How on earth have I managed to get this far into JALC’s lifespan without talking about the Olympics and my embarrassingly high level of fan-girl-ness about them?
I mean, yes, there have lots of long gaps and hiatuses: nonetheless, this blog started 15 mother-forking years ago (!!!), which means that Paris 2024 is the 8th set of Olympic games that has taken place since I started writing here.
So I mentioned in last week’s “re-entry post” that I’m undertaking some “life renovations” during this latter half of 2024.* Some of that is referent to topics I’ve discussed here previously: self-care, healthful movement, mental health, decluttering.
And some of that is working on some things I haven’t mentioned in the past. For example, I’m trying to figure out what kind of paid work I want to do during the final act of my career and I’ve started learning about my (most-likely, though officially-undiagnosed) ADHD brain.
I’ll admit, typing my tongue-in-cheek title, has put Bey’s refrain firmly stuck in my head:
Bow down, bah-bow down, bitches…
(I was always pretty good at earworming myself…)
But however happy I am to have an excuse to embed a diva-licious video into a post–and I am always happy to have an excuse and to do so–let’s take a moment for some real talk before I proceed any further:
ain’t NO ONE need to bow down to me. For any reason. I’m just plain, little ol’ me.
A couple posts ago, I mentioned my theory about humans being wired for anniversaries. I still haven’t taken the time to consult with Professor Google to see if there is any science bearing out that theory—for tonight’s sake, I’ve decided that whether or not I’m right about humans in general being wired this way, I know from my own lived experience that I sure as shit am wired that way.
I think it started with all the moving around we did when I was growing up. A lot of my memories of growing up are organized on the internal string of beads I keep in my head tracking what town and house we lived in for what years, what school I was at, and what my classroom looked like at different ages.
The internal recollection of where I was when such-and-such a memory took place is one of my most vivid ways of being able to place when something happened and how that memory exists in the sequence of events that have made up my life.
So I expect I’ll be spending the next month or so being a little bit haunted by the recollection of “where I was a year ago.”
So I mentioned that I had a less-than-wonderful endocrinologist appointment near the end of January. Basically, my A1C level is elevated after however-long of being stable.
And it could be a post-2020 dumpster fire kind of anomaly. After all, my stress has been through the roof since last fall, what with a very COVID Christmas, the presidential transition (and insurrection) and coming up on the first anniversary of this COVID life.* And to be honest, I paid just about ZERO attention to monitoring my carbs or sugar intake during the latter months of the year. Plus the fact that I’ve been sedentary as fuck since this COVID thing started. Most of my activity in recent years has been of the “functional fitness” variety: walking from the parking garage to the office building, being on my feet at work, airport and city walking during my almost-monthly business trips, plus the recreational activities of play rehearsals and dance choreography. And none of that has been happening for the last 11 months.
So, the spike in my A1C level could be temporary. Or it could be a progression in whatever level of pre-diabetes/insulin resistance/whatever ethical doctors really call it I currently have.
Jury’s still out on that—more observation and follow-up testing over the next few months to see what’s what.
But regardless of what the diagnostic outcome is, feels like a good time to get my butt off the couch.
Which, alas, isn’t anywhere near as easy a task as that sounds.
Because this past week, I’ve come face to face with the depths of how diet culture has completely destroyed my relationship with healthful bodily movement.**
There’s one more other thing that had me sufficiently preoccupied that it delayed my return to JALC by 4 or 5 days. It was a new project (or obsession), but it’s one that deserves a much more thoughtful exploration than last night’s joking reference to “shiny new objects.”
It started last Wednesday, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Someone on one of the lefty/liberal FB groups I belong to posted a link to the Arolsen Archives‘ #EveryNameCounts campaign, making the observation that the need to support this work is more pressing than it’s ever been, especially given the photos of those Capitol insurrectionists wearing anti-Semitic shirts with slogans like “Camp Auschwitz” and “6 Million was Not Enough.” (Also see this video from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum at around the 9 minute mark. Watch the whole thing if you can.)
[Allow me to pause one more moment to turn said calendar over to February.]
Now there’s a few main reasons for my radio silence. First and most prominently, I was on deadline for a stretch. An inevitable part of life for the non-profit grants professional. Especially one as prone to procrastination and over-scheduling as I can sometimes be.
I’ve already talked about my tendency for doing it kind of big for Christmas/Yule decorating. Part of that embarrassment of riches is not one but two different Advent calendars.
One of these is the traditional “Advent tree,” where you hang a different ornament on days December 1 through 24. You will note that our ornaments do not so much get hung up as they are magnetically affixed to said tree….
The other one works more like this perpetual calendars do. You know the ones that have the blocks you rotate around to show the day, date and months? Here’s an example:
Our is simpler: no months or days, just number blocks we can rotate and re-arrange to count down from 24 to 1 as we go through the month of December. It’s also cuter, since the numbered blocks are held by a dapper-looking penguin in a top hat and winter scarf.*
I haven’t touched the Advent tree since I (magnetically) hung its final ornaments December 24th. But once the calendar turned over to 2021, I put the “countdown penguin” back to work.
He’s counting down days till the Presidential Inauguration of Joe Biden.
With the weekend down-time, I’m probably gonna start my next puzzle tomorrow. It was a Christmas gift from my niece, and it ended up having a bit of a joke attached to it. You see, she’d also brought a puzzle to her parent’s house as a traditional Christmas project—yet another one of those shared traditions I’m looking forward to ALL of us enjoying together for Christmas 2021!*
Only the wintry scene on the puzzle itself was not a match for the wintry scene she’d chosen, as represented by the picture on the box.
It was the multiplicity of birds that gave it away
(I will pause for a quick sidebar to give mad props to anyone able to do a 1,000 piece puzzle without a guide photo…)
So, I was warned that the photo on the outside of my new Springbok puzzle box might or might not end up matching the puzzle inside.
[CN: violence; white supremacy; terrorism, domestic & otherwise: specifically 9/11/2001 and 1/6/2021]
I have vivid memories of the early hours of 9/11, after seeing plane #2 go into the South Tower. I was living in the heart of Philadelphia, unsure of the scope of the planned attacks and aware there was a slight chance that the historically significant locations in my then-home city might be interesting symbolic targets. At a couple different times during those endless, rapid-fire minutes, I spoke to other Philly friends, weighing the likelihood of Philadelphia or Washington DC or both cities being targets this clear autumn Tuesday.
The detail that’s haunting me this week is something my friend L. said in that brief slice of time between the Pentagon being hit and us learning the fate of Flight 93.
I think I could cope if they hit the White House, but if they hit the Capitol, it will break me.
And now, a little less than 20 years after that haunting, heartfelt moment, the “they” that hit the Capitol this week was part of an inside job. Domestic terrorists.
Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 