#which is exactly how I felt when I lost my taste during Covid I was like wow this is my life now and then in went back to normal

[weirdgirlvampire]

My problem is when I’m being Insane about something I can never convince myself that I’m being Insane like even if I logically know that I’m being Insane about something and tell myself that I still don’t feel the threat level get any lower

[pizza-soup]

Sorry I've been missing in action.

Long story short I got very injured at the labs, but I've been making a fast recovery. For the more detailed, graphic version, you can read below. Warning: Mention of hospital, blood, car accident.

As I mentioned, I got really injured at work beginning on February 21 at around 9 PM. It was during a routine check at some of the sites, one in particular needed our higher clearance because there had been a breach at a fence that past week, so I, and two other guards went to check out any tampering of the fence again. They say it might be vandals but a lot of them say it was some kind of large animal. The road to those sites are a single path through the woods, lit with a few lights, no curves, just a flat road with a hill on one side. It hadn't snowed that week either, so no fear of ice or anything. It was just a routine jeep trek.

It happened so fast. Our vehicle was knocked over, I'm not even sure how, but we were rolling in the dark down a hill, hitting trees. I remember the shouting, holding fast, and the glass. I remember crawling toward a tree and trying to sit up against it or maybe I was put there by the other guard, Dolores, I remember her telling me to stay awake. I asked her if I was dreaming. It didn't feel real. I asked what was happening to me because I couldn't move right, everything felt so slow and muffled. I passed out by the time they got us into the medical ward. I don't remember them putting me in a gown or putting in an IV. I woke up later, I buzzed the call button out of fear and pain. My whole left side was throbbing. A nurse was relieved I finally came to. She gave me pain meds and called the doctor in.

I was told there had been an accident, that much I already knew, but no one was killed, just injured. I lost a lot of blood, my uniform was soaked in it and they had to cut it off me. Part of the metal from the door frame folded in and pieced my left shoulder and I had minor cuts on my hands and arms from the glass. My blood pressure dropped so low they were scared my heart might've stopped. I was given blood, hooked up to a lot of things and I would have to stay under watch for a few days. There was a lot of tests they needed to do to figure out just how bad my injuries were.

For the next few days I was just sleeping, I couldn't sit up without feeling dizzy. I had to lay semi flat, my blood pressure was still very low. My left side was still throbbing and the stitches itched. A lot of bruises developed from being tossed around like I was, mostly on my arms because I was shielding my face and head. My minor glass cuts stung while batheing. Nurses came in every few hours to check my vitals, help me use the restroom, shower, help me eat, ect. I got so tired from the smallest things. I couldn't call anyone, my phone was in my locker. I finally got someone to help me call my brother to tell him what happened. My brother was naturally scared, he thought something happened to me and he was sad to know he was right. He wanted to see me, but he couldn't, I was in the medical ward on lab property. He wanted to call our mom to tell her but I told him to wait, there was a possibility that I might be transferred to a local hospital where they can visit me, and I didn't want her panicking and trying to drive up here in bad weather. It's best she waited til things cleared up.

After the first week I was transferred to a local hospital after getting a bunch of tests done. No brain trauma, no broken bones, no blood sugar issues or thyroid problems. I could sit up in bed by then and eat on my own. I still couldn't walk very well without feeling really dizzy, again, low blood pressure. A lot of minor bruises were fading away. I never had my anemia officially confirmed, but they confirmed it and had me take daily iron and placed on a blood building diet in the new hospital. I was tested for covid, I came out clear.

My brother and mom visited me daily, and the other doctor said I was recovering really quickly, that gave us a lot of hope. I could be out of there by a few days, though my blood pressure was worrying her. Seems it wasn't so much the blood loss, but that it might have been an underlying condition already linked to my untreated anemia. She would get the in-house dietitian to include a bit more natural sea salt to my iron rich diet, as well as tell me what I should eat at home and that I need to drink a lot more water than I normally did. This is a problem I've had for awhile, I forget to drink enough water. The doctor warned me I better remedy that immediately especially with low BP. My mom was already taking notes. She really wanted to just take me home already. I really liked her being there, I'm not that shy about my body, but I honestly felt better having my mom bathe me and comb my hair instead of strangers doing that. She was also a lot more gentle around my stitches and bruises.

Eventually I did come home, I still needed a lot of rest and help getting out of bed. I had to fight the urge to clean house, help with groceries, ect. I'm so used to being self sufficient. I felt so frustrated that just walking around the room would tire me out, when I'd hike for miles just a few months ago. I was tired of sleeping and sitting down. But there wasn't much else I could do. I did a lot of origami, my bro got me a coloring book, I watched a lot of movies, took my iron -which is nasty btw-, ate meals that were saltier than I normally would prepare but my taste buds would have to adjust. I was happy my new diet included a lot of fish though.

I did have some close calls. I really thought I could stand up in the shower instead of sitting, and wound up calling for my mom to help me up after collapsing. I collapsed again when I was trying to cook dinner for myself. My face, according to my mom, was drained of color and my breathing was shallow. I felt so dizzy and nauseated. She nearly wanted to call the hospital again. My bro said I was pushing myself too hard and I always had a problem with not asking for help. That I needed to learn to stop being so damn stubborn and rest. To anyone else, that sounds harsh, but he knows me way too well, probably better than our mom. I do have that problem, I do push myself too much. After that, I decided to be more patient with myself. I was sick and might be sick for awhile.

This week I'm doing a lot better. I can do my daily things now, I even went to get groceries and take a little walk to the river. But I can't over do it, I can't stand up or walk for too long, and I can't lift anything heavy, otherwise I get bouts of dizziness and need to sit down. The pain isn't as bad on my back anymore though it's still very sore, my arms, especially my left side, have a dull pain. I can't sleep on my back and left side, only my right and on my stomach. A lot of the cuts on the back of my arms and hands have scabbed over, minor bruises are gone but major ones on my shoulder and neck are still pretty dark and tender. I'm still finding glue spots on my chest and stomach from the medical tape and the EKG patches they put on me, but a bit of lotion is taking it off. My stitching, according to my mom, is definitely going to leave a pretty bad scar above my shoulder blade, but it's fine. My body has a lot of scars here and there from close calls, but I consider them ' Marks of Life'. They're proof I survived and thrived.

It'll take time for me to really feel like I'm back to normal. My mom refuses to go back home until I make a full recovery. She hasn't tended to me like this for a long time, mainly because I rarely get sick. I trait from my dad's side. We don't get colds or flus for years, no history of cancer, heart issues or diabetes, and his family usually remain active to their elderly years, not to mention our graceful aging. My dad used to say it was our native blood, we're just built tougher. The only thing that could kill us is getting injured like this. God, he'd be so worried about me though. I remember how he'd fuss over me when I skinned my knee as a child or got my allergies. If he was alive, he'd probably refuse to let me do anything out of bed, but then that's exactly what I should be doing anyway.

I got a report on the other guards health yesterday. Dolores and Elijah. She was the least hurt out of all of us, just a dislocated arm, mild whiplash, and some really bad glass cuts on her chest and arms, she's home recovering with her husband and kids. Elijah was the driver and got knocked unconscious with a bad concussion, his entire left arm was sliced by glass and metal, he lost a lot of blood like me and is recovering just as slow as I am. He opted to stay in the lab medical ward because he doubts his roommate can care for him at home, he's on a lot of pain meds, so he sounded distant on the phone. I think out of all of us, he's going to take the most time to recover. I told him I'd pray for him and if he wants, I can visit. He appreciated that a lot. I thanked Dolores for helping us that night, she was the one trying her best to keep us alive and sent the distress signal on our ARK devices so they could find us in the dark. Without her, I think we would've bled to death.

God, it feels like a distant nightmare. I still can't figure out how we were knocked off the road like that. Something hit us out there and it was strong. I felt the impact in the backseat, but I didn't see it. Dolores says it looked like a bear, but bears aren't that strong. Eli says he saw horns, so maybe a bison. Bison are that strong, especially against a little jeep. The incident is still under investigation. The lab is also very concerned about how this happened. It's possible the same thing that hit us, has been tampering with the fence.

One less thing to worry about is the hospital bill, the accident happened on lab grounds, everything is taken care of through them, probably because they don't want to get sued. They are giving us another two weeks before we report back in to the doctor for another round of tests and physical tests, as well as check to see if my stitches were still secure. Our return to work solely depends on our results, we may not be able to come back until late April. They really want to be sure we're okay. Because I'm an 'Ophanim' aka Tier 3 guard, I'll also be given a mental test before being hooked back into Selene. They just want to be sure there's no cognition issues and I can sync properly to her. I may have to do a refresher since I've been away for so long, but I'll worry about that when it comes.

Well, if you read this far, thanks. I hope I didn't scare you all too much. I am doing a lot a better though, I promise. I'm getting stronger everyday, though activity on this blog will be slow. Send me some prayers, good vibes, whatever. I'd really appreciate anything. Hope you've had a good month, better than mine hopefully.

[cewfreeland]

Life in the COVID-19 epicenter

We’re on day 14 of staying at home to do our part to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, COVID-19. Everything considered we are doing so well. We’re a family with two teenagers who are finding joy in spending time with each other again. Brian and I alternate between depression and gratitude. Fortunately, we never seem to be in the depression part at the same time. That comes from being so different and also knowing when the other one is starting to spiral into the dark place. The other one rallies - reaches out through the unknown and finds a spark of joy to bring the other one out of the blue fog. 

One of my closest NY friends is recovering from a diagnosed case of COVID-19. He proactively reached out to me this morning to tell me he made it through the night since I have been bugging him every day to see if he was still in his apartment or had needed to get the urgent care that we hear our neighbors needing from the sirens wailing. Another close friend in NY lost her sense of smell and taste but seems to have come out unscathed other than those two symptoms.  I keep wondering if my short bout with fever/chills/cough/fatigue/shortness of breath/diarrhea in early March was COVID-19, followed by the kids having raging headaches several days after my illness.  Brian was in DC for most of my illness so I don’t think he got it. An antibody test cannot come soon enough.

Brian and I both have a remarkable amount of guilt. I think his guilt is centered on the fact that he is still employed while so many other artists and art workers are not. He also sees his industry hemorrhaging and with no end in sight. We watched the depression inspired film Cradle Will Rock about the Workers Progress Administration and the Federal Theater Project last night. He is optimistic that something that transformative will come out of this crisis. I have faith that he can be a part of this recovery.

As for me, the bright side is that people understand what public health is now!  The downside is that I feel like I can’t help. My grad school group chat has a really stark view of what healthcare workers are facing.  One classmate has had his surgical residency all but halted and transitioned to emergency surgery. Two pregnant classmates are still caring for patients - one in pediatric ICU (where she’s not seeing many kids, thankfully) and the other a radiologist (who is volunteering in other ways to relieve the pressure on her colleagues). Another classmate also lost a sense of taste and smell and was back at work 5 days later. She is an OB/GYN and is only delivering COVID-19 positive patients out of fear that she may still be contagious. Still another classmate is a pulmonary critical care physician who has not said much for a while, no doubt because he’s working non-stop. An anesthesiologist at Emory has become a media darling and we all cheer her on when we catch an op-ed in the NYT featuring her or catch her on CNN or MSNBC. I so wish we were celebrating Michelle’s sudden rise to fame for different reasons - her victory as a candidate for the Georgia State Senate, fighting for women’s rights, achieving better healthcare for her constituents. Unfortunately, she’s telling a sadder story right now - the reality of intubating COVID-19 patients as they struggle to breathe - giving them a shot to recover. That every breath the patient makes while she’s doing her work could be exposing her to the virus, and therefore her family, as well as the other healthcare workers. 

One classmate is part of the leadership team for the emergency department for one of the big NYC/Long Island hospital systems and she has been working to set up alternative entrances for urgent cases across their 19 hospitals. A physical therapist is transitioning her entire team from out-patient settings into in-patient settings. She and her colleagues are all being exposed every single day. One day, she’s with a patient with suspected COVID-19 status but not confirmed, the next she hears what she already knew about the status. And this happens each and every day.  They sound weary and calm. The reality of what we hear on the news made even more terrifying by their accounts. They are not dramatic, they are not overstating. They don’t have the time or the energy to add to the fury.  They are simply doing their jobs and the daunting incline on the graph of predicted patients forming ahead of them is simply something for them to climb - one day and one patient at a time. 

And I am working from home - not doing anything glamorous like I might have done if my life had not taken the detour it did 2 1/2 years ago. I am conflicted about how I feel about that. Since grad school ended, I have felt aimless - working full-time has felt very “lame.” I’ve dabbled with consulting, exploring getting my PhD, starting my own business. Being “still” is hard for me. And not being part of the central communications team at this time is hard as well. I am grateful to have moved on from that life and role - I feel like my work is more meaningful now - but there is an element of wanting to be in the drama. But I also think this is a lesson for me - to become comfortable with the long game rather than filling up space with busywork and crises. 

What I am doing is managing my team who has been thrown into unfamiliar territory. We hired these smart, courageous, and caring people to talk with people all day, every day.  And now, they’re at home, having to rely on the phone to connect with our 10,000 participants in the hopes that we didn’t catch them at a bad time. The worry is that maybe someone in their home is unwell and calling about research is not exactly on their minds. Or, perhaps they’ve lost their job and are worried about paying rent on April 1st, and May 1st, and June 1st. The good news is our team is brave and smart and empathetic and they may be just the ear that person needs at that moment. And medical research is something that more people understand now. They get how important it is to contribute to the cause. I started sending out little prompts each day to encourage communication, maybe a little humor, and at least some sense of community. Ironically, I worry more during my sleep about what “prompt” to send them than other things.  On Thursday, my prompt was “share your favorite coronavirus meme.” I sent out one about the Breakfast Club but quickly realized that I was only one of a handful of Gen Xers in the chat and many had not grown up in the U.S. and didn’t appreciate the humor. Epic fail.  

There has been discussion of doing testing on the blood samples given by participants collected in December, January, February and March (until we suspended enrollments) to see if we can see a true understanding of the incidence of the virus in populations across the country. That is VERY exciting to be a part of that possibility - to understand the DENOMINATOR in a more scientific and controlled way.  Additionally, there is some talk of running antibody testing on participants going forward. We have the infrastructure to do that and it would undoubtedly help the individual and the scientific community in ways we can’t even imagine.

- - - 

Brian has brought remarkable order to our unusual new existence. He has all of us up and doing our morning things as well as adding a few new rituals that are starting to feel normal. In addition to getting dressed, making beds, eating breakfast, he also has us taking our temperatures and taking an allergy pill Having allergy symptoms while we’re all very aware that any cough or headache could be a sign of infection is not an option. His parents sent us an extra stash of Zyrtec since we couldn’t get it at our local pharmacy. Amazon is running slow - for which I have no anger about - but it does mean that we are tied to what our local shops have on hand. 

Last week, we heard this woman from the Upper West Side comment on the local news that people were acting like it’s Little House on the Prarie. “People are making soup. They’re eating leftovers.” Lillian’s response was “That is what normal people do.” But our lives are different.  I have found my gatherer urge go into hyperdrive. Maybe it’s because Lillian is so picky or maybe because having what everyone wants at the exact time they want it is a way that I am feeling a sense of control over this insane time. We were almost out of flour, and I became obsessed with getting some. Our regular mail shipment of toilet paper is running low (as in we have about 10 rolls left) and our provider is saying it will be another few weeks before they’re back in stock. I feel this chronic fear that we’re going to run out of Lillian’s macaroni and cheese, the one thing she will consistently eat, and feel this pull to out and get her more. I became obsessed with getting hotdog buns - and we don’t even eat hotdogs normally - but when I found them in stock, I bought two bags.  I understand that hoarding is a bad thing, but I cannot deny the anxiety this situation has brought out in me and manifesting in wanting too many hot dog buns.  

Probably the best personal thing that I’ve done during the past two weeks is that I’m on a quest to achieve my long-term dream of being a runner. I’ve started “Couch to 5K” too many times over the past several years to count. I just started week 2 - I did week 1 two weeks in a row - so I’m finally moving forward further than I’ve ever gone. It feels like my lungs are getting stronger and my sense of accomplishment is getting satisfied. I find great joy in being in the gorgeous Fort Tryon Park, staying away from my neighbors, knowing that I’m investing in myself and my community even if it’s one lonely step at a time.  

[aliensandidentity-sp22]

Who Am I

Who am I? A question so simple yet almost impossible to answer. As I write this, I find myself struggling to put into words exactly who I think I am. Despite its negative connotation, my mind keeps returning to what I view as my biggest weaknesses. For as long as I can remember (which happens to be around elementary school, at least concretely), I’ve been a perfectionist. Whether it was school, sports, simple games, or even small running races on the playground, I viewed it as all or nothing; either glad I had won or devastated that I had lost. This persisted throughout my life but became almost unbearable once I began playing basketball for my high school team. Basketball is a game where mistakes are inevitable, but given my mindset at the time, I couldn’t bear letting myself slip up at all. Combined with the pressure I felt from crowds watching games, I found myself not wanting to play in fear of doing anything wrong. I’d love to say I got over this in some miraculous way, but I still deal with this fear to this day, although I have found ways to help me be more positive about it.

My love of music surpasses all my other hobbies and interests by a fair margin. Since I was little with my dad playing one of his hundreds of CDs to me getting my own Spotify account, I found myself falling in love with songs I didn’t even know the name of. Through the internet, I started to form my music taste. My taste revolved around songs I heard as a child and songs I heard on the radio that I simply thought were catchy. When COVID hit, I found myself without much to do except listen to music for hours on end. This is where my love for music blossomed, as I was constantly searching for music on a wide spectrum from 50’s jazz to vaporwave back to underground hip-hop. Some of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard have had a real effect on me, either making me understand my emotions better or changing my outlook on life. While that might seem dramatic, my life has changed for the better because of music and I can never thank it enough for that.

My dad has always been a big influence in my life from my hobbies to being my biggest role model. Over this past break, on Christmas, to be exact, I had a long conversation with my dad about creativity, music, fashion, and practically anything that came to our heads. It was during this conversation that I realized how similar I’ve become to my dad in the best way possible. I am very much his son. As a kid, it was hard to appreciate what it meant to have good parents, because I assumed everyone was raised in the same way. It was only when I reached high school and beyond that I realized how lucky I was to have supportive and loving parents. I try to model myself and the way I act after my mom and dad. Whether it be treating a stranger with kindness or practicing humility, I have a yearning to be the best person I can be, both to others and myself. As long as I’m attempting to be a good person and aware of others, I think I can lead a fulfilling life. Who I am is complicated, but I know that deep down, past all the intricacies, I’m proud of what I’ve become.

[erhiem]

Feather muthaland, Bibimutha’s songs play as if she is rebuilding her confidence in real time.

Photo Illustration by Renee Klahr, Aamna Ijaz/NPR; Courtesy of Muthaboard

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Photo Illustration by Renee Klahr, Aamna Ijaz/NPR; Courtesy of Muthaboard

Feather muthaland, Bibimutha’s songs play as if she is rebuilding her confidence in real time.

Photo Illustration by Renee Klahr, Aamna Ijaz/NPR; Courtesy of Muthaboard

NPR Music Turning the Tables A project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. So far we’ve focused on reversing traditional, patriarchal best-of-lists and popular music history. But this time, it’s personal. For 2021, we’re digging into our own relationships to record the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How can we break free from institutional pressures on our tastes in keeping with the lessons of history? What exactly does it mean to create a personal canon? Essays in this series will explore our unique relationship with our favorite albums, from unmatched classics by major stars to sub-cultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Because the way some music holds a central place in our lives is not just a reflection of how we develop our tastes, but of how we approach the world.

In April, two days after my partner got his second COVID-19 vaccination dose, a friend sent us an invitation to celebrate his birthday at a bar. “I’m not sure,” I said, citing CDC guidelines to wait at least two weeks before socializing. But I had another idea. While some dreamed of nail salon appointments as a return to normalcy, and others fled to Airbnbs on the outskirts, I suggested making a noise on the phone once again with the crew, three Geminis and Taurus.

Our first time together was in 2019, which we regarded as a rite of passage, playing Kendrick Lamar good kid, maed city (an epic, if not prestige update for the specific soundtrack) as our visions began to blur. More than anything, I noticed how the psychedelic influences calmed the ticking urgency I felt on a daily basis in order to make productive use of my time. That kind of urgency became too much to bear last year: With the world still in a pandemic holding pattern, I was also eyeing my 35th birthday in June, and I needed to answer questions from family incessantly. Didn’t feel closer – to where my career was headed, or whether I would have children, and if so – than it was ten years ago. Naturally, I didn’t tell this to my friend.

While I certainly yearned for pre-pandemic normalcy, or perhaps a time where my age was not nearly as consequential, I was also inspired by muthaland, Chattanooga, Tenn., the first album of 2020 by rapper Bibimutha. muthaland Helping me take myself out of this pressure to live up to everyone’s expectations. The album begins by promising a good time; In the opening skit, a game show contestant swallows an acid tab to enter Bibimutha’s world. This realm of her imagination ends up as a tangle of feelings and thoughts, where not a single factor – not her career or single motherhood – completely defines who she is.

I first heard about Bibimutha in 2016. Not long before artists like art rocker Björk embraced her. Even in this crowded music landscape, it’s hard to forget an artist who names their debut EP after an iconic makeup palette, or whose moniker dates back to their mid-20s as having two sets of twins. The latter is considered a badge of honor. Early singles like “Rules” and “Rose” were the talk of a smoky-eyed relationship that could make women completely in agreement (“I’m not going to waste my waist, my thighs, my time, and all my energy/effort. Can *** * which just not for me”). The ambitious concepts he had in mind for his debut album also looked promising. his first thought, prosperity gospel, as a result of her love-hate relationship with televangelist pastor Joel Osteen (“He can sell any f****** thing and you’ll just spend your money,” she once said). Later, she stated that she planned to call the album Christine; It would be inspired by a relative who killed men who either betrayed her or abused her.

Yet I didn’t really connect with Bibimutha until we were both at the peak of our frustrations with our careers. In July 2020, Atlanta’s NPR affiliate WABE dropped under the map, a Southern hip-hop podcast that I co-host, just as overall podcast listenership began to return to pre-pandemic levels. and until muthaland Arriving last August, BbyMutha was completely disillusioned with the music industry. “After this album I’m never doing it again,” she said. This rap retirement announcement ended prematurely, although at the time, listeners mourned the lost potential. In muthalandLong after that tab swallowed one of the most indulgent rap fantasies of all time, BbyMutha is a next-gen LA chat with wordplay inspired by Gucci Mane, a rare woman who navigates traps and orders sex from across the gender spectrum. But Bibimutha also emphasizes in “Holographic” that the journey is a “rave with roaches” swirling around her house. At the height of her musical talent, she could still find a place where she falls short.

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As the oldest of my cousins, I spent most of my life in Maryland oriented around achievement and success, setting a good example. After graduating during the 2008 recession, the older I’ve gotten, the harder it felt to be, shortly thereafter separated from my first and only 9-to-5 to pursue a culture journalism career. moved to Atlanta for what seemed frivolous or self-indulgent before this “Essential workers” became part of our lexicon. (“My mom actually ran away from the Vietnam War when she was 16, so I could see” My Block: Atlanta For work, I’m not a s***,” i once joked.) I attributed my lack of hustle to this fear of failure which only intensified over the years. and before muthaland, I looked for music that helped me wrestle with or push through those feelings. open mike eagle dark comedy Soundtracked my uncomfortable entry into the gig economy after college. I still turn to trap jeezy songs Let’s get on this: Thug Inspiration 101 Or DouBoys Cashout’s “started out as an activist” for a momentary boost.

In the spring of 2019, I learned that this persistently worrying and ensuing fatigue had a name: generalized anxiety disorder. (I’ve kept it a secret from my family; my uncle once said that Asians “take too much pride in going to therapy,” as statistics following the Atlanta-area spa shooting would show.) As I tracked my sleep and panic attacks in one notebook after another, I learned that perfectionism—my once default answer to job interviews—is, “What’s your biggest weakness?” – not really to be seen in a positive light at all. Still, my mother’s way of asking “How are you?” Keeps “Are you busy?” and “Are you making money?” And I still answer “yes” every time. It has taken me almost all the time in the past two years to accept that self-awareness is still a work in progress.

Last December, my therapist gave me an exercise regimen that I still use today. In a moment of crisis, I write down the first negative thought that comes to mind (“I always make the wrong decisions,” “My career is coming back,” “Christmas is ruined”). Then I write through a reality check, as if interviewing myself: Are all these ideas true? Or is there evidence that this situation is not as dire as I had feared?

I recognize this train of thought muthaland. Songs like “Roaches Don’t Die” become anthemic because when Bibimutha brags and boasts, it’s like “You don’t f*** with who’s who with who’s government stamp and wic, huh?” Like what happens between songs. When she looks in the mirror and longs for the confident woman she once was (“I miss that b**** sometimes”) she descends on a personal statement in the face of “heavy metal”. “They see the truth when they see me / They see they aunt and they mom and grandma, gee,” she raps. “They look in a mirror, it ain’t clear / I’m afraid of everything being b*****.” At the end of “Scam Likely”, Bibimutha mocks the pseudo-awakening, drag race-savvy listeners who insist on having her as a role model (“And she makes me feel so empowered that ****** is empowered – and i up“). I get her reasoning: Role models seem impenetrable. Bibimutha’s songs sound like she’s rebuilding her confidence in real time.

During my last visit, my therapist told me to work on my definition and measures of success. I still don’t have concrete answers that translate into neat life goals, though maybe that’s an answer in itself. muthaland Teaching me to lower expectations that may read as plausible but ultimately prove untenable. Its themes confirm how I felt after my first 2019 visit, which is that scientists should revisit the psychological properties of hallucinations, even after decades of government-imposed stigma. Bibimutha’s lyrics demonstrate that motherhood, as it would be, cannot replace a sense of self. Neither would career ambitions, for that matter: muthalandThe most obvious nod to any kind of rap pantheon is “outro (skit 5).” Game show hosts thanks “sponsors” Boosie, Webby, and Diamond and Princess from Crime Mob — and then in 19 seconds, it’s over. muthaland otherwise completely untouched by discussion about Rap’s Mount RushmoreHow sales and clout factor into greatness. In how its soul-searching slowly unfolds during its hour-long runtime, the album is teaching me that position is not everything, but timing is.

In the flurry of excessive social activity between getting vaccinated and preparing myself for the Delta version, here’s what I’ll remember most:

The post-vaccination journey that finally took place on a Sunday in May. By 6 p.m. the effect was gone, though my partner reading the tarot gave to our friend, the second Gemini, didn’t wrap up until close to midnight.

The first time I heard BbyMutha’s “GoGo Yubari,” a harsh indictment against her baby daddy and the nature of how she became a baby mama: “Another violent story, another self-esteem destroyed.” BbyMutha released it in June, one of several loose and unreleased EPs from this year. muthaland. (Thank god she didn’t actually retire.)

Finally, a passing comment from a friend ahead of her 35th birthday this month. The keyword was “milestone”, with this weighted expectation we had already achieved, suggesting that all this was not enough. “I’m always here to talk about it,” I said, and I meant it. After the past year of working as a stand-in confidant of BbyMutha, I feel ashamed personally, or a shame at all.

christina lee is a music and culture writer living in Atlanta. She co-hosts the podcast under the map.

The post BbyMutha’s ‘Muthaland’ Is Teaching Me That Status Isn’t Everything : NPR appeared first on Spicy Celebrity News.

[gracia-suficiente]

Despite doing a year recap post for 8 years now, I contemplated not doing a post this year. 2020 has been one of the worst years of my life, from the very start of it. There’s a lot from this year that I don’t want to remember, that I want to get away from as soon as I can. But, I have also learned a lot from these hard times. And I hope one day to re-read this post and think, “Gosh, I had it bad, but I made it.” So here’s my 2020:

Like I mentioned, January 2020 started off rough. My family and I almost lost my sister. I won’t go into detail but getting that call was one of the worst days of my life. It didn’t feel real. It felt like I was living a nightmare and it was so hard to see my parents go through the fallout of it all. The only good thing I can remember from that month was meeting my now good friend, Evan. To be honest, I’ve always been kinda attracted to him. I’d see him around the office and thought he was handsome and nice. We were on the same audit and he actually invited me to lunch one day (1/15 to be exact, I may or may not still have the email he sent me) and we clicked instantly! We became fast friends and even started to hang out outside of work soon after.

February was still stressful because of everything that happened with my sister in January. She was back home and it was hard to see her recover slowly. But, February was probably my favorite month of the year. Evan and I hung out quite a bit. On the first, he took me to this arcade in town and that’s when I was sure I had a crush on this man. It was so much fun! For the first time in forever, I didn’t spend Valentine’s Day alone either. I think this day was one of my favorites of the year. It was a Friday and a slow day at work so Evan stopped by my desk and asked if I wanted to go for a walk around the Capitol. This was something we had started doing frequently; he would stop by my desk or I would go by his desk to ask for a walk around to chat. We walked around the Capitol and then he asked if I had plans for the evening. He then asked if I wanted to have a happy hour with him and I said yes. We went to this small bar near the Capitol right after work and we had drinks and talked and talked and laughed and laughed. Before we knew it, THREE hours had passed. It didn’t even feel like we were there that long! We decided to head out, since it had gotten so late and neither of us had eaten anything. We walked back to the office in the night and he hugged me goodbye. On the way home, I listened to a playlist of songs I had made that reminded me of him and I was the happiest girl in Austin that night. Evan also invited me to a food tasting event that weekend on 2/19 and the waitress thought we were on a date and we didn’t correct her. February was also great workwise; I planned my first Wellness event as Coordinator and it was a success! The audit that I was working on was also picking up (I like to be busy). A group of work friends and I started monthly game nights too. It was so nice and fun to finally have a solid friend group. Lastly, I saw The Jungle Giants (2/16) and Beach Bunny (2/28) which ended up being my only two concerts of the year because…

The coronavirus hit in March. Well, that’s when the first shutdown/quarantine happened. I remember hearing about the virus in China but really didn’t pay much attention to it (I was obviously very distracted at the beginning of the year lolol). But Friday the 13th, I packed up some things from my desk and had to telecommute indefinitely. I don’t really remember feeling scared or even too worried. I thought it would all blow over relatively quickly. Boy, was I wrong. My parents came to visit for spring break, along with my brother and sister. It was so nice to see them but also hard to see my sister, who was still recovering. We didn’t get to do much either because soon after they got to Austin, the city shut down. It was really hard to go from having a busy life to not leaving my apartment at all. Another bad thing was that I had taken part of the CPA exam this month and found out I had failed. It sucked but if I’m being honest, I didn’t study as much as I should have. But one good thing was Evan. Wow he really was an anchor during this hard year. Despite the stay at home regulations, we kept hanging out. I know it wasn’t the most responsible thing to do, but we always hung out at home or outside and I really needed to see another person after spending my work week completely alone. He plays guitar and suggested that we learn to play a song together (since I play piano) so we started learning to play The Scientist by Coldplay.

April was another difficult month. Spending Holy Week completely alone was rough. The thing I wanted and needed most (the Eucharist) was unavailable to me because the churches were closed. Things were getting really bad in Europe and New York. I cried so much during Holy Week. Work was getting stressful too. But again, Evan was a constant. By this point, we were texting nearly every day and hanging out almost every weekend. I really enjoyed spending time with him. Not sure if this happened in April but one Saturday, we went geocaching and we found an Office themed geocache where we had to use a laser-pointer to find trees that eventually led to a box of trinkets. That was such a fun day.

Work was insane in May. I had never felt so busy before! One good thing about working from home is that when you’re extremely stressed, you can cry and no one will know. Things slowly started to open up again and I was able to go to reconciliation for the first time in 2.5 months. That was a blessing. Porter Robinson held his Secret Sky Fest, a virtual festival of EDM artists that was so much fun to jam out to alone in my apartment. I really missed live music and even though it wasn’t the same, it was still a good time. Evan and I kept hanging out and practicing our song. We even recorded a video of us playing together and it’s the cutest thing ever. Also, there was one Saturday in particular that sticks out to me: May 23. But we spent nearly all day together, playing music, drinking on his porch, getting dinner, sharing intimate details about our lives, and then playing board games with his brother when he got home from work. That day was another one of my favorites of the year.

June was a bittersweet month. I went home for my brother’s high school graduation. I had never seen the airport so empty in my life. My sister and I actually weren’t able to go to the ceremony and we had to watch it at home on the TV. But it was fun to celebrate with him and my family afterward. I worked from my hometown for a while and it was so nice to get to see my best friend and grandpas again. I really didn’t do too much with them as we were all being cautious. But this was the month that Evan told me that he started online dating again. I was crushed. I knew we were just friends but I liked him and thought he might have liked me too, considering how often he was texting me and asking to hangout. I was so confused because it felt like we had just gotten so much closer recently and I thought it might be leading to something more than friendship. But I was wrong.

I went back home in July again for my brother’s birthday. My parents had a small birthday/graduation party for him and it was nice to be back home again. The summer blues were really hitting me hard this month and you’d think that Taylor Swift releasing a surprise album would be a huge plus. But it gave me depression lolol It’s a sad album and her song “August” described exactly how I felt about Evan and his new girlfriend. I spent many summer nights, crying and drinking wine listening to this album. I don’t like summer and the things that make summer bearable (cool movie theaters and pools and air-conditioned museums) were taken away from me. Work was incredibly stressful too.

I don’t remember much of August to be honest. I was depressed and lonely and the summer heat was killing me. Work was continuing to be stressful and I wanted the audit to be over with. I was also upset because I didn’t get to hang out with Evan as much. He had been seeing this one girl seriously and I didn’t feel right hanging out with him one on one. There were a couple of highlights: I got to see one of my good friends/coworkers, Alana, for the first time since everything shut down. She is such a light and I really enjoy her friendship, even though we aren’t super close. Also, I got promoted on the 21st! It came as a complete surprise to me, considering that I had just gotten promoted the year before. Although a lot of managers had told me that I was already working at a higher level, I didn’t really feel like I was ready for a promotion so I was SO shocked when my manager called to let me know.

September was another weird month. By then, I was eagerly awaiting the holidays and the end of an already too long year. My depression was subsiding but I didn’t feel like my old self either. I celebrated my birthday with my cousin, who moved to my city in July. I am so thankful for her and her love; I probably would’ve spent my day alone if it wasn’t for her. We didn’t get to do all that we planned to do (there was a flash flood) but we did get to go to dinner! A few days later, Evan treated me to ramen and wine and we had dinner at my place and we talked for the first time in a while. It was such a sweet gesture from him and I felt bad that I didn’t do anything for his birthday.

October started off well with a few virtual concerts (Future Islands and Hippo Campus) and then my mom came to town halfway through the month because I had FINALLY scheduled my wisdom tooth removal. The surgery had to be postponed for a week (my dentist’s thermometer said I had a fever, but I ended up being fine and even tested negative for COVID. Idk what happened with that but it was annoying) so my mom stayed a little while longer. Then, on October 27, my dad called my mom to tell her that my grandpa had passed away. It was such a shock and completely unexpected. That day is one of the worst of my life and that’s when 2020 took a turn for the worst. Instead of getting my surgery later that week, I packed my bags and drove back home with my mom.

November was grief and exhaustion. I worked from my parent’s home and the audit wasn’t particularly stressful, thankfully. I was upset that I didn’t really get to say goodbye to my Austin friends (*cough* Evan *cough cough*) but I was also glad to not be alone anymore, after spending a good majority of 2020 alone in my apartment. The COVID cases in my hometown were at an all-time high though so I didn’t get to see any of my friends or even much of my family. It was heartbreaking going to my grandparents’ house, now completely empty, and see that everything was just as my grandpa had left it. Thanksgiving was sad and small.

Work was busier in December but thankfully it never got to an overwhelming place. My family was FINALLY able to lay my grandpa to rest on December 10. With all the COVID restrictions and the increase in deaths, it took forever for my grandpa’s funeral to be arranged. It was a small ceremony with maybe 15 people and I cried throughout the entire thing. We didn’t get to do a proper military burial for him (because of restrictions) but he did get a flag presentation. I helped my family clean out my grandparents’ house and I actually got to keep a few of my grandmother’s clothing and jewelry pieces! It was nice to have some of her things to cherish. Also, Taylor surprised us AGAIN with another glorious album. It was as if she knew that I needed something on the 10th to make me feel better after the funeral.  I was able to take off a couple of weeks from work and I cherished those days off. It was nice getting to spare some carefree time with my family, sister who had come back from NYC, and cousin. I also finally saw my best friend and even got to meet her new boyfriend. It made me so happy to see how happy she was with him. The holidays were still bittersweet because I missed my grandparents and our Christmas celebration was much smaller than usual. But I did get to help my dad make tamales and we got to go to mass for the first time since Thanksgiving! The year ended on a bit of a sour note for me because I awkwardly confessed my feelings for Evan and even though he reciprocated them, he said he didn’t want to date me. I was really hoping to end the year on a high note. I was really hoping that I could have one good thing and that things could work out with us. It was sad to hear him say that he was seeing someone else and as much as he liked me (and he REALLY liked me), it wasn’t enough to break up with this other girl and try things with me.

And that was my 2020, not including all the horrific things that happened in America and the world that just added to my stress and anxiety. I’m not sure how I feel about 2021. I didn’t even make New Year’s resolutions this year because they feel pointless to me. I’m trying to be hopeful but honestly, it’s been hard to do. I still miss my grandparents so so so much and even the thought of them brings tears to my eyes. Evan is still dating this girl and tells me about her and I have to pretend like it doesn’t hurt because we agreed to be friends. I don’t have any audits lined up after my current assignment. I’m staying home and trying not to see my friends as often because COVID is creeping up again but it makes me feel isolated and bad that I can’t see them. I miss Austin but also don’t want to go back to being completely alone again. I’m finding it hard to get on a good prayer schedule. So please pray for me and my family and the repose of the soul of my grandparents. I can’t wait for the day when I can read this and hurt for my past self, but also know that I’ve made it to somewhere better.

[proteus-no]

What exactly is going on with supernatural? I’m outside the fandom, but it sounds real exciting... whatever is happening...

brooooo...... SO MUCH is happening right now, so here’s a not quick run down cause I ended up rambling, have fun anon:

- Castiel was introduce 4x01, and from literally the day after, the fandom has been shipping him and Dean together. Cas was planned to be killed off fairly early on, but the fans loved him (and his dynamic/relationship with Dean) so much that the writers kept him around

- Originally a female angel (who Dean had sex with) was supposed to be his guardian angel. But the fans.... 

- And so begins a long and torrid history of Destiel, which personally I have been shipping for 10-11 years, and so have many other fans. There were too many things that added up, like every Cas did, he did for Dean. Like.... literally everything. And somewhere along the way, Misha (Castiel’s actor) started playing Cas like he was in love/pining

- People labeled Jensen as homophobic because he, personally, didn’t headcanon Dean as bisexual (even though most fans did), and got testy and upset with Destiel because fans would harass him over it, which is understandable

- But then season 15 happens

- The writers focused a LOT on Dean and Cas’ (platonic) relationship. And fans were getting hype. They loved it. They were acting like an old married couple and we were living.

- And in 15x10, Dean is high on anesthetics from getting dental surgery, and has a bit where he’s dancing in black and white, and it’s very much a Hayes code thing. And he briefly dances with a lamp (this is where the lamp memes come from). Light fixtures, light in general, and lamps have always been a symbol/stand in for Cas, so every goes nuts

- Also in 15x17, God says that in every other universe, Castiel never disobeys. He saved Dean from hell, then did what he was told. But this universe’s Castiel had a “crack in his chasis” and was the only one who disoeyed. Who rebelled. And now he was outside God’s plan

- And God (Chuck) has always been a stand in for the writers. So Castiel, who was so loved by the fans that he was kept on the show and completely changed their plans, is also outside the writers hands. We all just went  👀 👀 👀 

- And then, on November 5th, 2020, 15x18 airs and the internet loses its collective shit. It doesn’t matter if you were a die hard fan, lost interest along the way,never watched it but was interested, or never had any interest at all, EVERYONE was talking about this episode.

- Because, my dear anon, Castiel explicitly confesses his gay, homosexual love for Dean. 

- Sadly, Death wanted Dean dead for trying to kill her. And there was this entity called the Empty (which everyone calls Turbo Hell) that also wanted Death dead. But the thing is, is that Cas made a deal with the Empty to save his adopted son, Jack, who was trapped there. Jack would get out, but the moment Cas experienced true happiness, the Empty would take Cas.

- So Cas doesn’t want Dean to die. So he starts talking about how Dean is a good person, an amazing man. And fans were like... oh? And he continues, talking about how everything Dean has done, he has done for love, for his love of Sam and Jack, and how he loved the world and wanted to save it. And we’re like Oh????????? and then he says Dean changed him, and that he LOVES Dean. And then we lost out collective shit, and he pushes Dean away and gets eaten by the Empty.

- Everyone started calling Dean and Jensen homophobic because Dean wasn’t reacting much but like???? Home boy was being chased by and about to be killed by Death, and Cas starts saying stuff that no one has ever said to him before (see, Dean hates himself and thinks he corrupts everything he touches), and THEN his best friend (who he thought was straight, amongst other things but I’ll touch on that later) confesses he loves him before promptly dying.

- But the thing is, he was dying from experiencing true happiness, and his happiness was just confessing, not even being reciprocated, which is a huge oof.

- Also everyone not in the fandom conveniently ignores how Dean broke down crying on the floor immediately afterwards.

- But then the behinds the scenes information comes out and OH BOY.

- As it turns out, the actors joined the writers for writing and planning out season 15, and you want to know what was the first thing they wrote for this season?

- Thats right, you guessed it, Cas’ love confession. So they wrote the entire season with he knowledge that Cas is hopelessly in love with, and always has been, in love with Dean.

- I cannot stress this enough, but Cas has always been in love with Dean.

- And in the scene, when Cas pushes Dean away, he leaves a bloody handprint on the location that Cas had branded him when he dragged him up from hell.

- You want to know who gave that suggestion?

- JENSEN “HOMOPHOBIC” ACKLES

- BUT WAIT IT GETS EVEN BETTER

- BECAUSE JENSEN IN A CON SAID THAT HES BEEN PLAYING DEAN, SINCE HE MET CAS, WONDERING IF CAS EVEN FELT LOVE LIKE HUMANS SINCE HE’S A CELESTIAL BEING

- WHICH MEANS DEAN’S BEEN WONDERING IF CAS COULD EVEN LOVE HIM

- AHHHHHH

- THE JACKLES LONGCON FOLKS

- But then the next episode airs, and Dean is in a forward spiral, blacking out drunk. Everythings bad, but Cas and his confession arent really brought up and we’re like?????? ?????

- But the main story, really everything but Cas, gets resolved at the end of the episode.

- But also, the show runners have keeping Misha’s location during filming a secret. So we have no idea if he’s even in the finale. So everyone's obviously going to watch, and hope, that Cas comes back and Dean can finally reciprocate.

- But then the finale airs, and at first we were hopeful. Dean’s room is full of lamps, and Cas’ coat can be seen in the background. We also see an application as a mechanic on his desk. And we’re so hopeful, that Dean is moving on from the hunting life. He’s going to have an actual life

- But then Dean dies, from a fucking juggalo vampire, impaled on a rusty nail (actually its bent rebar, but rusty nail is funnier). During a simple hunt. And Dean doesn't want to be saved, which goes against ALL OF HIS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AND HIS ARC FROM NOT ONLY THIS SEASON, BUT THE PAST 5 YEARS

- DEAN, WHO IS CALLED A KILLER BY GOD AND SAYS “YOU SEE, THAT’S NOT ME” BECAUSE CAS SAID HE WAS A GOOD PERSON WHO LOVES SO MUCH

- JUST.... DIES.......

- And on top of that, Sam, who’s arc the ENTIRE SHOW has been moving past his toxic co-dependency from his brother and finding his own life just..... doesn't move on...... he spends literally the rest of his life grieving over his brother. Naming his kid after him, the whole shebang.

- And there was this awful “old Sam” who was in really bad make-up and a silver party city wig. it looked so bad.

- And Dean? Up in Heaven? Just drives his car around. Like, that’s it. He learns from Bobby that Cas is out of Turbo Hell and is fixing up heaven with their new God (Jack, which also goes against Castiel’s arc that he isn’t God’s little soldier, he’s his own person, he’s outside God’s plan. And yeah, Jack is God now, and he’s still Cas’ adopted son, but the point still stands that he’s God’s soldier again) and just continues driving until Sam finally dies and comes to heaven.

- Oh and not to mention that Sam’s love interest for the past couple of seasons (Eileen, a deaf woman) is just never mentioned again, even though she was shown to be brought back, and Sam was grief stricken when God snapped everyone out of existence. No, Sam gets a blurry face woman as wife instead, and Eileen is never heard from again.

- So basically the writer taunted us with Cas to get us to watch the finale because they knew we wouldn’t watch if Cas wasn’t in it.

- So even though the show has ended, more news comes out every day. Like, for example, the heavy focus on Sam in finale and lack of acknowledging the homosexual declaration of love was because they wanted to keep the Sam girls and cis white heterosexual audience pleased so they would follow over to CW’s new show, a Walker Texas Ranger reboot staring Jared Padalecki (Sam’s actor)

- It was also brought up that even pre-covid, the show runners didn’t even bother to ask past characters to come on the show for the finale, even though they said they wanted to have a big scene with all of Sam and Dean’s found family showing up in heaven (including the band Kansas, and I find the implication that the Winchester’s killed them is hilarious) but yeah. They never even asked.

- Jensen also asked a crew member to record the scene on his phone while they were filming, so it has all the cut content. And like Jensen, release the tapes.

- Misha also made a tweet linking an article about how to tell if nuts are rancid, highlighting that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth

- There’s a lot of other stuff that happened, but I’m forgetting

- But RECENTLY both the latin America and indian dub of 15x18 was released and more information came out.

- For example, Dean was originally supposed to scream Cas’ name that it could be heard from blocks away.

- But the BIG news is that, okay in the American version, Dean says “Do do this, Cas” as in, don’t sacrifice yourself. But the lips movements never really lined up.

- However, in the LA version, Dean says “y yo a ti, Cas” which translates to “And I you, Cas”, and in the Indian version, it’s translated to “I’m yours, Cas.”

- AND HOLY SHIT

- DEAN ACTUALLY CONFESSES HE LOVES HIM BACK

- AND JENSEN’S LIP MOVESMENTS WOULD LINE UP MORE WITH “I’M YOURS” OR “AND I YOU” THAN “DON’T DO THIS”

- So basically Destiel is not only canon, but RECIPROCATED, but like, only in Spanish, but hey, we’ll take what we can get.

- AND THEN Misha releases a video that’s summed up to “It was a rogue translator, blah blah blah” and just seemed like CW was holding a gun to his head to do damage control

- Everyone was pissed for like .2 seconds but then Misha immediately apologizes and goes to his replies and has been talking with fans about why they’re upset, and just genuinely just learning about the strife and anger people are feeling. It’s big “Dad trying to understand his kid’s problems at school” vibes. 

- And Jensen has been radio silent the entire time even though it’s obvious CW has been trying to get their actors to quell the fans, and honestly he stan a king.

And that’s what you missed, pretty much. But new information is coming out every day, so periodically send asks and I’ll update you on this shitshow, anon

[socialjusticeartshare]

First She Was Separated From Her Family, Now She’s Separated From School

A refugee child, once separated from her mother at the border by Trump, now struggles with online school.

Every weekday morning, a 12-year-old refugee named Génnezys logs into her seventh grade online classroom. She sits at a tiny table in a corner of her cluttered living room. Before logging in, she tapes her phone to a chair and dials my number on FaceTime. Once we’re connected, I peer into the screen of a laptop lent to her by her public middle school. For hours, I observe coronavirus pandemic-era education for Génnezys and about 20 other children of multiple races, nationalities, and economic circumstances. What I see is both heroic and tragic.

Génnezys is one of the thousands of immigrant children who were torn from their parents in 2018 by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. I wrote about the desperate efforts of Cruz, her incarcerated mother, to find her 10-year-old daughter. They were reunited after about six weeks. Cruz later borrowed $6,000 from a friend for a coyote to smuggle her three-year-old daughter into the U.S. The child was detained for a few days then released to Cruz.

I asked Génnezys to invent a pseudonym to protect her family from U.S. government reprisal, and she came up with a fanciful one based on the Spanish pronunciation — HEH-neh-sees — of the first book in the Old Testament.

Today the family resides in a small Southern city. Cruz works as a janitor, earning a bit less than $10 an hour. They live in a small apartment with one bedroom, which Cruz and the girls share with her boyfriend. He is also an immigrant, and he pays half the rent. He’s employed in construction, and he leaves for work very early in the morning. Cruz goes to work after taking her four-year-old daughter, whom I’ll call Bety, by bus to a daycare center. With school strictly online now because of Covid-19, Génnezys stays in the apartment all by herself from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., often supervising an 8-year-old girl who has her own school computer with headphones. This child’s Latina immigrant mother works, too, so Génnezys acts as babysitter. Before online school started in September, she worried intensely that being without an adult in the home would be lonely and scary. I live hundreds of miles away, so I volunteered to sit with her via FaceTime. She says that she feels much better when I’m with her.

During the first two days of remote school, the teachers, all young or middle-aged white women, cycled though a dither of confusion and kind but mostly fruitless efforts to actually see and hear their students. One problem was that the online platforms were glitchy. The class links often crashed, leaving the students, including Génnezys, with blank screens. But by week’s end, the kinks were worked out — yet the students remained silent phantoms.

“Know that I see you. I hear you. I’m with you,” one young teacher intoned to the kids right after introducing herself. They had names like Hassan, Rasheeda, Yennifer, and Travis. “Black Lives Matter,” the teacher added. She was met by silence from her new students, and she could not see their reactions either. She asked them to turn on their mics and cameras, but getting them to comply was harder than pulling their teeth. “What did you do all summer? How did you deal with Covid? Talk about your family!”

A boy with an Arabic name turned on his mic just long enough to say that he had a baby sister. Indeed, the loud wailing of an infant could be heard. The teacher skipped a beat, then the boy’s mic went dead. No other students turned on their microphones. Not even Génnezys, who had earlier proved she was not shy. When the teacher mispronounced her name on the first day of school, Génnezys politely but firmly corrected her. She is a brilliant girl who knew no English whatsoever two years ago yet speaks it almost perfectly now, and who scrolls through the internet on her own initiative for details about the accident that crippled Frida Kahlo.

Though she has defended her name and sometimes has been the only student to answer her teachers’ questions about math, Génnezys remains strenuously silent about most of the details of her life. The family all got sick in late May, with many days of fever, coughing, muscle aches, nausea, dizziness, and diarrhea, as well as loss of appetite, taste, and smell. They recovered, but Cruz is suffering now from hair loss — a condition just recently recognized as a complication of Covid-19.

When Cruz got sick, she was employed in housekeeping at an upscale chain hotel. She said she fell ill after being ordered to enter and clean a room occupied by a woman who was coughing. She was not given PPE for the job.

Cruz estimates that in her building complex of a few dozen apartments, about 20 other people came down with Covid-19. “No one died, but some were carried off to hospitals in ambulances,” she said, adding that all were immigrants from Latin America.

Latinos comprise fewer than one in five residents in the county. But they make up about half of the people in Cruz’s census tract, while just across a main thoroughfare almost everyone is white and owns a house.  In Cruz’s tract, many of the Latinos live in cramped little rental apartments.

During the outbreak and their own illnesses, Cruz and her children were never tested for Covid-19. Nor did she contact me, though she instructed her preteen daughter to call me for help if she took a turn for the worse. The family just stuck it out, but Cruz was fired by the hotel because of her sickness and missed work. She got the janitorial job just as soon as she felt better. She couldn’t self-quarantine: She had rent to pay, kids to feed. None of this is something Génnezys wants to talk about in online seventh grade.

She doesn’t turn on her camera either.

It’s hard to know exactly why the students as a group refuse to show themselves to their teachers or to each other. Middle school is the empire of peer pressure — pressure not to stand out, even in normal times, when rows of children are looking at and breathing with each other, along with a teacher in a real room. But the kids’ reluctance now seems at least partly due to how dispirited and disconnected their virtual classrooms feel. Génnesyz’s teachers practically stand on their heads coaxing interactions with the students, but the teachers’ energy seems TV-ish, abstract.

The kids are alone. They have no books. The only class that resembles normal school is math. As in times past, the teacher writes figures on a board and explains what they mean. The other classes are a mishmash of hyperactive YouTube science videos with men who speak too fast, and a woman with a white coat and test tubes performing experiments — work the students normally would be absorbed with in a classroom lab, but which they can only stare at now from afar, wall-eyed. An art class features hip-hop music, whose teaching intention is muddled, and digital choose-and-drag stickers and emojis. Strange, sci-fi cartoon people in Génnezys’s American History class purport to recount the high points of the antebellum human bondage, the Civil War, and the Black Codes. After that lesson, I asked Génnezys if she understood what a slave was. She still didn’t know — though she did remember the cartoon guy saying that a man named Frederick Douglass had been forcibly separated from his mother. She knew what that meant, from firsthand experience, but didn’t mention it in class. With me, she minimized her experience. She’d learned that Frederick Douglass was an infant when he was taken. “But, um, I was 10 when it happened,” she said. “I was a big kid, not a little kid.”

One teacher conducted a lesson about why students should participate in small- group, online “breakout” chat rooms. “Because they help us get to know each other?” said Génnezys, daring to speak.

“Very good! Thank you for that, Génnezys!” chimed the teacher, saying all the syllables correctly. Then she warned the students that they must use “appropriate language” in the chat rooms, and that their language was being watched.

This teacher also held a “correct answer” contest, with her pupils silently checking T’s and F’s on their screens. “True or false: If you fight at a school bus stop, you will be punished as severely as if you’d fought a school. True! Right, Brian! Brian gets a point! He’s pulling ahead of Corinne! Next question. True or false: If you touch the private body part of someone else at school, whether on purpose or by accident, you will be punished the same, either way. Yay, Corinne! She’s back in play!”

But there are no school bus stops now. There are no “someone else”s at school.

Génnezys has another reason not to turn on her camera: She is ashamed of her clothes. She fits a girl’s 14 now, but her wardrobe dates from a year ago, when she was size 10 and 12. Her shirts are too tight for her rapidly developing body. In the morning she puts on her mother’s dresses. They are several sizes too large.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe War on Immigrants

Cruz can’t afford to take her daughter shopping. She just lost another week of work, and wages, due to Covid-19. Two co-workers at her janitorial job tested positive and one is in the hospital. Because Cruz worked closely with both infected women, she was quarantined for 14 days. She had no proof that she had already contracted Covid-19. She had to stay home, along with Bety, who ran around the apartment laughing, yelling, and rifling Génnezys’s little desk while her sister tried to pay attention to online class.

An employee from the county health department came by to deliver some onions and pieces of fruit. Cruz finally got a negative test result but still had to finish the quarantine. Génnezys did not tell her teachers what was happening.

Génnezys also avoids the camera because of what Cruz calls “her obsession.” On the second day of school, a teacher asked, “What is your favorite thing to do?” Amid the mass silence, Génnezys activated her mic and bravely answered: “Play with slime,” she said.

“Slime?” said the teacher, nonplussed.

“Yeah. Slime.”

“Ah. OK. Yeah. Slime. Well, that sounds relaxing!”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Slime” is a faddish kid product that’s been around since the 1970s. Back then, it was valued by boys for its gross-out appeal. Now it’s prettier, smells nice, and is all the rage among preteen and teen girls. Many make it from a home recipe involving glue, borax, food coloring, and plastic beads from craft stores like Michael’s.

Génnezys was already into slime by age 10, back in Central America. Cruz’s partner there, an extremely violent man who was neither of the girls’ fathers, was terrorizing and assaulting Cruz and the children, threatening them with death. The girls witnessed the violence. Cruz made plans to hide Bety with her sister and flee to the U.S. with Génnezys. Meanwhile, Génnezys discovered slime. “In my country,” she remembered, “it was called moco,” which is Spanish for snot. She pushed it, pulled it, rolled and wrapped it, over and over and over. It calmed her, Cruz remembers.

After a grueling trip north, including a stay in a filthy, crowded stash house, things got worse at the border when the Trump administration took Génnezys from Cruz and shipped her 2,000 miles away to a child detention center. There, she was warehoused with mostly older Central American girls who’d come to the U.S. by themselves, pregnant or already with babies.

After spending six weeks with these young women, according to Cruz, 10-year-old Génnezys was using racy language and discussing sex. After she was reunited with her mother, she experienced night terrors and walked in her sleep for three months. She had three sessions with a psychologist. Then, said Cruz, “She entered a new phase of her life: adolescence,” and “she hardly talked about what happened.” Even so, Cruz added, “Two weeks ago, after Génnezys had an eye exam that showed a problem with one of her eyes, she mentioned to me that an older girl in the detention center hit her hard in that eye with a ball. That was two years ago. She’d never told me till now. Sometimes I worry about what’s in her head.”

Outside of her head is slime: jars and jars of it in all colors and textures, from shiny and glistening to rough and frothy. “I love YouTube slime videos,” Génnezys told me. The site has a plethora of young girls extolling their slime collections, as well productions with sexy women’s voices doing ASMR routines, and images of long, manicured fingernails digging languorously into the goo.

“I worry about it,” said Cruz. “It’s such a waste of money. But she would rather have slime, even, than clothes that fit her.”

If Génnezys were to activate her camera for her classmates and teachers, they might see her furiously and endlessly twisting, pulling, and punching her strange doughs as she fidgets at the computer and tries hard to do her schoolwork. A few months ago, Wired magazine interviewed a neuroscientist and psychologist who suggested that people might be gravitating toward slime during the Covid-19 crisis to simulate the feeling of touching actual people.

As a Central American refugee child, Génnezys has been traumatized by murderous violence, forced family separation, poverty, and plague. More and more, however, nonrefugee children in America are joining her in the grief and fear of being apart and alone. How many of these kids are scrunched over their own computers, secretly toying with slime?

“I don’t know,” Génnezys said when I asked her that question. “Maybe I’m the only one. Before the virus, I didn’t play with it in school because school was good. Now, I don’t think I could do school if I didn’t have slime. Without it I’d be dying.

“Dying of what?”

“Boredom.”

Article Source

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: ESPN’s New Michael Jordan Documentary Is Exactly What We Need Right Now. Here’s How They Made It

ESPN has taken noble swings at programming a sports network with no sports. But there are only so many airings of marbles races, old games and gabfests about the April 23–25 NFL draft—an event that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, feels as significant as a speck of sand—that viewers can take. That’s why fans clamored so hard for ESPN to move up its highly anticipated 10-part docuseries starring Michael Jordan, widely regarded as the greatest athlete ever to grace this earth, from an original airdate of June 2—coinciding with an NBA Finals series that no longer exists—to ASAP. People need a dose of nostalgia, and reason to anticipate any kind of shared cultural experience, now more than ever.

Luckily, the network listened. The first two episodes of The Last Dance, which chronicles Jordan’s final championship season, with the 1998 Chicago Bulls, debut on the network on Sunday, April 19. On each of the following four Sundays, a pair of new episodes will premiere on ESPN; the series will stream on Netflix outside the U.S. starting on April 20. Through previously unaired footage captured from a crew embedded with Air Jordan and the Bulls that 1997–1998 season, and fresh interviews with all the major characters—including Jordan, his running mate Scottie Pippen, coach Phil Jackson and Dennis Rodman, who went on a team-sanctioned bender in Las Vegas with then girlfriend Carmen Electra in order to clear his head a bit—The Last Dance offers raw, rare insight into a team that became the subject of global obsession. (Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, in which Jordan’s final shot in a Bulls uniform clinched Chicago’s third straight championship and sixth in eight years, remains the most-watched NBA game in history, having averaged 35.6 million viewers.)

For a generation of fans who never witnessed Jordan or those Bulls teams live, the film will serve as a satisfying crash course on the MJ mystique. And while amateur Jordan scholars probably won’t discover any new bombshells, at least in the eight episodes available to the media, the project offers all viewers a useful reminder: Jordan’s career arc was unfathomably bizarre. He first retired in his prime after his father’s tragic murder, shifted to playing baseball—baseball!—then took a second forced retirement after ’98 because Bulls executives, for some still inexplicable reason, felt inclined to break up a team that did nothing but win and thrill the globe. If Jordan existed in today’s Twitter-mad, media-saturated world, the unstable Internet would have already lost its collective mind.

Ron Frehm—APMichael Jordan scores 55 points vs. New York, while wearing No. 45, upon returning to the NBA in 1995.

Moving the documentary up a month and a half to appease the quarantined masses added some logistical challenges. The final two episodes aren’t done yet, and the production crew is working remotely to see it to the finish. Before the pandemic, director Jason Hehir compared the edit process to preparing Thanksgiving dinner, where he could be in the kitchen communicating with people preparing different portions of the meal. “Now, instead, they have to send me the potatoes, send me the carrots, send me the turkey via messenger,” says Hehir. “Then I can taste and tell them what I want it to be. It’s a more roundabout process.” One of the most crucial interviews—with Utah Jazz point guard John Stockton, a key Bulls foil in the 1997 and 1998 Finals—was conducted in Spokane, Wash. in early March, just before the outbreak shut down the state and the rest of the country.

Going into the 1997–98 season, Bulls management hinted that the team’s dynasty was nearing its end. So Andy Thompson, then a field producer for NBA Entertainment—and uncle of current Golden State Warriors star Klay Thompson—thought this final campaign should be recorded for posterity. But the league needed buy-in from Jordan. An up-and-coming NBA exec, current commissioner Adam Silver, pitched the idea to Jordan; he could sign off on how the footage was ultimately used. At the very least, Silver told Jordan, he’d have the most amazing collection of home movies for his kids.

The NBA shot more than 500 hours, a haul that sports documentarians had been lusting after for nearly two decades. At the 2016 NBA All-Star Game in Toronto, producer Michael Tollin, co-chairman of Mandalay Sports Media, met with Jordan’s reps. Tollin pitched the project not as a documentary but as an event. The market for long-form epics was taking off: OJ: Made in America, the multipart doc that would go on to win an Oscar, had just debuted at Sundance. (With the continued rise of streaming services that give the films a bingeable home after airing, the demand for such docs has only grown.) Jordan, assured that the project would offer breathing room to share his full story, signed on.

Although Jordan had a hand in the project—two of his longtime business managers, Curtis Polk and Estee Portnoy, are executive producers—The Last Dance doesn’t feel too sanitized. Turns out, he’s the Michael Jordan of documentary interviewees: the best talking head in the film, honest, conversational, unafraid to unfurl profanities. We see Jordan at his most petty, like in archival footage when he pokes fun at the height and weight of diminutive Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, with whom Jordan feuded for years. (Krause died in 2017.) In one interview, ex–Bulls center Will Perdue calls him an “a–hole,” before in the next breath acknowledging Jordan was a “hell of a teammate” for pushing Chicago to greatness.

Jordan defends his ruthless motivational methods. “Look, winning has a price, leadership has a price,” he says during one interview in The Last Dance. “You ask all my teammates—one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something he didn’t f-cking do.” The film cuts to a montage of Jordan lifting weights and running sprints. Still, Jordan tears up, a middle-aged man conflicted by his past. For once, many can relate to him.

Jeff Haynes—AFP via Getty ImagesMichael Jordan celebrates his sixth, and final, title with coach Phil Jackson in 1998; both soon leave the Bulls.

The Last Dance also takes on the controversies, like Jordan’s penchant for gambling and aversion to politics. He famously refused to endorse Harvey Gantt, the African-American Democrat from Jordan’s home state of North Carolina, in his 1990 Senate race against conservative Republican Jesse Helms, who opposed the Martin Luther King Day holiday. “Republicans buy sneakers too,” said Jordan, whose Nike Air Jordan sneakers launched the concept of sports marketing into the stratosphere. (In the film, Jordan insists he made the statement in jest.) Even Barack Obama, an unabashed Bulls fan, admits to the filmmakers he wished Jordan had publicly backed Gantt.

Jordan’s defense: activism’s just not in his nature. He was too focused on his craft. “Was that selfish? Probably,” he admits. “But that’s where my energy was.”

While The Last Dance deserves credit for exploring this part of Jordan’s legacy, the section still feels like short shrift, given the emergence of social activism among today’s sports stars. What does Jordan think of modern athlete engagement? How do today’s stars, LeBron James and others, view Jordan’s neutrality? These questions go unanswered. Even in a documentary covering the late 1990s—and even amid a pandemic where politics has taken a back seat to more serious chaos—placing Jordan in a contemporary context feels not only appropriate, but crucial.

Such nitpicking, however, counts as part of the fun. And we sure can use a little of that. No Michael Jordan treatment, even one as comprehensive as The Last Dance, will leave everyone entirely fulfilled. Viewers can look forward to weekly debates about the documentary’s merits and shortcomings. Whether it’s during his playing days, his retirement years or a still surreal quarantine, His Airness is always worth talking about. Even from a social distance, it turns out, Michael Jordan can bring us together.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[ireneinisolation-blog]

3/20 - COVID Dreams

I’m getting to this rather late in the day, and while I had planned for a larger topic, I’ve decided to go light instead, especially as it is so close before bed and I don’t want to wind myself up. Here it goes.

Since coronavirus first started circulating in Wuhan in January and the first stories of it started to make it here (not sure exactly when it was, but early-ish) I’ve had dreams and nightmares about it. Interestingly, I don’t think I actually had the virus in any of these dreams, but a lot of anxiety surrounding exposure and quarantines. I don’t think have yet begun to have anxiety dreams about economic collapse, but I’m sure those will come eventually in one form or another.

I think my earliest dream was just a vague idea of being in quarantine. But it was not super negative or all that emotional overall. It was just that I was in quarantine for suspected exposure, and that was it, nothing happened.

Another one a few days later involved my college roommate inviting me to go on a day trip with her to Shanghai. I politely declined as I did not want to be exposed to the virus. After that, some Veronica Mars characters appeared out of nowhere and that was a nice distraction.

I later had another covid dream with Veronica Mars characters, interestingly. Though not that interestingly I suppose as I was rewatching old episodes around January/February. In the second dream, it was a very anxious dream. I was quarantined at a military base after possible exposure to the virus. We slept in an open room (the same as in the images that came out of Wuhan where people with mild versions of the virus were kept), and our eating was regulated by when the military allowed us to have food. It was completely out of control, and within the dream I felt quite anxious. But I guess my mind decided to turn it around. One of my close friends from childhood showed up, and then it was like instead of being in quarantine, we were just having a sleepover at a military base with a bunch of other people. And then Logan from Veronica Mars showed up - hot Logan from the movie and newest season. So my friend from childhood and I just spent our time flirting with him. My brain really improved that situation. By the end, not such a bad dream.

I think there have been other dreams about quarantine. Honestly, too many dreams of this variety to count at this point.

One of the weirdest dreams I’ve had so far on this topic, and honestly one of the weirdest dreams I’ve had in a while relates to the movie Melancholia, which I did not see recently, but have been thinking about a lot recently. I saw it for a class when I was younger and I hated it. I still hate it. But for whatever reason it really stuck with me. So basically, first half the movie, main character played by Kirsten Dunst is super depressed during and after marrying a rather bland looking Alexander Skarsgaard. The second half the movie, there is an impeding apocalypse because there is another planet that is about to smash into the earth and kill everyone, and Dunst’s character suddenly finds a way to be ecstatic and really come into herself in the end of the world. When she is doing this, she can be seen doing all kinds of weird things in which she is reveling in the end of everything. One of those weird things she is doing is that she lounges, naked under the night sky, glowing in the bright light of the approaching planet. It is some weird symbolism (I think the movie is something about her not being able to handle living, while everyone else can’t handle dying? I don’t know. Lars Von Trier is fucking weird). Well I’ve been thinking about this movie a lot lately, because I’ve been thinking about how people are responding to this current “apocalypse” (not really an apocalypse, but still damn shitty hellhole). Some people hoard TP, some people retreat from the world, and some people, interestingly, seem to thrive on the chaos. Not necessarily in the sociopath way, not necessarily not in that way either (some of them are sociopaths). A week ago, I feel like I was feeling a little like this. Feeling invincible in the face of uncertainty. If only I could get the virus early, know I had it (but also just really hope that I wouldn’t have a severe reaction), and then everything would be fine, right? This week? Not so much. Now I’m just super anxious and not feeling very Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia-esque. But I still know a few people are like this. Anyway, that’s all background. Here’s the dream:

I was on the side of a hill near a house, and under a tent? like those weird outdoor ones that are white and used at festivals. Well outside of the tent was someone who I - in real life - knew when I was younger but have totally lost contact with. She was lying on the side of the hill, naked, and basking in the end of the world! Freud with surely have a fucking hay day with this one. Within my dream, I tried to avert my eyes as it would be indecent to see her that way. But she was reveling, and complained of my prudishness. Then the dream changed, apparently my brain was bothered. Instead we were in her house - both clothed - and she had a tiny yappy dog that was jumping all around. I was super annoyed with it, and tried to go upstairs and lock the annoying dog outside of the room. Somehow it got in, and then I spent the rest of the dream trying to figure out how to kick the dog out of the room. (I’m not normally so weird with dogs. I mean, small yappy ones can be quite annoying, but overall I’m quite the animal enthusiast.) So yeah... that dream was quite weird, especially as far as Freudian related things go. But I swear it wasn’t sexual. It was just WTF Melancholia.

Another dream that I had very recently first involved a bunch of teenagers getting drunk at my high school - I wasn’t in high school, but there and observing - they were being very rowdy, and very gathered together. I found out from the administration that they were partying to protest social distancing. Like dicks. This was no doubt based on the face that I keep hearing about people, especially college kids, doing shit like this that is going to fuck over everyone else in the end. The fact that they were teenagers probably relates to me recently watching Sex Education on Netflix to distract from the unpleasantness.

The second half of that dream, I was at a music festival with a bunch of women in their 70s and older. I was standing near the registration desk, and a few women were asking if they really have to wash their hands all the time, as it is inconvenient because their aren’t enough facilities for it and they want to just relax. Then they asked if they could just keep their hands in their pockets instead of washing their hands. We all agreed this would probably be fine. I think this dream probably relates to my anxiety and the world’s anxiety about older people getting the virus. But also the issue that some older people are not taking the situation seriously enough and keep going out anyway.

That’s all for my recent covid dreams. I am sure that there are many more to come, unfortunately. I will update later if any more interesting ones come up.

Let’s see, daily updates... daily updates... Thank god for my fidget spinner. It’s been doing a lot of work to absorb my nervous energy. It’s now over a week into my shelter in place and my apartment is still a fucking mess. I really should rally to clean it at some point. Wouldn’t it be nice to come out of all of this (at some point in the unknown future) and actually be a person with a clean apartment? Yes, I think that would be nice. I did some baking today, and that made me feel temporarily better because baking is such a nice distraction. Also, I was feeling very crappy the first half of the day. Certainly anxiety related. I just had this pit in my stomach and felt ill. Well I decided to make one of my favorite meals for lunch, and it got me back on track to feeling better. It is fare to say, few other people would find it comforting, but I love it: A bowl of chickpeas and chopped red cabbage with apple cider vinegar, EV olive oil, salt, onion powder, and garlic powder. It feels healthful and tastes delicious. In news related to the first half of the last item, I’ve been anxiety fasting. It’s motivated by the same thing as stress eating, but with the opposite reaction. Unfortunately, once I start this, it is hard to re-regulate my food, and then by extension my sleep, habits. I’m trying to do better. The chickpeas and cabbage helped.

Goodnight! I hope my dreams are free of anything covid related!

[moodboardinthecloud]

How to Deal With the Anxiety of Uncertainty

Our brains weren't wired to deal with the "psychological pandemic" of not knowing what the future holds. Here's how to cope with living in limbo.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-deal-with-uncertainty-coronavirus/?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=wired&utm_mailing=WIR_Science_090220&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=WIR_Science&bxid=5eeb27340a64fe56174f61cf&cndid=61443371&esrc=growler-free-covid&source=EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_SCIENCE_ZZ

IF THERE’S ONE defining feature of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s uncertainty. Will there be a vaccine? When can schools safely reopen? Will I still have a job next week? Should I book a spring vacation abroad? A crisis that we’d all hoped would be short-lived is dragging on indefinitely, and the list of unanswered questions keeps growing.

“I’ve started thinking about our current situation as being marked by two pandemics,” Kate Sweeny says. “The viral one, of course, but also a psychological pandemic of uncertainty.” A professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, Sweeny specializes in understanding how people cope with ambiguity. All her research points towards one conclusion: We don’t cope very well.

“Waiting periods are marked by two existentially challenging states: We don’t know what’s coming, and we can’t do much about it,” Sweeny explains. “Together, those states are a recipe for anxiety and worry. People would often rather deal with the certainty of bad news than the anxiety of remaining in limbo.”

That’s what researchers at three institutions in the UK found in a 2013 experiment, when they attached electrodes to 35 subjects and asked them to choose between receiving a sharp shock immediately or waiting for a milder one. The vast majority chose the more painful option, just to get it out of the way. “It’s counterintuitive,” admits Giles Story, one of the academics behind the study. “But it’s a testament to how anxiety-inducing and miserable it can be to have things looming in the future.”

It may be counterintuitive, but it’s actually something we see play out again and again in the scientific literature. Whether it’s receiving a cancer diagnosis, finding out a round of IVF was unsuccessful, or discovering that you failed an exam, for many of us, unequivocally bad news is easier to deal with than the ambiguous waiting period that precedes it. Knowing what we’re dealing with, even if it’s crappy, gives us some agency. Uncertainty leaves us scrambling to regain an element of control—by hoarding toilet paper, for example.

Ironically, while actions like these might provide temporary relief, they can have the opposite effect in the long term, sending our anxiety levels through the roof. “People who struggle with uncertainty engage in behaviors to try to feel more certain, like taking their temperature repeatedly,” says Ryan Jane Jacoby, a staff psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. “But these actions only serve to perpetuate uncertainty in the long run, and they can really take a toll on your mental health, as they start to take up more time and energy.”

So if stockpiling a year’s supply of toilet paper isn’t going to ease the anxiety that comes with living in a state of limbo, what will? Answering that question involves understanding why exactly we struggle so much with uncertainty. According to Mark Freeston, a professor of clinical psychology at Newcastle University in the UK, it’s all to do with evolution. “It’s of no use for a newborn to understand where danger is, because they can’t do anything about it. What is useful is understanding how to find signs of safety.” That means learning to recognize the people or surroundings we know keep us secure—and being suspicious of the ones we aren’t familiar with.

“As evolutionary psychologists have argued, being intolerant of uncertainty has survival value,” Freeston says. “So instead of wondering why some people struggle to deal with uncertainty, the better question to ask is, how are some people able to cope with it?” The answer—which Freeston and the other experts I spoke to have spent their entire professional careers working on—could help make long periods of uncertainty more bearable. Here are some of the coping mechanisms they've found can help.

Stop With the Mental Time Travel

When you’re dealing with uncertain situations, it’s tempting to both fixate on things you’ve done in the past—could last week's trip to the grocery store be to blame for my sore throat today?—and worry about what the future will look like. “During waiting periods, I would always find myself doing a lot of mental time travel, thinking back to what I could have done differently, and playing out various future scenarios,” says Sweeny. Dwelling excessively on what could have been and what might be—ruminating, to use the technical term—is exhausting, and unless it is brought under control, can trigger depression and anxiety.

To stop the spiral, Sweeny recommends learning how to focus on the present by using an age-old technique: mindfulness. “It entails an intense focus on the present moment, so it’s a good fit to ameliorate the time travel problem.” Sweeny and her colleague Jennifer L. Howell put mindfulness to the test in a study involving law school graduates awaiting bar exam results. “We found that people who are naturally mindful, and also people who did brief mindfulness meditation every week or so, seemed to fare better during a stressful waiting period.”

You don’t need any expensive equipment or devices to start practicing mindfulness. “Being mindful is challenging, but practicing mindfulness is easy,” Sweeny advises. “There are tons of apps and YouTube videos with guided meditations, targeting all kinds of struggles. There are also other ways to practice mindfulness. For example, you can eat in a mindful way, focusing on every movement, taste, smell, and sound.”

Binge-Watch Your Favorite Childhood Show

While you don’t want to waste time worrying about the past, taking a little trip down memory lane can do wonders for your mental health during periods of uncertainty.

“At the start of the pandemic, people went back to eating a lot of the food they’d had as a child,” Freeston says. In March, as cities across the US went into lockdown, sales of comfort foods like pizza and hotdogs exploded. “It’s not comfort food because it’s high in calories, fat, and sugar. It’s comfort food because it’s familiar. People are looking for those signs of safety that help us cope with uncertainty.”

It doesn’t have to be food. Anything nostalgic that reminds you of a time when you felt secure can help offset the anxiety that comes with so much unknown. “It’s the unknowingness that people are really struggling with, so we need to find comfort in things we recognize,” Freeston advises. If you’re worried about your waistline, try binge-watching your favorite show from when you were a kid. “There’s a reason so many adults are going back to watching Disney movies,” Freeston says. “The show you saw last year would probably be just as entertaining to rewatch, but it wouldn’t give you those same familiar signs of safety.”

Ditch the Book, Play a Video Game

If it was hard getting your hands on Clorox wipes or yeast back in March, it was all but impossible to buy a Nintendo Switch. Sales of the handheld console doubled year over year as people sought to tune out reality and lose themselves in the virtual worlds of Zelda, Animal Crossing, or Mario. And it worked.

“What these people are doing is called finding their flow—essentially a state of complete absorption in an enjoyable activity, when time seems to fly by and you even lose self-awareness,” explains Sweeny. A new paper she worked on with eight other researchers confirmed that for people in lockdown in China during the peak of Covid-19 there, this type of engrossing activity helped preserve their mental health. “It’s a really effective antidote to distress during various waiting periods,” Sweeny says.

If video games aren’t your thing, plenty of other activities will do, from gardening to painting. The trick is to find something that’s not so easy you’ll get bored and not so mentally taxing that you’ll struggle to concentrate—which is probably why so many avid readers haven’t been able to stay focused on their books. “The best kind of activities to achieve a flow state are ones that are enjoyable, that challenge you just the right amount (neither boring nor frustrating), and that allow you to track your progress,” Sweeny says. “Video games are perfect for this purpose, but almost any activity can become a flow activity with a bit of attention to those three components.”

Find a New Rhythm

So many people have lost so much during the pandemic—jobs, houses, loved ones—that it feels frivolous to be missing smaller things, like the bagel you used to buy every morning on your way to the office, or the bar you went to for happy hour on Fridays. But as trivial as these things might seem, they helped create the sense of stability and predictability we need to function.

“Before the pandemic, I knew I would get up in the morning and have my one cup of coffee for the day. When we went into lockdown, the idea that I might not be able to do that was really upsetting, not because I’m addicted to coffee, but because it was part of my routine,” Freeston says. “It’s these little signs of safety that create a rhythm to our lives and tell us things are going to be alright.”

To help alleviate the anxiety we feel when we lose this rhythm, Freeston recommends building a new one. “You have to make sure you’re creating enough safety signals for yourself. What are the things that, even if we have to go back into lockdown again, you can count on?”

Importantly, it has to be things that you can control, so post-lockdown bucket lists are less useful for these purposes. “Lots of people are projecting into the future, thinking ‘This is what I’m going to do when ...’ But some of those things might not happen, or they might happen in a different way from what you envisage,” Freeston points out. “Instead, think about how to build some structure into your daily life that you can rely on, so that you know what will be happening at 7:30 am on a Monday morning whether or not the schools reopen. If everything goes smoothly, you won’t need these safety cues. But if it doesn’t, you’ll feel less unsettled by it all.”

Play Around the Edges

As much as we might like to, we can’t stay cooped up in our apartments eating comfort food and watching Beauty and the Beast forever. “Almost everything we do in life has an element of uncertainty to it,” Jacoby points out. “When we use our stove or drive into work, we’re accepting some level of risk that our home may burn down or that we may be in a car accident. Instead of trying to run away from it, challenge yourself to practice tolerating uncertainty.”

Freeston recommends starting out small. “Once you’ve found those things that help you regain a sense of safety, start building in some elements of flexibility,” he advises. “So you can still watch movies from when you were a kid, but maybe ask your roommate to pick from a selection, so you don’t know which one it will be.” Once you’re comfortable with that level of uncertainty, you can add in more.

But you won’t tolerate even small amounts of ambiguity until you feel safe again, Freeston warns. “We want people to become more tolerant of uncertainty, but you can only do that if you’re feeling safe. So you need to become secure first, and then you can start playing around the edges.” Consider that permission to spend this weekend watching reruns of your favorite show.