My Year of Butterflies

A Year-Long Meditation on Joy

[myyearofbutterflies]

On a Friend Who Knows What to Say

Quarantine isolation anxiety is definitely hitting critical mass with me.  A lot of the anxiety thoughts that plague me in the background have come to the fore over the last few days.  More and more, I have a running commentary in my head, telling me I’m a terrible person, and my friends only pretend to like me.  

I know that plenty of people have these thoughts.  I know that these thoughts are my anxiety rather than an accurate assessment of myself and those around me.  But over the past few days they’ve gotten stronger and stronger.  Isolation is a hell of a thing, and it seems to be amplifying all the worst parts of my thought patterns, no matter how I try to fight it.

Today I sort of shut down a bit.  I meant to get several things done around the house, but instead I found myself watching YouTube and trying not to think.

Cue my best friend.  I posted something vague on the Discord server I share with him, his brothers, and their wives: “Dear vague, pointless isolation-induced anxiety: fuck off, no one loves you.”  That was it.

He reached out, asked me if I wanted to watch some more Mob Psycho 100 while Skyping together.  It’s become our go-to light and uplifting show.  I agreed almost immediately.  I didn’t realize until I was talking to him how much I had missed simply chatting with someone I’d known forever, who got me on a very basic level.  Even being two time zones away, I felt less alone talking to him.

Between watching and talking, our conversation lasted five hours.  That’s not a record for us, by any means.  We hadn’t talked in a bit, and had a lot to catch up on.  He’s been struggling more with depression since quarantine, but is finally reaching out to a professional for help.  He’s also forcing himself to get out and get exercise, which is making him feel better. I admitted my own struggles with anxiety these past days, and he put it simply:

“Do you think I would pretend to like you for twenty years?  I can’t pretend to like someone for five minutes if I don’t. You aren’t a terrible person; I wouldn’t have put up with you if you were.”

It’s funny, but that was something I really needed to hear.  I needed an outside measure of my own worth and my friends. Using him as a measuring stick gave me that.  Because he’s right: he wouldn’t have put up with me if I was terrible.  He wouldn’t have pretended to like me for twenty years. The second he saw that I was having a rough day, he was reaching out because he likes me, and because reconnecting was something that helps us both.  

Sometimes, the most important thing in the world is a friend who knows just what to say to reach you.  

[myyearofbutterflies]

On Little Joys

Today was a day of many tiny frustrations and anxieties that made joy difficult. Nebulous, ill-directed anxiety has become more and more common the more that seems to be going wrong in the world, so I found myself needing to step back, take a break, and focus back on joy rather than the yawning fear that our world is falling apart around us.  I can’t control that.  I can impact it in small ways, but day-by-day?  Beating back the anxiety seemed to be the priority today.

So today I appreciated all my new flowers.  The last of my sages has bloomed, so that all of them are flowering now. 

My lemon balm has begun to put out tiny white flowers.  The yarrow flowers are beautiful yellow-red.  

But perhaps the most exciting thing today was the first flower of my borage.  These gorgeous blue flowers are edible, and I can’t wait to think of what to do with them.  

I’ve also begun to appreciate the earliest harvest from my garden.  Baby arugula is a great addition to a lunch salad, as are the tops of my shallots.  I also picked a dozen of my lemon balm leaves and made a tea out of them.  They smell and taste a bit like citronella, but it’s somehow pleasant.

And I finished today by resuming construction on a dress I’m making out of an old set of my sheets, which were a lovely sateen, and so soft I couldn’t just throw them away.  I’m making a coat dress with an Early Modern inspiration on the sleeves.  I’m also considering playing around with embroidery, as it’s a fairly simple pattern that I’m tempted to fancy up with teaching myself embroidery.  It would require a trip to Joann’s, if it’s open, or some online shopping.  I have precisely none of the supplies needed for embroidery, but I’ve been doing some research on how it’s done, and it feels fairly similar to sewing, so I’ve at least got the basics down.  I might as well add embroidery to knitting and sewing in my odd collection of hobbies.

Through all those activities, I slowly beat back the anxiety.  I feel better.  I have lovely flowers in my garden, and the possibility of an extremely comfortable, beautiful dress. It might be far too elaborate to wear for most events, but I have hope that there would be some perfect opportunity once it’s done.

[myyearofbutterflies]

Bending Toward Justice

There was a victory today for LGBTQ+ folks in America.  It often feels like the world is eroding from under our feet, but today there was a win.  We were given the basic right guaranteed to people that we cannot be discriminated against at our workplaces for being who we are.  That may seem like a drop in the bucket with Trump trying to erode healthcare and other legal protections for us, but this was a step.  And more than that, it was a precedent.  

With this victory, the highest court in the land has stated that we are equal in one sector of society.  This can be applied to other sectors of society in the courts.  I also think it’s important that several conservative justices, one of whom (Roberts) had ruled against LGBTQ+ rights in the past, joined the progressive justices in ruling for our rights.  

These are dark times.  More storms are coming.  Many people face daily injustice.  There are many who couldn’t even celebrate the victory because they were so exhausted and waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But this shows that there is hope.  This shows that the arc of the moral universe may feel longer now than ever, but that it is still bending toward justice.

Congratulations to all LGBTQ+ folks.  Pride is a time to look back and forward, to acknowledge how many people have come before us to fight for the rights we have, and to look forward toward our own fights.  We won today. Tomorrow, we start fighting again.

But for tonight, there is a rainbow over Albuquerque, and I think I’ll have a little champagne.

[myyearofbutterflies]

A Short Vacation

Sorry I’ve been away for the past few days.  My folks came to visit me, and I was fairly occupied.  A quarantine is a strange but nonetheless welcome thing. My folks had quarantined themselves before coming to visit, only stopped for gas, drive-through food, and at hotels they had already vetted for cleanliness and a period of non-occupation in their room.  I had taken all possible precautions to keep myself safe before they came as well.

They were here for what amounted to a long weekend, but it was still the first time I’d seen them in person since January.  It was great just to be with them.  We worked in my garden, my dad decided to teach me how to grill, and we did a fair amount of hiking, which was the only thing open at this point in my state. It was basically a staycation, but with people there to visit.

It was great.  I love my parents dearly, and as I’ve gotten older they’ve become as much friends as parents.  They will likely always feel the need to act like I’m a child in some ways (my mom still has trouble letting me drive with her), but more and more that slips away as we get older.  More and more we could sit on my back porch drinking beers and chatting.  We could cook and garden together.  We could stay in for days on end and just catch up, and it was lovely.

These times have changed us in many ways.  We’re all discovering new things to do, new ways to live.  The way that breaks and vacations looked last year no longer applies, but there are still ways to reach out safely.  They take work, they take care, there are risks associated which must be weighed.  This was as safe a way to see them as I could find, and I think we all needed it.  The hardest part of quarantine for me has been the isolation, and I do fairly well on my own.  I hope that people everywhere find ways to reach out, if not in person then in other ways.  Or if in person, I hope they find ways to be safe and to be close.  It’s hard, but these are the challenges that are worth navigating for me.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On Finding the Humor

It has been a day.  I have to laugh, because today has been so over-the-top ridiculous that it’s either funny or awful, and I’m going to choose funny.  Some days, that’s the best you can do.  Some days, the bad shit comes in so fast that it gets fucking hysterical by the end of it.

So yesterday my tire pressure sensor was blinking, meaning that the battery was dying. I took it in, and had the tire sensor swapped out.  So far so good.  They warned me that, given the heat in New Mexico right now, the pressure light might come on when I start up the car, because hot air rises, but it should go off once the air circulates around.  Cool.

So I wake up this morning for work.  I get in my car, and the tire pressure sensor does indeed come on.  No big deal, I think.  They told me this might happen.  I’m a little worried when the light never goes off all the way in to work, but I look at the tires once I get there, and they all look okay.

I go in to work.  I was grossing today, meaning that I was cutting up and putting surgical specimens into small plastic boxes to be processed and turned into slides for me to look at tomorrow.  I’m on with a fairly anal retentive attending, who wants to oversee everything I do.  He is also very particular about how and when I do things.  So we’re in the gross room, and he wants to go through and look at all the specimens.  Not my usual thing.  Normally I go through them one at a time, but whatever.  Not much difference to me.

So we’re going through the specimens.  I’m about to swap out a hernia sac for a bit of ischemic bowel, and I’m picking up the hernia sac jar, but I didn’t screw the lid on tight enough after we looked at it. The bottom of the jar promptly falls off, and though it lands right-side up on my grossing table, it splatters formaldehyde everywhere.  It’s on my disposable smock (why I wear one), on my cloth mask, but I think that’s it. We move onto the bowel after I secure the lid.

And then my right eye starts to burn.  Shit, I realize, I must have gotten a droplet of formaldehyde in my eye.  We’ve got a procedure for that, though.  I tell my attending, we go over to the eyewash station, and I hold my eye open as water sprays on my eyeball for a good two minutes. Afterward, the stinging is gone. But, I’m told, I still need to get checked out by employee health, since I was potentially injured on the job.

Fair enough.  My supervisor (not that attending, thankfully; I don’t think he would have handled having to talk to real humans very well) takes me up to employee health, who are very nice.  The doctor is an old GP just finishing his peach yoghurt, and they’re very jokey.  I’m in no pain, so he’s not too worried. Really, his only concern is that it was technically a chemical spill in my eye, even though it was a tiny amount. And eyes scare doctors.  No one wants to deal with eyes.  We both agreed it would have been a lot easier if I’d stabbed myself with a scalpel.

Then he starts to worry: are there delayed effects of formalin?  Was my wash enough?  What is the correct procedure?  He calls the ER, but they’re as afraid of eyeballs as he is.  So he calls ophthalmology.  And ophthalmology was apparently bored, because they decide that the best course of action is to be THOROUGH.

The next thing I know, I’m not heading back down to work; oh no.  I’m going to ER.  I’m not only getting another eye-bath at the eyewash station, but then I’m escorted into a room, and I get fucking suction cups with hoses and little pegs slapped onto both of my eyes (I told them it only got into one, but that stopped no one).  The hoses were attached to two litres of lactated ringers (sort of fortified saline), and I spent the next hour with nurses swapping out towels around my face and head as fluid poured into my eyes through the most uncomfortable damn suction cups in the world.  It certainly wasn’t the worst hour I’ve ever spent, but I think I’d like never to repeat it.

After that, an ophthalmologist comes to see me, give me a very thorough eye exam, and declare my eyes good and healthy, if now reddened from having suction cups pulled off of them.  He prescribes some drops to help the redness and help my eyeballs recover from their ordeal, and off he sails.  I spend the next hour waiting to finally get discharged.  In that time, my supervisor calls because the last she saw of me, I was at employee health and likely to return quickly.  I explain the situation, and she’s stunned, bewildered, but would also like to go home.  I don’t actually need her to wait around with me, so I tell her to go.  

Finally I get my discharge papers and my prescription.  Then I spend another half-hour at the hospital pharmacy getting the drops, because I’m allergic to an old-school antibiotic, and the pharmacist wanted to go digging through the literature to make damn certain that no-longer-used antibiotic hadn’t crept its way into the saline eye-drops.

Finally, FINALLY I return to work.  All the doctors have gone home.  I have to assume that my attending from that day did my grossing for me (and I was supposed to get a kidney too, which I’m very sad to have missed!).  I pack up my stuff, put some drops in my eyes, and head out to the parking lot.

My tire is flat.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On Donations and Trying to Make a Difference

I finally got my new debit card!  I found out that the Northstar Medical Collective actually has enough money at this point, so I ended up donating to ActBlue, which split the donation between multiple civil rights organizations in need.  I’m thinking I might also see if the ACLU needs donations.  Something tells me that legal funds are going to be very important coming up.

Life is not always joyous.  It can be hard, it can be cruel.  I can feel overwhelmed by the world, but by doing this, I felt like I was at least making some small difference.  I am looking around and I’m seeing so many people making small differences, learning new things, trying to be better than they were.  This is what growth is about, and I hope this is how we change as a society. If you can’t get to a protest yourself, you can donate.  If you don’t have money, it’s time to get creative.  The K-pop stans hit on a brilliant way to support people.  Crash surveillance apps and racist tags with anything you’ve got that’s silly and irrelevant and reduces that sort of thing to the laughable nonsense it is.

People are mobilizing.  People are coming together.  This is shaping up to be the largest civil rights protest in the history of this country. The rest of the world is joining in and helping out how they can.  Even in struggle, there is the joy of unity, of mutual aid, of caring and compassion and people trying to do better than they did yesterday, and do better still the next day.  

[myyearofbutterflies]

On the Cyberpunk Anti-Surveillance Movement I Never Expected

Not much to say today.  My debit card has not arrived, but I’ve picked out the donations I want to christen it. Not only the Northstar Healthcare Collective, but also the ABC link, which allows for donations to multiple organizations at once.  It seems like a nice way to spread my donation around and do the most good.  I would definitely recommend either of those, if you want to lay down a little cash to support the protests.

But honestly, the thing that made me grin today?  K-pop.  I’m not particularly into it (although, hey, if a K-pop stan knows of a Korean folk rock band, hit me up!), but I found out that the K-pop stans on Twitter, who’ve been known for some time as those people posting inexplicable videos of their favorite bands dancing in completely unrelated posts, mostly to the annoyance of the other people in the comments … just weaponized their posts for the greater good.  They’re choking out the MAGA tags with videos of their bands.  They’re crashing police surveillance apps with K-pop.  They’ve taken something that was a somewhat ham-handed way of trying to promote their favorite music, and they’ve turned it into a gloriously wacky way to support the protests.  And interestingly, they’ve gotten a lot more people to listen to their music this way.  I’ve seen multiple people thanking them for their work, and listening to songs or asking for suggestions in the mean time.   

So you know what, hell yeah, K-pop stans.  Get out there and be that cyberpunk anti-surveillance force for good that you can be.  Crash those servers, choke those tags.  Flood all that shit with your bands and your music and your joy.  It’s one of the most creative ways of using your passion to help support the protests that I’ve seen yet, and I am cackling.  So if any of you kids know of a folk rock K-pop band, shoot me a link.  I’m happy to listen!

[myyearofbutterflies]

Today I Weeded

Today I weeded.

Some days are harder than others.  On some days, joy feels far away.  It feels like your joy would damage someone else’s struggle.  I look at the news, of hundreds and thousands of people protesting centuries of systemic racism and abuse.  I hear the helicopters overhead, bringing in more of the patients from northern New Mexico to our hospital, because COVID is still a real threat. The difficult choice the protesters had in choosing to tolerate more abuse or go out facing the virus and the police makes my heart break.  

To talk about joy today seems like it would be disrespectful.  There are days for joy, and there are days for acknowledging the years of pain others have suffered.  So, instead, today I went out into my garden and I weeded.  I tried to make my little space a bit better. Tomorrow (or whenever my debit card comes in, thanks for that person who stole my card number at the VA canteen) I will donate to the Northstar Medical Collective, which seeks to provide medical care and support for protesters in the Minneapolis area.  I firmly support these protests, but I want to make sure that they’re as safe for the protesters as possible, so if anyone else knows of good organizations providing support for the protesters (medical care, masks, water, etc), please met me know.  As a medical professional, that is what I can do.  And since I can’t be there in person, I can donate to support the healthcare workers in Minneapolis putting themselves on the line to care for those who are protesting for their rights and their lives.

Today is a difficult day.  It’s hard to see light at the end of this tunnel, but I hope.  I have seen pictures and videos of breathtaking bravery and kindness during these dark times.  I have seen good people doing their best to help others, to support others, to protect others.  

Sometimes it feels like I can’t do anything to truly help, particularly with such enormous events unfolding around me.  But I can donate.  I can put my money where my words are.  And I can refocus that nebulous grief and anger into something that’s at least a little productive.  So today I weeded.  Tomorrow I donate.  The next day I see what else I can do to support those who are trying to make the world better, however they can.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On Fanworks

I spent most of the day today, when I wasn’t doing my weekly clean-and-cook, reading fanfiction, and it got me thinking about fanworks.  The effort and the time that fans put into fiction and art and other creative works is really astounding, and it’s creative a massive amount of free content for anyone interested in the same fandom.  That’s amazing.  And it’s one of the things the internet has really been able to make happen.

Obviously fanworks existed prior to the internet, and the zine community was really astounding in everything they accomplished, but the internet opened up what had been a tiny niche of people into something anyone could get into and enjoy. And while fandom can certainly have negativity within it, the fanworks are, to my mind, a genuinely great thing.

For me, when I write fanfiction, it’s been one of the best places to exercise creativity. I could play with other writers’ characters, their worlds, and even explore their writing style.  I could expand my own repertoire by mimicking someone else for a time, finding things about their writing I really loved and incorporating it into my own.  I’ve always been a huge fan of plot and character in balance, and there are some truly stupendous fan writers out there creating stories that are dense, have a plot that feels like it could have been lifted from the source material, and have written the characters so well I can picture them saying every word.  The sheer talent on offer is astounding.

I’ve also made at least one genuine friend through fanfiction.  I’ve only met Zircon in person once, as we have an ocean between us, but we started out simply as fans of the same show, writing the same niche characters from that show.  We both admired one another as writers, and she became my primary editor.  We built a mutual respect for one another’s notes, so much so that I trust her to point to areas where I need to overhaul entire chapters, and she would do the same for me.  It’s tough, getting criticism, even from someone you respect, but finding someone like that, who knows how to point out what you’re doing right along with what you need to improve, who makes excellent suggestions, and who simply helps make a story better is worth her weight in gold.

So I simply wanted to thank all the amazing writers, artists, musicians, and other creatives who make fanworks available to us.  Being able to spend an entire day reading well-written, densely plotted, clever stories in a fandom I already like is a real treat.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On a Show about Joy (and Growing Up, and Striving to Be Better, and Generally Just a Show about People Trying)

A show that has brought me joy many times since I started watching it isn’t one that I’d normally check out.  I’ll admit, I’m not big on animation.  I don’t mind it, and some of my favorite movies from childhood were animated (looking at you, ‘The Last Unicorn’), but I drifted away from animation.  I can count on one hand the number of anime I’ve watched beginning to end, and two of those I watched in the early 2000s.  

Which made this show an exception to many of my trends.  I should explain that I came to it through another animated show.  The friend I mentioned in the last post introduced me to it, and he’s not hugely into animation either, so I figured it had to be good.  That show was ‘One Punch Man’, which was a lot of fun, a visual treat, and generally an enjoyable romp.  And while I dug the animation style, I was most interested in the comedy writing, and the undercurrents of melancholy that pervaded the show.  So when I found out that the writer of the original manga the show was based on had written something else that was getting turned into a show, I decided to give it a go.

‘Mob Psycho 100’ is a show about joy, and about being better, and about trying to improve yourself.  It’s about learning to lean on other people, and to let them lean on you.  It’s about friendship, and finding joy in other people, and in the hard work it takes to improve yourself.

The show is, in some ways, a deconstruction of the kid-with-superpowers genre and the coming-of-age genre.  The kid with superpowers doesn’t really consider those powers to be particularly special (he finds far more fulfillment in joining a fitness club and gradually passing out less frequently while running), and rather than being pushed to use those powers to save the world, he is encouraged by his mentor to NOT use them to fight or to take on the bad guys.  Because his mentor, despite having no powers of his own, recognizes that he’s the adult, and even if he’s less well equipped to fight, he should be the one to carry that weight.  It’s a show about letting children be children, about giving them a space to become adults without traumatizing them along the way.  There are children who have been failed in that respect, and we see both them and the adults they can become.  Many are driven by bitterness, that their lives were miserable, and that in turn leads them to do some miserable things on both the small scale and a grand scale.

But the other thing that impressed me about this show was that it was relentlessly about hope.  Almost every antagonist is offered a second chance, and many of them take it.  Many of the characters who do terrible things later turn their lives around and try to be better.  They try to rejoin a society they rejected—for good or bad reasons—and they try to find meaning and a place in it.  They were offered a hand of friendship in a dark time, and when things get hard later in the series, they all start turning up to lend a hand in return.  

If there is a core message, it seems to be that people aren’t all good or all bad. Every single character has both in them. Even the main character, who is a genuinely good and sweet kid, has a massive amount of pent-up rage and destructive resentment inside him threatening to hurt the people he cares about. His mentor, another genuinely good guy, also happens to be a conman who has used the main character to legitimize his fake psychic business since the kid was nine.  The main character’s little brother loves him, and also fears and resents him.  

They are all imperfect people, but through the course of the show, they all strive to be better, and they encourage the people around them to be better as well. This self-improvement is infectious, and through forgiveness, through offering the chance to be better, to be understood, and to receive kindness where none was expected (and sometimes to receive a sharp slap of reality to break up a protective superiority complex), this decency spreads throughout the cast.

It sounds saccharine, I know, but it’s all mixed with psychedelic visuals, great comedy, awesome fights, crazy experimental animation, and enough wit and weird subversion of genre conventions that it never comes off as over-sweet or overly-simplistic.  Because the characters are flawed, because the world can be cruel and unfair, their kindness, their support, and their simple acts of humanity shine all the more.

Anyway, if anyone is looking for a truly joyous show for these rough times, I would absolutely recommend ‘Mob Psycho 100’.  I’d recommend the Japanese voice cast over the English cast, as I feel that the overall voice quality is far stronger, and the translations in the subtitles tend to have more nuance than the dub lines.  But either way, this one is well worth a watch for anyone hoping for a bit of light and hope in these times.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On an Old Friend

Again, as much as I feel like this quarantine is pulling me physically apart from people, old friends are reaching out.  Tonight a friend I haven’t seen in a year and only talk to sporadically reached out to see if I wanted to chat.  As so often happens with us, we ended up talking for over an hour, and it was as though we had seen one another yesterday.

I have a lot of people I like, but few I consider genuine friends, the sort I really believe I will be in touch with all my life.  He’s one of those.  We’ve been friends since I was a sophomore in High School, and I think that, of all people outside my own family, he understands me better than anyone.  He is, in many ways, the dude version of me, and we see our experiences, our thoughts, and our emotions reflected in one another. Talking to him is something like holding up a mirror, and something like realizing that, as much as he’s like me, we still have fundamental differences, fundamental disagreements.  And that’s good too.  It’s good to care about someone, to respect them, and to disagree with them, because you have to believe that they have genuine reasons for believing what they do, and getting to the root of those reasons has helped me understand thoughts and beliefs I don’t hold.  It’s helped me realize that mine is not the only experience, and that, with a few different life experiences, I could have drawn very different conclusions about the world.  And often times we find common ground on things we disagree about.  We find a middle we can both agree on.

He’s the friend who encouraged me to be more assertive, to be honest about my opinions and to be bold with my beliefs.  I’m the friend who taught him how to not always bull ahead when a softer approach might work better, to work with people when possible, and to believe in your own position, but not to the point you can’t hear another perspective.

I think that’s the best thing a friendship can do: it makes both parties better. And through the years, that understanding has allowed us to open up and discuss difficult topics with one another. Our own struggles, our doubts, our fears, our failures all feel safe to discuss because we’ve both allowed ourselves to be vulnerable with one another.  And there is enough respect and care there between us that we aren’t going to stop liking one another for simple weakness.

I may not have a ton of people I consider my close friends, but I do have a best friend, and it was great to hear his voice again, to catch up, and to realize that, despite the months since we last talked, it felt like no time at all had passed.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On a Little Joy from Years Ago

During tough times, there are inevitably small things that make me smile. Recently, that’s been running old episodes of ‘Time Team’ in the background while I’m at home.  I used to be an archaeologist, and there’s something fun about seeing work I used to do on the television in a fairly unvarnished manner.  

There is something great about seeing other people be enthusiastic about something. Passion is infectious, and seeing professors and doctorates sneaking out on their weekends to do digs just makes me happy.  You can tell they’re all academics, that they’re all respected in their fields, and that they’re coming together to educate people about what archaeology is.  There’s something so genuine in that, and it’s fairly rare on television that a show just lets people who are good at a subject be good at it without any drama.  

It’s also bittersweet, watching those old episodes.  I’m seeing these people gradually get older, and occasionally I see hints in comments about some of the people in it who have since died.  But I think that, of all the things someone could leave behind, this video record of them doing what they loved, with exuberance and without any sort of veneer of glamor, just a bunch of academic nerds in trenches, that’s probably the greatest eulogy they could have.

Anyway, a brief moment of joy in seeing the joy of others, transported over twenty years from time of filming to my time of watching.  That joy is crystallized, eternal, a perfect example of people doing what they love.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On My Maternal Grandmother

I’ve already talked about my paternal grandmother, so for Memorial Day I thought I would write about my maternal grandmother.  Both of my grandmothers were extraordinary women in different ways. While my paternal grandmother fought for civil rights, my maternal grandmother was overcoming much more personal challenges common for the period during which she grew up.

The first thing to say about my grandma is that she was smart.  Possibly brilliant.  It’s difficult to tell, because her intelligence was always somewhat masked by a lack of formal education.  She was made to drop out of school around the ninth grade to help her family, as many girls at that time were.  She had wanted to continue on to college.  Even then, grandma has a mind for numbers.  She had wanted to pursue mathematics, and continued to dream of going back and auditing college math courses up until she died.  

But she didn’t.  She dropped out, and helped her family, and got married shortly thereafter.  But her passion for math didn’t fade, and she ended up using it in a creative way.  It was the 1950s, when many women stayed home, but my grandfather was … an unreliable source of income, to put it mildly.  I don’t want to get too deeply into the issues surrounding my grandfather, but suffice to say he had some substance abuse problems that led to some abuse problems that led to him living with the family only sporadically.  My mom’s older brothers remember this far better than she did, as by the time she was born he had largely overcome these problems and was living in the home again, and although he was still not particularly talented at making money or holding down a job he was at least a better father to her than he was to them.  They grew up resenting him and always feeling distant from him, but mom still has largely positive memories of her dad.

Grandma, in the face of this, got herself a job.  But she didn’t get herself just any job.  She instead campaigned and won the position of county treasurer, with no more than a ninth grade education, and would continue to run the county finances until she retired in the 1990s.  She became the main breadwinner of the household.  She used her skills and her intelligence to keep her and her kids afloat during some very hard times.

Grandma’s is a story of perseverance through life dealing you some genuinely terrible hands.  It’s of using one’s talents even as avenues you’d prefer to use them in are closed off. It’s of doing your best, of making yourself into something even when others insist you can’t.  I admire my grandma’s strength, her determination, and her abilities.

I also admire her for letting my mom do what she couldn’t.  They didn’t always get along.  Grandma had difficulty showing affection, and their personalities were very different.  But when it came time for mom to go to college, grandma insisted that she go, that mom get the education grandma was denied.  One of my mom’s aunts (grandma’s sister) even offered my mom $1000 not to go to college, believing that no man would ever marry an educated woman. Grandma flew in the face of her older sisters and her community at large.  My mom was one of the few girls of her graduating high school class to go to college, and that was down to Grandma.  It turned out that, while Grandma had difficulty showing love, she could do it in roundabout ways: providing for her children, giving them a stable home with a steady income, and making sure that their educations were everything hers couldn’t be.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On a Return to Routine

After a time of relative craziness, and looking at a stressful week ahead, it’s nice to get back in the swing of a routine.  Today I cleaned, I did my laundry, and I relaxed.  I look forward to tomorrow, as I’m planning to write about my other grandmother for Memorial Day.  

There is something so pleasant about establishing a satisfying routine.  There are certain tasks that need accomplished, and having done them the house looks nicer, my favorite clothing is clean again, and I have food I like.  But more than that, there is a sense of familiarity.

I suppose there’s something to do with control in that.  A routine reestablishes a sense of control over my life.  I did what I always do on the weekends.  Even a crazy week on call didn’t stop that.  I was exhausted, but I rested, then I got back up and I got back to the routine.  I am still in control of these small things about my life, even when things get crazy and some events move beyond my control, and then promptly go out of all control.  But the routine remains.  The basic tasks of house cleaning, cooking, and laundry remain.  Their tangible results remain.  Their intangible results remain.

I’m still struggling with the joy of simply being.  Time and time again, I find my joys turning back to doing things or making things.  Yesterday was a joy of being, I suppose, in that I simply relaxed for a day.  I did nothing and made nothing, and simply enjoyed the time to myself.  Is that the joy of being?  I feel that I’m still missing it.  It’s out of my reach still.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On a Down Day

I meant to write yesterday.  I got to see a few of my colleagues I hadn’t seen in a month when I had to go into work, and it was really lovely catching up with them.  But I was also exhausted after 4 hours of broken sleep thanks to a final rough night of call.  So instead of writing, I went to sleep.

But seeing them really was nice.  We didn’t talk about anything of importance.  We talked about dogs, mostly, about or own dogs, or dogs we wanted, or breeds we thought were funny.  My current favorites are the English bulldog,

the borzoi, 

and any corgi mix, but particularly the corgi mixes with big regal dogs like german shepherds. This image alone has me laughing.

They made what had been a long hard day enjoyable, and chatting with them like life was normal for a bit was a breath of fresh air.

Today I recover.  Some days, it’s really nice to do nothing.  I decided I wouldn’t clean or cook or be productive in any way today. I gave myself permission to relax, to rest, to play video games and watch ‘Time Team’ and just enjoy myself.

I really needed this.  I needed a day when there was nothing to do, no demands on my time or things I ought to do. I needed to give myself permission to set aside my responsibilities that could keep until tomorrow, and only take them up tomorrow.  It’s been nice sitting about, doing very little, and just remembering how to breathe.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On a Decent Night’s Sleep

The last few days have been tough.  Two nights in a row with a page every hour on the hour means that you don’t get good sleep, and the older I get the more decent sleep I need.  Last night was the first real reprieve.  Only three calls throughout the night, and all of them easily dealt with.  That meant at least a few hours of uninterrupted sleep at a go.  I woke up today and felt more human than I did yesterday, certainly.

Sleep is one of those pleasures that’s hard to define, because we don’t remember it. We know what it’s like not to get enough of it.  We remember waking up, and maybe remember our dreams, but all our joy regarding sleep is a peripheral thing.

And yet, I love getting good sleep.  Finally getting a decent night’s sleep last night reminded me of that, and I find myself eager for tomorrow night, when I’m off call and I can sleep as long as I want, uninterrupted.  I might not remember sleep, but I know how much good it does me, and how wonderful it feels to wake up in the sunlight, well rested and ready for a new day.

[myyearofbutterflies]

On a Funny Call

Sometimes, even working a late night can bring some joy, if only in the glorious absurdity that is medicine.  Tonight, I got a call from the blood bank, stumped as to how to handle a case.  They had been contacted by a physician on the other side of the country, with a patient who had difficult to type blood. For those (many) who don’t know much about blood typing, it’s usually a straightforward process, but in the case of a patient who has received a recent transfusion of an out-of-type blood (say, getting O negative blood, the universal donor, when they belong to any other blood group), this will cause a mixed reaction, showing both blood types when typing.

But there was a problem.  This patient claimed he was being treated for a blood disorder with frequent transfusions, and he got one at my hospital, he claimed, in January.  Not only that, but he claimed that his doctor was one of our pathology doctors.

There were only two problems with this story: he isn’t anywhere in our charts by any variation on his name.  And also, that doctor that he claimed was his treating physician?  She’s a senior researcher in our lab.  I don’t think she’s seen a patient since the 1980s.

So I ended up having a long-distance conversation with a transfusion doc on the other side of the country, about a patient who thought he had gotten a mysterious (and apparently secret) blood transfusion from one of our researchers.

The researcher in question is one of the most brilliant women I’ve ever met.  She knows everything about her field.  She’s also undeniably odd.  One of her biggest quirks is her tendency to not have great volume control when she’s speaking, so that every conversation with her is conducted at something just shy of a shout.  Just imagining her attempting to give a transfusion, having thoroughly forgotten how to insert a vascular catheter, let alone how to start the IV, bellowing at this poor patient in an ear-splitting version of chatting, tickled me to no end.  So, patient all the way across the country who somehow thinks our senior researcher was sneaking out in the middle of the night to give you blood transfusions, I wish you all the best.  Hopefully your new treatment team provides you with good blood, helpful treatments, and a physician just as talented (if more in the correct specialty and perhaps working at a slightly lower decibel level) than your ‘previous doctor’.