The Shutdown Diary: Days 2 through 4

Disclaimer: The thoughts and feelings expressed in this post are solely the author's and do not represent the official position of any government agency.
With Congress is in recess until December 27th, we are guaranteed to be closed through at least Thursday.
And Mick Mulvaney predicts that the shutdown could go into the new year.
With such certain uncertainty it seems there’s nothing to talk about in re The Shutdown. At least for a few days, "shuttered" is our status quo.
But we still have Christmas celebrating and Christmas cheer to keep us happy an occupied.
Have a great holiday, folks, see you on the flip side when Congress reconvenes.
Merry Christmas!

The Shutdown Diary: Yuletide Edition, Day 1

Disclaimer: The thoughts and feelings expressed in this post are solely the author's and do not represent the official position of any government agency.
Day 1, of course, is a Saturday, so there’s no real change to my routine.
The day started with a walk with my lovely friend and our dogs wherein we attempt to solve the problems of the world.
But not the shutdown. Alas, we have no solutions for that. None that all parties in DC would agree to, at any rate.
We do agree, however, that tamales are an awesome Christmas treat. If you aren’t talented enough (or do not have enough time) to make them yourself, go buy some. Add them to your holiday menus. Take the advice of two lady lawyer and every Mexican grandma ever, eat tamales at Christmas.
The rest of the day has been last minute Christmas prep:  a little gift-wrapping, a little baking.
This is in the oven right now:

It’s from this book, a favorite of my husband’s from childhood.

It will be our post-tamales Christmas Eve dessert. The Boy’s been wanting to make it for a month. (You know, since Thanksgiving, when we read the book.)
As for the shutdown, well, seems like nothing is happening anytime soon. From the Washington Post:
"Few lawmakers were in the Capitol on Saturday morning, and no votes were scheduled in either chamber. Many lawmakers took off Friday night to return to their home states as they await word of the talks, having been assured that they will get 24 hours notice before any vote occurs to reopen the government."
So we’ll watch and see, but I’m thinking we do orderly shutdown procedures come December 26th.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find my easy baked Brie recipe.  I’m taking it to a little get together with friends later today.
Cheers!

The Shutdown Diary: Yuletide Edition

Disclaimer:  The thoughts and feelings expressed in this post are solely the author's and do not represent the official position of any government agency.

Oh, hey!

Happy Winter Solstice!

Merry Christmas!

Joyous Kwanzaa!

And (maybe even) Happy New Year!

We are headed into another government shutdown.  Just in time for Santa!

So, to recap:  The President and Congress, once again, disagree about funding the government.  As of about 7:00 p.m. Eastern, the House had adjourned with plans to reconvene at noon on Saturday, December 22nd.  And the Senate has no deal.  That means, barring a miracle, that the government shuts down at midnight (Eastern) tonight.

Welcome to the Yuletide Shutdown!

We won't go into the whys and wherefores of the reason there is yet another impasse.  You know the whys and wherefores.  And you know that at least one side of the budget tussle predicts that it will be a long shutdown.

I don't know about you, but this governing-by-crisis is getting kind of old.  And not just because I am a to-be-furloughed government worker . . . but because I am an American who wants a functional government.

Meanwhile, the stock market is on track for the worst December since the Great Depression.  Yay.

This week alone has been the worst week for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 2008.  Super.

You remember the market crash in 2008, right?  Here's a graphic to remind you:

Same website, The Balance, has another graphic highlighting the ten biggest one-day losses in the history of the Dow.  Guess what years have had 4 each.  Hint:  They both begin with "20" and end with an 8.  Here, see for yourself:

But, don't give up on 2018 just yet.  It still has 10 days left to surge ahead of 2008 and win the title of DJIA Shittiest Year Ever.

My cup runneth over.

To add to that happy news, and, as a reminder, non-excepted government employees have no guarantee of being paid after a government shutdown.  In the past, we have gotten back pay.  But we are not guaranteed the back pay.  Only excepted employees are guaranteed back pay.  (Excepted employees still have to come to work and will get paid, but not until the shutdown is over.  So it could, conceivably, be weeks before even they see a paycheck.)

Here's a fun fact:  A lot of us were planning to take paid annual leave over the next week or two to spend time with our families.  So you might think that this is No Big because we can just take the paid leave during the shutdown and not suffer the economic consequences of no pay.  Alas, no.  Paid leave is not allowed during the shutdown.  So you're just furloughed and you can't draw salary from your annual leave time.  Also, if you were an employee who had "use or lose" leave hours that you were hoping to spend during the holidays, those hours are now going to fall into the "lose" category on account of the shutdown.  Total bummer.

So here we are, just before Christmas, and we may not be paid for what could be a long time.  So bills, mortgage payments, food, incidentals . . . all that has to come out of savings or be charged up on credit cards.  And so . . . that really, actually, totally, and completely sucks.

So, yeah, I guess I'll just watch the news and wait and drink a liberal pour of mulled wine.

Merry Christmas!

P. S.  I wonder if NORAD's Santa radar will still run on Christmas Eve.  Probably will . . . probably deemed essential . . . national defense and all.

Crepe

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my reflection from a certain angle and I see it. Crepe.

My neck is turning to crepe paper.

Also, the backs of my hands. 

And the skin around my eyes. 

And the skin in some of the areas of my body that I usually keep covered. 

This isn’t surprising, really. 

I’m 48. 

Crepey skin in late middle age is not the least bit surprising. 

So I’m not surprised, but ....

It’s a little jarring sometimes to glance in the mirror thinking you’re going to check that your bobbed hair is smooth and be distracted by your neck.

And it’s crepe-like appearance. 

This sounds shallow. 

It is shallow.

I don’t really CARE. (But I do kind of care.)

There are worse things than crepey skin. And I experience almost none of them whilst occasionally being surprised by my neck.

THEREFORE, I am grateful to be healthy enough to be old enough to have this jarringly crepey neck. #middleage

My House is a Mess

I like order.  I find it calming. I like organizing things. It’s zen. 

My house is the opposite of order. It’s a series of piles — books, toys, games, papers, random things that come through the door.  I try to get control of it. I try to organize and give everything a place. But it’s a losing battle. 

And I get embarrassed. I, honestly, sometimes don’t want people in the house. I don’t want them to witness the barely controlled chaos. 

But I had an epiphany last night, while my son and his friend happily played together surrounded by entropy. 

People don’t really care about this as much as I care about this. 

And if they do care, if they do judge, they are just jerks.  Lots of people’s houses are messy.  It’s okay that it doesn’t look like a page from a Martha Stewart magazine in here. 

Sure, I’ll still straighten up when guests come over, but I’m not going to worry about the mess anymore. And if someone drops by, I’ll just move the pile of stuffed animals from a chair and offer them a seat. 

Throwing it all away.

Okay, not all. But a lot of it. A lot of "stuff."

Being a parent involves throwing a lot of stuff away. Stuff you would have thought of as treasures as a kid.

Plastic tops. 

Sticky wall crawlers. 

Kids meal toys. Lots and lots of kids meal toys. 

All those four packs of red, blue, green and yellow crayons you get at restaurants that don’t give out toys with their kids meals.

Temporary tattoos. 

Broken crayons. 

Stickers. 

Dried up play-doh.

Dried up markers. 

Those don’t hurt.

But some things do. 

Scribbled drawings on a million scraps of paper.

The 1,000th origami throwing star he made.

All the drink pull tabs and rocks and bits of string and sticks and candy wrappers that he slips into his pockets during the day.

You can’t keep it all any more than you can keep him from growing up.

But you keep some of it.

Tokens of a childhood that goes too fast. 

And he stays your boy, no matter how big he gets. 

Off the Grid

Well, not totally off, but, let’s say back to 2008 levels of grid engagement. Engagement? Entanglement? Enmeshment?

In any event, I deactivated my Facebook account a little over a month ago. I’m not sure of the exact date. But it was early May 2018. Irony: Few people will read this post because it will not be cross-posted to Facebook. Hmmm. 

Maybe, I’ll reactivate my Facebook account, post the blog entry, then deactivate it after a couple of days. 

Nah. 

The whole point of this post is that I am not on Facebook anymore and to discourse on what that’s been like, and why I did it. Going back on to talk about how great it’s been not being on Facebook seems counterintuitive at best, hypocritical at worst. 

And it HAS been great. 

I’m less stressed out. Truly, Facebook wasn’t all bad, but I felt pressure. I felt pressure to check it, to "keep up." I felt pressure to click "like", lest I offend someone by causing them to think (maybe), "Why didn’t The Working Mom like this post?" I felt pressure when I read and saw some of your posts and they made me feel not great about myself . . . or not great about you. I felt pressure to hold the "right" opinions. If I was too conservative for some or too liberal for others, I came under fire, which was not fun. (Although in truth, y’all, the liberals were far more likely to attack than the conservatives, at least in my feed. I’m a flaming liberal -- for Texas -- but maybe we do need to think about our approach to topics we disagree on, lest we alienate our allies.  But I digress, Mr. DeNiro. Maybe Facebook is not the right arena for these kinds of discussions -- political, social, religious.)

Increasingly, I found I did not like being on display. Increasingly, I felt like I had to moderate myself in ways that seemed unnatural. (Unnatural for Facebook, yeah, which is inherently unnatural.)  Increasingly, I wished for fewer likes and opinions. Increasingly, I didn’t want everyone to know what I was doing or what I just did or what I was wearing or the conversation I just had or the show I just watched. Increasingly, I wished for a smaller friend list, a much smaller one. Increasingly, I saw how shallow the interactions were, how one resurrection of a years-old photo of my then-sick/now-dead cat produced present-day wishes for his speedy recovery. (An experience that was, at once, painful, annoying, and infuriating.) Increasingly, I wished for freedom from the immediacy of the information cycle. I wished NOT to learn about "it" on Facebook. (This goes for Twitter too, but I don’t follow many news sources -- or people even -- on Twitter, so it’s not as bad there.  Basically, my Twitter feed is 90% Star Wars.)  Increasingly, I wanted to pull back. 

And then there’s the privacy issue. Facebook has surreptitiously taken and disclosed so much of our information to political think tanks, foreign powers, and marketers. It bothers you too, right?, when you see items advertised in your Facebook feed that you have just googled or searched for on Amazon.com. It’s unsettling. And how do they know? How, indeed? And if they can manipulate our shopping that way, what about the rest of our behaviors?  I didn’t want to continue to feed the beast. They had what I’d given them. I didn’t have to continue to give them more. 

Except.

I’ve stayed on some social media. I’m on Twitter (@Mom2IPK). I’m on Instagram (@merdypurdy). So my info is still out there in ways. Facebook owns Instagram, so I’m not completely out of its clutches. But Instagram doesn’t have a hold on me like Facebook did. Neither does Twitter. They just don’t invade your mind (or my mind, anyway) the way that Facebook did.

I’ve thought about whether I might come back to Facebook one day. How would that look? Would I sneak back on and make my profile private while I curated my privacy settings and deleted "friends"?   Maybe. That seems like a lot of work. And would it really be worth it? I don’t know. It should not take that much time and mental energy to participate in something like Facebook. It seems like it should be easier than it is. It should not take this much thought and constant curating to ensure one’s sanity and privacy. So maybe I don’t want to be there after all. Maybe I don’t really want to come back.

I do miss out on things: community event notifications, Facebook groups I might find useful, seeing pictures of my friends’ kids and family.

I don’t miss the pressure, though, nor the aggravation and the vulnerable feeling of being too exposed. 

So I’m staying off Facebook, at least for now. The good thing about deactivating is that you can always reactivate when you want to, when you’re ready. Right now, I don’t. I’m not. I’m happy here on my little-read blog and my tightly held Twitter and Instagram accounts. The broad boulevard of Facebook is still too much for me right now.