The grocery store has been alarming me again. Today half a dozen things on my list weren’t there, and some of them have been ongoing not-theres: the grocery store has been low on bread (variety and quantity) for weeks; they’ve been patchy on half-and-half and light cream for weeks; they’ve had lots of paper towels and facial tissue but extremely limited variety (like, today you could buy a 6-pack of store-brand paper towels, and that one pack/brand option lined allll the shelves, with the exception of a few packs of one brand name, plus a few two-packs of the store brand); they’ve been extremely limited on granola bar variety.

We’re fully back into the times of having one or two things spread out to artificially fill the shelves that are supposed to hold dozens of things. I am fully back to reminding myself that THERE IS PLENTY OF FOOD IN THIS STORE, even if I can’t get the exact things I want. Like, it is REALLY OKAY that I can’t find my preferred brand and fat-level of dairy to put in my coffee; it is REALLY OKAY that I can’t find my preferred brand and flavor of ice cream; it is REALLY OKAY that I can’t find my preferred brand and type of bread. All of these things are REALLY REALLY OKAY, they just don’t FEEL okay without a little mental management.

Paul and I are recently back from a several-day trip to a big city. The kids are old enough to leave on their own (especially with my supremely competent neighborhood friend on-call Just In Case), and we were only a couple of hours away if something HAD gone amiss. It was fun to be tourists in a city we’ve previously gone to only for medical stuff. But it did remind me that I don’t like cities.

I DO like certain things about cities. I like the way everything is RIGHT THERE: you don’t have to drive 45 minutes for a small art museum and 45 minutes in the opposite direction for a small theater and 45 minutes in yet another direction for a historical site: the big art museum and the big theater and the historical sites and a bunch of other things plus a ton of shopping/food options are all within walking distance.

I don’t like how busy and crowded everything is in a city, and how loud. I don’t like how much CONSTANT HONKING there is. I don’t like how packed-in everything feels: I had intended to do a little shopping, but every single store seemed tiny and cramped and with about enough room for half a dozen shoppers as long as they were all on physically affectionate terms. I don’t like how EXPENSIVE everything is. I don’t like how very often I encounter puddles/piles of things I rarely if ever encounter on the streets/sidewalks in my small town.

There’s another thing I don’t like about cities, and I have been thinking of how to describe it, because the descriptor that first came to mind involved the word “parasitic,” and that’s not nice. But it’s the way everything we encountered seemed designed to squeeeeeeeeze money. We would take a tour, and the tour guide would use various types of manipulative patter to pressure us for tips. We would walk down the street and be approached by someone who would say weird and/or flattering things and then turn to the real point, which was to ask for money; and we are not city-born or city-raised, so neither of us knew what we were supposed to do about that, or how to avoid it. We would look at a city-map board, and someone would come up to us and try to help us, and we would accept the help politely even though we didn’t want it or need it—and then they would ask for money. There were gift shops everywhere, including at the LIBRARY. It was disheartening.

I didn’t actually mind the people performing (musicians, mostly, but also a woman painted to look like a statue), or the endless food/souvenir carts, or the gift shops, because it was low-pressure, money-wise, and felt like it added ambiance—but after a few days, even that started wearing on me. So much HUSTLE, so much ATTEMPTING TO SUCK MONEY OUT OF EVERY ENCOUNTERED PERSON, so many MONEY-MAKING IDEAS. So many $6 bottles of water! So many t-shirts with the city name on them, exactly the same as the ones being sold on the previous block and the next block! So many people offering rides and tours and merchandise and novelties! So much STRIVING for MONEY. I started feeling like a walking wallet, a potential mark; it started feeling as if the only reason anyone would interact with another human being was to achieve a financial transfer.

I don’t know if it’s perimenopause, or something about the keto diet, or mild undiagnosed Raynaud’s syndrome (several family members have it)—but it is pretty common for me to be VERY VERY CHILLY right after eating, and especially to have VERY COLD HANDS, sometimes with numb fingertips. One of the best treatments is to have a hot mug of tea/coffee to wrap my hands around—but the mug cools as the tea/coffee is consumed, and sometimes I don’t want tea/coffee. I don’t know why it took me until TODAY to realize I could just MICROWAVE A MUG OF WATER AND USE IT TO WARM MY HANDS. I have a mug of hot water sitting on my desk right now, and after every sentence I wrap my hands around it for a few seconds. If it gets too cool to be useful, I can simply RE-MICROWAVE IT.

(My feet can also get very chilly after I eat, but I have a foot warmer plugged in under my desk.)

Another warm thing near me right now is Elizabeth’s cat, the 12-14-year-old one who has kidney stone issues that are likely to cause us to make The Difficult Decision sometime in the next year (he has the kind that are highly likely to be recurring, and the surgery to remove them is $3000 each time), if he doesn’t first die of what is probably lung cancer. He has become my little buddy the last couple of months, which is odd not only because he has never liked any of us except Elizabeth (we didn’t acquire him to be Elizabeth’s Cat; he is the one who decided he was Elizabeth’s Cat), but also because I am the one who forces his jaw open every other day to give him a pill, and I am the one who takes him to the vet. (I am, however, the one who gives him wet food three or four times a day on the vet’s instruction, which is probably outweighing all these other factors.)

A couple of times, the vet has one of her techs call us to check on the cat. During one call, I’d asked what we should look for in terms of knowing when it would be Time To Bring Him In, and she said that cats tend to hide their suffering, so most owners bring them in later than they should—which is grim, but good to know, and also makes it feel much easier to call Sooner rather than Later, without worrying that they’ll think I seem over-eager to put the cat down. The tech said the cat would probably lose his appetite, and that we might find little clear puddles around the house: a cat who isn’t eating enough will throw up clear fluid. She also said he would start hiding more, and/or hiding in places he didn’t used to hide, and avoiding people more.

So far the cat has gained back all the weight he lost from his kidney-stone distress, and is looking full and plush. And he is SITTING ON MY LAP, which he has NEVER done: he doesn’t even sit on ELIZABETH’S lap. He has a check-up with the vet at the end of this month, and I am looking forward to asking her what this cat is trying to pull.

On the other hand, in the past few days Elizabeth brought to our attention that the cat’s pupils were not evenly dilated. I’d thought it was just the positioning of the light in the room, but we moved him around a bit and the issue persisted. So…I mean, I looked it up and there are a bunch of innocuous reasons a cat might suddenly have mismatched pupils (it could even be the medication I’m giving him every other day, but he’s been on that for a good long while so it seems like we would have noticed the pupils before now), but there are also a few reasons that would join (1) Expensive Unavoidable Recurring Kidney Stones and (2) Lung Cancer, on The List of Reasons To Put Him Down. So even though I need to pee, and my hand-warming mug of water needs re-heating, I am not moving this cat off my lap.

I just stopped myself from having a yelling episode (proposed theme of yelling: no one ever listens to me; no one cares about anything I say; no one changes their behavior even a tiny bit based on any of my reasonable requests, even when those requests BENEFIT THOSE SAME PEOPLE; I am unable to influence anyone in this house so hey how about I go live by myself; I have said all of this NICELY a THOUSAND times to NO EFFECT) by remembering how bad I felt the last time I yelled, EVEN THOUGH THE YELLING WAS RICHLY EARNED BOTH TIMES, (1) which is progress, let’s call it! and (2) which led me to want to link to the last time I yelled, but putting “yell” or “yelling” or “yelled” in my blog-post search field got too many results, which is discouraging.

I have an additional motivation for remembering when I last yelled, because after I suppressed today’s yelling impulses, noticing as I did so that it was more difficult than usual, I remembered that I donated blood today—and suddenly wondered if the day I last yelled was ALSO a blood-donation day. I do remember it was a Friday, and Friday is when the blood-donation center nearest me has their blood drives. This would be good information to have. If I am going to be yelling-inclined on blood-donation days, there are things I can do about that. I can declare Blood Donation Days to be household-chore holidays for the blood donor (both time the Yelling Impulse occurred while making dinner). I can take to my room, for everyone’s happiness and emotional safety including mine. Etc.

Let’s swing wildly to a different topic. I realized on Wednesday that I had apparently lost my mind: I had not purchased any Halloween candy. And at first this might seem entirely sane to you: we have lived in this house for three Halloweens so far, and we have never had a single trick-or-treater. And that’s what worries me, because that is why it seemed sane to ME to buy no trick-or-treat candy. I had thought it through, concluding that if we DID suddenly get trick-or-treaters, I keep enough individually-wrapped candy and snack-cakes in the house that we could muddle through. It was only on Wednesday that I remembered our household Halloween tradition of filling the two largest plastic mixing bowls with candy and eating it freely while watching Halloween shows. (I do not watch the Halloween shows. Paul and the kids watch the Halloween shows. I take my candy and go into another room.)

And when I say it worries me, I mean it actually does worry me a little! How could I have been coasting along without thinking of that?? It’s a little as if we got to December 20th and I realized, wait, I don’t just put up a Christmas tree for the VIEWERS OUTSIDE OUR HOUSE!! Well. Anyway. After work on Thursday I went to Target and spent…let’s not discuss irrelevant details. I was pretty relieved to see candy choices still available, let’s say THAT—because when I’d tried to arrange curbside pick-up, I’d found that NOTHING was available.

Wow we are getting so much election-related mail. There’s one organization that sends repeated reminders that they can see whether we voted or not in previous elections, and gives us a score based on that attendance, and reminds us that this is public information that can also be seen by our neighbors. It’s super creepy and menacing. We’re also getting stacks of glossy oversized postcards that make me not want to donate any money to any candidate ever again.

We are back from a college open house for which we had two goals: show Elizabeth that this college had a really good art program despite having a non-artsy-sounding name, and help Edward decide between this school and another school that are his top two. Elizabeth did come away with a better feeling for the art program; also, we attended a presentation by the professor in charge of the illustration program (Elizabeth’s current frontrunner major), and we both felt like we came away with a much better idea of what that major would be like, both as a degree and as a future career. Edward was put off by a speaker for his program, an older guy who kept saying things like “You want an example of new tech? Two words: Tik Tok.” So now the other school is his top choice, which is too bad (because I don’t think this one speaker was a good representative of the school) but there it is. And Elizabeth would rather not go to the same college as Edward, so maybe this is for the best (Edward’s current top choice does not have an art program).

Elizabeth is getting increasingly stressed about choosing which colleges to apply to, which in turn is making me increasingly stressed. Her original goal was to go to the art college of a university: she wants non-art-program fellow students, plus the option of taking non-art-program classes, plus the ability to combine art with something else if she finds something else. But both of her high school art teachers are murmuring about this. “The art world is so competitive, and a well-known art school really helps”—that kind of thing. One of the teachers went to an inexpensive small local college and regrets not going to a bigger/better art school; the other teacher went to perhaps THE most well-known art-only college, and is colleagues with the first teacher at our middling small-town high school, so I don’t know if that gives any evidence for the idea that an art-only school is better.

But of course it’s making Elizabeth feel like she’s on the verge of making the wrong decision. And it’s not as if I know anything about it, so I can’t even advise her—but I’d thought her reasons for wanting a university sounded solid. What we’re going with now is something more like “Welp! We don’t know! So we’ll do the best we can here to make this very-hard-to-even-guess-what’s-right choice, and then you can transfer if you need to / get a further degree elsewhere / whatever needs to happen!”

Years ago, my doctor mentioned in an off-hand way that she always gets her flu shot in October, I don’t even remember what she said about the WHY but I assume it was exactly the boring explanation you’d expect about getting it early enough in the season to be helpful, but not so early that it might wear off before the season was over. For some reason this LODGED IN MY BRAIN. As in, I turn the calendar page to October and I think “OCTOBER: FLU SHOT TIME.”

Which is to say that one of the items on this week’s To Do List was getting my flu shot, and getting everyone else THEIR flu shots. As with the new Covid booster, I had to stop trying to maximize the efficiency of this task. When the kids were little, I used to bring them all to the pediatrician at once, and the nurse would herd us all into a room together and give the shots assembly-line-style. Now everybody’s got SCHEDULES I need to work around. So yesterday as soon as Edward came home from school, he and I went to the pharmacy and got our flu shots: I was extra-motivated to bring him, because he’ll be seeing his GI/Crohn’s doctor next week and the GI/Crohn’s doctor is for sure going to ask about the flu shot. And I was motivated for myself, because of the putting-my-own-oxygen-mask-on-first parenting concept, and also because I work in a public space, and also because it seems like if I’m old enough to be getting ARTHRITIS IN MY KNEES then I am old enough to be vigilant about my flu shot.

Henry is in another play so has rehearsal every day after school until dinnertime; I’ll have to bring him this weekend. I would have brought Elizabeth today, but she said “Noooooo not todayyyyyy I’m so busyyyyyyyy.” Paul can get his at a flu-shot clinic at work; William has his internship there but we don’t know if that means he can participate in the clinic or not, so probably I will just bring him when I bring Henry or Elizabeth.

I’ve been so focused on Covid shots/boosters the last couple of years, I’d forgotten what it was like to get something that didn’t need much aforethought. I didn’t think about the brand of my flu shot. I had to remember whether flu shots were normally accompanied by side effects or not. (For me, it’s only a matter of a sore arm.) I felt briefly panicked that I didn’t have a vaccination card with me for the pharmacist to write on, HOW WILL I PROVE I GOT THE FLU SHOT oh yeah they will just believe me.

What I’ve been hearing, mostly on NPR, is that the flu season is predicted to be extra intense this year. Something that puzzled me was that they interviewed someone who was saying that the past two years the flu has been very low because we’ve all been masking and social distancing and staying home. But, like, no we all the hell have not. Some of us have, but at least in my area the VAST MAJORITY have done no such thing for WELL OVER a year now—so why was LAST year a low year for flu? I wondered if it might be because, even in my area, most medical locations (including dental, vision, the people at Edward’s infusion clinic, etc.) are still masking and requiring patients to be masked. Perhaps a lot of the flu used to be spread in medical situations, and THAT’S where it’s been reduced? But surely not in schools and businesses, where even last flu season we felt like people were looking at us funny for wearing masks.

Spirit Day is coming up on Thursday, October 20th; which I mention now, more than 10 days in advance, in case you are going to suddenly realize you don’t have purple shirts for one or more people in your household who would like to wear a purple shirt.

This is definitely easier for women’s/girls’ clothing than men’s/boys’: one year Old Navy had men’s t-shirts in TWO shades of purple, and I bought a ton of them for all the men’s-clothing-wearing members of my household, which I’m particularly glad of because this year I’m not seeing much available. They do have a t-shirt in plum. Target has a purple Hanes men’s t-shirt that seems good.

I keep realizing each year at the last minute that my only purple shirt is a disappointingly wishy-washy pale purple, which is FINE, but now it has a little hole in it; and also I now wear more shirts with pictures on them, so I went looking for something new. I know I know I know but I bought myself one from Amazon: it’s this peony one, if you want to be Spirit Day twins with me.

(This zinnia one in purple was a close second, and now that I look at it again, I wonder if it would have been better: the pink of the peony sort of sways the color impression of the peony one. Well, but I liked the big peony better, and I do plan to wear this shirt all year.)

In case it helps with sizing, I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy t-shirts, and I can wear a women’s XL or 2XL in this brand, depending on whether I want it Fairly Fitted (like, I tuck my knees up under the hem to stretch it a little before going out in public) or Looser and Less Bust-Enhancing (the size I usually buy for my work t-shirts).

In 2017, on the day after Inauguration Day, I signed up for a $100/year online subscription to The Washington Post. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” yes, give me that, give me allllll of that. My intention was to support Journalism; I picked the particular paper in large part because of the columns of Alexandra Petri (her most recent column: “To Clarify, I Meant Ban Abortion Except for Republican Politicians: Myself Is the Last Person Who Should Be Bothered by My Values”).

I would be interested to see a little graph of my satisfaction levels each year when the subscription auto-renewed. For the first few years, satisfaction levels were high: DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS!! SUPPORT JOURNALISTS!!! SHINE A LIGHT!!! ETC.!!!

At some unknown point, I became aware that Jeff Bezos, multi-billionaire owner of Amazon, was also the multi-billionaire owner of The Washington Post. Satisfaction levels dropped somewhat—but, you know, Very Rich People have often funded such things, AS WELL THEY SHOULD. Carnegie. Rockefeller. Something about the railroads? I don’t really know anything except that rich people funded things and named them after themselves. Maybe that sort of thing was okay. Maybe that’s one of the GOOD ways rich people can spend their money! Journalism! Museums! Concert halls! Etc.! SOMEONE needs to fund those things! Maybe the opinion pieces on topics such as “Capitalism Is Great, Actually,” and “It Would Hurt Us All To Raise Taxes on Billionaires” were fine, just, you know, balanced discourse. I’m not really reading any of the articles I have access to, but we should still Support Journalism in These Dark Times.

In the last couple of years, I started wondering if another organization could make better use of my hundred dollars a year—especially when I saw subscription offers now going for $30. But I was reluctant to actually unsubscribe. It felt like Defunding/Devaluing Journalism.

Then, this week, The Washington Post sent an email, very similar to the emails I keep getting each year as my Amazon Prime membership increases, telling me that my subscription would be increasing to $120/year. I’d found my Line: $100 for a purely digital subscription I wasn’t actually using was Okay, but $120 for a purely digital subscription I was not actually using was Not Okay. I DO want to support journalism, I DO!! But I feel like maybe Jeff Bezos can easily afford to support it without my specific help? And also: I find NPR much more useful, news-wise, so perhaps I will just TRANSFER my support to THEM. Win-win! Funding journalism that NEEDS funding! Plus, NPR sometimes gives me a cute bird mug/tote!

As I tried to cancel my subscription, I encountered hurdles. First there was the screen that I might have carelessly thought meant I had successfully completed my cancellation—but no, I had to scroll past some paragraphs about the cancellation to find another button to click to ACTUALLY cancel.

Then, after I clicked that button, an offer: Would I like to keep my subscription, for $60/year?? Oh!!! Okay!!! I was already going to willingly pay $100/year! Then you raised it to $120/year, which is why I cancelled! And now it’s $60/year???? All along you could have been happy with HALF what you were going to charge me???? You didn’t NEED to raise the price after all, you were just TRYING IT?????? to SEE IF I’D PAY IT?????

Infuriating. And absolutely confirmed that I was making the right decision. I clicked YES UNSUBSCRIBE.

The next day, a new offer: Would I like to have the subscription for $40/year???

This post has two purposes: first, to tell you about how glad I am that I stopped my subscription to The Washington Post; second, to let you know that if you would like to continue your subscription, you can apparently get a better rate by trying to cancel. (Has anyone gotten similar results while canceling Amazon Prime?)

I am currently living the kind of life where I pretty often do things that don’t really make EFFICIENCY sense (such as driving round-trip 40 minutes to pick up a Target order without combining it with other errands out that way), because I can’t really fit those things in at a better time and/or because getting it done relieves enough To Do List Stress that it’s worth it. I will think “Yes, it will sort of waste 40 minutes to do this—but then I will have done it, and it will only be 45 minutes later than it is now. We will worry MOST of the time about efficient/responsible use of gasoline, but RIGHT NOW we will let it go in the interest of Getting It Done.”

Some other things we’ve been checking off the list:

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins, which was a bit of a hassle and had a lot of variables and also had a firm deadline. This was a process involving so many decisions/steps, it feels wrong to have it be just one dot.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: deciding who should take the photos, and when, and where.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: actually taking the pictures.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: going through hundreds of pictures to narrow them down to a reasonable number of finalists.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: choosing one from among the finalists, cropping it, and emailing it in. Yes, that feels more accurate.

• BABY yearbook photos for the twins, which meant going through several years’ worth of photos, and Elizabeth really wanted to help, but she is way busier right now than I am (two part-time jobs; several clubs; several AP classes; volunteering; social life), so then it became me going through the photos and making a folder of Very Narrowed-Down candidates that Elizabeth could help choose from.

• More college visits. I hate them so much, they are so boring and they all seem the same, but it does feel very good to get them done. Making it worse: my boss saying “Well, and when they find that Right College for them, you can just SEE it, they just KNOW!” Yes well good. How many colleges do we have to tour before I am allowed to give up on that Just Knowing part, because that has not happened yet for any of my first four children. And I kind of hope it DOESN’T, because what if they don’t get IN to the college they Just Know is right for them?? Also, I do not believe for the most part in Just Knowing.

• Updated Covid boosters for three of the kids, and for Paul. This is a good example of something where I had to stop trying to plan for efficiency, and instead just leap on opportunities: “Oh!! You’re home and I’m home and the pharmacy is open!! Let’s go RIGHT NOW.” Elizabeth had fever/chills the night of the vaccine, and felt pretty tired, but was better by mid-day the next day. William felt worn out the next day, and had a sore arm. Henry and Paul didn’t feel any side effects.

Then we had Parents’ Night at the high school, which led me to post this on Twitter:

I felt like with each teacher I was either TOO BLURTY, or else allowed an uncomfortable silence to fall, or else stayed too long, or else left too abruptly/soon. Mostly I worried I was too blurty. My main Coping Thought for such things is that the teachers are already exhausted after working a full day, and most of them just want to get through this evening alive so they can go home and put on soft pants, and they are meeting FAR TOO MANY parents to care too much about what any one particular parent is like. (The problem with this Coping Thought is that if I were a teacher I would be EXTREMELY KEEN to see what my students’ parents were like, and then I would spend a lot of time afterward thinking about those encounters. So.)