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.

Just squeezing in all the mirror pics we can before the mirror gets dirty, okay? Plus I want to remember what I was wearing today, The Day Our Boss Announced a 10% Pay Cut, known in some parts of the world as The Day Joe Did Most of the Elmo Alphabet Puzzle By Herself, also fondly referred to by many as The Day My Grocery Delivery Had Everything I Actually Ordered Which Was Really Awesome. 

~

"It had not been all suffering and horror. 
Life is never only one thing."
From "Kingdom of Gods" by N.K. Jemisin who I swear to goodness if someone I know doesn't start reading so we can discuss her brilliance in great depth and detail I will THROW UP.

~

This house has been on fire. At the moment the flames happened to have burst through the doors of those of us who have been pretending that our eyes aren't burning from the smoke, or from those of us who have been putting damp towels underneath the doors and pretending like nothing is burning, or from those of us who, you know, pour gasoline on the thing. "Oh yeah you know, now that you mention it, it is really unbearably hot in here isn't it. Huh." And there's that one guy leaning against the basement door that's already got chains and padlocks on it a la Saturday morning cartoons starring rascally rabbits saying "BUT WHY DON'T THEY JUST GET OUT OF THE BASEMENT I DON'T UNDERSTAND." This house sucks and I'm glad it's on fire but I say that from a place of extreme privilege, a place where the worst thing that's happened to me since March is that I've had to manage working a full-time job from home while hanging out with my cutie cute cute lady baby who is so, so cute.

There's nothing I love more than a good long gaze at my own navel, as you all know (and love, or hate enough to be interested otherwise you wouldn't be reading this drivel) so here goes: I'm not black. I'm sure as shit not at any protests right now, no matter how much I support the spirit. All I am is filled with white-hot rage that we live in a world where humans rob and rape and straight-up murder other humans because they know they can get away with it.

My desires for safety and comfort conflict with my desire to torch it all. Just, god, just burn it all down and start over. Me and my chubby legs wouldn't survive ten minutes post-apocalypse, though. And I haven't played all the Sims that I want to play in this life. And then also, it's not all shitty. Humanity I mean. I don't know if it's okay to say that right now, I'm actually almost positive that it isn't okay to say that right now, but in order for me to not lose my mind I need to remember that it's not all shitty. And that, personally, is what I'm pulling for - the non-shitty parts of this world we've built.

I guess what all this wine-fueled rambling is getting at is that all I can do right now is read books and examine my own racism and sort of start mapping out a specific plan for how to raise my daughter to be decent and kind. It doesn't feel like "enough" because it isn't, but if a million people who otherwise feel powerless to effect change did it too then maybe it might make a dent. So what's my point? I don't know. I don't know if I ever knew. I think I always start these things and then sort of hope they turn into something.

That's two Office references now, for anyone who's keeping track. 

Hi, it's me! I have pioneer woman hair and I got a new mirror for my playroom/home office/living room. And, um. That pretty much covers May!

Except that, I did finish that one quick quilt I started and it came out so cute that I immediately ordered some fat quarters (that's quilting lingo, I'm a quilter now it's a whole new world) off of Etsy that are now nestled snugly inside of the storage ottoman I've been using as a desk chair, waiting patiently for me to feel like taking the sewing machine out of its box again.

Not every day is a perfect day, but I'm doing my medium best most of the time and honestly for you to expect more than that is unreasonable. And, quite frankly, rude. How dare you.

I'm not in a frame of mind to do anything else here, as it turns out. But enjoy these phone pictures and be kind to yourself and keep your eyes out for the helpers, and remember that people are trees. (MR ROGERS/Ram Dass/I'm sleepy)