Week 43

Wednesday

Saturday

 This was the week that Spokane dressed up as winter for Halloween. This happened to us last year, too -- a heavy dump of snow on leafy trees, causing bent and broken branches, broken car windshields from broken branches, downed power lines, and total mayhem. A benefit of COVID is that we need not think so much about our commutes if we're lucky enough to work from home, but as soon as the power went out at 2:45 p.m. on Friday, I panicked. A house without WiFi or hot water, a car without snow tires, and no reasonable escape plan from a hilly neighborhood kicked my worrying into high gear. 

Where I finished the workday

Fortunately, the power returned within an hour and we were completely fine and able to boil our gyozas in beef broth for dinner, which was the only reasonable thing we had to eat without going to the store. Later that night I heard a loud "whooooosh," followed by a thump, outside the bedroom window, which was a branch that took another one down on its decent into our backyard, hitting our deck railing. No damage was done, and the branches now rest peacefully on the part of the yard I consider to be the "dump" anyway. How no power lines joined them, I will never know. In the meantime, the rest of the city experienced small and large outages throughout the night as more lines gave way to the weight of the snow and snapped branches.

 

Other than weather events, the week was fairly ideal for its routine and fall colors, followed by the crystalline winter breezes and blue sky. I dropped off our ballots and got a flu shot, so I'm doing my part. In lieu of watching the final debate on Thursday, I joined my P.E.O. sisters on Zoom for a Halloween trivia night. Work has been busy and heavy on strategy and planning, and I find that by evening I only have the mental wherewithal to wind a ball of yarn and watch Unsolved Mysteries with a cup of peppermint tea. I'm still waking up early for exercise, and walking the bluff nearly every afternoon, but I'm pretty spent by 9 p.m. and am falling asleep toward the ends of shows. 

Reading

What you're doing when practicing your times tables or taking a standardized test or writing an essay isn't learning, but preparing yourself to work. This is an incredibly utilitarian view of education, implying that the ultimate goal of the system is to mold us into efficient workers, as opposed to preparing us to think critically, or to be good citizens. --Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

While reading Petersen's book this week, I have been thinking about the point at which I began to view every class, every essay, every job, and every activity of volunteerism as a point on my resume. For me, it was eighth grade. For many other millennials, it began much earlier. My parents did not over-schedule me and allowed me to have a childhood that was largely unstructured, gave me some agency, and let me be bored (thanks, Mom and Dad, from the bottom of my heart). It wasn't until I got into high school that I realized how many kids spent very active summers at various camps, enrolled in gymnastics and non-school-sponsored sports teams, gifted-and-talented programs, and participated in organized volunteerism. Sure, I had vacation Bible school, music lessons and church youth group and occasional camp, but otherwise I spent full days at my friends' houses, splashing around in the pool, walking to the gas station for froyo, and recording songs off the radio. High school was when I got the feeling that maybe I should have spent those summers becoming a well-rounded person to get a leg up on college applications. So I made up for lost time. I volunteered as a candy-striper at the hospital. I attended a couple Key Club lunches. I joined Mu Alpha Theta, the math club. I participated in the German-American Partnership Program. I got involved in choir and took zero hour classes to make it fit in my schedule. I worked a couple jobs. I took AP classes. I played in harp festivals where my performances were judged. I'm not saying that none of these experiences was fulfilling -- they all were, and I loved my high school years -- but midway through my senior year, including on New Years Eve of the new millennium, I continually broke out in hives in the midst of preparing for college applications. We first thought it was an allergic reaction, but eventually we believed it was stress. Every action seemed crucial, from the number of colleges I applied to, to the activities I participated in, to my GPA and my test scores. It became a miserable process, so miserable that when my brother told me, within weeks of the application deadline, that he thought the college where he taught might be a great fit for me, I took it as divine intervention and applied. Fortunately he was right and it all worked out. But I will never forget the year that led up to that decision. It was so counterintuitive for me to live with so much stress that I have prioritized finding balance ever since, and I've mostly lived an anti-burnout life. But I'm also extremely lucky: I grew up in a stable family, and I have had a steady job and a retirement plan since age 22, which is not typical for many millennials, and I'm white. If any one of these elements were removed, my life would look different. Still, it's not hard for me to see the precarious situations that so many of my peers have entered into, the patterns that were established by concerned parents to live lives of constant activity in order to get ahead in life, the recessions and general lack of financial security amid rising student debt, and the job economy that doesn't provide much if any stability that allow people to think beyond the end of the month. Petersen does a great job of digging into these elements.

Recipes

We're still doing bike-race-themed dinners. Last Sunday was Belgian meatballs with Belgian beer for watching the Tour of Flanders. 

Our CSA keeps giving us pears, so I put them on top of some gingerbread. Killer combo. 

Making

This looks like progress, but it's not much. I still need to attach the sleeves and keep knitting upward.

Watching

We watched the new Borat movie. I can't unsee that Rudy Giuliani scene that everyone is talking about, but there was another scene that made me laugh harder than I have in a long time. That said, don't watch it unless you know what you're getting into.

And we also watched the new Netflix version of Rebecca, which I found to be a bit meh. 

Listening

This Brene Brown podcast episode offered a different perspective on burnout, from the emotional and physiological side, and it was also fascinating.