Quarantine Halloween

Cozy evening: Oktoberfest food of an array of sausages and sauerkraut in front of the fire, followed by watching the holiday-appropriate Coco while sipping a heavy, dark, sweet blackberry dessert wine.

I earned my cozy evening by spending the day frostbite sailing, masked even though outdoors, as I am being extra cautious since my days in the jury room last week.

Watching

It feels a little bit weird to say I've wanted to increase the movies or TV I watch. I guess I figure it beats scrolling endlessly through news sites and social media in search of uplift (hah, as if) or even stimulation (boring). So I've been increasing my time on the bigger screen. Here are some of the things I've watched:

Movies

I found a fun new app: "Letterboxd". I don't understand the name, but I found it by searching "Goodreads for Movies" and that is exactly what it is. It allows me to keep track of what I want to watch and what I have watched. It has a social aspect - anyone else want to get it and track each other's movies? (Doesn't do tv).

Radioactive: about Marie Curie. Really interesting and well done. I watched it over two nights.

The Trial of the Chicago 7: written by Aaron Sorkin, it makes a coherent narrative about events that resonate with today. I'm just barely old enough to remember this in real life - I was a freshman in high school in 1968, just awakening to a political conscience. 

The Glorias: really entertaining movie directed by the always unusual Julie Taymor. Striking use of color in the direction. The women's movement has come under a lot of justified criticism recently for having been the white woman's movement, but this shows Gloria Steinem as having been brought into the movement from the beginning by people of color. Split over two nights. Loved the end.

Enola Holmes: very disappointed in this not very entertaining bit of fluff. Didn't even meet my low standards for fluffy type of show.

Under the Tuscan Sun: catching up on things I didn't see the first time around (2003). Entertaining enough, and totally removed from today which was the goal for the evening.

Ocean's Eleven: I've rediscovered that a caper movie, beautiful thieves deceiving each other, is my favorite form of movie. I inherited this from my mother who loved them too. Scarce today, but I do have the rest of the series to watch. From 2001, some things are eerily different than today - big chunky cell phones, anyone?

Battle of the Sexes: Billy Jean King in context. I really liked it. 

Television

It turns out that Netflix and Amazon Prime are the easiest streaming channels for me to watch on my tv. (I still have basic cable which also gives me on-demand networks.) So my TV watching is heavily geared towards those outlets. I don't actually watch any current network shows.

The Queen's Gambit: Just finished it last night, took me three nights. Las Vegas and Europe and the midwest in the 1950s and 1960s. So very stylish, clothes and interiors, the coloration of the cinematography helps evoke the period. It makes you feel good. I read the original book decades ago and this is a different feeling. Very well done, enjoyed immensely.

Mrs. America: I've watched a couple of episodes and want to watch more. Covers in detail and with shifting points of view events covered briefly in The Glorias. 

Occupied: Such an interesting premise. Norway goes all green and shuts down oil production in the North Sea. An energy starved Europe stands by while Russia moves in and takes over "temporarily". Focuses on compromises one makes to survive. I'll watch more of it.

Snowpiercer:  Stars my beloved Daveed Diggs. It's a little weird and hard to follow, but I think with another episode I'll be hooked.

The Good Wife: Seven seasons, started in 2009, I hadn't watched any of it. Classic network drama. Sucked me in the way Grey's Anatomy did. Good sympathetic but flawed characters trying to get by in the world. At least one good legal case per show, with longer term plot threads moving between the shows and through the seasons. I'm only part way through season three, so I've got a lot to go! I play it in my basement while I'm doing chores or sewing, because it doesn't demand all my attention.

Piccard: Star Trek. Not the best, by a long shot, but fun to catch up with TNG characters, in the "whatever happened to ol' ...." sense.

Schitt's Creek: I waited for the last season to come on Netflix for free. Stevie is my style icon! So sweet to the end.

Away: I love a good space yarn, and here they are off to Mars. It's ok, I'll watch more than the 3 or 4 I've seen so far, but so far not so engrossing as some of the others. 

Madam Secretary: If only I lived in that universe, where reasonable people try to behave well. I finished it this summer.

Grace and Frankie: I finished it on Netflix, sigh. But are there more seasons coming?

Below Decks Sailboat: I haven't watched reality TV (except for HGTV) until this. It was my guilty pleasure, the single season I watched this summer, being a voyeur to good looking young people hooking up and breaking up, in a fantasy setting, trying to do their jobs serving badly behaved rich people. I tried another season, and it didn't work as well for me.

Want to watch: Little Fires Everywhere for escape.

Style Icons

Looking at my clothes, trying to decide what to do with them, made me muse a bit on what I own and how I want to be seen in the world. My entry into the working world was coincident with the era of skirted (but man-tailored) suits. I had shirts from Brooks Brothers, and little silk floppy bow ties. I was happy to have a uniform. As I grew more confident at work, I finally evolved to slacks, a blazer, and a T, or rarely, a tailored shirt. Imagine my delight to find Samantha Bee create a name for herself in exactly the style I wanted! At last!  A role model of a woman whose work and look, both, I admired!

 But, since I was roughly twelve years old, there is a style I adopted and wore as much as I could, when not at work.  But, not until very recently did I ever see someone representing the way I choose to look. But, finally I did. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Stevie Budd!

The plaid shirt, tee, jeans, and sneakers is me. Though lately, more likely yoga pants than jeans.

(Except for the hair on both. I'm a short-hair girl for life, since I got my ponytail cut off right after my high school yearbook picture was taken.)

Clothes

When I retired, I decided I wouldn’t touch my work clothes for a year, to give myself four seasons to figure out what I might actually wear going forward. This hasn’t been a year that is a fair test of what I might wear, obviously. But I own too many clothes and I feel the need for a purge coming on.

I did a major clothes and closet makeover back in 2012 (and wrote about it here, here, and here). I just re-read all of those posts, so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. Basically, I took all the clothes out of my room, demo’d my old closet, installed new racks and shelves but no doors, and then only allowed clothes back into my room that I would wear right then. And, I vowed to not own more clothes than fit in my newly efficient room. This was not really a big constraint, because in addition to the closet (which has room for boxes on top of the hanging racks) I have five chests of drawers in my bedroom, ranging from small to medium. Work clothes almost entirely hang in the closet, and all other clothes are in drawers.

The visual approach really worked for my work clothes - having everything hanging out where I could see them helped me get dressed in the mornings. But, looking at those clothes now, I think maybe they are getting dirty or fading, being “out there”. So I’ve just ordered a hanging curtain to block the light and keep them less dusty. But that is purely cosmetic, and doesn’t deal with deciding what I want to own going forward.

My unstable weight has contributed to the problem. I have continued to buy clothes, mostly in bigger sizes that are more comfortable now. The weight started to come on in my last two years of work. At first, I resisted buying new because I assumed I would lose the weight as quickly as I gained it. Alas, no. But then I was within spitting distance of retirement and I resisted buying good clothes knowing I wouldn’t need them all. In fact, I had a knee operation six months before I retired, and used that as an excuse to start wearing yoga pants to work. I kept that up until the end, supplemented with dresses that would work for a wider range of weights than my tailored pants.

So, paradoxically, I have too many clothes but not much in the way of good clothes that fit right now. I need a plan (having a plan makes me feel just about as good as actually doing something). How about this: save doing anything about it for a stretch of bad weather. And in the meantime, buy nothing. Maybe do laundry more often to get by.

On Vacation

How can I be on vacation? Vacation from what? But I feel like last week was indeed a vacation, at least from my [normal] life. My boat partner and her husband, J and J, had their vacation to the Azores aborted at nearly the last minute. We have been in essence podded together this summer, sailing without masks but seeing no-one else but family and store clerks. They live in rural Pennsylvania, beautiful but not so cultured. And so, J and J came and stayed in my lovely basement instead of the Azores, which is almost as nice. It certainly was nice for me!

J had done her homework, and gotten timed tickets to open museums in DC. The African-American History Museum, the newest and everyone’s first choice, was not available. But they got the Portrait Gallery (my favorite) and the American Indian Museum, which I had never been to, and for the day I wasn’t available, the Spy Museum. The best weather day of the week J and I went sailing, while husband J did a major gardening chore for me and worked on his novel and played with my dog. The whole week was the best of fall weather, warm enough to be outside, bright bright sun, not too hot, rated 10-out-of-10 every single day by the Capital Weather Gang in the Washington Post.

It was so nice to be out and about! We spent hours inside the museums, which were not at all crowded and thus felt safe. Husband J had been a middle school teacher and had been on several field trips to the museums, but there was enough change to keep him going, reading every sign on every display. We had drinks and nibbles at a sidewalk cafe one day, deli sandwiches dining outside at the new Eisenhower memorial with J & J’s lovely DC-suburban resident daughter another. Most of the food at home was takeout, where they delighted in our easily available Central American, Ethiopian, and Vietnamese cuisines. I was also pleased to be enjoying so many different flavors not cooked by me.

But I am used to being alone, and I was not displeased to have a day of isolation and solo recovery, before plunging back into my [normal] life. Which is, tbh, isolation most of the time too, and it suits me.

Blursday

 I read the term “Blursday” in The NY Times, I think. I don’t remember the whole article, but the term struck me as just exactly right. This is the time period in which I am living. There is little to distinguish the days, except if I zoom in and grab it, write it down for posterity.

I try various things to track my days, to try to pin down where my time goes. This is so hard: I can’t really remember. I went grocery shopping, was that Thursday or Friday? When did I last go through my mail and pay all the bills? Don’t I have some deadline coming up on one of the few things I am actually responsible for? When last did I speak to someone? To my family?

It’s so easy to just drift. I am doing things, sure enough. I’m working in the garden, I’m walking, reading books, laundry piles up and then gets done. I’m pretty much on an island most days, but things are getting done.

I’m keeping a log of when I do what in the garden, when I remember to do it. I started this after I planted some grass seeds, and then after a period of time, they came up. How long was that after planting? Because I was planting more seeds, I really wanted to know how long to wait before declaring failure. (Because my mind always assumes a catastrophic failure, but that’s a discussion for another time.) I had to go back and look at my pictures, and read the date taken, to be able to figure that out. Hooray for taking the pictures at the right time!

I’ve taken to actually keeping a calendar to see where my time goes. There is little on the calendar to begin with, but I go back, not every day, but every couple-few days, and try to reconstruct what I did. I don’t have goals here, just curiosity. But I do want to minimize the aimless puttering, the aimless TV (as opposed to purposeful TV!), and the aimless iPad surfing. It bothers me when I have hours accounted for. I want my time to count for something, even if it’s just growing my mind. 

So I look for clues, in the electronic signatures I leave around various places. My fitbit tells me when I woke up and went to bed, and by the number of steps I can often figure out when I did various physical tasks. My phone knows where I am in space, sort of (it’s buggy) and so I can use that to verify what day I went to the Giant supermarket. The iPad tracks screen time, even down to which app I am using, so I fill in details with that. Reading books or watching TV have no electronic signature, except when I finish a book (if it’s on the kindle and I have it connected), or what I can deduce from lack of activity tracked by the fitbit.

Why does this matter? No idea. But I’m doing it, at least for now.

Planning, Tracking, and Hunger

"Hunger is NEVER an emergency".

 I first heard that phrase many years ago. At the time, it was the fashion to suggest that many small meals was the "best" way to diet, and that it was important to avoid ever becoming actually hungry, because that would lead to raging hormones that would make a person lose all control. The implication was we are all victims of our biology, and, like the Incredible Hulk, we could not be held accountable for what we did when we were in a berserker mood.  

The context for my first contemplation of hunger as merely a normal expression of impulses (rather than an emergency) was a diet book based on cognitive-behavior therapy approaches, which I read years ago. The idea is to examine thoughts, and change them consciously if they are not serving you well. Clearly, the facts about hunger are that we can live for weeks without food - so for us in America, missing a meal time is not an actual emergency (except for some people with diabetes or other medical conditions). So if we get hungry at an inappropriate or inconvenient time, we can remind ourselves we will survive, and to be patient until it is convenient to eat. It was a liberating thought, and I've used it fairly often to skip snacks or reaching for crap rather than good food.

This approach is very compatible with the coaching group I am currently participating in. The emphasis in my group is to plan and track food, and to be very aware of hunger. We are taught to analyze what we feel in our body, to feel what hunger feels like, what satisfied feels like, and to only eat when we are hungry and to stop when we are full. I'm pretty sure I've got the first notion - what hunger feels like - down pat, but stopping when full is still very difficult for me. One tidbit that caused a lightbulb to go off for me was the notion that how much food it takes to be full does not change based on how hungry I am. A portion is still a portion. 

This came into play for me today. I experimented a while back with "intermittent fasting", a fad that suggests only eating during an eight- or ten-hour window each day has weight loss benefits greater than simply a calorie reduction from less opportunity to eat. I abandoned thinking of this as a useful thing, but overall it has made me more receptive to skipping breakfast. Because I have so much more energy in the morning, and because it often gets oppressively hot in the afternoons, I jump out the door to start my day without having eaten anything first. I have my coffee, and I drink lots of water, but nothing to eat until later.

I was especially conscious of how I was feeling this week, because last week I felt better in every possible way than I have in months. No headaches, no generalized malaise or fatigue, more energy than is my norm. I wish I had taken the time to write about this at the time, because it would be useful to remember better. As my body reverted back this week towards what is sadly my normal baseline, (with a full-blown migraine to mark the transition) I tried to stay tuned in to how my body was behaving.

I got engaged in projects of some sort every morning this week, finally breaking my fast between 11:00 am and 1:30 pm. I found it difficult to stop what I was doing, because my experience has been once I do, I am likely done with productive work for the day. If it's gardening I've been doing, like today, I have to shower as soon as I come inside, to try to ward off the always-present but not always observed poison ivy, which further delays when I finally eat. The day I didn't eat until well after noon was a problem. Hunger had moved from an annoying feeling of stomach growling to a hollow feeling in my chest, and finally a headache. I recognized the headache - not a migraine, but hunger. I eventually ate (very quick salad with just lettuce, meat, and bottled dressing), but for the rest of the day I was feeling the need to "catch up". Let's just say unplanned carbs happened. My coaching group would not allow that - food doesn't just leap into my mouth - at some point, I chose to put it there. My salad, and tylenol, eliminated the headache, but I had strong urges to eat for the rest of the day and I did.

Eating around 11 am, as I did today, seems to work much better for me. I'll be having another meal by 3 or 4 pm, and later I'll have to deal with my evening drive towards sweets- a constant issue, no matter how much I've eaten earlier.

I still think hunger is not an emergency. I don't have to eat. I've got reserves to last me weeks, comes the apocalypse. But my experience this week suggests letting myself get too hungry means I have to exercise a great deal of control to avoid overeating in an over-reaction. It would be more sensible to avoid putting myself into that position in the first place.

(This post was inspired by other's posts about hunger.)