Hi how are you I'm watching the first season of Teen Mom 2 because some beautiful angel put it on Netflix and I have a lot of thoughts, mainly about Corey & Leah. Please lmk if you're also traveling back in time to 2010 so we can discuss. 

Our Christmas was very nice, thank you for asking. Joe left Santa's plate of cookies on the floor underneath the tree - a bold move, and I applaud her for it. Her "big" gift this year was a Little People garage and we've played with it nonstop since Christmas morning AND she's tried to take it to bed with her every night so far SO I highly recommend it if you're in the market for a toddler toy. (Please don't let the very detailed negative reviews deter you. Just enjoy the fact that there are people writing and leaving them and maybe feel worried for their children, because if a piece of plastic is so disappointing to their parent then that kid is in for a rough life.) 

Santa also brought me an exercise bike because I had to look at pictures of myself in a tank top and the reality of how flavored coffee creamer has negatively impacted my life suddenly became very, very real. And honestly I can always use extra places to dry sweaters so no, I will not regret this impulse purchase [OF SANTA'S] by March. Anyway I disassembled the crate it arrived in at the bottom of our staircase, carried it up all three flights of that staircase piece by piece, and then put it all together myself THEREBY AND HENCEFORTHWITH I have already started burning calories and begun rocketing toward hotness. 

The cat is also on a diet. It's nice to have a buddy. He agrees he doesn't hate it everything is great.

I am "on vacation" until Monday, which I didn't think would be relaxing but it actually has been. It helps that my whole company closes for the week, so at least I don't have the anxiety of being unavailable if someone needs me. (LOL I'm literally like, the bathroom attendant where I work no one really ever needs me but I STILL WORRY SO MUCH.) I'm planning on working the weekend after New Year's if Diego is around then to entertain Baby Joe, and I know this all seems boring but I honestly fantasize about having a four-hour stretch to be left alone to get work done. That's my fantasy. I'm not even on a beach because I don't want the files to get sandy. 

Today it rained. Oh, how it rained. A cursed freezing rain. SO. This afternoon I filled the tub with water and some big Legos, balanced my laptop on the sink, and worked in the bathroom for an hour while Joe played Water World. I cannot recall other details of this day because the second the clock struck five I poured myself a glass of wine. (It wasn't a bad day. I just like wine and quite frankly the fact that I have stayed sober during every daylight hour so far of popsicle stick crafts and PBS Kids and Teams meetings should earn me a free goddamn pass to drink whatever I want to, okay? OKAY? I'M NOT BEING DEFENSIVE HOW DARE YOU? HOW DO YOU EVEN DARE?) What I can tell you is that right now there's a naked baby doll relaxing in the cat's water fountain, and when I finish up whatever this is I've got half a mind to join her.

When Joe grows up I'll be able to explain how weird the world was when she was little, and how every day I spent watching her grow up felt like a little miracle no matter how bleak everything else got, but for now it has to be enough that we get through every day. And we do. And there is a lot of giggling and cuddling, and sometimes we have the same hair style so I think we're doing pretty great all things considered:

state of the union

Joe lies down whenever it all feels like too much, and frankly there are worse coping mechanisms so I try and be supportive. Feel your feelings, little woman.

Back in September I searched "crock pot apple" on Pinterest and learned that my root chakra is blocked, so I bought a plant on the advice of a spiritual website and just made applesauce like I always knew I was going to. The plant is flourishing in spite of being dropped thirteen times before arriving to its new home directly on top of/next to a radiator/an open-all-winter window. I'm unsure of how much the plant has impacted the health of my root chakra but since neither one of us is dead and it looks cute in my kitchen I guess I'll keep watering it. 

My cat had his wellness visit yesterday and I paid hundreds of dollars to learn that he's fat and has stinky breath. Words cannot express how much I love and adore our veterinarian, but I already knew both of those things. Except now that I've paid for the privilege of having a learned doctor explain how I'm supposed to train my cat to brush his own teeth over a period of several months, I have to actually do something about how fat and stinky he is. And if there's anything I'm annoyed by, it's being asked to do things. 

Today I made macaroni and cheese from scratch. At 10AM. And we ate it for breakfast. And lunch. 

Blogger still won't let me upload photos except for when it does but then quickly changes its mind again which makes it worse, pick a lane Blogger. 

singing loud for all to hear

We went to see the Holiday Lights at the Bronx Zoo and it was a delightful distraction from my ongoing existential crisis and how fat I am. (When I say something like that a lot of people assume I'm referring to this year and I guess I am but I also have been chubby and disoriented since adolescence so I mostly just mean, you know, in general.) 

The last time I went to this zoo was a decade ago when I first moved here and it was on a free entrance day in the high heat of city summer and I had to do teAm BuiLdiNG acTiViTiEs which were worse than the crowding and the heat combined. It's much nicer when it's November outside and you bring a cute little baby. Also they had s'mores stations set up and it was so cute I could.not.even and also we found out they sell beer there which just. Mm. If that's not Christmas then I don't know what is. 

I know this is old news but my oh my is the new blogger interface a real pain in the ass. Of all the things in all the land to complain about, I know I know, but really. Is the person in charge of it okay? Has anyone checked on them? Is this a cry for help? I just can't imagine a happy person did this to us. Listen, if you're reading this: We're here for you. Just please fix the photo uploader and let the hostages go.

Lately I've been reading first thing in the morning instead of immediately getting ready for the day or doing any work. I've been waking up at the butt crack of dawn since elementary school when we bought The Sims and I became mildly addicted and started waking up at four in the morning so I could play for hours before school, but since I've been focused on fitting work into whatever "extra" time I have most of my odd morning rituals have been abandoned. BUT GUESS WHAT, there's no such thing as "extra" time. And it turns out that odd rituals are really important. And just like it isn't a waste to put makeup on when nobody is going to see you if it makes you feel good, it's also not a waste to spend thirty minutes reading some Patrick Rothfuss (yeah hi, I guess my 30s are when I get really into the fantasy genre - this is just who I am now guys, take it or leave it) before taking a shower or doing something to justify the paycheck you're still somehow earning. 

Especially when, let's be honest okay, you're not that productive throughout the rest of the day. I've reached the "fuck it" phase of whatever stage of life this is and if you haven't yet I highly recommend that you join me here. We smile and nod at work emails that used to infuriate us, and we take candy bar flavored creamer in our coffee. The cat somehow made a hole in the bottom of our new couch and sleeps inside of it, and we're fine with that. 

Leaving the house - other than to go to the park or the grocery store - is starting to feel a little bit more normal, even though the things I'm doing aren't necessarily normal. Last week, for example, I got to experience a day in the life of multiple children "virtual learning" with two toddlers thrown in for fun and by "got to experience" I mean that I ordered a pizza for lunch and let the TV be on all day and was glad that my kid isn't old enough for the state to care what I teach her. On another day I paid a nice lady to come sit with Joe so I could bring my work to Diego's work so that I could actually complete some work which felt (a) nice, because there's no quiet like the quiet of a coffee shop with no tables and (b) risky, because indoor dining technically isn't allowed here for four more days and although I was masked up and tucked away in a far corner and technically not dining it still felt like breaking a rule. 

I don't need to go anywhere and so I largely do not and will continue not to, but taking the train and walking in Central Park and being irritated for regular city living reasons were like balm to my soul the last couple of weeks. I don't know what the next months will bring, and I have to live one day at a time if I don't want to collapse, but it's nice to remember some of the reasons I love to live in this godforsaken Christmas morning of a city. 

 

What did my arms do before they held you?

SYLVIA PLATH

Waking up to a temperature under sixty degrees (that's Fahrenheit, exotic foreign readers) feels like God looking right into my window and saying, "I see you. Here is a gift for all of your troubles." Especially after a season of maneuvering a toddler and her stroller/tricycle/wagon up and down two flights of very steep, very narrow stairs on our way to and from very hot, very sticky excursions. It's just, I'm just. It's been so hot. 

We slept with the window open last night. I'm writing this in bed, wrapped up in Brown Blanket - Purple Blanket is in Joe's crib, thank you for asking I'll send your regards - drinking coffee and smelling the air and savoring not being depressed. Everything felt grey for about two weeks, and the only reason I can sort of measure the time is because it started shortly after Joe's second birthday at the end of August and started to dissipate a few days ago. 

It was a lot of things, and it was no one thing - you know, I know you know. My brain just forced its own fallow period out of self preservation. Anyway, this drop in temperature feels like a "Welcome back" from the universe and everything is all about me et cetera. 

The girl that I love is as clear as a diamond

And she moves like the trees in a warm summer night

But the girl that I love, she's like a bird in my window

When she flies she will fly far away from here.

But the girl that I love has my heart in her pocket

My mind in her purse, and my life in her hands.

- JOEL ALME, "A TENDER TRAP"

one morning

5:00AM: I wake up to Elton John singing "Circle of Life." (Sometimes it's "Call Me Maybe" because those are the only two songs I have on my phone. I think. I really don't know what's on that thing besides cat pictures and the Target app.)

5:01AM: I realize that Diego is still in bed, too. I ask him if he's late for work because these days it's extremely rare that I wake up with anyone other than the cat next to me. He's not. He starts mumbling something in sleepy Spanglish and I tune him out and keep scratching the cat and start mentally organizing a to-do list.

5:30AM: I get out of bed to feed the cat because right on schedule he's gone from happy little purr bucket to attempted murderer. Diego beat me to the bathroom so I start a pot of coffee and then stand in the kitchen checking work emails on my phone until I feel like he's had enough privacy (approximately forty seconds) and burst in on him so I can wash my face and teeth.

5:45AM: Diego leaves and I plow through as much work as I can before Joe wakes up. It's a little bit like getting to work an hour before any of my coworkers, except that they don't need their diapers changed when they walk in. And if they do it's not technically my problem, so.

6:45AM: I bring a cup of coffee into the bathroom and listen to a podcast while I put on makeup because it's important to look SNATCHED even though the only person that sees your whole face most days is your daughter and she's biologically programmed to love you even if you're ugly.

7:10AM: I go into Joe's room, where she's in her crib chattering at her bear and some dolls. We "pick out" an outfit together, I scrape her hair as much into a ponytail as it will go, and we read books for a few minutes before she tears ass into the living room after the cat.

7:30AM: She immediately finds a bag of groceries that her dad left on the kitchen floor last night and insists on eating an apricot and a mango POST HASTE. Then she wakes up all her other dolls so they can watch her give Hello Kitty some face tattoos while I attempt to keep working a little bit before breakfast.

 7:45AM: While I'm pouring her milk I realize that we're out of eggs, which isn't the worst thing because I decide to treat us to bagels in the park. I order some breakfast delivery and turn on the TV, hoping that between the milk and Peppa Pig I can squeeze a few more tasks in before we head to the park.

8:00AM: LOL

8:15AM: We grab the stroller, stuff Joe's backpack full of water bottles and the bagel that has now been delivered, and head to the park while it's still early enough to avoid other people.

8:Something - 10AM: We eat breakfast while watching people run on the track, scare some birds, chase a tennis ball around and play with the marbles Joe has snuck into her pockets. At one point I lose my keys, but don't worry I found them. Exciting stuff, people. A real roller coaster.

10:Something: Come home, "work" some more.

12:Something: I feed Joe some leftover lentils and rice and then she goes down for a nap. I have a meeting. I eat my own lunch and consider taking my own nap.

I have no idea what time it really is, let's be serious: Joe wakes up and usually at the waking-up-from-nap point in the day I've abandoned work completely save for answering an email or two. We play with toys, we color, we go for a walk around the block. She throws an inexplicable temper tantrum that lasts fifteen minutes. One of the two women who run her daycare has been making her food and dropping it off, so we "visit" with her and her teenage daughter for a few minutes and Joe pokes at some ants on the steps. Diego comes home FREAKISHLY early, and I ask him to do bath time while I cook so we can all eat together and he does so we do and now she's asleep after many more books and when I'm finished with this I'm going to take a shower and rinse this face mask off and maybe drink a beer and play The Sims but probably I will just fall asleep because even though this day was relatively easy as far as the days have gone because Diego was here for some of it I'm just very tired. And grateful that I have running water in which to clean my hands, and food to put in front of my kid even if she won't always eat it, but also still really tired. As Daniel Tiger says, you can be more than one thing. I hope you're all doing okay out there, and if you feel like shit even though you know damn well that all things considered you personally are DOING OKAY, I feel that.

In the absence of a commute and a building to swipe into and a desk to sit at that isn't in my living room, "taking a vacation day" doesn't feel quite the same. Particularly when, other than not logging into Teams or checking work email, everything else about the day is the same as the hundred days that came before it and the same as what the days in the foreseeable future will likely be. Joe still requires attention and cannot reach any of the places where the good snacks are kept (although, as I learned by terrifying accident very recently, what she can reach is into the silverware drawer for a butterknife that she proudly handed to me oh my god my heart it still hasn't started up again.) All of the housework still needs to be done, and then done, and then done again. Plus also, as anyone working from home with children and no childcare knows, "the workday" and "the workweek" have ceased to have any real meaning. You do what you can when you can do it, and if that means using nap time seven days a week to answer emails and run reports and generally just try to keep it all together then that is what you do. 

But, though however in any case. I have taken a few days "off" since March (saying "since March" instead of "since everything got weird" feels a little bit like elderly ladies whispering "cancer" but I still keep phrasing it that way where are my pearls) and yesterday was one of them. We left very early to go to the pharmacy, and then on the way to the park I braved a Dunkin Donuts for the first time... since March. Ordering was a little bit of an ordeal, given the masks and the plastic partition separating the employees from the customers, and the coffee I walked out with was a very distant cousin of the coffee that I ordered. So that was a little sad because I didn't like it at all (who orders "winter spice" anything in June? I ask you) BUT HOWEVER they stuffed half a paper bag full of chocolate donut holes for Joe and so, you know, all in all not a wasted stop. 

After the park we came home and read some books and Mommy used some face scrub and put on a mask and applied some self tanner (too timidly as it turns out, my shins are still blinding passersby) and then we took a nap. Daddy happened to come home early yesterday too, which was nice because we got to play with him for about an hour before bed. It was also nice because after our nap I was a little bit... not sad, but just... mmh, you know? (I don't know if you know. It's just that hours and hours of one-on-one time with a small child one hundred plus days in a row with absolutely no other adults around and not one single place to go to to break up any of that time for either you or the small child can tend to wear on one, at times. I occasionally get a little stare-into-spacey so it was an enormous relief to have another human being around for Joe to interact with. Anyway.) Then I attended virtual happy hour and then Diego and I ate vegetarian chicken nuggets and then we went to bed.

Today is Saturday and my instinct is to do some of the work that's sitting five feet away from me. Most of my job consists of reconciling and organizing and keeping track, and someday it might be fun to dig into the psychological reasons behind why I find those things so soothing but today is not that day. Today I'll just acknowledge that it's hard for me to let things pile up (unless I'm the one that made the piles; that's fine, it's different when they're my piles because I know what they are and what's in them DON'T TOUCH MY THINGS) and that most of the time - at least these days - the list of tasks that plagues me so is nowhere near as long as I convince myself it is when I haven't "worked" in a while. I also feel obligated to keep doing the best work I can for the people who are paying me, you know? "Why should my work suffer?" I ask myself. "There's no excuse!" Except there's a twenty-month-old excuse currently eating green apples and brie and croissant off of my plate in between watching a movie and rearranging her toys throughout the apartment. Also, you know, the general State of Things.

Anyway, today I'm not doing work and tomorrow I'm not doing any either. I am writing this instead, and when nap time rolls around a few minutes from now I'm going to throw a third layer of paint onto the accent walls in the kitchen that I decided were a good idea many weeks ago. Then from now on, since I at least know for sure that I'm home for the next two months minimum, I'm going to block out parts of the day to get work done. Whatever doesn't get done during that time will just have to wait until the next block of time. DOESN'T THAT SOUND LIKE SUCH A GOOD PLAN.

Namaste peace be with you.