Category: Memoir

Where were you a year ago?

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Memoir, Pop Goes the Culture, The Voices in My Head1 Comment

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.

A picture of several beaded bracelets in different shades of red and maroon.

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.”

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I hate to move it move it

On By MezzoSherriIn Be Your Own Beautiful, Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, Health at Every Size, Memoir, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head1 Comment

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.

Two potatoes with cartoon faces drawn on them, sitting side by side on a dollhouse-sized couch.

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.**

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Bearing witness

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Memoir, Politics and Policy, Pop Goes the Culture, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

[CN: the Holocaust, genocide]

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.)

A concentration camp prisoner intake card, slightly out of focus. Superimposed over are the words "#EveryNameCounts: An Initiative of the Arolsen Archives."
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Time passes

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Memoir, Meta-Blogging2 Comments

It has been—

[Looking at calendar]

—3 weeks since I last write here on JALC.

[Allow me to pause one more moment to turn said calendar over to February.]

A calendar showing the first 2 weeks of February 2021.

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.

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Rites of passage

On By MezzoSherriIn Memoir, Politics and Policy, Pop Goes the Culture, SpiritualityLeave a comment

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….

Picture of an Advent calendar: a small Christmas tree with 24 ornaments hanging on it.

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:

A perpetual block calendar, with multicolored blocks showing the date Thursday, September 24. The blocks are photographed at an angle so you can see some of the other months and numbers on the un-used sides of the blocks.
DIY instructions to make your own available here.

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.

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Permission to fail

On By MezzoSherriIn Make Epic Shit, Memoir, Practicing in the Heart, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

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.

A completed puzzle sitting in front of the puzzle box it was packaged in. The puzzle box shows a wintry scene with a gazebo among tress, with a single red cardinal ion the foreground. The completed puzzle shows a wintry scene of a snowman standing in front of a wooden fence, surrounded by more than a dozen birds.
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.

A box for a 1,000-piece Springbok puzzle, showing a picture of a red-and-white striped lighthouse on a grassy bluff, in front of a pink and peach colored sunset sky.

It’s like a bonus mystery with my gift. Fun!

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Storming the people’s house

On By MezzoSherriIn Memoir, Politics and Policy3 Comments

[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.

A screen shot of a Facebook post by Rebecca Solnit, interpreting a photograph showing an insurrectionist carrying a Confederate battle flag in a Capitol hallway while another rioter sits on a leather couch holding stolen riot police gear. (Link to full post in photo caption.)
Full post here.
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Cosmic rewards

On By MezzoSherriIn Books Books Books, Memoir, Self-Acceptance, Stuff about Stuff1 Comment

I’m almost sorry to be going back to work tomorrow.* Not all-the-way sorry: it’s good work with good people, and mama likes being able to pay her bills.

Still, I’d had fantasies about what I’d be able to do with two full weeks off-the-clock: I was hoping to do a whole bunch of decluttering and start rearranging my home office so that I can treat myself to a real, functional desk for here. Now that I’ve been working here every day for 9 months, with no end in sight, and doing more writing AND with grad school on the horizon, it’d be really nice to have a workspace bigger than 19″ by 40″.

But the truth is that I was so burned out after 2020 that it took me a number of days just to unwind from that. And then there was the time and effort I put into hosting my first solo grown-up Christmas. So I didn’t really turn my attention to the house until this past Wednesday or so—and even then, I balanced my efforts on that score against my (entirely legitimate) desire for rest & relaxation.

All of which is to say: I’m still a bit of a ways from having the office cleaned up enough to make room for a replacement of my elementary-school desk.

An image of classroom desks lined up in an empty classroom.

Still, I’m glad of what I managed to get done in these few days. I filled several more boxes for Goodwill, and have emptied out more than a dozen file boxes that were holding various stuff that had been stowed down in the basement at various points in time when we were trying contain and conceal my hoarder’s mess in advance of hosting friends over for some sort of event or other.

(Ah, the pre-COVID days when we were able to host parties!)

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Shine on, you crazy diamond

On By MezzoSherriIn Be Your Own Beautiful, Memoir, Practicing in the Heart, Self-Acceptance, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head1 Comment

I’m gonna be a little bit emotionally honest tonight.

One of the main reasons I posted my reading challenge list last night is ‘cos I was still too embarrassed to share my word for 2021.

[Quick catch-up for anyone who needs it: I’ve chosen focus words for a few years now, which is something a number of folks in the self-development world do. And, as I mentioned in the run-up to New Year’s Eve, my word organically came to me somewhere early-to-mid-December.]

Now, that unbidden emergence is the way all my successful word-of-the-year experiments happened,* so odds are that unbidden word is the right choice for me in 2021. And I have enough trust in my intuition that I haven’t been actively seeking a different option. But, alas, I also have enough self-judgement that I’ve not been willing to share this word with anyone.

And what is this super-embarrassing term that has me in such a tizzy?

Shine.

A close-up picture of a sparkler.

(Kinda silly, right?)

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Laying some groundwork

On By MezzoSherriIn Life-Long Learning, Memoir, Stuff about Stuff, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head1 Comment

It’s been a long time since I did “New Year’s Resolutions” (I wrote about that last year and the year before). Nonetheless, in these waning days of 2020, I find myself in a reflective state of mind, drawn towards the notion (fantasy?) of getting myself more centered/grounded/organized before 2021 rings itself in.

Part of it is that odometer-turning energy that gets me every turn of the calendar. Part of it is the positive side effect of allowing myself to really-and-truly check out of work—-something I’d not done since COVID started.

But let me be clear: NONE of this is irrational exuberance about 2020 turning into 2021. As far as that cosmic detail is concerned, I agree with this wisdom I’ve seen going around Twitter and FB:

Nobody claim 2021 as “your year.” We’re all going to walk in real slow. Be good. Be quiet. Don’t. Touch. Anything.

Solid advice, as far as I’m concerned.

Still, I find myself doing some preparatory things for this quiet walk into 2021.

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