Resolved: Baby Steps

Decided on a few goals:
1) 3,660,000 steps.  Let’s do this!
2) Water.  Still breastfeeding, so I need to stay hydrated.
3) Read 10 books that I already own.  Also read the 10 books recommended by the Washington Post
4) Related - make sure my Kindle still works, since it’s been a while.

Still thinking through the whole managing stress goal.

Resolved

I normally make New Years resolutions, but then tend to focus on numbers of books read, etc.  This year, I’m pretty aware that I’m not handling stress well.  Baby - not really, she’s basically a toddler - and the new job and the constant barrages of chaos from the Trump Administration means that I can’t shrug off the minor annoyances of life as easily as I would prefer.

Hard to put that into a SMART goal.  And if I knew how to re-center myself, I’d do it already.

Fake Facebook Days and Your Idiot Friends

I guess today was pregnancy loss remembrance day (or something), because half a dozen people in my feed have listed the dates of their miscarriages.  Including the one person, who mentioned her pregnancy loss seven years ago, who gave me grief about not having children up to the point when she found out I was pregnant.  You know, also the one who makes sure to post on April Fools Day that joking about being pregnant is traumatic for her, but she was willing to ask me at every single family event when I was going to have kids.  She has no way of knowing whether or not she was "joking" about this a few weeks after my own miscarriage or not, because it's none of her business, but of course, she needs to have her own precious emotions protected.

I'm realizing that I have a lot of unprocessed feelings and emotions about my pregnancy and subsequent postpartum depression which is going to require a lot of energy to monitoring my personal filters to not piss off every one around me.  But I don't feel like apologizing, either, if I do slip up and tell this person to shut up already because she may (or may not) have made my life hell for years and years and years.  Again, none of her business.

Part time, online jobs for moms

Can someone please create a database of part-time jobs that can be done online that 1) is legit, and 2) doesn't involve annoying people on Facebook?

A friend of a friend is a consultant for 31, aka low-quality over-priced LLBean knockoffs for people who haven't heard of Lands End, and is currently hijacking my friend's friend list for a "31 Party", in which there is no actual party - just flooding your newsfeed with 96 pleas in 5 days (I counted) to order tote bags with quirky personalizations (at an extra cost) before the "party" ends.  Maybe if someone was eating a piece of celery somewhere while sipping on a riesling, I'd feel a bit differently, but alas, these types of weekend afternoon parties have gone the way of Lia Sophia into the dustbin of history.

Of course this is the friend's sorority friend.  My own sorority friends include Tupperware and Pampered Chef consultants, and I even rejected friending someone from my pledge class when I saw that her own page was nothing but Pink Zebra posts.  But, there's also other friends hawking Traveling Vineyard and Scentsy and whatever else they moved to since LulaRoe imploded, as if they never learned their lessons.  Each one posting about owning one's own business and vaguely uplifting quotes about empowerment and occasionally using the word Mompreneur.  It's the need to earn money, but without paying for daycare or a babysitter.  Back in high school, this was usually done with a part-time retail job while the kids were in school, but it appears that these jobs don't really exist any more.

What put me over the edge was this most recent hostess, who wrote that we should purchase tote bags because she made the decision to quit her teaching job to focus on her family.  You know what?  Fuck you.  I owe you crap because you made your own poor financial decision.  It's not a secret that the American economy is not structured in a way that a single-income household could thrive.  This was not exactly a secret here, and as a graduate of an elite liberal arts college, there's no excuse for not knowing.  And, if you really do think that it's an issue that a teacher can't afford child care, then fix the fucking structural barriers that prevent this.  Lobby your school district for day care.  Mobilize your union.  Don't make it sound like a $35 tote bag is going to do much to save your situation, let alone the situation of similar woman, many of whom don't have the resources to fight because of other structural barriers. Your choices are to understand the awful structure of the economy and go back to work like the rest of us, or fucking do something to change the outcomes of all women. Yes, this makes it sound like I've gone full Republican, but it's more that I've been hearing this shit from Republicans who just a few years ago were talking about the need to cut taxes and benefits.  You know, before they figured out that these cuts would impact their own lives.  You made your bed, not thinking that you were making it for yourself.  So sleep in it and stop complaining.

And, no, I didn't buy your damned ugly purses.  Your $80 bag is $39.95 at Lands End, and is now 40% off.

Confirmation Bias

I finally deleted my pregnancy app.  It was long overdue, mostly since my daughter is 8 months old, so I hung onto this for almost a full human gestation period beyond its useful life.  But, I've wanted to do so for some time, but needed to check in from time to time to watch this like one would watch a car crash.  Except for me, it was the watching death of data and reason erode over the course of a few months, and a small scale experiment in how social media can be easily hijacked.

It started out as a need to reach out to other people when I was pregnant and couldn't brush my teeth without throwing up and needed to know that I wasn't the only person experiencing this.  Once I found the message boards, I got the confirmation that I needed, but also a group of women who suddenly discovered that the United States was a shitty place to be a pregnant woman.  So I stuck around.  It was nice to see a bunch of Red State women complain about the lack of paid maternity leave, their high deductible insurance plans, the lack of affordable day care, and how their at-will employment state didn't make it illegal for their employers to fire them for being pregnant.  Come for the pregnancy tips, stay for the schadenfreude of telling someone to petition the state government of Texas or Mississippi or Arkansas to protect workers. 

But then the inevitable happens.  A few loud-asses start saying that anyone who doesn't agree with them is Mom-shaming.  Providing a link to the CDC site demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines - Mom-shaming.  Linking to the AAP guidelines for introducing peanuts to infants - Mom-shaming.  Starting a discussion about a Fisher-Price recall - Mom-shaming. You could say that you were adding sharks to the water birthing tub you were considering, and the first person to ask you if that was a good idea would be accused of Mom-shaming.  There's only so much of this silliness that you can take before you just decide it's not worth it.

The problem stems from two separate ways of conducting an argument - the first is to support one's opinions with data and logic.  The other is to resort to name-calling to shut people up.  So if you decide to put your newborn into bed with you to "co-sleep", you don't care that this has been shown through data that this increases the likelihood of SIDS.  But since you can't refute this with your own data or logic, you just start name-calling.  Eventually, the people who are good at finding reputable sources of data reach their breaking point and drop out.  Those left behind rarely look around and say, "Hey, didn't there used to be a dozen doctors posting in this group and now we only have an unlicensed holistic midwife around here?", so this change in the group's dynamics is often unnoticed unless you are looking for it.

Just in case you were wondering how Facebook and the 2016 election worked, it's the same.  I mean, do you correct your dumb home-schooled cousin anymore, or did you unfriend him?

Postmortem on the Blog

Having a blog is something I kind of *want* to have, but I also do not have the time or energy to really devote to it the way I had.  Back when I was posting pretty regularly, it was because I needed an outlet for my intellectual interests and a place to vent about what I didn't like in my life.  But now, I find myself in a non-dead-end job with a baby, so I have plenty of opportunity to exercise my brain and the happiest, smiliest baby on the planet (since the acid reflux and skin issues were solved by the end of June... hard to be happy and smiley when you are in pain 24/7). 

I've been really fortunate.  When I haven't liked my life, I've had the resources to change it.  Not all people do, but totally leaning into that white privilege hard here.  I had a fabulous public school education financed by antiquated school funding laws, and the knowledge that if everything failed, my parents had a basement I could move into.  I can see where previous generations would get to this point - good career, kid, money in the bank - and turn Republican.  But I see every place where a government program made my life possible, and I wonder why we can't expand these to bring more people into the middle class.  That might be a new focus for me - generally looking at these issues that should have made my husband and I into some Goldwater Republicans, but instead have us firmly in the Bring Back Obama camp.

Life changes and old blogs

Welp, I had a baby, and now I will never sleep again.  At least not continuously.  And the advice that you sleep when the baby sleeps is bullshit, because you still have to do laundry and do the dishes and try to feed yourself and deal with the depression that makes it impossible to do any of this.  And floss, because you always have to tell yourself to floss.

2017 Oscars-Nominated Movies. All of them.

I came across an old Marketplace Story on how long it would take to see all of the movies that were nominated for an Academy Award.  Sure, this was 2013, but I assume the 2017 nominees would be in the same ballpark.  Back then, it was 99 hours.  So, less than a week, right?

I've heard it a number of times that nobody sees the movies that are nominated for Best Picture. They never play these films outside of New York and Los Angeles and a couple of film festivals.  I've never bought into this.  Sure, it helps to live near a major city, but even in small college towns, all you need is a cinema department with a projector, and you can find these films if you search beyond the 18 screen megaplex.

Before the Oscars, I managed to see 5 of the 9 Best Picture Nominees, all in the Washington suburbs. Moonlight and Hidden Figures were at the American Film Institute Silver Theater for an African-American film festival, La La Land at a 1930s renovated movie theater in Greenbelt (retro theater for retro musical), Fences was at the MegaPlex in the theater with the reclining seats - very nice, and Hell or High Water was a DVD I checked out of the local library.  I remember thinking for each film that rather than needing to go to impressive lengths to find them, that I had multiple options for watching them.  That same Greenbelt Theater also was showing Hidden Figures, but with talks by NASA scientists before the film since NASA has a space center in the town.  Moonlight was showing at a handful of art theaters in addition to the film festival.  And La La Land could be watched by anyone anywhere with a screen.  I assume.

So, I'm on my way to try to watch every movie that was nominated. Library DVDs have been a real help, but Amazon Prime and HBO have had some available at my leisure. Should be a fun couple of months to get me through the rest of our non-winter.

Introverting and Reading

I made two New Years Resolutions this year, and somehow, they seem to be reinforcing each other.  The first was to go to the gym 15 times a month.  The second was to read 2 books a month.  Since I read on the treadmill or elliptical, I've managed to read quite a bit more than that.  2 months in, and I've read 13 books so far.  And been to the gym 38 times. Feeling pretty good about this, and kind of psyched to see how these goals have reinforced each other.

Figured it might not be a bad idea to write up my impressions of these books, if not so much to have non-Trump things to write about, but also record my thoughts in case I want to recommend books to people. So, I'll be posting a bit in the coming weeks.

Feeling broken

Turns out that Sally Yates openly defying the Trump Administration did not come out of nowhere.

The Washington Post reports that she and her office briefed the White House on Jan. 26 about the conversations between Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador. Why was nothing done?  Well:

The White House Counsel's Office conducted a “review” of the legal issues and determined that “there was not a legal issue but rather a trust issue,” Spicer said.

So, Donald Trump, having been briefed by the Acting Attorney General that Flynn had engaged in illegal activity, determined that this wasn't a legal issue.  It's a trust issue.  Can he really trust Flynn after misleading Mike Pence?  Oh, come now, we've all mislead Mike Pence at some point.  Why do women keep trying to tell me what I can and cannot do?

Four days later, Yates said that she could not defend the Muslim ban.  Openly.  Since her previous attempt to work the chain of command failed.  She was fired.

This story has broken me.  I think I hit my limit.