November 2022 I decided to stop posting to Twitter. It wasn’t an easy decision; Twitter was sort of my last refuge of largely unfiltered writing. But the site started turning sour and I couldn’t justify doing anything that contributed to ad revenue or usage statistics, so I walked away from it. I tried Hive Social but after a week of putting up some longer content, the site went dark because of security concerns. I wasn’t going back to Facebook and Instagram isn’t the place for long musings or short quips. I considered restarting my Tumblr blog but then it occurred to me that all I was doing was looking for the next site to post stuff until the new site popped up. I’m just fragmenting who I am across all of these online spaces…but I own this space. I mean, sort of, but more than I own the space I occupy on Twitter, Instagram, or anywhere else. The only reason to post on those sites is that it’s easier to share with strangers and to have your thoughts and work validated and passed on. Those likes and shares each bring a small piece of adrenaline with them, and you know that your work is good; that you are good.
In all my years across all of these sites, I’ve had maybe five things go sort of viral. Most things get a like, maybe a share.
All that to say…why not just use this space? My last post here was in October 2020; it was a living tribute to our dog Twinkie who was in decline. It was good. It was meaningful. Who cares if anyone read it, I enjoyed rereading it.
I spent the past year taking in a lot of media. I’m a big fan of metrics and tracking progress, so I had a spreadsheet tracking all of the new-to-me albums I listened to (365), all of the movies I’ve watched for the first time (89), all of the recipes I cooked for the first time (61), and books I read for the first time (29). I came out of this year feeling more creative, having the desire to share again, and this blog is the place to do it. I’ve updated the newsletter so it sends out every Friday at 1 PM EST with any new content from the previous week. Feel free to subscribe, it’s easier than checking back here.
And with that, I feel like a proper catch-up is in order.
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My last post was a tribute to Twinkie while she was still alive. She passed shortly after that post and hardly a day has passed where I haven’t thought about her. We adopted Beans a month after Twinkie’s passing. Beans came from a tough situation, she was rescued from a hoarder. She was adopted and returned because she, “Didn’t do anything.” We took her on and gave her a great home but quickly realized that Beans will always be Beans, and the best we can do is make her not afraid. And when she came to us she was VERY afraid. Now, two years on, she trusts Liz and me and maybe even likes us. She sometimes does small things that seem dog-like - sniff around the living room, a signal she wants some pets, nudge one of us on the couch - but for the most part, she’s a loveable lump who wants nothing more than to sleep on the bed and be not afraid. And that’s ok with us.
As for animals, Skippy (rat terrier, 9 years old) is still my pal, and Ashes (cat) is still with us and going on 18 years now.
I blogged quite a bit about my job at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. My work in that area continued and I ended up pretty low on the author list for this paper: Seroconversion and fever are dose-dependent in a nonhuman primate model of inhalational COVID-19 and I was the PI/first author on this paper: A Novel Framework for Modeling Person-to-Person Transmission of Respiratory Diseases. Work is going well, I have a great team that’s doing some important and interesting work. As for writing, I’ve been writing for myself. I got myself a FreeWrite and have committed over 100,000 words to it but haven’t done anything with any of it. The writing was a mix of travel journaling, some fiction, and a whole lot about health and disease and aging and caring. I’ll return to some of that shortly.
Liz started a new job in early 2022; she left Arlington Public Libraries to take a job as Director of Communications and Student Outreach for the Dream Project, a charity that supplies scholarships for undocumented students living in Virginia. It’s a great organization and she is great at her job. The job made sense for two reasons; first off, the pandemic pushed Liz and me to start investing more in our community. We set up charitable giving goals for local organizations in 2021 and 2022 and passed those goals in both years. So her job fits with how we’re plugging into and trying to help care for our community. The other reason the job works for Liz and me is because it enabled us to better care for Liz’s mom who moved in with us in March 2021.
That’s the answer to, “where have you been?” Helping with the ongoing care of my mother-in-law (MiL, from here on out), who has a myriad of health issues but the one that’s most demanding of our time has been early-onset Alzheimer's disease. That’s something I don’t talk about publicly, primarily out of a desire to retain my MiL’s dignity, but as the stages move on and she’s becoming less like her old self, it’s becoming more and more necessary to talk about it.
Liz and I are mostly good at taking care of her. It’s too hard of a task to be great at, no matter who you are. One thing that gave us an edge in this area is that we were in the process of taking classes with the county to become foster parents, and those classes included crisis-informed parenting. Turns out, what you learn in crisis-informed parenting is directly applicable to caring for foster kids, any kids, Alzheimer’s patients, dogs, and all fellow humans. In our case, it certainly gave us the language and the headspace to understand and apply the fact that the one thing MiL needs is a safe space.
We adopted several rules in this house early on to create that space.
1) Never say, “remember,” because she doesn’t. A lot of folks will start a sentence with, “Remember I told you we’re doing XYZ today?” It causes stress for Alzheimer’s patients, the only thing they remember at that moment is that they don’t remember. That one simple rule greatly lowered her anxiety.
2) We applied a rule from something I saw on Twitter once. Someone was talking about Alzheimer’s patients and was saying that we need to move away from complicated schedules, large-format calendars, and bringing our loved ones into the present. We should instead spend time with them where they are because that’s a safer space for them. We try to do that as often as possible and spend time with MiL in her reality as long as it’s a calming and peaceful one.
3) Liz’s aunt gave us another bit of advice that we adhere to religiously. If someone with anxiety thinks there’s a spider in their room, you need to convince them that the spider does not exist. If someone with Alzheimer’s thinks there’s a spider in the room, you need to tell them you killed the spider. This one seems the cruelest, but Alzheimer’s patients fixate; in MiL’s case, she can fixate on bad things. It’s always easier to simply tell her the bad thing has been dealt with.
4) Props to Maya Angelou for this one because another truism when dealing with an Alzheimer’s patient is that they won’t remember what you tell them, but they’ll remember how it made them feel. We try to be very conscious of our tone and what we say, not just to MiL but around her. Liz and I have gotten pretty good at arguing via text or at least making notes on something we want to argue about later. Our vibe influences her vibe, which influences our vibe, and locks us into this cycle that’s hard to get out of.
We also have a home health aide now; Medicaid assists us there and our aide is tremendous and gives Liz and me needed space, cleans MiL’s room, does her laundry, cooks meals for her, etc.
And that’s our house. That’s a portrait of our lives right now.
We’re doing well, tho. That’s something people don’t get sometimes. When I explain our living situation, people go right to apologizing and that’s heard and appreciated but, also, we chose this and we deal with it pretty well. We get help from family and still find ways to travel. Since my last blog post we did a Southwest road trip, traveled to Portland and Seattle with MiL, and visited/fell in love with Quebec City. We’ve been to Chicago and New York several times to see family. I’ve also traveled to Pittsburgh, Austin, and San Francisco for work. Liz takes time to go see her out-of-state friends at least once a year, too.
Having said that, OF COURSE it hasn’t been the easiest couple of years, and there have been other events that I don’t particularly want to talk about right now or ever, but we’re fortunate in that we love each other, we communicate well, we have steady and meaningful work, we take time to do the things we enjoy, and we care for each other and all creatures that live in this house.
We have goals for this year; I’m not a resolution guy, more of a theme guy, and I’m generally good at sticking to the themes. And one theme for this year is to get back to sharing. I honestly think we’re good at some things. And it’s good to share those things.
So maybe some stories here, maybe some reviews of movies and albums and local spots that particularly inspire me. Maybe some fiction, maybe some theory. Maybe some insights on health and disease and caring for loved ones and the community. It’s a blog. I’m going to treat it like a blog again.
And that’s my catch-up.