The Oscars Game

Friends have introduced me to the Oscars Game: Try to watch all of the top contenders for the top awards before the awards show happens. Then, share opinions by texting or tweeting during the show, since we now have informed opinions about these movies. Part of the problem in Normal Times is simply trying to guess which movies are contenders (so there is enough lead time to see them all), and then trying to get to the theater or find a way to stream them, before time runs out. Luckily, this year, most of them should be available for streaming, if at a sometimes steep price.

Left to my own devices, I would see far fewer movies. But I enjoy entering into the spirit of the Game. Sometimes, the chase leads me to see movies I would otherwise skip. Here is my list of possible contenders. I copied the outlines from a friend, and then I've added some additional. The list contains some movies I have no intention of watching, but others think are Oscar-worthy.

Ammonite	O		Fossils	Rent
Another Round	O		Drunk Danes	Rent
Da Five Bloods	X		Vietnam Vets	Netflix
The Father	__		Senile dad
The Forty-year-old Version	X		Playwright Rapper
French Exit	__		Aging in Paris
Hillbilly Elegy	No
Judas & the Black Messiah	O		Black Panthers	HBO
The Life Ahead	__		Sofia Loren	Netflix
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom	X		Musicians
Malcolm and Marie	No		Abusive relationship
Mank	__		Citizen Kane
The Mauritanian	O		Guantanamo Bay
Minari	O		Koreans in Arkansas	Rent
Miss Juneteenth	O		Mother/Daughter	Rent
Never Rarely Sometimes Always	O		Teen Abortion	HBO
News of The World	O		Reconstruction Texas	Rent
Nomadland	X		Road Trip	Hulu
On the Rocks	__		Bill Murray	Apple
One Night in Miami	O		Talking	Prime
Palm Springs	X		Groundhog Day
Pieces of a Woman	__		Dead baby	Netflix
The Prom	No		Gay highschool girl	Netflix
Promising Young Woman	X		Revenge	Rental
Shirley	No		Shirley Jackson
Soul	X		Cartoon Jazz Player
Sound of Metal	X		Deaf Drummer	Prime
Trial of the Chicago 7	X		Abby Hoffman
U.S. vs Billie Holiday	O		Censorship	Hulu
The Way Back	O		Basketball	HBO

If there is an "X" I've seen it. If there is an "O" I will (probably) see it. If there is an underscore, I haven't decided. And a few are just plain "No".

I am being very careful about what I see. I have seen movies in the past that depressed my mood for days. I'm not wanting to risk that right now. But there aren't a lot of rom-coms on this list - maybe Palm Springs? Maybe The Prom, though that got really bad reviews. One thing I like about streaming at home - I can stop a movie, and come back later, or even never if I really didn't care for it. 

What do I think of the movies I've seen? That would require a different post.

The Sh*tshow Continues

I have tap-dancing class online at noon. I signed in a couple minutes early on my ipad, in the basement, wearing my tap shoes. At 12:04, (I found out later) the local hospital sent an email saying they had spaces available. At 12:30, I checked my phone and spotted the email, which had been forwarded by several listserves I'm on. I turned off the zoom camera and clicked on the link to the website, then the red "REGISTER" button on the screen. It took me to the screen you see here. Does this mean "just be patient, you are in a cue"? Or does it mean "refresh every 30 seconds and you might get through"? 

I decided it meant the latter, and so every 30 seconds for the next TWO AND A HALF HOURS I clicked "refresh". Then, at last, it took me slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y to the next screen, which said "no appointment availability". 

So glad I have absolutely nothing else to do with my time.

Apparently, there is a phone line for "non-internet friendly old people" run by the state that will, according to the message, have more appointments available on Monday. Guess we know how I'll be spending my day.

Chasing Imaginary Unicorns

My state is down near the bottom in vaccine distributions. It is SO annoying and frustrating. Because the state decided to decentralize the vaccine distribution, many people like me are spending every day chasing rumors and catching glimpses just as the unicorn vanishes around a corner up ahead. 

I am not terrified of getting the virus but I would like to avoid dying from it. I know that “normal life” requires herd immunity. My only risk factors are being old and fat, so I’m towards the bottom of the first priority group. And so I’m not desperate to get vaccinated, but I want to be responsible, pay attention, and take my turn when it’s available. That was my calm and rational approach to this a few weeks ago. And then chaos broke out.

There are literally 8 different possible distribution channels I need to monitor, not just daily, but multiple times a day. Twice in the last week I got to a website that had appointments available when I started to register, and then all slots were gone before I finished the process. And these were slots I had pre-registered for. And most people in my same situation are also going for the same multiple different channels, so each channel is having to deal with the whole eligible population of the state instead of just a sub-section. There are strong dis-incentives to be a good little citizen and just wait your turn, versus clogging the system by all jumping on at the same time.

There is no confidence that any place I’m pre-registered for will actually send me information about available slots when they have them - so I go out there and shake the trees. 

In my more charitable moments I chuckle and say “it’s like trying for Hamilton tickets!”. But honestly, it’s a clusterfuck of inefficienc;y. Not incompetence, not at any one place, but in the choices made at the beginning of how to approach this. It angers me, because they had more than half a year to build a better plan. 

Truly, if I had an appointment I knew would be honored, and that appointment was a month or two away, I’d be much happier right now than I am.

Archive Project: Intriguing Finds

 

Working my way through the boxes, I find such interesting things. Last night, I found a postcard my grandfather sent my grandmother in 1916, before they were married. These people are strangers to me - my grandfather dead decades before I was born, my grandmother frozen mentally in the Victorian times she was raised. But how cute!

It's a penny postcard of the veterinary college he attended, sent to her at the family farm where she lived, age 19.

"Say don't you think you had better get busy? Big basketball game on tonight, vets vs. Lawyers. "Noble" is feeling rather "indisposed" again, has kind of a "grip".  ONS"

Was she invited to the game? Who is "Noble"? A friend? Or an animal patient? Things I will never know.

Losing Weight?

I've belonged to a paid weightloss group for just over a year now. Have I lost any weight? Well, maybe net 5-6 pounds down over the whole year (the Washington diet: don't actually reduce, just slow the rate of growth). And, a couple of pounds up from where I was in October. It sure beats gaining weight, but it doesn't appear on the surface to be a ringing endorsement for this weight-loss approach. Never-the-less, I think this is the right approach for me, and I have no plans to end my membership any time soon. Why?

First the background: This program is called "No BS" and it is the creation of a foul-mouthed southern woman named Corinne Crabtree. There is a free podcast, which is not only a marketing recruitment effort but also useful in and of itself, covering the basics of her approach. She has a free, short, on-line course. Once you complete that, you get on an invite list for the 2-3 times a year she opens to new members. Once you are in, there is a lengthy video course, emails, live zoom coaching sessions, pdf planner and worksheets to download (or buy to be shipped), a huge Facebook group with additional subgroups, spontaneous Facebook live events, and specialty short focus courses. Frankly, much more than I need.  

There are four basics to this: Sleep well, drink lots of water, make and assess afterwards a daily plan of what you will eat, and eat only when you are hungry and stop when you are full. Sounds so simple, yes? There are no other food rules.

I went through the video course last year when I joined, and I've been doing the daily worksheets more often than not for the past year. She updated the video course for this year, and it's much improved and I'm going through it slowly. The focus is of course on that last basic: eat only when you are hungry and stop when you are full. Any other eating is termed an "overeat". How do you quell overeating? Much of the course is on this - full of practical guidance and step-by-step approaches.

This program makes use of how we live and how our brains work. So maybe it isn't surprising that fundamentally, the key to eating mindfully has a lot in common with what I've learned about how to mindfully quell chronic pain. She says, in the video course, we are fat because we overeat, and there are three reasons we overeat: 

• Lack of body awareness
• Failure to feel our feelings
• Allowing our habit brain to take over

In dealing with chronic pain, these are also the three areas we work on. Much time is spent in mindfully focusing on our body and our feelings. And pain, like eating, can be a habit. Sometimes, it works for us, as a way of avoiding dealing with life. Sometimes we think, "I'm hungry", when we are tired or frightened. And sometimes, we think, "my leg hurts so very much" when we are scared or avoiding something. Body awareness - putting the lens of our attention to very specifically how "hunger" or "pain" is manifesting in our body, is part of the process. Journaling and meditating to bring our thoughts and feelings to consciousness is part of the process. And observing what we do - making unconscious actions conscious - helps us find habits that don't serve us and create habits that help us make the life we want. 

And, as part of both processes, we bring self-talk into our conscious mind, and change it deliberately. 

So with both processes I've done a great deal of work over the past year. I've had a hard time - and still am - with leg pains and migraines. But with the work I've done, I feel like I'm on the right track to leave them behind me. Just like I feel like I'm on the right approach to deal with my eating, in order to get to a better weight.

Self-Talk, Self-Care, Self-Love

I've been thinking a lot about my interior dialogue. Of course, I have a constant running rumination, but it's really shocking to actually tune in and hear the less-than-kind way I address myself. Word choice matters a lot, not just in the "big things" but also in the little things.

I've been a meditator for a while now, and I've always had a problem with the type of meditation known as "loving kindness". Frankly, it sounds like the woo-woo stuff I've always run far away from. The language and phrasing, invariably delivered in a special meditator's voice that comes across as pretentious to me, are sappy and sometimes downright silly. I doubt the power of positive thoughts to do much for oblivious recipients. And then, to apply that woo-woo stuff to myself...! I can't even. "You are perfect just as you are!"  P-U-L-E-A-S-E spare me! I am so far from perfect I can't even type the phrase without grimacing!

I've had a lot of problems with language around self-care, as well. "Self-indulgence, more like!" I think. I have no shortage of self-indulgences, from impulse shopping to ice cream or TV binges. I don't need more self-care, I need more self-discipline, to go out there and do more things that matter better. There is so far for me to go to live up to my own standards and judgement.

But through my various works at self-improvement, I've heard repeatedly that "self-love" is a necessary precursor for lasting change. At the same time, meditation has given me the ability to actually observe and overhear my inner dialogue, which is a manifestation of my relationship with myself. I definitely have an inner mean girl (and we don't need to delve here into why the voice sounds so much like my mother). So when my meditation app (Ten Percent Happier) said they were doing a New Year's challenge around self-love, I decided to give it a go.  

Well, it turns out that Dan Harris, the self-described "fidgety skeptic" behind the app, shares my distaste for the whole subject, and yet understands its importance for the same reasons I do. Leading up to the meditation challenge, he did several podcasts (also named "Ten Percent Happier") about what is really meant by the practice and approach of self-love, why it is necessary, and how to approach it so that it feels authentic and not forced bullshit. The challenge itself, short video clips followed by a daily meditation, was useful and I was faithful at participating. But it was really the conversations on the podcasts that helped me so much. 

So I don't have to use the loving-kindness vocabulary, and I don't have to jump all the way to pretending I'm perfect. I'm a work in progress, for sure. Self-love may be a bridge too far, but I can get to self-acceptance for sure. I'm a person, and deserve credit just for that. I don't have to look back at my accomplishments to justify my existence. Simply being here is all it takes to be worthy of love. In the language of one of the first meditations I learned, "as long as you are breathing know there is more right with you than not". 

So I've been cutting myself a lot more slack lately. I still have the urge to do more, be more, be better. But I think I'm more tuned to being kind when I don't live up to my own expectations. By listening to the way I talk to myself - turning inchoate feelings into actual words, often on the page, helps me get out useless loops of self-recriminations, accept what really is, and move on. And the "moving on" still involves effort and striving and falling short - but now it has just a little less recrimination.

UPDATE: Re-reading, I see I didn’t circle back to self-indulgence versus self-care. I got this through an analogy of how we treat others. For example, if an employee falls short, you don’t go all “it’s fine, it doesn’t matter, here’s an award so you don’t feel bad”. But you do encourage them, coach them, help them figure out how to do better next time, because it does matter and you want them to succeed. What are the barriers to success? Are there ways to provide assistance?  That same dialogue internally is caring for yourself, instead of a tongue-lashing, even if the tongue-lashing comes with ice cream.