing to write about. Except for my sorrows, feeling cut off from my creative well, wondering whether I have to just say goodbye to that part of my life.

Those of you who know exactly what I mean by all of this, do what you have to do. The task here, I believe, is figuring out a way to create time and space out of thin air, time and space to remember who we are and why we do what we do.

So far I have failed to make it past the first episode of any organizing show other than Hoarders. I keep thinking I’ll find them motivating, or that they’ll teach me something new about coaching clients. This time, I might keep going, because The Home Edit is good for my marriage.

I turned to my husband after watching the show and somehow not noticing the transition to Episode Two.

“Do you know why I foisted this on you?”

He paused for a beat and then said, “Because you don’t have any of that stuff.”

“Got it in one!”

The Home Edit seems to find time to help two households per episode with one area of their home. The first episode happened to include two women’s closets, and then the second episode had... a woman who needed help with her closet.

There are a lot of things I like about the show and about The Home Edit in general. I love that it’s a woman-owned business and that they’ve done so well for themselves, moving from consulting to the book to a product line to their own television show. I love the rainbows. I also went so far as to organize my own refrigerator based on their methods.

(My husband loves it, by the way - it’s the only organizing job I’ve ever done that he has particularly noticed or commented on more than once).

There are some things that I think are funny across the Home Edit universe:

The pantries in these homes are the size of what used to be big walk-in closets.

The closets in these homes are the size of... literally my entire bedroom.

People are paying big bucks to professional organizers to sort things that I don’t even own.

I thought about this a lot because my holdout friend finally called me for help. I have a local friend who I knew immediately was “one of mine.” I told her about my work and offered to come over and help her for free - because I love her and I’m nice that way. She wouldn’t even let me see her place, much less accept my help. (And then she got evicted twice in a row, from two different apartment complexes, for failing the habitability check). We talked on the phone for an hour, and then she sent me photos. Level 2. Then she busted her butt like a maniac, all by herself, and got rid of 80% of the hoard in her living room - in like five days.

I think about people like her when I see these shows that celebrate standard consumerism. For my people, the chronically disorganized and the compulsive accumulators, it tends to lead to even larger hoards. They believe that buying more stuff - organizers, matched sets - will solve their problem. Then they find out the hard way that they have 10x more stuff than will fit in the organizers.

Every time I did a home visit, I would fit “organizers” with the price tags still on. Bins, tubs, boxes, drawer units, and definitely clutter-busting books!

Getting Organized is aspirational. I didn’t realize, when I started, that what I really hankered for was an upper-middle-class lifestyle in an upper-middle-class home. My tiny, dark apartments were never going to look like the spacious, well-lit houses in those photos. There’s a reason a celebrity like Reese Witherspoon has multiple closets the size of my living room, and it’s because she can afford them.

Ever go around The Container Store and price out your ultimate shopping list? For most homes, it would easily be a couple grand. Not everyone is going to be able to spend $200 on organizers for their fridge and pantry, or specialty hangers and storage boxes for their ultra-closet.

Maybe spend that on new furniture instead, if you can?

There are two reasons my holdout friend finally started getting rid of her hoard. The first was love - her dad was coming to visit for the first time in many years and she was beyond excited to see him. The second was money - she started her own business and she’s probably earning at least triple what she was when we met. Those simple shifts, from isolation to hospitality and from scarcity to prosperity, are very powerful and effective.

I wonder if now my friend will take an interest in things like The Home Edit?

Recently we found out our company won’t be calling anyone back on site until there is wide availability of a COVID-19 vaccine. Today, I read in the news some speculation that that wouldn’t happen until summer or fall of 2021. Looks like we’re buckling in for the long haul.

I bring this up because guess what, all the fall and winter holidays will pop up on the calendar regardless of what is happening in the world. We might as well plan now for alternative ways to celebrate.

I used to visit my family three or four times a year. We live a thousand miles apart so it takes some planning. I haven’t seen any of them in person since December, and it’s looking like we may not even be halfway through yet. Believe me, I’d love to be making plans to see everyone during Thanksgiving.

Which is what I’m doing. I’m emotionally planning to see them on a video chat.

I know a lot of other people are planning to meet in person. Or if not, they will have extremely intense family pressure to meet, which will ramp up in double proportion to any resistance from the more science-minded or cautious voices.

DO IT I REALLY WANT YOU TO

Look, I got COVID at a social occasion. I’m pretty sure the person I got it from, got it at the airport. That is my bias.

I’ve heard some pretty compelling talk about “love over fear” and people making choices based on how they interpret that. I feel the same exact way.

The way I interpret it, I choose love. Any sacrifice that is demanded of me, I’ll make it gladly, because I love my family. I will do anything to keep them safe. That means depriving myself of their physical presence for a while.

I choose this sacrifice of physical presence over fear:

The fear I know I would feel if my parents got sick

The fear I would feel if I realized I was the one spreading the virus to people I love

The fear I would feel, standing in the hospital parking lot, holding a big sign over my head

I don’t need to love someone from inside the same room. That would seem to me to be a very low-battery kind of love. A weak love.

Mine is a love that radiates across continents. I have no fear that it can’t be felt.

I know this because if anything, I hear from my family more often than I did before. They really pulled together for me when I was sick. We’re on family group chat every day, cracking jokes and sharing pictures. Of course we’d rather be able to see each other in person.

Which we will. One fine day.

Just not this Thanksgiving.

This is why I say we might as well plan now. There’s time to make it fun, if we’re all united in agreement that we’ll do things virtually.

For the rest of you poor souls whose families are going to try to guilt-trip you into risking their lives by carrying your body to them, there’s time to plan your responses.

Keep in mind, we might all be wrong. There’s always time for people to change. But you can probably write out a pretty accurate script of what each of your family members will say in most discussions. You can probably predict all the ways they’re going to try to “force” you to do what you don’t want to do, which is to go to their house, hug everyone with no masks on, and potentially have to plan a virtual funeral two weeks later.

A good friend of mine taught me how to do this. I told her I needed to learn to say no. She said, “Don’t say no. Say, “Um, no.” We practiced it together until I got the intonation right.

There are a few ways you can go about this. What you choose depends on individual temperament.

Passive-aggressive: Say yes and then claim that someone is too sick at the very last minute.

Workaholic: Say maybe and then claim you have to work on a report (school or work).

Tech-savvy: Make a recording of yourself saying No and play it on a loop so you don’t have to rely on willpower.

Executive: Pay someone to handle the guilt calls for you.

Honest: Say you have no intention of traveling during a pandemic and you aren’t going to do it.

This is what I’ve learned from being married to an Upholder. They just say what they intended to say. They don’t do guilt - they either do what they committed to do, or they do nothing, because if it isn’t part of their system, it kinda doesn’t exist. One simply does the correct thing, and in this case it is obeying shelter-in-place orders and working together to end the pandemic.

This is what I’ve learned as a Questioner. My answer to every possible situation is, Here, read this. Then I turn on the firehose and send mass quantities of links, articles, books, charts, and pre-review journal articles. I can genuinely do this ad infinitum. Wear ‘em out. Of course, there is the other variety of Questioner who gets sucked into the information vortex and does not necessarily have the academic rigor to distinguish fact from conspiracy theory.

I don’t think Rebels need any help giving people a firm No. Rebels don’t react well to peer pressure.

It’s Obligers who have the issue. There is a distinct Obliger tendency to operate by group consensus. If the Obligers in the family all got together and came up with a beautiful fantasy of eating and drinking in large groups, then by gosh you’d better not mess it up.

This is where I think planning can come in. What if we simply came up with a variety of plans that are more interesting and fun but still allow everyone to live until next year?

These are some of the things my family has done:

Try to copy a picture blindfolded, on a timer, and then give points for individual parts of the drawing. This could be fun to do with gluing tail feathers on the turkey.

Two partners try to wrap a gift and tie a bow around it using only one hand each. Also on a timer. Extremely funny on video.

Wear matching ugly sweaters.

Trade stories and jokes.

Trade recipes.

Simply put a laptop on the dinner table and casually hang out.

One thing we have not done, which would be great fun, is to learn a TikTok dance and have a family dance-off.

We also haven’t done any photo slideshows, although we probably should.

I tend to be the family tech support person, which is why this occurs to me, but some family members may be resistant to doing stuff remotely because they don’t realize the possibilities. They may be very uncomfortable using most of the features of the electronics that they already own. Sometimes they’ll try something for a cute grandchild or niece that they wouldn’t try for one of their own adult children.

There’s still time to practice.

One day, all of this will be over. I sincerely hope that on that day, all of us can celebrate together. I plan to run down the middle of the street yelling WAHOO! Might as well plan for it now. It will help to have something to offer as a distraction when you have the inevitable talk with your family about why this year is going to continue to be a little different.

You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, and that is true of so many things. A good night of sound sleep. A quiet neighbor. Gum tissue. Your favorite hair tie. Your keys. Most of all, a general lack of pain.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a hot, throbbing pain directly behind my navel. That was a week and a half ago. I can recall it distinctly because it’s been bothering me off and on ever since.

Nothing else was wrong. Nothing graphic, don’t worry.

I’ve been blessed with a cast-iron stomach all my life. I can eat extremely weird combinations of foods. My kitchen tends to be stocked with dozens of spices, half a dozen vinegars, at least two types of mustard, and exotic things my husband can’t pronounce.

I don’t get motion sickness. I can read in the car, face any direction on the train, and ride in ferries and boats, no problem. I can even do the spinny rides at the amusement park.

I don’t usually even lose it when I get a stomach bug. I’ll just find that I’m tired and have no appetite, to the envy of those around me who are leaning over their buckets, green for two reasons.

All this is to say that days of burning, stabbing pains wandering around my stomach and duodenum were out of character for me.

What the heck was going on?

My life has been a mess since I got COVID-19. It’s really one darn thing after another. While I’m proud of my body for fighting off something that has killed a million people, it feels like the watershed between when I felt fairly young and athletic, and when... well, maybe that will change, but... Now it feels like I’ve turned the corner and I’m walking the straight path toward old age.

I figured it was a virus. Then I thought, what is it really? Aren’t these things usually of the 24-hour variety? But then I remembered the two occasions when I’ve gotten a norovirus, and those lasted more like five days.

Then I thought something that normally occurs to me more quickly. What if there is a nutritional fix for this?

I’m going into detail on my troubleshooting process here, because I know a lot of people have mysterious digestive complaints and they haven’t been able to get answers from their doctors. Just because your doctor can’t figure it out in a 15-minute appointment doesn’t mean there is no solution.

!

Let me say that again. Just because medical science hasn’t done enough clinical trials or peer review, that does not mean that a health issue is untreatable or permanent.

My basic organizing principle is that different people get different results with their energy level, mood, and overall state of health because they eat differently over the course of a year. In some cases, there may be a genetically-based food tolerance issue. Otherwise, I believe it’s a combination of timing (more than anything), volume, and proportion of cruciferous vegetables to everything else.

The food input regulates the gut flora, and the gut flora help process the nutrients, and the nutrients determine everything else.

Wonk that I am, that’s my working hypothesis.

This is an objectively testable hypothesis. Let me point that out. It’s common for ‘alternative medicine’ to make untestable claims, and that’s fine, because a lot of subjective things like mood are quite real and a major determiner of quality of life. I do think it’s helpful to distinguish when there is something that could be tested in a lab, something that could be the subject of traditional double-blind peer-reviewed studies.

With the will, with the funding, with the time...

I think all of this will happen over the next couple of decades. I think Big Data will provide a lot of answers. This is going to include all the DNA testing that so many people are doing. I also think we’re going to find more and more previously unidentified viruses that cause all sorts of health problems that were previously chalked up to ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety.’

Psst: What if ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’ were not root causes, but in fact near-universal symptoms of underlying 100% physical causes, such as viral infections, chronic sleep deprivation, or nutritional deficiencies?

Testable!

So anyway. Here I was with this haunting, distracting, annoying gut pain that seemed to have no obvious cause. I knew I hadn’t injured myself because I’ve torn an oblique before, and this was definitely chemical. Or was it? I started to wonder if I had an ulcer (something with a bacterial cause) or maybe something way weirder. It went on long enough that my husband told me to call my doctor.

Which never happens.

Then I suddenly remembered the existence of probiotics.

See, I had a deadly viral infection this year, little thing name of coronavirus, and then I had to take courses of antibiotics twice in three months. It seems obvious to me that the balance of helper microbes in my body might have been thrown off by all this.

We went to the store, and I bought a 32-ounce carton of juice with probiotics in it. I proceeded to drink it out of the bottle, since we were on a long walk and I had no way to refrigerate the rest of what was the only form factor of this juice in the store.

I started feeling better literally within minutes.

By the end of the day, the pain was back.

We went to Whole Foods, a store that stocks a much broader range of probiotics. I bought more juice (half the price that it was at the conventional grocer) and some little shot-size containers. The quantity that I proceeded to consume was probably double what was recommended. I didn’t check because I’ve used this stuff before, and it worked, and I was fighting a bigger fight this time.

Over the previous several days, my pain level had been between a 3 to a 5. It woke me up at least once every night and came at me in waves throughout the day.

As soon as I started getting the probiotics down, literally within minutes, the pain would recede.

Three days later, I’m basically fine.

This has been an impressive experience for me. I didn’t have to take more antibiotics. I didn’t have to get palpated or have some kind of body scan. Basically I got to avoid going to the hospital and getting exposed to possibly contagious people, which is my priority right now. I didn’t even take antacids (not an acid problem) or anti-inflammatories or anything.

Just lactobaccilus.

One day, possibly in the near future, it will be possible for the average person to do a simple, inexpensive test, and find out which specific things make up their personal gut flora. There will be better data and better access to personalized treatments. There will also be better indications that something like probiotics actually aid human health - or don’t. A lot of “treatments” will eventually go the way of the goose, flapping off into the distance while making a great deal of noise.

For today, I’m a person who gets my flu shot, who takes my antibiotics as prescribed, who regards mainstream medicine seriously and obediently. I also think it makes sense that if I eat a thousand meals every year, what goes into my meals matters, and has a lot more to do with my daily state of health than a rattling bottle of pills.

Hey, did you pack your go bag yet?

Someone close to me has been on an evacuation order, the fires are that close. Seven people on his work crew had their houses burn down.

I told him, yeah, my good friend had her house burn down last year.

Between us, we probably know almost as many people who have been affected by wildfires as we do people who have contracted COVID-19. (Which, by the way, has started touching my own personal family in a most offensive manner).

The first thing to think about with go bags is actually not your own stuff - it’s your pets and their stuff.

This is what I reminded my person, who claimed that his cat likes to ride in the car. True. Cool story, bro. Have you tested that theory when there are flames down the street?

Animals panic when things are on fire. This may save their lives, if they can outrun the flames in the right direction. It may also mean their certain doom, if there’s nowhere to go. It’s also unlikely you’ll be able to find them again.

BTW did you get your guys microchipped?

We have a parrot, and fire would be extremely bad news for her. Smoke inhalation would probably take her out before we could get her into her carrier. Nevertheless, I keep it directly under her sleeping cage, door facing out. All we would have to do is pull the Velcro so the door flaps down and stuff her inside. Right next to the carrier is her go bag, with styptic gel and a few other supplies.

Styptic gel, you haven’t heard of it? Neither had our vet. It stops bleeding if you smear it on a wound. It stings a little, but it’s got a topical analgesic in it so they calm down right away. Birds, dogs, cats, people, probably lizards, I dunno. Most useful veterinary first aid item I know of. I keep it in the outside pocket of the go bag for easy access.

First aid. That’s the thing that nobody really thinks about until something happens. Like this time I was running for the bus, and I tripped and flayed open my knee just as the bus was coming. I got on but I didn’t have so much as a napkin to stop the bleeding, and that was the end of my white capri pants. Now I take those large bandages and the gauze and the rolls of tape a lot more seriously.

Our smaller first aid kit is right on the top inside my go bag. It’s bright red, of course. No matter how many times I might pack and repack this bag, the first aid kit is staying on top.

What else goes in there that we always meant to pack, but never got around to it?

Somewhere, somehow, you want all the contact information for your insurance. (Medical, car, homeowner, whatever else you have). Also all your bank information and anyone you’d want to get in touch with if you have to evacuate.

Assume, of course, that you’ve lost your phone somewhere.

Strangely enough, I had a second conversation right after I talked to my person about evacuating his pets. This one was about restoring a device that hadn’t been backed up.

* this is your regularly scheduled random reminder that, oh yeah, you kept meaning to get around to that, too *

I explained that, considering what the device was used for, it was probably okay that it had never been backed up. But please talk to the free tech support person about getting that set up, so you won’t continue to run into this situation every few years?

Imagine the perfect combination of factors: your device was never backed up, you never packed your go bag or listed off your emergency contacts, and then you actually did have to evacuate. You’re sitting in an emergency Red Cross shelter trying to rack your brain and figure out how to get ahold of everyone. Anyone.

Facebook, probably, and someone would probably be kind enough to let you log in for a few minutes.

But then, with your life up in the air, how many hours do you really want to spend tracking down all your insurance and bank info? As well as lining up somewhere to stay?

And trying to track your poor missing animals?

Hopefully not while your kids cry down to their chins over them?

I have had to evacuate my apartment because of a fire. I’ve also had to evacuate my building at work after explaining to my customer why I had to hang up our call, which they did not believe. When it happens, it’s not like they write you several letters first. You’re either sound asleep or doing something important when BOOM BOOM BOOM. That is, if you’re lucky enough to have a firefighter come and beat on your door.

I don’t mean to be scary, except that I totally do. Packing a go bag is somewhere way down the list from writing a will, becoming an organ donor, and putting your fire extinguisher somewhere accessible. (Um, you do have a fire extinguisher, right?) Try to make it vivid and visual in your mind that these things happen, and lately they happen all the time.

Practice. Practice grabbing your stuff and rounding up your small dependents and actually getting them out the door. It will immediately become obvious if there are any flaws in your plan.

I tried it with the dog, the parrot, and my backpack. It was nuts. I could barely walk 1 mph. Fortunately, nothing was on fire so they were both like “Walk? Right on!”

Suddenly all my great plans about packing a paperback book and some playing cards didn’t sound so great. Keep it light.

If you don’t actually have practice walking long distances with a heavy backpack, don’t put yourself in that position on the one day you really need that backpack. Either train for it or keep culling what you have in there. Keep putting it on and weighing it.

Having a solid evacuation plan is more valuable than a go bag. Even better is to have several plans. Think out what you would do if certain roads are blocked. Think out what you would do if you have to shelter in place for several days. Talk it out with your best friends, especially the fluffy kind.

Hopefully we never need any of this stuff. It sure is a lot easier to sleep soundly when we know that we have it zipped up and ready to go.

I love knives, so it made sense to me that a knife would be the symbol of becoming completely debt-free. Not sure if anyone else in the world has ever done this, so I am sharing my idea of the debt knife.

An inkling of the idea of the debt knife probably came from something I read years ago. It was the foreword to a cookbook written by two friends who signed a three-book deal. They did really well off their first book. In the second book, they mentioned that they used some of their money to buy a set of really high-end kitchen knives.

?? I thought.

I started my adult life with a bunch of hand-me-downs from various family members and whatever my roommates brought in. I had pots with missing handles, wobbly dull knives, mismatched plates, cracked cutting boards, and melted Tupperware. Nobody was going to offer me a publishing deal on a cookbook because my cooking was terrible. If I wanted to make a recipe and I didn’t have all the ingredients, I would just... skip them.

It wasn’t until I’d been married a few years before I discovered that my measuring spoons were inaccurate as well. That explained a lot.

It hadn’t really occurred to me, when I read this cookbook by the successful cooking friends, that one would... upgrade one’s gear. Was that... allowed?? Could one simply go out and... buy brand-new stuff?

When we got married, my husband’s uncle bought us a really, really excellent soup pot. I love that thing. We have cooked, oh, I’m sure hundreds of gallons of soup in that pot. I think warm thoughts toward that uncle all the time. A close family friend got us a set of salad tongs and likewise, we think about her and her terrific cooking every time we use them.

On the other hand, I didn’t think good thoughts about anyone the last time I used our cheap plastic pancake flipper and part of it crumbled off into the pan. Eww.

It’s my considered opinion that splurging on small items of daily use is better than other extravagances. For instance, if I buy a very fancy bar of soap, it might cost triple what I’d pay for regular supermarket bar soap, but it’s still under $10 and it will last for months. I’ll enjoy it more than I would an expensive pair of shoes that I would only wear to special occasions - that would then make my feet bleed anyway.

This is part of how I’ve gradually developed an appreciation for well-made kitchen gear. This is also part of how I arrived at my debt knife as a symbol of financial freedom.

This is how you can tell what a nice knife it is. It came in its own special box and it has a sheath.

That’s not how you can tell. You can tell what a nice knife it is because when I showed it to my husband he went “OoooOOOOooo.” Then he wanted to hold it and angle it back and forth.

Damascus steel!

Lolololol men crack me up, all you have to say is “Damascus steel” or “carbon fiber” and you have their full attention. Try it sometime.

What we had been using for the entirety of our marriage were a couple of IKEA knives that I think cost $7 apiece. They were adequate, except that after some time the handles started to dissolve and ooze black goo. Something happened to them after they got cooking oil on them enough times. You’d make dinner and then your hands would turn black. Gross and very annoying.

We kept using them, though, because nothing is easier than getting used to small miseries when you’re busy.

I though about it and I thought, if I buy one very nice santoku knife, that is all we’ll need. We can chop vegetables with it, then wash it and dry it and put it in its special sheath and put it right back in the drawer.

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened. We both like knives and this knife has its own gravitas.

The first thing I cut up with the debt knife was...

(what would you cut if you had one...?)

...a bunch of kale. I liked the idea of chopping up something that symbolically is flat and rectangular and green, like dollars. I also liked the idea of associating it with a healthy habit like cooking at home.

Another thing I like is exploring holiday traditions. For many years now, I’ve been making Hoppin’ John on New Year’s Day. I can’t argue against its claims to bring good luck and financial fortune, because we have gradually done better with money every year since I started making it. Also, at this point I’ve gotten my recipe down to the point of perfection, and sometimes we eat it just because it’s so good with cornbread.

Money used to be a painful topic that made me cry. It was like that for many years. In fact, when I met my husband, I was still at the point when I would make a payment on my student loan and the balance would actually be higher because the interest was front-loaded. Many a bitter tear over that. I was so poor I slept on an air mattress that I kept having to patch because I’d wake up on the floor.

I haven’t forgotten.

Becoming debt-free was a victory that took many years of focus and hard work. It’s something worth celebrating. When you’re still in the trenches, it can feel like it will never happen. It’s so easy to slip into a sense of futility. Don’t give up!

Every time I use my debt knife, I think, I did it. I made it through. I will never be in debt again.

Every time I use my debt knife, I think, others can do this too. I believe it. Cut yourself free and imagine what symbol you will choose to represent your freedom.