Future fears

My sister has left for the airport. She graciously spent a day while the kids were at camp cleaning out their room. I sifted through the remains, tossing everything but play weapons, costumes, books and a few favorite other toys. Gone are the first reader books, legos, little kid stuff, cars and trucks, dinosaurs, etc. Let’s be honest - the kids spend 99% of their time playing video games or watching other people play video games. This is our life now. Some toys went to a four year old grand nephew of my brother-in-law; the rest went on the street for people to drive by and pick up. This worked well for the first round of giveaways from the attic clean up I did last week, but this time I discovered to my horror that someone had dumped all of it in our recycle bin (none of it is recyclable). I had a minor meltdown about this, then the BF went and dug it all out to put in the trash instead, and then he was somewhat butthurt at discovering we’d gotten rid of all of the very expensive toys he’d bought the kids that they never once played with that he’s convinced they’ll still play with. Then in the last few days several boxes have shown up of things he’s ordered them - giant expensive remote control cars, kites that don’t work, etc. And so goes the saga of the stuff. No matter what, the big clean out has undone years of neglect around here - I used to do a toy cull a couple of times a year, but have not done it in at least three years, and it showed. Now there’s very little left in their room - you can actually walk on the floor; it’s a miracle! I won’t let it get to that point again. And I’ve got to convince the BF to stop wasting his money on piles of plastic crap. 

With my sister on her way home, now begins Phase 2 of our summer - the Month of Camping. Day after tomorrow we leave for the Kern River for 4th of July weekend, then we have a coastal camping trip the weekend after, then we leave for our great southwest road trip after that, for ten days. I’ve started plotting out our road trip, and tbh the prognosis is not good. Some portion of it was dedicated to Zion National Park, which, as it turns out, has turned into Disneyland. Apparently the lines to get in are so long you have to show up before dawn to even think about getting a parking spot or getting on any kind of shuttle. Lines are hours long and everything is packed. I still want to hike The Narrows, but I’m starting to wonder if we’ll even make it to the inside of the park. I’m looking into (expensive) private tours that can maybe get us in there so we can at least have one day there. Then the next portion of our trip is exploring Navajo Nation...which is completely closed. While the tribal council has voted to reopen all the parks and monuments, the president has vetoed this, and I don’t see movement by the time we’re there in three weeks. Thanks, covid. So I’ve spent the last few nights frantically looking for alternatives, and finding a few. However, everything we want to do is informed by the heat, which may be unbearable. This may end up being a very different trip than I’d envisioned. It’s time to adjust my expectations now because we’re probably not going to end up doing any of the activities we’d originally planned. Now I’m really wishing I’d booked us for Hawaii instead.

Registration for my event has been glacially slow since opening night. I’m getting cancellations practically every day from people who transferred from last year but now realize they can’t or don’t want to go. I am very concerned about the Delta variant fucking everything up for me. This is pretty much the worst scenario I could have imagined - opening up again and receiving tons of abuse from right wingers (who are now organizing their own competing event, I might add), then the left wingers staying home out of (justified) fear, and basically no one supporting me and the whole thing being a big money-losing failure. Right now I’m really wishing I had preemptively canceled early in the spring like I wanted to.

But with all that negativity happening, I will say that a) there’s a chance that while Delta shows its teeth soon, it may not very much affect vaccinated people and may only spike certain low-vaccine areas, which is not our area, and b) in two months people’s tolerance for risk could be pretty high, especially after a summer of safe activities and c) I would be more concerned for winter events, two of which have announced their re-opening. Concerts, shows and events are re-opening all over and have no plans of canceling, Delta or no Delta. I can still limp through this one even if more people cancel, hardly anyone else shows up, and we stay more or less at this level of attendance. But oh, this all sucks so much. Between this and my still unapproved loan (which has been knocked back to “under review” and has stagnated there for a week now) I have been a ball of anxiety for weeks. Ugh. Just make it all stop.

Final review

The grant I’ve been waiting for since December has moved me from “submitted” (status since April) to “under review” (last week) to “final review” (this afternoon). It’s rare in life I’m in a position to be at the mercy of others - in fact, I’ve pretty much set up my entire life so that I am in charge of almost everything that happens to me (own my home, had kids alone, own my business, own my band that my business hires, etc). My future being in the hands of a government entity is extremely stressful and crazy-making. Especially now that a friend of mine with the same business type applied after me and has already been approved. It would be such a punch in the gut if after all this I was denied. Ugh. I can’t wait for this to be over so I can stop stressing about it. It’s been a long road. 

Everything lately has been an exercise in how weird and unresolved everything still is this summer. My sister is here, and although things seem kinda normal, they’re also kinda not. Restaurants are either closed or open limited hours. Places to visit require advance tickets. People are doffing masks but also many people are not, which makes me not want to be the person that makes everyone uncomfortable by not wearing a mask even if they’re not required nor medically necessary for me, personally, anymore. Travel is still up in the air - I don’t know if my one European teaching couple will be allowed into the US; most of my international visitors are preemptively delaying until next year. Now I’m worried the Delta variant will take over this summer and spike numbers so badly that I’ll have to cancel at the last second. Or even if it only affects unvaccinated people - right now everyone’s so traumatized they don’t know how to properly assess risk; if the vaccine we have in the US is still effective against the Delta variant, my event is still safe. And yet there are those out there convinced my event will be this huge super-spreader, which is pretty much physically impossible even under today’s conditions. Will everyone panic and want refunds? Who knows. I’ve never wished more for my event to be tomorrow and not still two and a half months away. So much can still go wrong. It’s scary.

The boys went to their first day of camp today at their old Rec center. I believe they haven’t been to summer camp there since 2018. When I drove up it was just a handful of glum masked kids sitting six feet apart at outdoor tables and I feared the worst, that they would hate it and not want to go anymore. Thankfully this was not the case. They enjoyed it and brought home the usual collection of crappy little crafts that will soon see the bottom of my kitchen garbage. Ah, summer. So they go this week to give me some time to decompress, then they don’t return until August. I’m going to make the most of this week to get organized and relax. In two weeks our Month of Camping begins and I want to make sure I’m ready for it. 

Camping Point Mugu

Yesterday we returned from our post-school ending camping trip to Sycamore Canyon, a little spot just across the beach north of Malibu. I didn’t take many pictures because...well...it was stressful.

At the last minute I had invited a divorced mom friend and her 12 year old son, who I had only met once when he was really little. While I knew from the grapevine that he had severe ADHD and autism and she was really struggling, I didn’t know quite how exhausting it would be to camp with them for three days. The boy was very loud and raucous and felt unsafe to be around - he would swing (play) shovels at their heads, at one point he dropped their dog on its back in a really scary way and didn’t seem to care, and the poor mom was in a constant state of snapping at him to stop being inappropriate and listen, etc. The BF and I agreed the first night to not let the boys wander off with him - not that we felt he would harm them in any way, but just his impulse control was so non-existent we were afraid the boys could be lead into something unsafe. Bobby was pretty much over it after the first day. I was on edge the whole time. 

Also, the point of this campground is to spend the days at the beach - and as is often the case in Southern California, it was freezing cold at the beach - a constant icy stiff wind that broke our shade shelter in half, and the water so cold you could barely stick your toes in. So I basically sat under a pile of towels all day, stress ate and fretted over the boys getting sunburned, which they sort of did despite my efforts to the contrary.

In good news, I killed it on the food front - made camping pizza for the first time ever which was a huge hit, and used my new pie iron to make campfire cherry pies (those could use a little work tbh). 

Anyway, we have two more normal camping trips coming up - Kern River over July 4 and another coastal one up north the weekend after. I think I’ll keep it to just us. 

I also picked out an engagement ring on Etsy with the BF and it shows as sold, so I believe he bought it. It’s pretty. It’s going to be weird wearing a ring showing my relationship status. That is all. Now, we wait. 

How it began, how it’s going

School’s out...4...evah!

The kids ate popsicles and watched movies for their last day at school. I contemplated sending them in with bouquets for their teachers but then thought it would be a burden on the teachers to deal with that and then wished I had just bought them anyway. 

We went to get ice cream and ate it in the filthy parking lot because there’s no seating in the store anymore, with masks around our chins. Theo did parkour on the parking lot barriers. The boys slapped each other repeatedly while laughing in the car. And that was how 1st and 3rd grade ended. 

There’s something profound about the beginning and ending of things. I’m not distraught anymore; but I am relieved/tentative about what comes next. Nine weeks of a choppy summer - my sister’s visit, lots of camping, an epic road trip across Utah, Nevada and Arizona, and finally ending in the return of my event. 

The boys have gotten so thin and tall since last summer. All the pictures people are sharing of their kids have them looking much like mine last summer - barefoot and feral. It’s funny to see them all institutionalized again. 

Penultimate day of school

I wanted to wait until tomorrow to post about the final day of school, but I’m feeling the feelings now. 

Today I cleaned out the shelf I had put aside for school stuff during the pandemic and returned it to what it was in The Before Times - a shelf for cookbooks. There were a whole lot of memories there, few of them good. I threw away several garbage bags of stuff - papers, broken crayons, many used school books for both kids - only to have them come home with all of the supplies and papers from school for the last eight weeks. I also threw away all of Bobby’s violin stuff. I still get very emotional when I think about Bobby and violin and other than keeping the instrument because it’s not something I can throw away, I really don’t want any reminder of it anywhere near me. I just can’t deal.

I found myself getting very choked up today at the prospect of the kids finishing out first and third grade and am struggling to put my finger on exactly why. I mean, sure, it’s the end of the craziest school year we’ll (hopefully!) experience. It’s normal to feel some type of way about it. But my sudden inexplicable sadness is really about something else. I feel oddly betrayed - like that the kids’ school is a co-parent of sorts, and it went away with no notice a year and three months ago, and I suffered, and then it came back in a blaze of glory, and now it’s gone again. I feel strangely untethered and alone. 

Did I mention I have major abandonment issues from my childhood? 

I think for me there’s a great comfort to knowing there are trained professionals in your child’s life helping to mold and teach them, that the entire job of teaching your child about the world and how to be in the world is not entirely on your shoulders. School is such an important element of society. As much as I hated getting up in the morning, I also enjoyed the ritual of it all - the packing of backpacks and picking up of kids in the afternoon. The routines. All of that is going away for nine weeks and I’m pretty freaked out. We’re back to chaos, with the added element of trying to throw my event together in (now, less than) three months. Even though I know I’ll literally blink and these kids will be back in school again - and somewhat normal school, with full days and full classrooms. It will be August in seconds. And it won’t be like last year where I’ll be preparing the house for a year of at-home learning. 

But, gosh, it’s been such an insane time, and here we are at the end of it, and I feel overwhelmed by the weight of all that. I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to breathe and feel the feelings. It’s a big moment, to be sure. 

Here is their first day of school picture from last August. How different things were, how little we knew about what was going to happen. We were still saddled with fucking Trump, for chrissakes, and had no way of predicting if we’d be free of him or not. I was planning my virtual event. I hadn’t even been to the desert yet. It hasn’t even been a full year and yet it feels like 10,000 years ago. I wonder how August will feel from now? Or next June?? 

Final week

One more week of school, one more week of school! This is the song I’ve been singing (changing up the countdown as appropriate) for weeks now. Everything is slowing. The kids don’t have much asynchronous work after school anymore; they are turning in books, the parking is getting easier in the morning as more parents jump ship for early vacations, and announcements are made for final week fun plans at school. They’re going to be doing so little there it makes you wonder why even bother showing up, really. But it’s an important wind down for a terrible year, so I’ll allow it.

They got their cheap soft cover yearbooks yesterday. Most of the parents sent our at-home taken portraits back in the fall for inclusion in the book, but many did not. Seeing all the blank frames definitely made me reflect on what kind of year it was. I get the feeling many kids have left the school, either for private schools or just leaving the area. Theo promptly defaced the entire book with a red marker. Sigh.

We don’t know what return to school in August looks like. Most likely still masks, maybe still weekly testing, but if they’re planning on full days of school I’m going to assume the classes won’t be split into morning and afternoon cohorts, so no social distancing. Does this bother me? No. And it looks like progress is happening on vaccines for younger kids, so that could be a game changer.

Speaking of vaccines, as of now out of 550 attendees at my event (440 new sign ups), the medical waiver people is looking pretty good - there’s one kid, two people who approached me about it months ago, one sister of a person who approached me, and one person I don’t know but who may have selected medical waiver on accident as two other people did. I’m sure I’ll get more, but I think my fear that hundreds of right wingers would try to flood me with fake medical waivers was unfounded. In the end, people don’t care that much. They’re content to make nasty comments on social media and send cruel emails, but that’s all they’ve got in them, really. 

This weekend I have my first gig since March of 2020. We had a much needed rehearsal Thursday night, and I struggled. I may for the first time ever try some vocal warmups just so I don’t sound like crap for the first half of the show, which is our new CD release party. Next weekend we have a delayed wedding gig in which I’ll ironically be singing “It’s Been a Long, Long Time”. But that’s it for the summer unless something else pops up. We did get a tentative offer for Austin in November, something we do every year. I think it’ll be fine, even in that reddest of states...but nothing is set in stone. Right now is kind of like walking on sand over concrete - hard and also slippery.

So next week I try to hustle to get all the behind the scenes stuff done that I couldn’t do this week because I was busy dealing with customer service issues - next week I need to start booking travel, get insurance, arrange the class schedule, judging schedule, set up our scholarship system, get my DEI statement vetted by a smart person and published. It’s a lot. I’m going to hustle in this last week I have with kids in school all day. Then we camp in Malibu a good portion of the week after. I hope I get cell service up there.

Opening night

So I opened my event last night, for the first time since Feb 2020. All last year I wondered if this would even be possible in 2021, and for a portion of this year I was dead set against it (much like I was dead set against a second baby - hi, Theo!). Lately I’ve been afraid that despite all I’ve been through that nobody will end up showing up, that it will be a sad little pig hoof of a year with empty contests, no money, and all the right wingers patting their swollen bellies with glee over the libtard’s own discriminatory vaccine policies coming home to roost. 

But no. Opening night was a rousing success. The technical part worked perfectly, and as of now we are on track for a normal attendance year. Normal. Can you believe it? I’m over the moon. 

Of course this could all be fool’s gold - just the most enthusiastic few hundred up front, and then a steep drop off (much like waning vaccine enthusiasm). So I’ll temper expectations. Hell, the whole thing could still end up canceled. But right now things are looking really good, so I’m just going to let myself be in that.

It occurred to me last night that if I am able to financially delay my opening night, I really should. There’s no reason to be “open” for seven months. As long as the info is there, and everyone knows we’re on, why start selling? Why start customer service duties months before I really need to? My goal is to open in April or May of next year instead of Feb. Why not buy myself more time off, if I can? 

In other news, the camping weekend I have to admit was stressful for me because I just couldn’t get my head out of this registration stuff. It was freezing cold at night and boiling hot during the day, and we were in a spot that was pure loose dirt with no shade, so everything was absolutely filthy. I also had brought nothing to do, so while the men went off fishing and the other mom was away at a funeral or in her camper relaxing, I was alone with four screaming kids. It was not fun for me. So I think I probably did better than I would have had I been at home obsessing, but I also didn’t enjoy myself very much. 

We go camping across the street from the beach in Malibu in two weeks, right after school ends. I’m going to bet that for various reasons this will be far more relaxing for me. 

Seven more days of school! I think I’m counting down the days even more than they are.