I restarted this list too many times. It’s also crazy long.
So, let’s get to five more things.
1) Sleep
I’m a big fan of sleep. In my teens, I did not eat enough food so I basically slept everywhere. I slept so much in my AP US History class my teacher commented on it in my yearbook.
My husband is not a “good sleeper.” Like many adults, he spends a lot of nights unable to turn off his brain and he’s always very confused by my tendency to fall asleep seemingly anytime I’m still for more than five minutes.
I do eat enough now. And I used to spend far more time fretting about the day in bed. Then I spent a few years teaching kids on the other side of the globe at random hours of the night and had to train myself to catch 20-minute naps between classes. After that, I can pretty much fall asleep anytime my heartrate drops below 60. After I took up “running” last year, that happens anytime I lie down for five minutes.
Many times when I nap, and most nights, I fall into a deep sleep pretty quickly. I’ll fall asleep wearing my reading glasses and holding a book. I’ll fall asleep with the lights on and music playing. I’ll fall asleep with the husband screaming at sports on the other end of the couch. I’m a champion sleeper. The husband always found this fascinating and confusing because he’s one of the millions of people who has trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, staying in one place while asleep, and napping in general.
Then, I happened to read this while trying to figure out what kind of bees were in our yard. One particular sentence stood out:
Though most bees passed through a sleep cycle. Unlike mammals, bees experience deep sleep earlier in the sleep cycle rather than late.
This stood out because, according to my FitBit, my deep sleep always happens early in my sleep cycle and most of my REM sleep is later, often right before I wake up which is why I’m often remembering very vivid dreams and details my husband finds unusual.
So, I mentioned it to my therapist. Mostly as a joke about being “a bee.” And her face got the same look of curiosity the husband’s gets and she told me she wanted to talk about this with some colleagues. Huh? Ma’am, my x-rays have already been used by my chiropractor to talk about scoliosis at conventions. Now you want to chat up my sleep habits?
So, I did a little more digging and found the Walter Kaiser article often cited regarding bee sleep and it seems to say the opposite.
Sleep in mammals is an active, controlled process; the same seems to be true of sleep in honeybees (Figs. 3, 4). Unlike mammals, bees experience their deepest sleep towards the end of the sleep phase (Figs. 3, 9, 10, 12).
Then, the Kaiser article is from 1988 and the Carolina Honeybees blog cites a 2008 book by Jürgen Tautz so maybe something in the research has changed? Until I read some of these library books, renting a honeybee tome doesn’t make sense.
At any rate, I’m not a bee. But I am a good sleeper.
2) Natasha
Speaking of sleep, the latest cat addition is an excellent drug. Even my husband, who is a notoriously-awful sleeper, has discovered that curling up with her in the afternoons turns into a nap even if that wasn’t the intention. It does not matter what time of day or night it is, how much sleep one of us has had, how much coffee we’ve consumed, or what we were planning to do. If we lie down with the kitten, we end up asleep. It’s powerful magic.
3) Risk vs Reward (On the frustration of living in alternate realities)
There’s a more-powerful magic that seems to have swept the globe, or at least the United States (what a misnomer that is). It feels like most of the nation has forgotten Covid-19 and its numerous variants ever existed. Or, if it did, it’s something that happened long ago, like smallpox. (Oh, you say a relative of smallpox, monkey pox, is also sweeping the country? Yeah, I’ve heard. I’m just not sure how many other people have.)
We had tickets to see Halsey and Chvrches last month. Now, we could get into the age of their primary fan bases and how I am not that demographic, but that’s not what this is about. I listen to a huge variety of music, and I like both artists. I loved Chvrches’ latest album and was excited to see them. (Halsey was great!) In the past, I’d have been thrilled that a band I liked was playing at Revolution Live, a very small venue in downtown Fort Lauderdale. It’s the kind of intimate-seeming concert space that hosts bands that are still opening for larger acts at the stadiums and acts that have been around for ages. Prior to the pandemic, we saw Blue October and Bad Religion there. (Both were also great!) These days, my biggest hesitation was the small space. Revolution gets packed and it’s the kind of place popular with younger, drunk crowds unlikely to wear masks and very likely to be scream-singing. Still, we had our masks, and were all set to go.
Then, he found out (via Zoom) half his coworkers had Covid, and did a little research to discover numbers were rising in the county again. So, he decided it was prudent not to go. (Note: he’s not the risk averse one in this relationship. He’s far more likely to invest in stocks, play slot machines, and say things like, “You can’t stay indoors forever.” I am the one who once spent my pocket change (literal change, maybe totally $1.75 in coins) on slots in Las Vegas and then left the casino.
Local friends are all living their normal lives. The neighbor no longer wears a mask at the grocery store. One friend traveled to Europe and went on a cruise. Another goes to bars and restaurants regularly. They tell me, “It’s like the flu,” and since most of them have had it at least once, they feel like the reward is worth the risk.
Meanwhile, I cannot seem to find good data on the percentages of people who develop long-term complications, be it Long Covid symptoms like fatigue or parosmia or underlying organ damage, and what – if anything – causes some to “just have the flu” and others to end up disabled.
If I hadn’t watched the husband suffer through the complications of a massive (non-Covid) infection in fall of 2020, I might feel differently. If I hadn’t been there every day as he recovered from one complication only for another to take hold, I might also feel safe running around maskless at bars. But I was there when a relatively-healthy guy’s kidneys started failing and blood seemed to be coming from everywhere. I know he still has to keep up with his supplements and medications or signs of bodily distress start to emerge.
So, I guess for now I’ll keep living between the waves and watching Chvrches on YouTube.
4) Reading
If you like lyrical language, go find a copy of Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson and/or Nothing Burns as Bright as You by Ashley Woodfolk. Both take the idea of a love story and run it through a gauntlet of poetry so that it comes out beautiful on the other side.
I’ve been working my way through Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. It’s a fascinating look at the ways data bias appears in unexpected places all around the world. While it discusses bias in a very binary way, the implications obviously impact anyone living outside the default system’s design, and any corrections to the system at large would benefit those traveling, working, and existing in those stereotypically women’s spaces. I listened to Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (by Amanda Montell) while I was cleaning and putting together a website yesterday. Very interesting to see how the similarities between things like CrossFit, YoungLiving, and Trumpers.
5) Body Work
Speaking of books, I finished reading Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos over the weekend. I found it oddly uncompelling, but I can’t quite say why. Perhaps it’s something to do with already deciding to write about things, even if they’re “navel gazing” because fuck you, that’s why. Seriously, though, why wouldn’t writers put their experiences and emotions into words? Even if writers are crafting fiction rather than personal narratives, they’re often drawing from things they’ve read, lived, and researched to create worlds that feel real.
My own version of “body work” has been trying to get over or ignore the body dysmorphia that has plagued me forever. By the time I hit high school, I had shot up to 5’9.5” (in 1990) but only weighed 110 pounds. I was sure I was fat. I mean, my thighs spread out when I sat and covered the whole [tiny school] chairs. My rib cage stuck out leaving lumps in my shirts, which for some reason my brain decided meant I was too overweight to wear anything but baggy clothes. In other words, I was an idiot.
Look at this dumbass (in the middle). This was printed in 1993, but my hair was far longer then, so it was more likely 1989-1990. Fashion in our town moved a bit slower than it did in the cities, so I was still rocking my giant 80s clothes and trying to figure out how to convert the feathered perm look into the “rooster” bang. Despite the fact that it is clearly hot out that day since my sister is in a tank top, I thought it was necessary for me to wear the summer version of Ally Sheedy’s Breakfast Club look. I thought it hid my “trouble zones.” Again, I was clearly an idiot.
In my twenties and thirties, I mostly kept my body-related “crazy” under wraps, but when my metabolism changed at forty, I started thinking of myself as “fat” again. Ironically, I was trying so hard to be “body positive” and “accepting” of myself and was trying to convince myself that my new pounds were curves, and it just wasn’t working. I felt too heavy and uncomfortable.
After losing about 30 pounds, I seem to have plateaued at a place that feels more natural and “me.” I now have to work on understanding the difference between a real body and a perfected body. It’s difficult to erase all those years of programming that says flat stomachs are somehow preferable.
A friend and I were having this chat over the weekend. After 40, it’s way harder to keep up that “fitness” aesthetic (that’s a fallacy of the diet industry anyway) and all those Instagram pictures of flat stomachs and large booties are often the result of filters/editing, plastic surgery, not having eaten yet that day, being in a non-bloated time of the month, etc. (or some combination of all that). I’ve been trying to be brave enough to post “non-perfect” pictures of myself because that’s what I look like and Versace isn’t paying me to be whatever version of the “perfect” body is this month. (Salem Tovar has multiple videos about toxic trends dealing withy body image and the internet, especially TikTok.)
So, yeah, work to do.
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