I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t give people health advice under any circumstances.
Why? Three reasons. First, it doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, nurse, space alien, shaman, mime, dog trainer, marathon runner, or whatever. Nobody will actually change their behavior based on what you say. Unless it’s something weird such as ‘eating raw pineapple will cause you to grow a second row of teeth.” Second, I recently sent in a tube of saliva to have my DNA analyzed. Supposedly this includes some genetic markers. It is a gol-danged mystery what might or might not have genetic components, including whether you have hair on your toes or a double-jointed thumb. No matter what happens, people now have the option of blaming their genes rather than external inputs. Third, after COVID-19 I just don’t know. I can tell people that COVID is real and that you probably don’t want to find out for yourself, so wear a mask, but anyone who would listen to me has probably been doing that for a long time. Again, what I say to someone will either be preaching to the choir, or it will have no effect. All I can do is offer for friends who know someone with COVID to have them text me. Even then, what can I do? I can talk about my experience, but that might not be theirs. For instance, I lost my sense of taste and smell for three weeks, and it came back, but for some people that loss appears to be permanent. Why? I have no idea. Is there anything they can do to get it back? I have no idea. It appeared to happen naturally in my case. Did anyone read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? [spoilers] Remember the part where Arthur Dent came home, ate something spoiled out of his fridge, and unknowingly cured himself of some space infection that would have wiped out all of humanity? What if I did do something to help myself get my sense of smell back, but I had no idea? What if it was... eating pickles? Something that I have done my entire life, and would never stop even if it caused my skin to turn green and warty? What if there are multiple inputs in my personal environment that combine in such a way as to cause certain issues in my life and eliminate others? That’s probably the main problem with trying to give other people health advice. We can’t do it in isolation, one factor at a time. Maybe we do twelve things, the combination of which is necessary to get our results, and maybe the other person is only willing to grudgingly do one of them? I can say that while I had COVID, I ate a lot of broccoli and cauliflower. That is true. Whether it had any effect whatsoever on my healing will never be known, because nobody did any kind of tests or measured any health metrics while all that was going on. It’s guesswork. This is where I think most people get into trouble with giving advice: singling out a particular input that they like and wanting to broadcast it to everyone. Example: Someone I know believes that she can’t get coronavirus because she drinks a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar every day. This is why she won’t get vaccinated. I utterly 100% think this is wrong, and that all the health effects it can cause are smelling like a salad... Or at least I thought that until this same person needed major surgery and took months to heal. Will anyone tell her that maybe her vinegar habit did something bad in her life rather than something good? Gosh, I hope not! Will she stop telling people that vinegar is a miracle healing cure? Extremely doubtful. Are they related? Nobody knows. What it would take to test something like this requires an entire scientific framework that is, for some reason, under scrutiny. The scientific method is the exact part that so many people are skeptical about. It seems to work like this. I will trust this advice and follow it scrupulously, every day, and tell everyone about it all the time. I will pay good money for it. I will drive many miles for it. I will rearrange my schedule for it. But only if it does not come from a mainstream health practitioner. Food and health are the new religion, and they have been for some time. We get into these things because we are desperate for a feeling of control over our lives. We want so much to feel like we can do or not do something very specific, and it will protect us from our mortality. This is why we want to get other people on board with our habits, because it builds and strengthens that sense of confidence and control. Now we are a team, and together we are unbeatable! Now everybody get that vinegar ready and let’s drink, one two three! I used to feel that holy fire myself. At that time in my life, I was surrounded by people who were almost entirely on a different wavelength than myself. Many of them were struggling with issues that I had beat, and I wanted to help. All I did was annoy people. Then I moved and changed my social group, and instead I was surrounded mostly by people more fit and active than myself. That shut me up! Now I’m working on recovery after a year of being blitzed by long-haul COVID. While I’m pleased to be able to run up a flight of stairs again, I still struggle to carry heavy objects, lift my arms over my head, or become very tired after doing a few things that used to be routine, like putting something on top of the fridge. I have a long way to go. Not that telling someone, “I’m tired too and I struggle with simple things too” would feel like much of a bonding exercise. What people really want is for someone to deeply validate what they are saying, and that does not include expressing that you had the same experience, because they want to feel seen and prized as a unique individual with unique issues. This is why I’m not giving health advice these days. All I can do is report something back from my recovery, such as, one day soon I hope to be able to put on a shoe without leaning on something. I’m packing for a camping trip, after packing for a flight recently, and I have realized something:
I’ve forgotten how to go places. I had a feeling I was forgetting something as I packed for my trip, even though I wound up bringing 100 pounds of gear. It turned out I was. I had to buy a new charger for my Apple Watch, and NOW I HAVE FOUR because I keep doing this. At this rate I’m going to have to start duct-taping one to my forehead. Now, as I put together my camping gear, I’m realizing that I am going to blow it in some unspecified way. I’ve spent literally months of my life camping. It has not been uncommon for me to spend three weeks at a stretch living in a tent. This is something that I know how to do. Or at least I used to. The reason I’m talking about all this is not because I live to embarrass myself. It is to encourage everyone who is making adventurous plans for the summer - pause and do some visualization and try to put yourself back in that frame of mind. Otherwise you’re going to forget half your stuff, just like me. I started digging stuff out of my pack, including the stuff that normally just stays in the pockets. That’s how I discovered that there are no batteries in my head lamp. This is very fortunate. I would much rather find that out in a carpeted suburban bedroom than up on the mountain while trying to pitch my tent in the dark. (Not that I can’t pitch a tent in the dark, because I definitely can!) I started doing my visualization. Then I realized that I hadn’t brought the solar backup battery. I don’t think I even opened that box, because if I’d seen it in our gear tub I’m sure I would have remembered it. Then I realized that I hadn’t packed any sunblock or insect repellent. There is time to rectify all these issues. That’s why it always pays to go over your gear days in advance. It doesn’t guarantee that you will remember every single thing, of course - just that you’ll patch more of the holes in your mental rowboat. (Okay, maybe I have a mental rowboat. Maybe yours is a yacht or an aircraft carrier - or maybe you’re just a little dinghy? Hahahaha) The thing about forgetting gear is that you can often replace it at a store on the way to your destination. But other times - you can’t. Sometimes the thing you want isn’t in stock anywhere in the region, and ask me about the time we had to forfeit the fuel for our camp stove in Madrid and then had no way to heat our food for the next week. The other reasons you want to avoid shopping trips for replacement gear are the time it takes out of your schedule, the escalated price of the items, and the chance that the store is out of stock on your particular size. Can I imagine a store with no AAA batteries, no bug spray, and/or no sunblock? Of course I can. There are two ways to go about making a good packing list. One is to find a checklist that someone else has put together. That can be really helpful, especially if you’re going somewhere you haven’t been before. For instance, I don’t have much experience with camping in the desert, so I would do a little research before I went on a trip like that, even assuming I went with an expert. In my personal experience, camping and traveling with laid-back, inexperienced people does not bring more fun and whimsy to the trip. It brings chaos and mayhem and crying in the road. *I* will be that laid-back person, thank you very much! The one who forgot my batteries and won’t go anywhere without 3 pounds of highly unnecessary electronics. Okay, so there are two ways to do your travel visualization. One is to imagine yourself going through your travel day, your bedtime routine, and then your wake-up routine. The other is to do memory recall of your worst travel experiences - worst sunburns, worst bug bites, etc - and those of anyone else you know. I can tell you right now, we have always brought our backpacking first aid kit and we have always used it, even on an overnight. I’ve also used every element of repair items, from Tenacious Tape to the sewing kit. While it’s possible to fix things with string and twigs, I’d rather not if I don’t have to. I was reading earlier about bird migration. There are two types of migrants, obligate and facultative. Facultative migrants make shorter, more local trips, so they can wait depending on the weather and availability of certain foods. Obligate migrants are going so far that they can’t predict conditions, so they just have to be ready for anything. As we are not birds, and we expect certain things out of life like shoes and beds and hot meals, we must therefore pack like the obligate migrant and retain the flexible mindset of the facultative migrant. When I do my chaos and mayhem visualization, I imagine all the wild stuff. Torn ligaments and large wounds and compound fractures and bear attacks - fortunately only from the literature - and lost shoes and broken phones and raccoons tearing up the food stores. Raccoons! Have torn up both my groceries and my tent at one time or another. When I do my routine visualization, I picture myself getting ready for bed. I pitch my tent. I lay out my bedding. I sent up my solar lantern and my toothbrush. I sleep. I get up in the morning and put on clothes and shoes. These things all sound simple to the point of boredom. The important thing is that those routines involve almost every single item anyone would need on a trip. Always remember that what you are bringing on the trip is you. The only point of leaving your house at all is to either spend time with people or experience things that you cannot experience at home. Your stuff should exist in service to your experiences and your relationships. Just like it does at home. Bring only what you need to have the best time possible, and remember, somehow you have survived despite every item you have ever forgotten, broken, or lost. When the gear is gone the adventure remains. What would you do if you were twice as smart?
The first person I asked this raised his eyebrows. The second person responded that it would make it harder to deal with idiots. (Would it, though? What if being twice as smart suddenly made it seem obvious not only how to deal with them - if there is such a thing as an ‘idiot’ anyway - but also how to change their perspective in such a way that they quit annoying you?) The more I thought about this question, the more I wondered whether I would still be working on the same problems in my life that I do now. For instance, would I still have a backlog of reading material? Probably. Would it be twice as long as it is now? Equally probable. Would I still struggle with insomnia, probably yes, possibly more so. On the other hand, if I were twice as smart, maybe I could finally figure out the answers to certain problems that I now find pressing, such as the desire to overpack on trips or try to do “one last thing” before leaving, making myself short on time. Or the pull to visit more and more attractions on vacation, thus changing cities too often and stressing myself out. My image of being twice as smart is one of frenetic mental activity. What if it were the opposite, though? What if being twice as smart meant more mental calm, as I realized that there was no reason to stress about certain things? How about you? How do you imagine being twice as smart as you are today? Another way of thinking about this mental game is to change the attribute. Instead of ‘smart’ we can think about being ‘attractive’ or ‘rich’ or something else. Funny? Thinking about having twice as many family members, roommates, or pets would clearly be a little messy, even if you also have twice as many bathrooms. Two parrots, two box forts... Going back to those other suggestions, personally, I would not want to be “twice as attractive.” Presumably that would put a lot of people within range of a professional modeling career. I have always thought that being so physically attractive that people would insist on stopping you and demanding your attention - I have always thought that would be completely awful. The very Hollywood concept of being “discovered” was something I found alarming as a child. You’re just sitting there minding your own business, and then someone comes along and wants you to stand still for hours so they can take pictures of you or film you? Do your hair and put you in false eyelashes? Actually that sounds like something that people do for themselves these days, trying to become social media influencers, and it still sounds just as boring and unfulfilling to me today as it would have in the 1930s. No thanks, I’d rather be ordinary looking. “Twice as rich” is another interesting concept. For most people on the planet, doubling their net worth would still not make them “rich.” If I had twice as much money, I still couldn’t retire yet. Worse, I still couldn’t buy a house in my neighborhood, either. This sort of raises the question, if everyone on Earth doubled some characteristic such as wealth, beauty, or intelligence, would it be noticeable? Think about this for a second, if you haven’t already. If everything in the Universe doubled in size overnight - would anyone know? How could you prove it, if even your tape measure had also doubled in size? Relatively, everything would still be the same. Your car would still bump over the same potholes and your cat would still want the same amount of treats. Would a cat sleep twice as much? If it could? That’s basically 24 hours a day. Some of us could probably sleep twice as much, and it might not be a bad thing. Those of you in the sub-six-hour range might give this some thought. Some of the same people could probably consume half as much caffeine at some benefit to themselves. This idea is infectious. What if I spent half as much, or twice as much, of my attention, time, money? Thus we return to the concept of being twice as smart, and what it would change. How much celebrity gossip would Smarter Me follow? Is there something that I don’t find all that interesting today, that Smarter Me wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about? Would Smarter Me still be into gator news? Yes, of course, who wouldn’t be? Right now something interesting is going on at work. Well, lots of things are, most of which I probably don’t know about. One of them, though, is that my boss told me to follow up and file an invention disclosure on an idea I had. This is not something that I currently know how to build. I am not an engineer. But innovation doesn’t work that way. You don’t have to have a working prototype, or even be totally clear on how to make something, in order to get a patent on it. I love my idea. I am sure that if I were twice as smart, I would be building it. I don’t know how to make it right now - material selection, design, etc - but I like to fantasize that if I were twice as smart, I would. I often quote Nick Hanauer with a directive that I use as my personal motto: “Solve the biggest problem you can.” The trouble here is that you have to choose your problem - unless it chooses you, which problems often do, in the same way that a stray cat might choose you, only with less purring. This is why I work where I do. I figured my company deals with the most interesting problems. I could be working at the animal shelter, or I could be working here, and there are plenty of other people drawn to the rescue space who could not or would not do my job. I assume that if we were all twice as smart, we would be solving some of our biggest personal problems by working in jobs that are appropriate to our gifts. We would all choose to go toward the problems that we find the juiciest. Instead of feeling stressed by our bosses and our commutes and our colleagues and our customers and money and all of that, we could instead be animated by interesting challenges. Or maybe not. I don’t actually know, because alas, all I have are the mental gifts that I have today. And all the rest. Just the one life, no doubling of anything that I have noticed. Unless the entire Universe did get twice as big, just last night. This is what is going on with me.
I got both my vaccines, and then I traveled for the first time in a year and a half. I went to three different international airports and sat next to strangers on two separate planes. Both flights were full. I’ve been running up the stairs. All I can do is speak to my own experience, and that is that the COVID-19 vaccine seems to have restored my health. I spent a year dealing with long-haul COVID symptoms, and now they are gone. Now I’m idly shopping for new running shoes. I’m tentatively thinking about short hiking trips. I’m feeling my way back into what used to be a pretty active, outdoorsy lifestyle. This isn’t just a personal anecdote. I know that millions of people, for some reason or other, are petrified about vaccines. It feels really important to share that vaccines work and that they are safe, routine, and normal. I’m starting to get the sense that getting vaccinated - against anything, really - may have a way of making a naive, “all-natural” immune system a little smarter and more efficient. I’ve been vaccinated against, let’s see: measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, hepatitis A & B, influenza, and now COVID-19. There are probably others that I have forgotten about - but apparently my immune system has not. What is important to me here is that I never got sick with any of the things I was vaccinated against! I had the misfortune of contracting coronavirus early in the pandemic. The day I was exposed there were only 3,000 recorded cases in the US. Obviously there wasn’t a vaccine available yet. If there was, I would have lined up to get one, because I get the flu shot, too. For some reason, a lot of people are suspicious of the testing around vaccines when they are not equally suspicious about other things. A few that come to mind are the cumulative effects of food additives across products and across time, and whether the ingredients on the label of “supplements” actually match what is in the product. I know someone who believes she doesn’t need the vaccine because she drinks a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar every day. I know several people who are adamantly against vaccines but who will use “supplements” and essential oils with wild abandon. Question: why do you trust the makers of these products so fully? Why don’t you demand the testing on these products that you do for vaccines - or can you even explain what kind of testing you would want? How do you know that isn’t already happening - is this a close scrutiny or an intuitive rejection? The problem with taking a firm, documented stand for or against a certain lifestyle is how to rebrand your position if you wind up having a health problem. I didn’t have time to formulate some kind of claim about whether I thought I could keep myself from getting sick with COVID. I got infected before I really had time to realize that hey, this could happen to me. If I had had more time to gather my dread and anxiety, as more people in my community started getting sick, I probably would have figured, yeah, I do tend to be vulnerable to respiratory infections. If I got it, I would probably be in trouble. There doesn’t seem to be any profit to me in making claims that can easily be refuted. Maybe I say something like, Oh, I eat a lot of cabbage, you should eat cabbage too so you don’t get sick. Then I get sick. Oops. Health is like religion for a lot of people. The way we deal with our anxieties is to build some sort of belief system that helps make sense out of a weird and frightening world. It helps us feel like we have some control. I bought this consumer product from a skilled marketer! It’s called [x] and the packaging looks like [y]! Owning this makes me feel strong, smart, and confident. If I can convince you to buy it, too, it will reinforce my feeling that I know what I’m doing. I did it, too. I bought some expensive vitamins that I took while I was sick. I got better. Was it because of these vitamins, or would I have gotten better anyway? Was I getting better anyway, and maybe... *gasp* ... the vitamins actually interfered with my healing?? There is no way to explore this counterfactual because I can’t go back in time and do it the other way, as a control. I can only guess and hope I’m right. This is why I look to big data and studies and testing done by other people. I don’t necessarily know the full resume of every one of these people - but I do know that I cannot trust myself as a single point of data. I’ve tried, and it’s stressful and confusing. What I do know is that coronavirus made me very ill, even though I am a not-old person who lacks a single one of the comorbidities on the list of risk factors. At least there is no question in my mind whether COVID is real. What I know now is that it’s possible to get better. That process will probably be shorter for some people and longer for others. Does this apply to other illnesses that are not viral? I don’t know. I only know what I experienced. Right now, I am finding that my energy level is getting better and better. I am starting to have the urge to move faster. This includes running up flights of stairs. A year ago, I could barely get down a flight of stairs, even clinging to the railing, without shaking, sweating, and waves of nausea. Physical recovery has a lot in common with adjusting your mental framework. It can make you want to just lie down and take a nap. It can involve a lot of brain fog. It can feel like running upstairs, working so hard just to get to a higher level. Bodies and minds are both designed for growth and movement. Both need to be exercised to function as well as possible. Exploring different ways to respond to a problem is nothing that we can’t handle. It’s not quite three weeks since I got my second COVID-19 shot. This is how it’s going.
About a week after my first shot, I felt the lifting of my lingering long-haul symptoms. So that was great. I had no aftereffects from either shot. My arm was sore after the first shot, but I barely felt the second injection at all. As soon as I had my appointments, I booked a plane ticket. I would be flying on the first day I was considered fully vaccinated. The week we got our second shot, our county changed the rules. It’s now allowed for people who have had both their shots to walk outside and go to the park without a mask. We took advantage of that fact! Nobody got within ten feet of us anyway. It felt like such a luxury to be outdoors, something that we never used to give a second thought. We went to the grocery store to buy ice cream. Another activity that used to be completely normal but that we had given up for a year. It was nice to go to the store without a face shield and not break into a flop sweat. I prepared for my flight with trepidation. It’s one thing to walk around the neighborhood and go to the park, knowing there are no other people within several yards. It’s something else to go to the store, where max occupancy is enforced. It’s an entirely different category to go to an airport with thousands of other people traveling from who knows where. As much as I want things to go back to normal, my tolerance for personal risk is basically zero. I knew there would have to be a way to go on my trip without being exposed to every type of pathogen from every region under the sun. I bought a special helmet. Much to my disappointment, I was required to take off my mask in the security line. Everyone has to. When you show your ID, they want to make sure it’s really you, so you can have the correct name on your headstone after they give you COVID. I put my helmet back on after I got on the plane, hoping it wasn’t too late. This is the important part. Despite all my planning, I was exposed to roughly two hundred people with my helmet off. Not only that, I had to take off my cloth mask in a spot only a few feet away from the line, where one person after another had also stood with a bare face. Nothing about that felt safe at all. I strongly doubt the CDC got any say in the TSA regulations. For my purposes, while I’m definitely still worried about COVID-19, I want to avoid any and all respiratory illnesses. I don’t even want the common cold, much less influenza or, worse, any emerging thing that doesn’t even have a name yet. I’m definitely a convert to the mask life. I had a good time wearing my helmet and realizing how much of the world was now reopened to me. I would feel safe wearing my helmet on the bus or the subway, and that means I can basically go anywhere I want. I got to my destination, where about half of the people I came to see are fully vaccinated, while the other half have only had their first shot. If you haven’t had to manage this yet, it’s not all that complicated. The fully vaccinated can hug in one room, and those who aren’t there yet can keep their masks on in another room. When everyone is together, we all just put our masks back on. Now it’s been five days since I was at the airport with my mask off. I’ve been nervous, I’ll admit it. I sneezed a couple of times and had to ask myself: WHAT WAS THAT??? Hayfever? Reaction to pet dander? Bubonic plague? I sneeze in bright sunlight, and I also sneeze if I taste strong peppermint, which is probably why it has “pepper” in its name, but it still seems like a corny joke. Culturally, our natural reaction is going to be, “Wow, this person is really a hypochondriac.” Getting worked up over a sneeze? Get over yourself. Yet my first symptoms of COVID were a sneezing fit and itchy eyes. At the time that I got sick, these were not recognized as potential coronavirus symptoms. I was feeling very weird, and I had gone to a social outing five days before, so my husband and I Googled and read through several lists of COVID symptoms, just to be safe. I didn’t have a single symptom on the list, and not a single one of my symptoms were on the list. Two weeks later, I was gasping for air like a trout on a riverbank and having tachycardia several times a day. This is why I still pay careful attention to my state of health every time I sneeze. I keep hearing of local cases - cases in my area, cases of people in my industry, cases of people who are one or two degrees of separation from me - where half a dozen or more people got the coronavirus at work because one individual thought they had “mild allergy symptoms.” It’s high time people quit going out or going to work in person when they are sneezing or coughing or having a runny nose. Yet I fear it’s never going to change. Our Puritan work ethic is too deep in the bone, even though nothing destroys productivity more than a global pandemic. The good news is, in spite of a couple of sneezes, I appear to be fine. I appear to have escaped the TSA plague gauntlet with no repercussions. That sorta supports the idea that the shot worked. Or at least it doesn’t refute it. Soon I will have been on my visit long enough to pass through a quarantine period. Then none of us will have to wear masks around each other and it will be just like the old days, sitting at home like normal. Normal! I have become average.
I am now average at something I used to be good at. I used to be an experienced, one-bag, minimalist traveler. Now, apparently, I have lost those skills. Therefore I make the claim that travel is only like riding a bike if you are actually riding upon a bicycle. You don’t pick up where you left off. Or maybe COVID did more to my brain than I realized. Let me start off with a confession. I have apparently brought a hundred pounds of luggage on this trip. For many years, I would bring my little blue roller bag, the one that fits so neatly under the seat and never gave me a bit of trouble. How is it, then, that I have found myself pulling items out of one bag and putting them into another so that I don’t have to pay $75 for an overweight bag?? “Jeans, towels,” shares the baggage clerk, offering examples of heavy things that might be quick to grab. Towels?? Who the heck packs a towel?? Where are people going? What destinations do not include towels? If you’re staying with family, and they have no towels, perhaps then it would make sense to bring a few. If you’re staying at a towel-free hotel then I simply hope it is not at a nudist colony. I realized that if my bag was overweight, then my suitcase must have weighed 54 pounds. The other bag weighed 40. (Ish?) Therefore, my checked bags weighed a combined total of 94 pounds. Added to my laptop bag and my carryon, it was quite likely I was dragging at least a full hundred pounds onto my flight. I should have realized this earlier, when I was staging the bags in our minuscule hallway and I tripped over the duffle bag and almost went flying. This is the amateur traveler I have become: tripping and stumbling over my own oversized, overweight luggage. I had to repack my suitcase because I had trouble zipping it closed, and then I realized that I hadn’t put in my shower kit. I had dropped in some nicely folded stacks of clothes straight out of the laundry basket. My usual method is to lay everything in flat, lining up the shoulder seams or waistbands with the top edge of the suitcase, and then flipping in all the sleeves and hanging hems. It’s fast, has fewer wrinkles, and seems to fit more stuff. That was probably where I got myself into trouble. Those additional four overweight pounds got crammed in during that second pass. “I’m packing like this is a road trip,” I realized, “and I have the trunk and the back seat all to myself.” I actually did all right with my carryon bags. The work laptop is what it is. All I had in there was the laptop itself, my fob, noise-canceling headphones, my work bullet journal, charging cables, and a pen. The other carryon was mostly for the benefit of the MicroClimate helmet, just in case someone forced me to stow it. Otherwise, all it had was my wallet, keys, lip balm, sunglasses, iPad, and a Band-Aid. I probably could have carried most of those things in my pants pockets. It surprised me, as I passed through various airports, how heavy and cumbersome those two bags were. I’m just not as fit as I used to be. Remind me to weigh these bags - but I suspect I would have been a bit tired just from standing in line and walking from one gate to another. I saw someone lifting a carryon into the overhead bin, something that used to be a negligible task on my own trips. I realized I would have struggled to do this for myself if I had packed a larger bag. Something else that I noticed, as I dragged my unwieldy pile of detritus hither and thither, is that my heart was beating very hard. While I certainly need to get back in shape, I have never in my life struggled so much with the physical act of hauling my own stuff. Or, rather, the last time I felt this way was as a 26-year-old, moving my stuff into my fourth-floor walk-up college dorm. I thought I would black out. I was having a harder time than my hugely pregnant friend who was helping me. A couple months later, I was running up and down those same stairs. All I can do is hope that a similar opportunity to rebound is presenting itself. Carrying luggage is functional fitness. Something else that I did during my trip, that is very average, is that I underestimated how long it would take a rideshare driver to pick me up, and I also underestimated traffic time, and I also underestimated how long it would take to check my bags, and I also underestimated how long it would take to go through security. I gave myself two hours to get from my apartment to my gate at the airport, and wound up twenty minutes behind schedule. When I arrive, I will be tested. I will unpack and go about my business, and I will find out whether I misjudged anything else. Namely, did I bring everything I actually needed? It’s woefully common for people to get very distressed about what outfits to wear on their trip, only to forget something truly important like their ID or their glasses or their inhaler. Have I done this? Not sure yet. As the world starts to return to normal, and the statistical picture starts to improve, I suppose I will start feeling as normal as everyone else again. That probably means I will return to traveling at least a bit. This experience has shown me how rusty I am. What that means is more work for myself, more hassle and inconvenience, and an inevitable ripple effect as other people are forced to deal with my big heavy bags. Time to remember who I am and start getting my act together. Make it simple, make it easy, and make sure not to stumble on it. My director just won a loyalty upgrade. I asked for what I consider to be a major concession, and he immediately said, “Whatever you need.” I am so happy about this that I would probably come over and mow his lawn or paint his house.
What that means in business terms is several things. One, if he needs me to expedite something, I’m eager for the chance to show my gratitude and I will leap into action. Two, if he needs me to come in early, stay late, or skip lunch, why sure, I can probably do that. Three, I’m not planning to go anywhere any time soon. He isn’t going to need to recruit or train my replacement. I knew I had a good shot at getting a yes, because I took my job right at the beginning of the pandemic shutdown. The whole team had just turned over, and it was a bit chaotic. I’ve had a year to demonstrate that I can get things done remotely. In fact, while I have worked for this organization, I’ve never done it any other way. I don’t even know where my desk is. I also know that my boss is a future-focused person. He is generally ready to try new things, willing to experiment and shrug off anything that maybe doesn’t pan out. What an employee will ask for depends on the person. I’ve seen it happen. One person wants a standing desk. Another person wants to start the day at 6:30 AM and leave in the afternoon to beat commute traffic. Someone else wants to job-share with another person who also wants to switch to part-time. Yet another person wants to go back to grad school, someone else needs physical accommodations after surgery, and someone else wants to cut back hours and ease into retirement. All I wanted was to continue to work from home in another state, so I can help out with some family stuff. As far as employee requests go, this could have either seemed completely impossible, or come across as a cheap way to earn some brownie points. In fact, the only effect my request should have is that I took some short lunches and then left early on Friday so I could go to the airport. Whether this is going to sound like a perfectly acceptable request, or an unbearable imposition, depends a lot on company culture, the makeup of the team, and the attitude of management. A scarcity-minded boss is naturally suspicious. What is going on?? What are these people trying to pull? How is anything going to get done around here if people are off gallivanting around? What else are they going to ask for? Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile. An abundance-minded boss will think, Oh good, my team is comfortable coming to me with things. If I wasn’t seen as a reasonable, flexible person, then I wouldn’t be hearing about this. This is a much better situation than someone handing in their notice. Nobody wants that. A decent human being is still open to the fact that real life proceeds while we are at work just as it does when we clock out. A person who has not been shut down and made callous by rigid structures will think, Of course, anything you need. Let me know if I can help. The pandemic has shown nearly half of the workforce that we can do our work from almost any location, and in many cases we can be more productive while we do it. I know of an early-career person who took off for a few months, working out of his van and driving from one campsite to another. That trip seems, if anything, to have enhanced his work ethic and commitment to the mission. It also seems to have had positive ripple effects on morale, as others heard about the trip, realized that they could probably do the same, and that they weren’t going to because they didn’t really want to live in a van that long. Me neither. It’s fairly common at my company for people to work late into the evening, and sometimes clock in on weekends, but then log in around 9 am. This arrangement is probably open to me, but the very thought depresses me. A younger version of me definitely would have preferred to sleep in every day and work as late as necessary to make up for it. The more mature me wakes up before 8 am, even on weekends, and might as well roll out of bed and get cracking. What is it that we want out of work? I submit that it isn’t any one thing. We can accept particulars such as a strict dress code, long or weird hours, high stress, tight deadlines, and other quirky rules. For instance, I worked for years for a company where nobody was allowed to use a phone with a camera. It was a security thing, and we shrugged it off. Constraints are a part of working. What we want is to feel appreciated, that our contribution matters in some way. We also want to feel a certain amount of autonomy. The core tension seems to be about that autonomy. From one perspective, the requirement seems to be: demonstrate that you are on task by strictly obeying all rules and regulations at all times. Do not deviate. From another perspective, the question is: if I get all my work done on time and meet or exceed all deadlines and other criteria, then why does anything else matter? Are you really going to tell me that it is more important for me to wear shoes when I’m on the job than it is for me to go above and beyond on my projects? That you’d rather have total compliance on issues like being physically present, even if it came at the expense of many other things? There is soon going to be a large-scale Game of Sorting. Some companies are going to insist on returning to 18th-century office procedures as soon as possible. Others are going to read the room and accept the new normal. Then the more traditionally-minded, authoritarian companies are going to find themselves surprised by the stampede for the exits. I can already guess where my company stands on this issue. How about yours? I went to the airport for the first time in a year and a half, and I bought a new MicroClimate helmet for the trip. This is my experience.
My itinerary began at LAX, with a layover at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, and continued on to PDX. This is a trip I have made many times, and I have spent untold hours at each of these airports over the past 15 years. I’m a pretty experienced traveler - or at least I used to be, in the before-times. Things are different now. I figured that the form factor of my MicroClimate helmet would advertise itself pretty clearly. This is a serious piece of equipment. I had read up on the corporate website, and it looked like other users were experiencing friction from various airport personnel. I assumed that I would get different responses depending on where I went and who I interacted with, and I was right about that. TSA and my airline, Southwest, were both pretty clear that a mask “covers the mouth and nose” and that it loops behind the ears. Obviously my MicroClimate helmet covers the mouth and nose, correct? But my mouth and nose are visible! This is where I recall all the cartoons I ever saw of confused computers and robots with steam blasting out of their vents, going all swirly-eyed and then exploding. My first issue was at the baggage check counter in LAX. I had been in the airport just long enough to check in and print out my baggage claim stickers. The agent told me that she understood, but TSA was going to make me take off the helmet and they weren’t going to let me wear it on the plane. I turned away, took off the helmet, and pulled out the double-layer fabric mask that I had in my pocket. “I apologize for making you uncomfortable,” I said. “Oh, it’s not me, I’m here to help *you*,” she said. I put the helmet back on for the short walk down the hallway and into the public restroom. I saw nobody, and thus no one said anything. I had felt anxious about being in the enclosed area of an airport restroom during the pandemic, and wearing the helmet definitely helped me feel better. When I emerged, I realized that swapping out the helmet for a cloth mask in the security line was not an experience I wanted to have. It was a cattle call. Nobody was distancing more than about 18 inches and there were at least 100 people packed together. I stepped to the side and put on my fabric mask and zipped my helmet back into my bag. This was very disappointing because this 1000-square-foot area was the precise reason I wanted the helmet in the first place. Hundreds of thousands of people a day pass through LAX from all over the world. I have gotten respiratory illnesses probably more than half the time that I have traveled through this airport. I don’t care what the statistics are about being onboard an airplane, or how their filtration systems are rated. I care about standing in line at the airport itself so the TSA can examine my internal organs. When it was my turn to hand over my ID, the TSA agent asked me to remove my fabric face mask. There ya go. My exact worst nightmare. Standing in the filthiest place on Earth with a bare face, where another dude was standing doing the same thing five seconds earlier. Buy any mask or filtration system or biohazard suit you like, and TSA will interfere with you and insist that you participate in equal-opportunity disease exposure. I made it to my flight on time, boarded, waited until takeoff, and put my helmet back on. Not a single person said a thing. My seatmates on either side glanced at me and went back to whatever they were doing, clearly unfazed. We landed, and I decided I would just push it as far as I could go. I would leave the helmet on as we disembarked. A few of the flight attendants and gate agents made eye contact with me and said nothing. Cool. As I walked into McCarran, it was immediately obvious that we were in Vegas, for two reasons. First, the slot machines, and second, the anything-goes atmosphere. A lady walked up to me, all smiles, and asked where I got the helmet. A man gave me a thumbs-up. People were checking me out as I walked to my gate. I sat for an hour, texting with my family and my husband. Someone sitting directly behind me coughed, and I didn’t have to worry. The performance of the helmet itself is, as far as I can tell, flawless. The fan does a good job of unobtrusively tuning out most background sounds, like a white noise generator. I was a bit hot, but probably because I tried to dress for Oregon, not Nevada or California, and I would have been more comfortable in short sleeves. Face ID recognized me on my iPhone, but not on my iPad. Go figure. I was able to pair my AirPods and listen to a show, although I did have to turn up the volume higher than normal. I don’t really like the chin strap - I wear a XXS bike helmet and the MicroClimate helmet is one-size-fits-all. It took a lot of finagling to adjust it so it would stay in place on my tiny little head. As a competent costumer married to an engineer, I will probably go in and rig a more customized strap setup for myself. And then send a drawing and photos to MicroClimate. We boarded our connecting flight. The ticket agent greeted me but said nothing about the helmet. The flight attendant at the end of the jetway greeted me and said nothing. The flight attendants doing the safety presentation said nothing. Then another flight attendant came over and handed me a surgical mask, making eye contact but saying nothing. I put it in my lap. We took off. After the safety presentation, a different flight attendant came over and firmly told me that I needed to wear the surgical mask. I understand how this works, because I also work on a team in which we sometimes take turns being “the enforcer” or “good cop” or “bad cop.” Having no desire to give any hard-working safety professional a bad day, I indeed put the mask on underneath my helmet and obediently wore it over my mouth and nose throughout the flight. Is this all they want from me? That I check the box for their baseline instructions and pointlessly wear the paper mask, even though I am wearing a helmet that literally covers my entire head and has its own air filtration system? All right, fine. Get used to it, though. Given another pandemic of a respiratory virus, and/or heavy wildfire smoke or a volcanic eruption, and/or any kind of chemical spill, and/or [insert nameless dread here], more and more people are going to decide to get themselves a helmet just like this. The reception of the crowd to this device was either positive or neutral. Almost everyone completely ignored me. Not a single person gave me a dirty look or appeared scared or annoyed. A little girl waved at me - and I waved back and smiled - and it may have been one of the few times she saw a stranger’s actual smiling face in well over a year. A couple of women came up to me and asked me where I bought the helmet, looking very intrigued. It would have been a great opportunity for MicroClimate to include a bunch of business cards, or even put a QR code on the back of the helmet. I wouldn’t really mind if people wanted to take pictures of me wearing it. I am a photo-shy person but I feel somehow anonymous in my helmet, like a person from the future. Which I am, now. This is a story about planning and procrastination, a story about simplification and about complication.
This is a story of how it can take two weeks to plan a trip and twenty minutes to pack for it. In ordinary circumstances, I’m a one-bag traveler. The more I have traveled this way, the better I have liked it. It argues for itself. I always know where my stuff is, I don’t have to go anywhere near the baggage claim, and in extraordinary circumstances I can dig out important items from my seat on the plane. I’ve been flying on my own for over 35 years. I’ve tried so many different combinations of luggage and packing styles. I’ve got it down to a science: I open the suitcase, lay out everything I’m going to wear one on top of the other, matching the top seams to the edge of the suitcase, and then fold in the arms and legs and zip it closed. I have literally made a video of this process and demonstrated that it takes less than five minutes. Why do people get so worked up about packing? I ask myself. It has to be one of two reasons: worry about what people will think when they see you, about which I care not a fig, or worry about What Will Happen. What if it gets cold?? What if it gets hot?? What if it rains?? What if Henry Cavill asks me on a date? I will admit that I do worry about that first one, because I despise being cold and it has become a non-trivial problem in my life. The other three, eh, who cares. I no longer attempt to pack a ball gown just in case I find myself in a simulation modeled after a romance novel. If I have to choose, I’m taking the thermal underwear, and I doubt there’s room after that for a crinoline. Have I traveled through multiple countries with just a backpack? Yes I have. This is why it is such a conundrum: why does it take so long, for someone who packs so quickly, to get ready for a trip of any duration? For a vacation, surely anyone can understand that the more planning goes into the trip, the more fun it can be. I will never forget the day we arrived at a museum that we wanted to see - the entire reason we had stopped in this particular city - only to discover that it had been razed to the ground. All that was left was a flat gravel patch. Whoops. Normally I will spend days or weeks researching restaurants - and double-checking that they are still there in the same location, with the same hours and the same menu. I will book shows and plot out grocery stores and pharmacies, and check the annual weather forecast and read blogs to find out what kind of bugs live there. All that good stuff. This is part of why I can pack so quickly. By the time I get to the stage of hauling out my suitcase, which is an obstacle for daily life in a tiny apartment, I have a very strong sense of what the weather will be like and how I will be spending my time. (The other secret is to only have clothes that you like to wear, stuff that you rate at least a 4 out of 5, so it doesn’t matter which ones you bring). There is more to the planning of a trip than the activities that one does on the trip, though. That’s the future forecast part. The real work is in getting ready to leave the apartment. One of the bummers of travel is that such a large part of the trip involves re-packing, the return trip, and then walking in the door to resume normal life. Jet-lagged, perhaps sunburned, most likely dehydrated. With a suitcase full of dirty clothes to wash and put away. And a messy apartment to clean? This is the gift that I give to Future Me. After too many bummer weekends and road trips that ended in weird smells - ask me about the green juice I left on the bookcase by the front door one summer weekend - I decided that I needed to, at minimum, take out the trash before I left. And clean out the fridge. And make sure there was nothing damp in the laundry hamper. And check for wasp nests in the bedroom. Each, one by one, added to the list after bitter experience. Trip planning has started to push itself further and further back into the timeline. Now, it involves making sure we don’t overbuy groceries, starting the week before the trip. It involves timing the laundry for optimal packing and minimal scariness. Ideally, it involves putting clean sheets on the bed the morning of travel. There are other things that need to be arranged. Putting a hold on our produce delivery. Making sure I don’t have any appointments that need to be rescheduled. Perhaps putting a stop on the snail mail. Ensuring no packages are going to show up and sit inconveniently on the doorstep while nobody is there. What else, what else, what else am I forgetting? On this particular trip, I ordered a box of supplies to be there on arrival. My special matcha, a case of soy milk, a bottle of mouthwash, and what else will I need? Hmm... The biggest thing that I needed to arrange in advance was the ordering of my new MicroClimate helmet. I am hearing mixed things about how cooperative the various airline personnel will be in actually allowing me to wear my helmet through the whole trip. This is something I will have to write up. In the meantime, it seems possible that it might free me to ride the city bus once again, if I no longer have to worry about picking up every cold and flu the way I did in 2018. There is one other important thing that I arranged in advance - over a month in advance, in fact - and that was getting my COVID-19 vaccines. I will be officially “fully vaccinated” the day of my trip. I used to like to joke that all you really need is a bikini and a tiara. Now I think you don’t even need that much, just antibodies and a smile. “I just thought I should tell you that I’m up to some shenanigans again,” I told my husband. It only seemed fair.
“Oh, what is it this time?” I told him I had stumbled across a video interview about a homeless woman a few miles from us who happened to have a master’s degree and some interesting engineering, logistics, and mathematics credentials. I rewound and wrote down those credentials. I can help with this, I thought, and now to track down this person. How do I find her? Those of you who have known me personally for several years may recall that the last time I got interested in something like this, it ended very poorly, but I was indeed successful in tracking down my target person a couple of times. With concerted effort, you can generally find a specific homeless person, because they have a strong gossip network and they keep track of each other. This time it was a bit easier. I looked through the comments on the YouTube channel, didn’t find anything, and then emailed the channel owner. He wrote back within ten minutes, saying he would be seeing her the following week and that he would pass on my message. [That was basically: I think I can get her a job, and please ask if I can bring her a small present, such as a pair of socks or a bottle of ibuprofen]. Several days went by, and I thought, alas, perhaps nothing will come of this after all. Then I got another email. The YouTube channel owner passed on a GoFundMe link, which he said he had verified, so that the money would go directly to the engineer. Oh cool! I thought. That is smart thinking. What would you personally do if you were living at the park and you needed a job? I know what I would do. I would use my credit card and get a room at an AirBnB, just like we did the last time we were technically houseless. I would call my family and I would call an employment agency. I have tons of resources, such that I would only wind up at a park if there had been a wildfire and I had to flee for my life. Plausible where we live. But then, I used to work in social services. I’ve worked at a couple of homeless shelters. I understand that the main difference between “the homeless” and the rest of us is that they tend to get hit with more disasters in a given time period. They always say they never thought it would happen to them, because nobody does. I also live in a very expensive area. The reason it costs so much to live here is because this is where the jobs are. If you want to be within commuting distance of one of the many engineering firms in the area, then you’d better be prepared to pay. Renting a place is not for the faint of heart. We expect, every time we plan to move, that we may have to call on eight listings for every one that is available to look at. We know we’d better be prepared to make an offer on the spot, because the landlord usually has a couple other people lined up to tour the place after us. I watched the video and I thought, this woman is a great deal like me. We’re close in age, we’re both White and we even have similar hairstyles. We could probably swap clothes. Is it unfair that I took an interest in her story? Yes, of course it is. There are well over half a million homeless people in the US, and nearly seventy thousand in my county. This is a societal decision that we made sometime back in the Eighties, to recognize that a lot of people have nowhere to live, and shrug, and train our children to step over them and go on with our lives. It’s easy for us to blame them for their situation, easy for us to accept the concept that over half a million people are lazy, or that all of them are drug addicts, or whatever it is that we tell ourselves. And our kids. In this case, I listened with compassion, and I realized - this is one starfish I can probably help. I know that I can get her resume looked at. I have personal influence with HR people and hiring managers and program directors. I spun out my story to myself a bit more. I thought of a few other women I know who would be in a position to help. I realized, I could help her get a salon haircut and an interview suit. With interviews lined up, it would be easy for me to get her into temporary housing and raise some funds to help her set up shop. I hadn’t even talked to her yet, and I knew I had a plan. I had a hand-picked action team. If we met, I would make my pitch. Simply take one step forward and you are back in the game. We can do this. This was all before I saw the GoFundMe link. Aha, I thought, girl power. Good for you! When I first saw it, the target amount was $10,000 and she had raised about $3,000 already. I saw the necessity of it. She had nowhere to live, no furniture, no work wardrobe, no groceries. In our area? Half of that was going to go to first month’s rent and deposits. It could easily take four months of interviewing before she actually started a new job and started collecting a paycheck. I kept checking back out of curiosity. The donations poured in. The target amount was increased to $15,000. Wow, I thought, go girl go! Donations closed in on $14,000. The target amount was increased to $20,000. Haha, I thought, excited for her. I showed my husband. “I’m starting to understand that she has a good head for numbers.” “Now she’s getting greedy,” he said. Really, though? “I don’t know about that,” I said, “she literally has nothing. She’s living at the park. What she’s trying to do is step from that back into a profession, into an upper middle class lifestyle.” I reminded him how long it takes to get a good engineering job and how much rent is in our area. “If I were the hiring manager, I would ask her, can you raise funds for my company the way you raised funds for yourself? It makes me wish I ran my own company so I could interview her myself.” This is the American way. Rugged individualism in action. It isn’t a personal tragedy, it’s a societal tragedy. We were willing to let a perfectly good mathematician and engineer live at the park, and nobody cared, and all that human potential was wasted because we tolerate long-term homelessness with a shrug. If that much. Nobody else was going to look out for Number One, so good for her. I’m still going to reach out to this woman. I’m going to offer to take her to lunch. I’m going to offer to introduce her to my stylist. I’m going to ask for a copy of her resume, and if it’s a little lumpy I’m going to connect her with the person I hired to redo my own resume. If all goes well, I’m going to pass on her materials to my HR person and ask what we can do. Then I’m going to ask her who else she met while she was... on sabbatical. I’m going to ask who she thinks is the next best prospect, and maybe we can see what we can do for that person. Not because this person or that person “deserves” my help, but because it intrigues me and it’s something that I have certain powers to influence. It’s also high time we stop having a homelessness problem and instead have a reintegration project. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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