The OCD Diaries

September 29, 2020September 28, 2020

Mental Shore Leave: A Remedy for Uncertain Times

Low energy. A lack of creativity that partly explains why I haven’t written in over a month. A deepening sense of dread. I’ve spent weeks trying to put a name or definition to the feelings and fatigue.

I know the cause, and I know that I’m no special case. A lot of people are experiencing the same things, and the whys are many: We’ve had to hold our mental functionality together amid an unending pandemic, a breakdown of public discourse, civil unrest and now a looming presidential election where an unclear result and constitutional crisis are all but certain.

I’ve finally found the proper label, courtesy of Dr. Aisha Ahmad. More importantly, she has put forth a remedy to help us move forward.

Mood Music:

Dr. Ahmad, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, wrote a recent Twitter thread about the six-month wall she has experienced when working for prolonged periods in disaster zones and how, when you hit that wall, it seems like the darkness is permanent, that things will never get better.

The desire to “make it stop” and “get away” is “intense” and our impulse is to try and ram through the period of uncertainty, trying to be as creative, disciplined and hopeful as we may be the rest of the time. She has learned to stop doing that, to give in to the lack of creativity and drive and take a “mental shore leave.”

Series of tweets from @ProfAishaAhmad: "Also, don't be afraid that your happiness & creativity are gone for the rest of this marathon. Not true. I assure you that it will soon break & you will hit a new stride. But today, roll with it. Clear away less challenging projects. Read a novel. Download that meditation app. /7"; "Frankly, even though we cannot physically leave this disaster zone, try to give yourself a mental or figurative "shore leave". Short mental escapes can offer respite and distance from the everyday struggle. Take more mental "leave" until you clear the wall. /8"; "In my experience, this 6 month wall both arrives and dissipates like clockwork. So I don't fight it anymore. I don't beat myself up over it. I just know that it will happen & trust that the dip will pass. In the meantime, I try to support my mental & emotional health. /9"; "Take heart. We have navigated a harrowing global disaster for 6 months, with resourcefulness & courage. We have already found new ways to live, love, and be happy under these rough conditions. A miracle & a marvel. This is hard proof that we have what it takes to keep going. /10"

I’m certainly experiencing this wall. I find it harder to write (this is my first post in a month), and it’s getting harder to get out of bed in the morning. I’m finding it close to impossible to be patient with the unending social media screeds from the left and right political extremes.

I’ve had massive cravings for escape — watching YouTube clips from Star Trek, Babylon 5 and The West Wing. I’m reading more comic strips than news articles. And I doze off in my leather recliner a lot.

I thought these were signs of weakness, of caving and buckling under the weight of life in 2020.

But the more I consider Dr. Ahmad’s words, the more I think those activities might be a sign of strength — that I’m indeed capable of finding new waves of energy, creativity and resolve by simply letting the wall crash over me, resting in the rubble and then getting up and brushing off the dust.

We can expect many more months of chaos. Dr. Ahmad’s suggestion of taking mental shore leave is a tool to survive it. The key is to take mental shore leave without abdicating one’s responsibilities. We still have to get up for work. We still have to take care of our families. Obligations won’t go away while we pull ourselves together. So how do we maintain some semblance of balance? Here’s my plan.

Keep working, imperfection and all

I’m fortunate to remain employed, doing a job that matters. It’s a job that was already busy before the pandemic. Since then, the work has been more intense and, to be honest, I thrive in those conditions. In recent weeks, I find that I’m not as full of ideas and drive as I usually am. But getting up every morning and keeping all my initiatives on track gives me some mental stability. I may not be at my most creative, filling a whiteboard with thoughts and ideas in multiple colors as I’m known to do. But I can still keep all the balls in the air and keep the machine moving. And so I shall.

Ignore social media — to a point

Few things are more toxic to mental well-being these days than Facebook and Twitter. People are fixed in their world views and quick to tear down those with an opposing opinion. I’ve tried to spend my time on these platforms being a voice of reason, trying to steer people toward common ground. It increasingly seems like a pointless exercise. Yet I use social media for a lot of my work, so I can’t skip it altogether. Instead, I skip over political posts more often. My sharing is increasingly music-related, bits of rock ‘n’ roll history and video clips, and humor.

Stick with the neighbors

A silver lining of this pandemic is that we’ve gotten more quality time with the neighbors in our townhouse complex. We take joy in the pets running around the yard, our gardens and the beautiful weather we’ve been having. I’m pretty sure there’s a wide range of political views among us, but we don’t talk much about it. The antics of the pets are a lot more interesting and a lot more fun. (Especially when you stuff them full of treats! –Ed.)

Take more naps

As I mentioned earlier, I’m dozing off a lot these days after dinner and sometimes before. For me, there’s no better escape than sleep. It gives me the mental shore leave needed to keep going the rest of the time.

Remember what has gone right

There’s been so much tragedy in 2020 that it’s easy to forget that things have happened that show that we humans have the capacity to endure. As Dr. Ahmad noted in her Twitter thread, people have adapted, learning to do groceries, go to work and even find ways to be happy during the pandemic.

The pandemic will be with us for months to come, but there are signs that we can absolutely live our lives and co-exist with COVID-19. As bad as the economic downturn has been, a lot of businesses have found ways to adapt and latch on to unexpected opportunities.

Surely, we can continue to do so amid political chaos that will not abate anytime soon.

I’m a big fan of this quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” I’ve certainly tried to do so.

But even Churchill understood that it was OK to stop within bouts of depression — which he called his Black Dog — and let go.

August 6, 2020August 5, 2020

Why We’ll Survive This

Recently, my posts have trended toward the darker side, with laments over our broken political discourse and inability to coalesce around common goals. That doesn’t mean I’ve lost hope, however.

Here’s why.

Mood Music:

When shit rains down in our communities, we continue to come together. That’s an old story, with such examples as people combing through rubble and tending to the injured at the WTC in the wake of 9-11 and the rescue missions immediately after Hurricane Katrina.

As Mister Rogers once recalled his mother telling him, “The helpers always come.“

I’ve seen abundant examples during the current pandemic — nurses and doctors I know personally, driving their sanity to the knife’s edge to keep patients alive regardless of their politics, food drives overflowing with donations to help people who have lost their income, success of a thousand Facebook donation drives.

At a more personal level, despite what you see daily on social media, people remain good, able to see past politics to care for people.

My late father-in-law was an inflexible, often angry Trump supporter. He was socially conservative to the core. But he loved his “liberal” family members as much as the conservative ones. And it didn’t matter what you believed or what color your skin was or what your sexual orientation was: If you were burned out of your home, in legal trouble or broken down on the side of the road, he dropped everything and did what he could to make your burden a little less crushing.

I have a cousin who I constantly spar with on Facebook over politics and what we should or shouldn’t be doing amid COVID-19. When we meet in person, we argue about none of that stuff. Instead, we share in the joy of the little kids running around us and the concern for family down on their luck.

I have a friend from the old neighborhood who is far to the right of me politically. But our shared past and relationships forged there far outweigh the squabbles of the present.

Humans can be terrible to each other. But enough of us are kind to each other to re-enforce my belief that when push comes to shove, we can still come together.

That’s why, as bad as things are right now, I think we’ll get through this. I don’t know how long it will take, but it will happen.

"Spectre of the Past" by Eddie The Yeti. A brown and black image of a human skeleton with skeletal wings. — “Spectre of the Past” by EddieTheYeti

August 4, 2020August 4, 2020

Observations of a Centrist

When it comes to politics, I claim neither purity nor perfection. Mine are simply a set of beliefs collected through life experiences and a vigorous read of history.

One thing I’ve always tried to do is be open, adjusting those beliefs in the face of fresh evidence. Such evidence has come my way more times than I care to admit. To me, the ability to be flexible in this arena is necessary for personal growth, evolution and my usefulness to society.

I spent part of my teens and early 20s as a libertarian before swinging the other way toward left-wing liberalism.

By the time I reached my 30s and since then, my political leanings have remained mainly in the middle. I vote for Democrats and Republicans, depending on who I think shows the best ability to lead.

I like a vigorous debate between those on the left and right. When the country faces a crisis like the current pandemic, I prefer that leaders be willing to cast aside parts of their ideology and meet the other side halfway to do what’s necessary.

Most people agree that the current situation is dangerous — a new virus we’ve failed to get accurate measurements on, resulting in people forced to stay home, keep their distance and freeze the economy.

Most people agree Congress must pass another massive emergency aid package as the economy plunges to depths unseen since The Great Depression.

Most people agree we need far more extensive testing and that without a more accurate count of who is sick and who isn’t, most other data points are useless.

But the public discourse has become overrun by people from both political extremes.

Many on the far right are shouting that continued social distancing and mask mandates are acts of tyranny, that this is local and national government grabbing power for power’s sake.

Many on the left argue that those who want social distancing to end are heartless tyrants themselves, willing to sacrifice grandma and countless other lives out of a selfish need to restart the economy.

We continue to argue and vilify each other. This scenario is now playing out against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election. People at one extreme believe universal mail-in voting is the only way to stay safe. People at the other extreme insist mail-in voting is a recipe for massive fraud and will undermine the accuracy of the election.

President Trump, who has skillfully played the emotions of both extremes like a master conductor, claims mail-in voting will rig the election against him, even as his policies undermine the U.S. Postal Service, increasing the likelihood that things will go wrong.

As I sit here in the center, it looks to me like the far left and far right are easily played, becoming outraged at the drop of a dime. If you disagree with the far left, you’re a fascist too dumb to know what’s correct. Trump knows how easily riled they are and presses their buttons effectively. The far-right casts aside reality not because they lack intellect but because they’re convinced they’ve been lied to over and over again. Yet some of the things they’ve been willing to entertain as truth boggles the minds of centrists like me.

Against that backdrop, here’s what I believe:

Mail-in voting is no different than absentee voting, which has mostly worked for decades. If it worries you, spend less time crying foul and more time demanding that the postal service receive all necessary resources to make this work.
Americans are spoiled when it comes to election results. Except for 2000, we’ve had an outcome on election night for decades. To make mail-in voting accurate, we should be willing to wait weeks and even a month or two for careful counting and recounting. Then, it will be harder to discount the election outcome’s legitimacy, no matter who wins.
Though I think mail-in voting can work, I also believe in-person voting can as well. Most of us make regular trips to the grocery store, where we spend a good hour (I do, anyway). Voting can be a quicker process, if everything possible is done to provide enough polling places and move people along. You just follow the same rules as you do with every other outing. Mask up and don’t linger.
With a hybrid approach, we can have a fair election.
The government has grown rotten and we’ve been lied to repeatedly. If the government tells you something is necessary, it’s not the act of an uncaring person to be skeptical. In fact, it’s a healthy reaction.
But it’s not enough to sit around and bitch about it. People of all political leanings must demand more transparent government. That’s a cause as worthy of the kind of protest we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter (peaceful protest, not the looting and vandalism that rightly sparked outrage). As the late John Lewis used to say, some things are worth causing “good trouble” for.
The Founding Fathers built this nation to avoid extreme outcomes. Checks and balances demands compromise.
It’s fine, even appropriate, to look on government officials with skepticism. Both parties have done things to make the American experience a terrible one in this regard. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — a Democrat — is often lauded as an example of good leadership in the pandemic but some of his early decisions were disastrous, particularly his order to put COVID-19 patients in nursing homes, which infected and killed people who might still be with us today. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — a Republican — refused early on to institute safety measures. Florida is now a hotbed of sickness and death.
Some claim the pandemic itself is a conspiracy and a scam. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when there are millions of sick and dead people out there it’s real. I know several people who got sick and at least one who died.

The only way America will endure is if many more people meet in the middle and cast aside tribalism for the greater good. That means doing or not doing things that would seem appropriate in normal times.

These are not normal times.

Editor’s note: Prints of “American Ragdoll” are for sale, with all proceeds being donated to the Elizabeth Stone House in support of survivors of domestic violence in the Boston area. If you’d like your own print, email sharanewild@gmail.com.

June 30, 2020June 29, 2020

On Masks and Virtue Signaling

Want the economy to re-open? Hate government-mandated lockdowns? Think wearing a mask and avoiding crowds is another example of totalitarianism?

As I watch the polarized clash of feelings on social media, my observation is that people across the political divide generally agree on the first two items. The third is how we get the first and lift the second. Yet here we are, fighting about it.

Mood Music:

Amid the shouting are right-leaning friends hurling an insult they love using when they want to land a crusher: Speak up for something you believe in — like wearing a mask — and the response goes something like this: “Nice virtue signaling.”

On the surface, that phrase doesn’t seem so bad to me. You have a virtue and you are expressing it. People on the left and right do it. What’s wrong with that? When someone doesn’t practice what they preach, that’s different, but since we never completely know what someone is doing with their lives offline, where do we get off painting someone as a hypocrite, let alone an entire group of people?

You think people wearing masks are virtue signaling and telling everyone else what to do. You think wearing a mask somehow infringes on your freedoms and is another example of the state trying to control the masses.

You opine that governors and public health officials should not make mask-requirement decrees without action from state legislatures. Yet state and federal laws give governors and the president the right to do so in a health crisis. COVID-19 qualifies.

You think the government has been wrong and/or dishonest about the pandemic, painting it as more of an emergency than it truly is? There’s no evidence of that, but the government has been lying to us about many things for a long time, so I don’t blame you for thinking that.

The last few months are a perfect illustration of that, with a never-ending stream of conflicting, inconsistent guidance as we struggle to learn more about this new disease. When you can’t keep your guidance consistent, people aren’t going to believe you.

I agree about and appreciate the physical difficulty some have wearing masks. That’s where I think limiting your exposure to other people comes in. And for the record, if I’m outside taking my morning walk, I don’t wear a mask. I’m the only one out there. It’s a different story when you’re coming into close contact with other people.

But it baffles me that you complain about the tyranny of lockdowns and reject a remedy that can control infection rates and let us carry on with our lives.

We can’t stay locked down without economic devastation, a mental health crisis, or a later surge in deaths because doctors aren’t doing cancer screening and other early-detection treatments.

We’re also not going to get rid of COVID-19 anytime soon, so we have to learn to live with it in our midst.

Wearing a mask and avoiding packed crowds won’t drop transmissions to zero, but it helps significantly. The proof is in states that have been at various stages of re-opening for weeks and still have infection rates under control. My state is one of them. More of daily life has resumed, many people wear masks and our infection/death rates continue dropping.

Looking at the current surge of COVID-19 happening in the south and west, it’s clear that a big part of the problem is that people are ignoring guidelines, going to crowded bars and not putting on a mask.

Some say they shouldn’t have to wear one because they have antibodies and “can’t catch” COVID-19. Immunity isn’t certain, nor how long any immunity lasts. And wearing a mask isn’t about you: it’s about protecting others. If immunity wears off or you don’t become immune in the first place, not wearing a mask endangers others.

If you think these thoughts make me a leftist, virtue-signaling sheep, fine. I make choices for myself and do so after considering how my actions effect those around me.

Some of you keep telling me to “reject the narrative.”

I do.

Your narrative.

June 17, 2020June 17, 2020

Be Patient with Each Other

Back in March when everyone was beginning to shelter-in-place, I remember someone saying that moving to stay-home mode would be easy compared to re-opening mode.

Now that we’ve begun that stage of the journey, I’m talking to friends and family who might agree.

Mood Music:

There are the endless procedures now necessary for people to return to their shops and offices.
There’s the long list of questions for how families safely resume gatherings.
As summer drags on, discussion about how and when to open schools will create enough stress to fuel a thousand migraines.

I don’t want to argue about whether the lockdowns or all of the re-opening precautions are justified. The arrows directing movement in buildings will be there for some time, as will the mask wearing in public.

Instead, we all need to:

Try to understand each others’ concerns as we head back out into the world,
Not brush someone off as paranoid because they’re worried about exposure to their households, and
Not take every question you get about your own precautions as a sign that the person asking doesn’t trust you.

Some will stride out into this new world more enthusiastically than others.

It’ll be easy to look at someone who wants to go through all the safety procedures before a gathering and believe they’re overthinking it.

It’ll be easy to take offense if you’re asked about your own potential exposure to COVID-19 — especially when you’re taking every safety measure known to humanity.

This is one of the more insidious things about the pandemic — it’s tendency to pit people against each other. I don’t mean the “it’s a hoax and it’s tyranny” crowd, or the “you went out in public because you don’t care about saving lives” crowd.

I mean the mistrust over how exposed someone is. About friends and family eyeing each other with suspicion over who is being careful or reckless.

It’s easy for mistrust and frustration when we don’t know for certain what all the right answers are in the first place.

As we move forward with each suggestion of a small get-together, there are a few things I hope we can all keep in mind:

A lot of us miss each other terribly and want to be together again.
We also have different feelings about how to come out of sheltering and having family events again.
Everyone’s concerns should be taken seriously and not be dismissed as overthinking or not being trustworthy.
If you’re gathering as a family for the first time in three months and one family member wants to know how it’s going to work, that’s a valid thing to ask about.
It’s entirely appropriate to ask what everyone’s exposure has been.
It’s entirely appropriate to let people know what your own exposure is.

It’s good to be at a point where we can start to think of doing some things together again. But make no mistake: We’ll be in this pandemic for many months to come.

We can’t stay locked away, and that means extra precautions. It’s a hard, complicated pain in the ass, so we have to keep working together, be more trusting and more patient with each other.

"Spectre of the Past" by EddieTheYeti is a black skeleton with skeleton wings on a brown and black background. — “Spectre of the Past” by EddieTheYeti

June 2, 2020June 2, 2020

Finding Reason in a World Gone Mad

I write this amid violent unrest across the nation. Angry masses are protesting police brutality after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after being pinned down by a White officer. That officer, Derek Chauvin, was charged with murder Friday.

With the internet full of pictures of a police station set aflame, overturned cars and rage-filled faces, I see some people on social media worrying that this is just another byproduct of a larger problem years in the making.

More than a couple people have suggested that this is a slowly unfolding civil war.

Mood Music:

The latest violence comes a few weeks after protests over the pandemic lockdowns, including a series of gatherings where armed protesters flooded the Michigan statehouse.

The civil war predictions usually show up in the comments of such threads. In more than one, I’ve voiced my own worry about it.

This thought is always in the back of my mind. In the early ’90s a lot of armed militias threatened violence. Some acted on it, the most tragic example being the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

But in the last decade, the political divide has become starker. The left and right fringes have become louder and angrier. We have a president who likes to fan the flames on Twitter. More than ever, it feels like America is imploding.

One such illustration is the Boogaloo movement, whose right-leaning anti-government members actively prepare for a second American Civil War. Another example is in the tactics of the left-leaning Antifa movement, founded as an anti-fascist entity but whose tactics have been branded as terrorism by some (Trump declared it a terrorist organization).

Are those fears justified? Time will tell, but let’s step back, take a breath and put things in perspective.

I don’t see the threat of civil warfare as out of the question. But I work in an industry whose job is to consider and plan for scenarios that seem crazy and improbable. Indeed, some crazy things have come to pass. Who would have thought, even four short months ago, that we’d be living in a world of pandemic-fueled lockdowns and an almost-complete freeze of the global economy?

One friend was warning of lockdowns and a depression-caliber economic calamity in late February and I thought he was being over the top. Yet here we are.

We should note a few things about what we see in the real world and online:

Everything is hyper-magnified online. When your Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of pictures of armed protesters and buildings on fire, it’s easy to feel like the world around you is truly coming apart.
The internet has made it easier for people at the extreme ends of the political spectrum to be heard. They are much more likely to spout off than people with more moderate views.
The internet has given us more access to data than we’ve ever had before, but that data never truly shows the full picture and it’s easy for us to cherry-pick the bits that fit into our preconceived views. There’s a term for that: confirmation bias.
We’ve always had violent civil unrest in this country. The aftermath of the MLK assassination in 1968 and the L.A. riots in 1992 are but two examples.

Other things worth remembering:

Despite all the vitriol online, there are still a lot of good people in the world who will drop everything to help those in distress, even those with whom they passionately disagree when it comes to politics. I see people who don’t agree on a lot of things stepping up to help each other, like one guy who donated to an online fundraiser to help someone he argues with all the time, after they lost their home in a fire.

Though social media makes it easy for people to say angry things, most of the people I’ve seen do it don’t act on it. It’s not crazy to suggest that the ability of some to blow off steam online has helped them stay nonviolent in reality. Of course, the same can be said for those who take their anger from social media to the real world.

What to do with all this information? I don’t know. I only know what I’ll do with it — try to continue doing the right things through my daily actions.

The world will continue to resemble a Dumpster fire for some time to come.

We can’t fix everything on our own, but there are things we can do each day to make the world a better place.

That’s an obvious thing to say. But in a world gone mad, the words need repeating.

May 28, 2020May 30, 2020

Good Things Are Happening (Updated)

With all the turmoil going on in the world — a pandemic, polarized politics — it’s important to remember that every day, even amid the bad, good things are happening. Here’s the current slice of that from where I sit.

We’ve entered a new phase of space exploration

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley blasted into space Saturday in the first launch from U.S. soil since the space shuttle program ended nine years ago. Unlike past launches when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, is in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon.

The curve is flattened

We still have a long way to go in this pandemic and it’s widely expected that we’ll see a second wave in cases — and deaths — later in the year. But for now, there are clear indications that the COVID-19 virus is slowing down, showing that we can gain the upper hand. (How best to keep that upper hand will be a fierce debate for some time to come, but the optimist in me feels more confident that we’re going to get better at learning to control spread without keeping everything shut down.) This New York Times chart tells the story:

We’re rediscovering old pleasures

One example I’m excited about: the return of drive-in movies, something I remember doing as a kid in the 1970s.

Business owners struggling with the shutdowns are increasingly repurposing their properties for this old pastime. Outdoor cinema venues are popping up all over the country.

Retirees are beating isolation by hosting a radio station

Radio Recliner is an online pirate radio station hosted exclusively by elderly DJs from assisted living communities across America. It was started in April by marketing firm Luckie to entertain lonely seniors and keep their spirits up.

The Good News Network notes that Luckie only planned to air daily 60-minute shows for a month, but the project has taken on a life of its own. Radio Recliner now has a team of 18 senior DJs.

When bad things happen in the world, good things happen, too — always. The pandemic is just another example of that. We can take solace in knowing that in the midst of such uncertainty, humans continue to shoot for the starts and achieve acts of innovation large and small.

May 6, 2020May 6, 2020

Turning Her Child’s Art into Epic Expressions of Pandemic Life

My sister-in-law Sharane created the new blog header you see above. I asked her to do so after following the work she’s been doing during the lockdown.

Mood Music:

I’ve never seen anyone else do what Sharane does: turn drawings from my nephew into her own epic expressions of pandemic life.

I asked for some narratives describing the circumstances behind each piece, and she kindly obliged. This strange, new world is hard, and she truly nails it.

Panda-Emic

3/27/2020

This is the piece that restarted my drawing. As a mother of two, a full-time childcare worker and a part-time student, I rarely find time or energy to draw. That changed, like everything else.

We had just started quarantine and my everyday routine had come to a complete stop virtually overnight. No work, no school, no after-school activities. COVID-19 had begun to consume my days and would soon consume my nights. I stopped being able to sleep, riddled with the “what ifs” of the pandemic.

One afternoon, I was sitting down with my son drawing and drawing and drawing. I finally felt stress-free — focused on something other than the pandemic. He drew this one picture of the sun and moon battling each other while a third monster tried to suck up all their power. It expressed what I was feeling.

This piece represents how the pandemic had all at once devoured every hour of my day, my mind and my energy. Like the small black-and-white figures, it’s the small things and everyday people that are the true heroes in this battle.

Yeah, that could happen

3/30/2020

Half the inspiration for this came from some doodling I was doing with my son, the other half was me just wanting to draw a giraffe. His picture just screamed giraffe to me, so I screamed back, “Yes, I will draw a giraffe!”

Why a giraffe in a ski mask with technicolor, bear-like creatures latching onto its neck, you ask? If the world can shut down, then why not have a giraffe robbing people.

Crazier things have happened.

Techno Poppy

4/05/2020

This piece was inspired by my son’s artwork and my daughter’s spirit.

As a parent with children that live in an era where technology is ever-changing and all-consuming, I struggle at times to find balance. I grew up without easy access to the internet and computers. Most of my young life was in a cellphone-free world.

So I try to help my children strike a healthy balance between imaginary play and technology. This became more difficult with the early closing of schools and social distancing.

Robot-Sitter

4/13/2020

My son drew a robot trying to take over the world. In our new normal of social distancing and a quarantined mom, I related to that robot.

I found myself overnight being given a whole new list of job titles plastered on top of my already vast library of existing titles, mainly the all-consuming job of mom. Now I’m an elementary school teacher, camp counselor, fort architect, etc.

Sketch book

4/27–29/2020

I’ve had sketchbooks in the past but I rarely used them to their fullest and was more prone to doodling ideas on napkins and random pieces of paper. Ninety percent of my art up till this new wave of inspiration was mainly fine liner to paper with no plan, no pencil, no eraser. I would start with a circle or line and see where it would take me.

I always wanted to finish a sketchbook so I figured what better time than now?

Thanks, Sharane! Readers can follow Sharane’s daily drawings on Facebook and Instagram. Please do not repost Sharane’s images.

May 4, 2020May 5, 2020

Midlife Crisis in a Pandemic

Erin and I are big fans of the Netflix series “The Crown.” The other night we watched an episode called “Moondust” and it hit me where I currently live.

The episode is set during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and shows Prince Philip (played by Tobias Menzies) grimly obsessed. The scale of human achievement has him in awe — and re-evaluating his life.

Mood Music:

The Duke of Edinburgh — as portrayed in this dramatization, anyway — is tortured throughout the series over the career he surrendered to be consort to Queen Elizabeth. He’s an adventurer who often must cast passions aside to carry out his royal function. Watching astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin pull off one of mankind’s ultimate achievements ignites a profound midlife crisis in him and he dives deep into his mind for meaning.

Spoiler alert: Prince Philip ultimately realizes one of his greatest problems isn’t a lack of adventure and moonshot-level achievement but of faith.

I can’t say I’m having a midlife crisis in the conventional sense. I’m grateful for the career I’ve built and have had plenty of adventure along the way. Aging doesn’t bother me. As I push 50, I often marvel that I’ve gotten this far, given past health problems.

But like pretty much anyone reading this, I’m going on two months of pandemic lockdown and often feel like an aging dinosaur whose life is passing him by. There’s no rationale for it. Yet as I spend most days at home, I feel caged, grateful as I am to be with my family — kind of like Philip locked up in his palace.

During this time, as good as my career has been, I fixate a lot on missteps along the way, what I’ve failed to accomplish so far and where I’m headed. I’m reflecting on the man I am overall — how well or not so well I’ve practiced my faith, how I’ve conducted myself as a parent and spouse (not always so well) and what my kindness level toward others has been (not very high).

This is not a self-flaying exercise. It’s simply where I am right now. I intend to use the lessons to better myself, something we all need to do sometimes.

I turn 50 in three months, and the self-critique was probably going to happen anyway. Current circumstances forced the introspection early.

In “Moondust” Philip finds his way through the crisis.

I’ll keep pushing myself toward a more positive evolution.

May 1, 2020May 1, 2020

Big Conclusions from Incomplete Data Are Folly

As the COVID-19 crisis escalated in mid-March, Minnesota Public Radio News Chief Meteorologist Paul Huttner wrote an article comparing everyone’s efforts to predict who would get sick and die to forecasting a storm with a broken weather forecast model.

Mood Music:

Describing the gaping hole in U.S. testing efforts, he wrote:

It’s like one of our weather satellites is down, and we can’t get a clear picture of what the storm looks like from above. We just can’t see the whole storm.

It was an apt analogy then and remains so. Yet we continue to grind our gears over a busted radar and barometer.

Nearly six weeks later, testing is still a massive failure in this country. We still lack the accurate picture needed to build forecasts and make plans to re-open society.

We see an endless array of charts, maps and other data presentations and thousands of articles across the internet that dissect it all in search of clues on how the virus affects the young vs. middle-aged vs. old. There are death statistics for all 50 U.S. states, for Italy, for Spain, and on and on. All this new data, daily.

And without massive testing and contact tracing, sifting through it all and making conclusions are an exercise in futility.

That doesn’t mean the data we have is useless. Every data point offers a lesson that we can use to make smarter decisions — and we have.

But trying to make the big-picture conclusions using data that doesn’t have a solid foundation beneath it? It’s starting to seem like a waste of time and resources.

Truth is, testing and contact tracing will never be where they need to be. There’s not enough personnel, supplies or logistical agility for the former, and the latter is rife with technical glitches. Not to mention the potential for government misuse.

So we’ll never have the broad, solid foundation to put all the other data into the proper context. We’re never going to know the exact number of people around the world sickened with COVID-19. We’ll never know the true death rate.

Perhaps we should make peace with what we don’t know and start figuring out how we can keep the largest number of people as healthy and safe as possible while re-opening businesses, schools and recreation.

Last weekend I read an interesting Wall Street Journal piece by Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and co-author of the foundation’s “A New Strategy for Bringing People Back to Work During Covid-19.” In the essay, Roy notes that we have specific goals we’re trying to make before we go “back to normal,” things like near-universal testing and an approved vaccine. “But,” he writes:

This conventional wisdom has a critical flaw. We’ve taken for granted that our ingenuity can solve almost any problem. But what if, in this case, it can’t? What if we can’t scale up coronavirus testing as quickly as we need to? What if it takes us six or 12 months, instead of three, to identify an effective treatment for Covid-19? What if those who recover from the disease fail to gain immunity and are therefore susceptible to getting reinfected? And what if it takes us years to develop a vaccine?

Such questions can raise fears in us, but these are truth-based fears. We can see, Roy points out, how unrealistically optimistic our goals are. It’s far more likely that we won’t make all our goals. And if we don’t, what then? “Do we prolong the economic shutdown for six months or longer? Do we impose a series of on-and-off stay-at-home orders that could go on for years?”

Roy doesn’t have the answers for how we move forward, but he does offer a starting point I agree with:

Instead of thinking up creative ways to force people to stay home, we should think hard every day about how to bring more people back to work.

Our current analysis paralysis — fixated around data sets that are limited without knowing the bigger picture of who exactly has had the virus, recovered or died from it — is unsustainable.

There’s a way forward. But it’s going to involve us taking a few leaps of faith along the way and tossing aside the broken forecasting tools.