work from home: week 1

well.

i promised myself when i started this project i would write about it all.

the good, the bad, the ugly.

this was a bad week.

this was a period hormones, world pandemic, social distancing, work from home notice, struggling to find a reason to stay alive week.

we'll start easy.

last week people started shifting to working from home. the first wave was 25% on friday the 13th. by tuesday it was up to 90%. there were a few of us hold outs at the office.

i prefer to work from an office. i NEED human contact. even if it's just the people walking by on the way to get coffee, IT'S PEOPLE.

i'm not a social person. this is not shocking news.

work is 87.2% of ALL my social interactions.

friday they gave us the official boot and i packed up all my shit and set up my tiny little desk to be my new office.

the work part doesn't bother me. all i need is my computer and a phone.  working from home will be nice in a LOT of ways. no warm toilet seats in the bathroom. no annoying coworker leaving passive aggressive notes on an EMPTY desk claiming it in the middle of everyone being sent home. no assholes leaving both coffee pots in the kitchen empty.

i'll have art to look at all day. plenty of light and windows to see outside. proper meals whenever i'm hungry.

i'll miss the cafe. the baristas were so incredibly nice.

i'll miss seeing my cube-neighbor every morning.

i'll miss the people whose names i don't know but i talked to in the kitchen every morning.

i'm so, so, so immensely grateful to have the opportunity to work from home.

i'm just really struggling with the corporate overlords hyper focus on numbers and productivity and not leaving ANY room for work flow shift as we all adjust to this new normal. i'm struggling giving even the tiniest rats ass about an auto dealership in texas getting fiber internet installed right now. which is...what i do. so.  you know. gotta figure that part out.

i'm nervous about 2x daily group team chats. my new "office" is in my bedroom. because...studio apartment. the potential awkward is off the charts.

i'm nervous about disconnecting at the end of the day. about remember what day it is. i'm already struggling wanting to spend "just a little bit of extra off the clock time" going through file names and cleaning up how things are saved in files i know other people access. now that we're all working from home i have this (virgo) need to organize everything since people won't be able to pop by my cubicle real quick to ask a question.

i worry that i'll be the weak link that will make everyone else not be able to get things done remotely.

i worry that i've only been at this job 4 1/2 months and still barely know my ass from my elbow.

i'm pretty mad at myself right now for never figuring out how to be a stay at home mom or a stay at home partner.

i would give anything right now for my biggest problem to be worrying about how to get acrylic nails off at home since salons are closed and it would be mortifying for anyone to see my nails grown out (real post from a fb group).

OH THE HORROR.

but, alas, i am not a stay at home wife or partner.


i'm still the same, single, social pariah i was last week.

which leads into some of the really bad stuff in my head this week.

my oldest son had to be on a nebulizer for years.  twice a day breathing treatments. we'd put the little drops in the machine and he would wear the darth vader mask while watching a veggie tales video.

the doctors were never able to tell us WHY we had to do that. he didn't have allergies. he didn't have asthma. we found out later, during a growth spurt, that he has sunken chest syndrome where the cartilage on his ribs on one side curves IN instead of OUT. did that cause it? there's one corrective treatment for it...they basically cut you in half and strap a metal rib cage to the cartilage and hope it corrects itself. that's it. we chose not to do that treatment.

does it still affect his breathing? does it make him more at risk for things like corona? i don't know.

last i knew he was living in the bellingham area.

ground zero for the united states.

would anyone even tell me if he got sick?

i doubt it.

my youngest son had early onset puberty at 6 months old. we started seeing pediatric endocrinologists. a few years later he had a reaction to an MMR shot and i discontinued immunizations for years because of how it affected him. this is why i keep my mouth shut about anti-vaxxer stuff. i don't know about for EVERYONE, but i watched it directly and extremely markedly affect my son.

we had *just* moved out of a domestic violence situation. he had JUST started interacting with people. talking. walking. engaging. social. happy. bubbly. got his mmr shot and that all went away.

so we stopped vaccines. instead we did speech therapy, reading therapy, behavior therapy. mentors and tutors and intervention programs at school. we started them again when he was 13 and the local school district stopped allowing medical exemptions for school records.

as he was 13 and in charge of all his medical decisions, i explained why i had stopped the shots, explained what i saw were the risks and the benefits and he made the decision to get caught up on his shots.

within a few months his behaviors had completely changed. his attitude was different. his reasoning, his discussions, his interactions. his behaviors at school started to fall apart. he started running away, getting into drugs, getting into fights, arguing with police officers.

regular teenage hormones + high school + friend influence? or some form of an allergic reaction that altered him again, the same way it did when he was a baby?

I DON'T KNOW.

does it affect his health now? does his pattern of high risk behavior put him more at risk for contracting/spreading this virus?

again, would anyone tell me if he got sick?

my mother is somewhere in alabama. she'll be 65 this year. she has ankylosing spondylitis in conjunction with iritis. the lifetime of medications from controlling those started causing pancreas issues years ago.

if she got sick would anyone tell me?

i have a brother who is a king county deputy.

a cop. in the middle of a pandemic. that started in his county.

and he goes to work every day. then goes home to his wife and 2 kids.

king county sent out a work-from-home notice a while ago. strangely enough his boss didn't agree to allow him to catch bad guys from his recliner. so it's a daily hi-ho and off to work for him.

luckily everyone else is dead.

grandparents all kicked off a long time ago.

i don't have to worry about my dad (also a cop) out in this.

i don't have to worry about my little brother living in seattle without insurance during this.


it's a weird feeling when you're glad people are dead.

and then there's me.

i'm the fucking worthless lump of nothing sitting in my apartment, 99% unaffected by any of what's happening and 100% unable to help with any of it.


i'm still fucking broke.

as much as i want to, i have zero ability to support local businesses trying to get through this.

I WISH i could order food from local restaurants. i fucking LOATHE cooking, even in the best of times.

I WISH i could sign up for online yoga and zumba and work out classes. even if i could afford it, i live on the third floor and we're ALL stuck at home and i really don't think my neighbors want to listen to elephant on parade every day.

i don't know how to sew OR own a sewing machine. even if i did, you really, REALLY wouldn't want a mask made by me.

i could run errands for neighbors but that would include A) talking to my neighbors (the meth heads can fend for themselves), B) going out where all the fucking assholes that AREN'T taking precautions are, and C) doing shopping. something i can barely force myself to do, for myself, unless i am completely out of everything.

i'm not a musician. i'm not an artist. i'm not a comedienne. i don't have anything in particular to contribute to the online community.

my skill set is this:
-sitting completely still reading (the same books over and over) for hours on end.

-professional level social distancing. i've been getting stood up by dates for 21 years. i was social distancing before it was even a thing.

- subsiding on a diet of trash panda food

-hiding my emotions and feelings behind carefully crafted jokes and half stories.



so. yeah. i'm struggling right now.

there's nothing like a global pandemic to show you how completely useless you are.

so.

yeah. 

i'm struggling.

i don't have a particularly positive note to end this on.

and that annoys me.

complain as much as you want AS LONG AS YOU PROVIDE A SOLUTION.

fuck.

ok.

well. i'm still hunting for silver linings.

i'm still trying.

I'M WRITING EVEN WHEN IT'S BAD.

that's something.

i'm being honest.

i'm still putting this out there even though there's a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY loud voice in my head screaming with all it's might FUCK OFF YOU TWAT. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE IT REALLY BAD RIGHT NOW? cry a little more you pathetic useless piece of shit from your comfy, colorful, safe apartment. you still have a job. you have plenty of food. you have puppy snuggles. suck it up buttercup.

but i've listened to that voice for years.

i've done the suck it up buttercup thing.

i've spent way too long keeping silent just because someone else has it worse.

there will ALWAYS be someone who has it worse.

growing up in the 80's taught me that.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY STARVING CHILDREN THERE ARE IN AFRICA?

so.

things are bad.

but i'm still here.

i made myself write this.

that's a start.

i knew starting this project there would be a LOT of changes. i knew anything could happen in a years time.

i did NOT expect this.

but.

i mean.

i'll get through it.