Starring out windows is what self-isolators do best

This might be the day that productivity fails me and I forgo a bra. I don’t want to get dressed or go for a walk. I probably wouldn’t even be writing this if I hadn’t made the commitment and if I didn’t know that there were at least one or two of you out there who are bored enough to read it. I read what I wrote yesterday and yeah this blog is terrible. So if you are reading it, I am sorry and I will try to be better but honestly probably not today. This is just what I am doing to keep myself mentally moving forward. I do wonder what book Brene Brown is writing right now. She and the people who are already at the top of their careers, the famous comedians, skilled authors and journalists, the people of our times, they will tell the stories of this time in our history and for that I am jealous. All I have are grand hopes for our collective conscious shift and a fundamental change to our systems and this quarantine blog.

I love logistics. I am fascinated by systems and I loathe that they fail us.

(Long Pause)

(Stare out the window)

Systems are people. That is something I learned in the first half of my Master’s in Public Administration program. Systems are the people who make them up. In us, as a people and a system, I see a blind spot when it comes to patterns and our individual parts in them. Our systems have a hard time helping people. Navigating them as a user feels like playing a game you can’t win, like the Hunger Games. They don’t all fail us, all the time. If I receive the unemployment I was quoted for, that system will work for me. I’m thinking primarily right now our crisis response systems at the local, state and federal levels, of coarse. Who isn’t? And ugh, get me back in school cause the next time something like this happens, and there will be a next time, I want to be in a position to contribute to the response, if not the telling.

I promised to revisit the difference between boredom and loneliness. The other night, though I had gone for a good hike in the foothills and delivered food to people and had just a tip top, gorgeously productive day, when I got home and the sun went down, I felt lonely. I hadn’t felt that in a good while. I felt so lonely I got mad at the people who weren’t here and then I started to think, like I used to all the time, “no one loves me…” As soon as I heard myself say those words I was I knew I was in trouble , that I was going to a place that I did not want to go and then thought, “ah yes, there is food for this.” I knew that I needed to immediately love myself to keep from going down that hole and so I ate a second dinner and then a second dessert and passed out before the endorphins could wear off. Its ok to give yourself what you need when you really need it most. So here is my half-baked theory- loneliness can lead to dangerous places and requires some sort of preferably immediate action, where as boredom is a blessing to be fully given into.

This hoodie has food all over it and smells like b.o.

---

I can't remember how to begin

I had a funny thought this morning, and I was like, “I’ll start with that today.” But I didn’t write it down and now it has left and I don’t know where to start. There are plenty of ideas written on my white board, but I am stuck on what I can’t remember so… I’ll divert to cats.

A couple of weeks ago my man came to visit. He has a manual transmission drill with speeds like the clutch on a car and a level of followthrough so high it is dizzyingly sexy. Anyone who really knows me, knows that I have had the dream of giving my cats a way to circumnavigate the apartment without touching the ground in a series of cat walks. This is supposed to dramatically improve their quality of life; it increases exercise, territory and vertical safe space. They would be made from things I had procured over the years at thrift stores and yard sales.

I had been carrying around this one small wooden shelf unit for years. It fit perfectly in the kitchen of my first solo apartment, a one bedroom “hallway” style unit of affordable public housing with very thin walls. In the winter, I could see the frozen Lake Champlain from my kitchen sink. That apartment sat in the little lakeside neighborhood I spent my most formative years in Vermont and where y cats Fabs, the formally feral, and Scratchy were both born. It was in that apartment that Fabs and I both found our way from hiding under beds and hissing at anyone who came to close, unless they were feeding us, to friends. And it happened right there on that kitchen floor, in the presence of that wooden shelf.

When I moved from Vermont to Idaho with my now former boyfriend, I sold or gave away most of my stuff. His furniture held more monetary value and he had a lot of it, so we sent his stuff ahead with the movers and mine went to a woman named Gigi. She looked older than she was and had just moved into a drug recovery/ retirement housing unit. She was the only person to stop by the yard sale I thought would be a good idea to hold in December, in… Vermont. She only had a few dollars and was interested in my trashcan. It was a fancy composting trashcan I had, yes paid way too much for and I too her if it didn’t sell, I’d give her a call. Once it become apparent that not even my friends were coming to my yard sale, that I was going to have to donate all my stuff anyways, we loaded everything up and basically furnished her whole place. That felt right and like I was a part of a miracle but it didn’t stop there. Once we arrived in Boise, I continued to let things go that I still regret. Chief among them was the car I called Wifey, cause, “Every woman needs a wife.” It was the first car I’d owned in 7 years- a Mazda 3, used, one-owner, black, still under powertrain warrantee, manual transmission. I’d taken a bus to the dealership and haggled them down 10% on the price. I was proud of how hard I’d worked to get to the place where I could buy that car but he had two of his own, both paid off and better in the snow. It made sense at the time to sell Wifey but it hurt. That was because I didn’t think that anything I brought to the relationship had value and that showed in the way I let just about everything go in an attempt to fit in. But somethings I just couldn’t and even though that shelf sat for years in damp garage spaces and was in terrible shape last spring, I knew that once I found my place, I’d find a place for it.

Somehow my dream of cat walks and my attachment to that shelf came together to produce the vision. Once I had that, I just needed the help executing it. Projects of this scale overwhelm me but luckily my sexy skydiving, firefighting, lover rolled through town in the van he built out and the cats and I have never been happier.

In part seven of my current read, titled “Don’t you ever get bored?” Louise writes, “There is something so smug about people who say with horror and umbrage at the very suggestion, ‘Who me? With my rich mine of inner resources? Me? With all my rare memories and rich philosophy?’ I hate people like that… But be that it may, the answer is no. We’re almost never bored.” I admit, I can edge on the umbrage here, as last week’s posts about bread baking and overcoming childhood trauma may have belied. Also, I have so many more grand dreams and half-baked visions which amount to a never ending list of unfinished home projects, akin to cat walks. Things like: curtains, blankets made out of old t-shirts, a stage for home shows and I’d really like to sand and paint my bar stools. Plus it ill be time to plant flowers on my patio. I mean it goes and on so that I could say confidently I could spend months in quarantine and not get bored. I mean to execute two of those things alone I have to learn to sew for heaven sake. Boredom is different than loneness though…. I think that was what I was going to write about today but ugh, I still can’t remember how it starts. Maybe tomorrow.

Fabs on the Sky Bridge

---