I have finished my course of steroids, and my SIXTY lip oil pens arrived the same day. The dose of steroids started with six pills per day and ended with one per day, and now I am feeling glum and missing the perky feeling I had when I was taking the medicine.

Also, I have a big hive on the back of my neck, so apparently this is not over. Some light research shows that the hive itself is not an indication of impending death, and that some people Just Get Hives, especially in stressful situations SUCH AS WATCHING A VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE LESS THAN A MONTH BEFORE A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. A trip to an allergist seems warranted but not urgent. In the meantime, I am going to try to pay attention to detergents and foods and whatever else might be contributing.

Yesterday, Swistle on steroids:

• washed two bathroom floors, regretting that she’d ever married or had children

• ordered a set of SIXTY Burt’s Bees lip oil pens

• left a comment on the Facebook post of an older Christian woman (one of Swistle’s role models as a child), telling her that her “Moral and Ethical Choice” presidential candidate was corrupt and that she, Swistle, couldn’t understand how she, the woman, and other women of God, could be supporting him when he consistently and persistently did the opposite of everything Jesus said to do

So perhaps I will not dabble in street drugs. And it might be wise to have Paul as a double-check on actions/decisions for the next four days.

I can partially explain the lip oil pens, and you may be particularly interested in an explanation if you remember my rather meh review of the one I bought awhile back. The thing is, it WASN’T worth $9, but I DID like it. I kept reaching for it, especially when my lips were kind of chapped and I wanted something nice and soothing. It was a little fussy to have to use the silly brush, and it didn’t last long before it needed to be reapplied, but I really liked the FEEL of the oil. And now I’m home all the time so I can use it throughout the day if I want.

So when it ran out, I looked for it online, thinking I could buy one for my Christmas stocking. Also, I was misremembering and thought it had been SIX dollars, which still seemed too high, but more reasonable. I was a little alarmed when I couldn’t find it at Target, and then when I found it on Amazon it looked like it was being sold the way discontinued things are sold: odd prices, various sellers. So then I looked on eBay, which is where I have successfully bought supplies of several discontinued items. I found basically what I’d expect: one listed for $6 with free shipping, another listed for $4 with $2.99 shipping, etc.—until I came upon SIXTY of them for $30 with free shipping. Well. I mean.

At this somewhat more sober moment, I realize I should have scrolled a little further, since there was an option to buy SIX of them for $14, which is approximately five times the price per pen, but is still a very nice price, and is approximately as many pens as I am likely to be able to use before they go bad. But at the time, I did not scroll any further, instead I hit Buy It Now, and now they have shipped and are on their way to me. If we do any sort of care-package thing in the future, YOU MAY BE SURE of getting a lip oil pen or two or ten.

We have been paying our housecleaners not to clean for over six months now, and I feel it’s time to stop. I feel it’s gone from “This Is The Right Thing To Do” to “We’re Making It Weird.” The last time we talked, they said they were back to their full cleaning schedule, so it’s no longer an issue of supporting them during a time when everyone is canceling. I kept sending checks because I thought at any moment we would say “Yes, come back again!,” and I wanted it to be seamless and easy, and I wanted to hold our cleaning time. But now it looks like that isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and so I want to change plans, but I don’t know how to STOP. What do I SAY? I can do it via a piece of paper included with a last check, so it’s not like I have to make a phone call, and that helps. But each time I sit down to write it, I get stuck.

Also there is a bit of a language issue. Last December, on the last time they came to clean before Christmas, I put out their usual check, but also put cash in an envelope for each of them. They never cashed the check, so my fear was that the check was lost/misplaced and they thought the cash was the payment—which would mean it would look like I gave them a seriously skimpy holiday bonus. I made several attempts but was unable to explain this; she kept saying they HAD been paid, and wouldn’t cash the replacement check I sent, and it never got straightened out and I had to give up. I still feel some level of agony over it.

So I need something (1) very simple and clear (2) that I can write on a piece of paper (3) and send with the final check. I want it too to be something that lets me comfortably employ them again after the pandemic is over.

The kids wanted to watch the presidential debate last night, and against my better judgement I tried to watch it too. I made it twenty minutes, and every single minute was a mistake, and now those twenty minutes are in my brain. I feel sick, poisoned. There was nothing good, nothing right, nothing wise, nothing useful, nothing of any value. On one side there was a corrupt old white man-ape and his lion-skin-robed donkey, the pair of them presenting as a single unit, the new false God of the white nationalist evangelical Christian party. [If you have not read the Narnia books in awhile, or ever: that’s a Narnia reference. It occurred to me that for those who didn’t grow up in the white protestant Christian church and steeped in C.S. Lewis, that metaphor might hit…oddly.] On the other side there was the appointed champion of the Democratic party, who will get my vote if I have to walk through fire and glass and virus to do it because he is a decent human being who wants to do right, which puts him in a completely different league than his opponent—but who is nevertheless a disappointing affable chuckling aw-shucks yet-another-old-white man who, with all this time to study and train to handle his opponent’s debate style, still descended within ten minutes to “Shut up” and “I got WAY more votes, WAY more!!”—but at least wasn’t an endless fountain of baffling lies and didn’t call on violent armed white nationalists to stand by, which feels like a very low bar but this is where we are. And even with four years to prepare for this day, there was a moderator (a third old white man, what an odd coincidence) who could not moderate, in part because he wasn’t given the tools needed for moderating someone who refuses to follow debate rules, despite our clear and experience-based foreknowledge that that would be a serious issue.

This is where I am right now: I don’t even want to hear SONGS by men. That is the extent to which I don’t want to hear male views and opinions right now. When I am on my morning walks, I will give a song by a man a brief chance—but such songs pretty much always turn out to be:

• “girl don’t you understand i just want to have sex with u”

• “I am so amazing, I will be legend, in a thousand years they will still be celebrating me because I am the greatest, I laugh mockingly at everyone who said I wouldn’t make it”

I am not here for it, not right now and I think it’s possible NEVER AGAIN.

I am still using the playlist Spotify created from the song Sledgehammer by Fifth Harmony, and MOST of the songs are by women. And also, the songs/singers tend to be rather upbeat and confident, which I am enjoying right now. But I found I was bothered by the songs in which upbeat, confident women plead with presumably mediocre men to consider dating them / staying with them. Then I had a sudden smack of realization: most of these songs do not use pronouns and do not say “boy”/”man.” It is in fact STARTLINGLY HETERONORMATIVE to assume that these upbeat confident women would waste their time on men! THESE SONGS MIGHT BE WRITTEN TO WOMEN!

I recommend listening to songs this way; it really gives a whole new tilt to things. She is not begging some dick in a stupid hat to please please please put down his guitar and/or video game controller and/or “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here” debate and pay attention to her! No! She is instead wooing an interesting, layered, kind, worthwhile WOMAN. Perhaps one who is considering running for office!

Would you like to see something that is horrifying or hilarious or both? YOU KNOW I KNOW YOU WOULD:

(If you can’t see it for one reason or another, it’s a padded mailing envelope on which someone has written, in what appears to be childlike printing: “I saw the condoms. I know your secret.”)

This is a mailing envelope that contains, yes, condoms. Some things to know:

1. This envelope is addressed to me. I don’t remember ordering condoms by mail, and in fact I actively remember routinely buying them in a store and NOT ordering them by mail, so I suspect this is an envelope fished long ago from the recycling in order to delicately conceal the condoms I bought from the store.

2. This envelope was at the bottom of Paul’s socks-and-underwear drawer.

3. Paul got a vasectomy in 2011, as I know you know, so these condoms are in no way recent, and they have expiration dates compatible with that.

4. It has apparently been a long time since Paul did a tidying of his socks-and-underwear drawer.

5. We actually found this envelope in 2018 when we moved, but I forgot to mention it until finding it again today.

We have NO IDEA when the writing appeared, else we might be better able to narrow down who wrote it. My instinctive initial suspects are Rob and Henry (though I want to investigate this “starting the letter O from the bottom” clue, too). Rob is a bit of a black-and-white thinker, an idealist who doesn’t get along well with his dad and tends to think the worst; he would have been 12 in 2011, which is the last time there was need for condoms; I think if it had been written earlier than that, we would have seen it, though perhaps not. Henry is the prankster who once drew “scorch lines” over an electrical outlet with a Sharpie marker and then lay on the floor nearby with a fork in his hand pretending to be unconscious/dead. The main reason I didn’t freak out is that he had TOLD ME about this prank idea a week earlier, at which point I had told him seriously-and-no-kidding that he should never, ever do it and it would not be even slightly funny and it would truly scare and upset me, as well as making me very angry about Sharpie marker on the wall. He would have been 5 in 2011, but I think it’s more likely to have been written AFTER that; he was 11 in 2018 when we found it. It seems like an EARLY MIDDLE SCHOOL thing to do, but I’m just guessing.

But also: what secret did this child think they had discovered? Do we even want to turn our minds to it? Did the child think the secret was that their parents were having sex? That their parents were attempting to prevent pregnancy? Did the child have a faulty idea of what condoms were for? Did the child think that Paul was…having an affair, and that condoms were an indication of that, considering how many children we had at our house, indicating that WE apparently weren’t using them? But what would the child conclude about the fact that the envelope was addressed to me? And why was the child rummaging in Paul’s socks-and-underwear drawer to begin with? THE MIND BOGGLES.

I woke up this morning with a song in my heart, and that song was, relentlessly: “MARY MAC’S MOTHER’S MAKING MARY MAC MARRY ME / MY MOTHER’S MAKING ME MARRY MARY MAC!!!” (If your heart does not already know this song, you can hear it here.)

Then, on my walk, I invented long sleeves and gloves. Normally I wear French terry joggers (sounds nicer than SWEATPANTS) and a t-shirt, but this morning it was chilly so I put on a zip-up fleece layer, the kind with holes in the wrists for your thumbs, so you get partial hand-coverage. Pretty soon I was thinking, “I like how my arms are less chilly, and I like that I can tuck my fingers into the long cuffs and keep them warm—but I don’t need an extra layer on my back, and it’s making me too hot. What I really want is just the sleeves and long cuffs, but I want the cuffs even longer so they cover my fingers too.”

Music on the walks is always an issue. I basically want to listen to the radio (i.e., not have to do the work of choosing my own songs, and have the fun of surprise/variety), but with no lengthy ad/DJ breaks that would make me switch stations if I were in the car, and I want the songs to be ones I would have chosen. What I’ve been doing is listening to Spotify, because it will play one short ad and then let me listen without ads for 30 minutes; and because if I give it a song to start with, it will play Suggested Songs based on that song, which is fun. Sometimes they’re all misses, and I have to pick a different song: I started with Mine by Phoebe Ryan, which I love and which I find good for walking, but then all the Suggested Songs were sad/heartbreak/slow, which is no good for walking. I had better luck with Sledgehammer by Fifth Harmony, which has given me mostly upbeat / girl-power / girl-anthem / best-friend songs for the last two days. If you do this same thing with Spotify, I would love to know what song you start with.

When I wrote yesterday about everyone constantly talking to me, I was overstating the situation—not only because people aren’t literally constantly talking to me, but also because it isn’t everyone: I hear from Rob and William so little, it’s possible to occasionally forget they’re living here, as I sort of did when I was writing yesterday’s post.

I find this distressing. I would probably be more distressed if they were constantly hanging around near me and talking to me about everything, since they are supposed to be semi-independent college students at this point—but just as it is possible to be too hot at one temperature and too cold at another, and just as it is possible to be overly hungry before eating and overly full afterward, it is possible to worry about too much interaction and also about too little.

Well, they have each other, and I do like that. They could be talking to each other a LOT, as college roommates might. They could be managing their lives exactly right: simulating as much as possible the living-away-from-home experience they’d be having if there weren’t a pandemic. Managing their own meals, managing their own schedules, NOT being constantly in contact with parents/siblings. But sometimes they seem to actively avoid us, to the point where it does hurt my feelings. William in particular seems annoyed whenever we approach him to ask him something—and it isn’t as if we approach him many times a day, it’s like once or twice a day, to ask things he seems to WANT to be asked, such as does he want me to make him some dinner when I make dinner for everyone else (usually no, but sometimes yes). And they don’t have the REPLACEMENT things they’d have if they didn’t have us: the roommates, the friends, the classmates, the professors, the other people at the dining hall tables, etc. So I do worry. (But at least they are not two more people constantly talking to me.)

It turns out I am VERY MOTIVATED by putting check-marks on a chart. Elizabeth made herself a summer checklist chart for June/July/August, and she made me a copy before she filled in her chosen tasks, and I have filled in SO MANY CHECK-MARKS this summer! Even for exercise, because I keep thinking that then I can check it off! …And yesterday was September 1st, and I didn’t have a chart to make check-marks in (we failed to make FURTHER copies of her chart to use in the future, because we were thinking only of summer), and I have lost my motivation almost entirely. I need a new chart.

I finally cut my hair. I was doing my boring blog project on posts from November 2010, and found this post where I was in the exact same situation: it was pleasing to be able to put my hair into such a nice bun, but it was too long for a ponytail and too long to wear in a messy French twist, and it was dragging me down and giving me headaches, and so I cut it, and it was reasonably successful and I was happy with it. All right then, I thought to myself; I don’t know how I did it before, but presumably I can do it again. And so I did, and I could:

(Notice my poor phone case, which was so cute before it was repeatedly cleaned with disinfecting wipes.)

Please forgive the self-conscious selfie. I was NEVER able to take a good picture of myself, but I completely lost the ability after reading two things: one, that everyone has a Particular Expression they do over and over and over again in their selfies (either always tilting their face to a particular side, or always squinching their mouth ironically, or whatever); and two, that when you see someone’s selfie, you see how they look at themselves in the mirror. Now I try so hard to counteract those two things, I end up with nothing I like. Of course I want a chin-minimizing angle, of course I do, but I can’t accomplish it without “tilting my chin down and looking up at the viewer through my lashes,” which I can never do again. And I always Do My Lips That Way, apparently.

Also, I have no Before picture: I seized on a moment of motivation right after getting out of the shower, and did not think of pictures. I see I did the exact same thing back in 2010. Well. Before I cut it, my hair was about halfway down my back, and it was frankly glorious (I have thick hair that does nice waves), but it was also long enough that I had to divide it in half and pull it in front of my shoulders to brush out the tangles, and it made me feel tired and oppressed me when it was wet and I had to deal with it, and the length didn’t flatter my face, and I hate wearing it down so it was always in a bun, and it was heavy enough to give me a faint headache. Now it is much, much better, though also frankly less glorious.

When it dried (it’s still wet in the photo), it floofed out into something a little more triangular than my stylist usually does, so now I have to decide what to do about that. I could leave it: it doesn’t look bad at all, it’s just different. Or I could attempt layers: recently I watched some videos and then cut some layers into Elizabeth’s hair and they turned out well (it’s basically just like doing a classic boy haircut where you pull the hair perpendicular to the head and then cut perpendicular to the floor; the only difference is you’re doing it much further away from the head); I just don’t know if I could do that at the back of my head. Still, I did cut it in a straight line at the back of my own head, so there is some hope!

In the meantime, I have joined Elizabeth in a Fun Hair Project. She was researching what to do about her “frizzy hair” (it doesn’t look particularly frizzy to me), and she found that whole part of the internet that is like “I thought my hair was frizzy and not-shiny but actually it was SECRETLY VERY CURLY!!!” and so she spent some time trying various things with rhyming names like “scrunch the crunch” and “squish the condish” and so forth. After a few oily-looking failures, she has determined that her hair is NOT secretly curly, and now she is in an adjacent part of the internet that is more like “The Top Ten Differences Between Handling WAVY vs. CURLY Hair!” and “How to Bring Out Your Beachy Waves!” It is super fun. I absolutely remember this stage of being a teenager. The main difference is that I was using magazines instead of the internet. Teen! Seventeen! Sassy! Also Cosmopolitan, which gave me a very skewed view of what my 20s were going to be like. It made a lot more sense later on when I read somewhere that teen magazines pretend to be aimed at teenagers but are actually aimed at pre-teens, and Cosmo pretends to be aimed at 20-something women but is actually aimed at high-schoolers. (Similarly, I felt some relief when I learned that Playgirl pretends to be aimed at straight women but is actually aimed at gay men. I had acquired a copy in high school, and was alarmed to find it extremely unappealing.)

Anyway, now that my hair is short enough that I can tolerate wearing it down, Elizabeth is instructing me on how to Accentuate the Waviness. This morning I tried what she has been trying, which is to comb my hair in the shower while it still had conditioner in it; then, after the shower, wrap it in a Turbie Twist for awhile (mine are all solid-color; I think I am going to order that flower-print one for my Christmas stocking); then, after getting dressed, take the hair out of the towel, arrange it as little as possible (like, you can approximate your preferred parting, and you can move that big piece out of your eyes, but otherwise don’t brush it or finger-comb it or anything), and leave it alone to completely air-dry. Do not touch it! Elizabeth says this is the most important part. She says there are pictures people have taken, showing the difference between The Side They Touched and The Side They Didn’t Touch, and the side they touched “is, like, VOOM” (here she made puffy/fluffy/frizzy motions with her hands). Once it dries, I am supposed to use the Turbie Twist to “scrunch the crunch”: i.e., lightly squeeze large sections of hair. BUT I MUST WAIT UNTIL IT’S DRY.

The next stage of experimentation, according to Elizabeth, involves mousse; I didn’t try that today because (1) I wanted to go through the stages the same way she was, and (2) I asked her how the mousse was supposed to be put in if we were touching our hair as little as possible, and she said “I have no idea.” So I’ll let her figure that out, and then she can tell me. This is a fun enough project to me that I did Target Drive-Up again yesterday just to get the mousse sooner than if I’d had it shipped. I also got cat food, cat litter, and bags of coffee, because those all had coupon deals (buy three bags of coffee, get them for $5.99 each instead of $8.49 ((and they had the Fall Blend Starbucks!)) ((it tastes no different to me than regular Starbucks but I always joyfully buy it anyway; same with the Thanksgiving Blend and the Christmas Blend)); buy $25 or more of cat food/litter get a $5 coupon; and 10% off Iams, which could be stacked with the other deal) that I couldn’t get if I got them shipped, so that was pleasing: I saved like $16. And THANK YOU to all of you who said what you do is add the things to your online cart for in-store pick-up, and then go into the app and switch them all to Drive-Up: that made a HUGE difference to the shopping experience. I only had to use the app long enough for it to crash three times instead of dozens! It was marvelous.

My great-aunt died recently and not unexpectedly, after a nice long life. She was one of the very few people I still exchange written letters with. I was so happy that I had written to her just a week before she died: what perfect, perfect timing. But the letter was just returned to me, several weeks later, unopened.

I can’t find the post where I mention that I wrote a letter to the head of the pediatric GI department about our experience in a shared room (oh, here it is, but it’s just a super-brief mention of it, no description), but anyway the next time we went in, it turned out the department head had SHOWED THE LETTER TO THE NURSES, WITH MY NAME. SIR. It seems reasonable to share a feedback letter with staff, but NOT INCLUDING THE IDENTIFYING INFORMATION. So that then a nurse SPOKE TO ME ABOUT IT. It was mortifying, even though the nurse in question was very supportive, said she thought a lot of other people probably felt the same way, and described my letter as “advocating for a lot of people”; I knew that the nurse who rolled her eyes and said the new policies were “borderline neurotic” and that this was “really no different than flu season” must ALSO have seen my letter.

The upshot is that they are going to give us our own room every time, but they are not going to be making any policy changes overall, and the department head sent me a letter telling me that they “had been assured” (nice use of passive tense) that it was perfectly safe to have two patients and two parents sharing a smallish room for hours. I guess if the only thing on offer is “Squeaky Wheel Gets Her Own Room Because She Is Weird and Paranoid,” I’ll take it; but that wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was for ALL patients to get their own rooms.