It feels weird and guilt-inducing to try to have a normal life while all around us things are crumbling. A political pundit summed it up well recently when he said one minute you’re protesting, the next you’re buying new placemats…and it all seems so ridiculous. And yet everyone says you need to take breaks for your own sanity, and tune out so you don’t get overwhelmed; you have to balance your life otherwise you’ll spiral into inaction. Also, when you have kids, you have to keep up some semblance of normal life so they don’t just get scared and anxious. But you also have to stay engaged and keep fighting. There is a lot of conflicting messaging right now. It’s hard to know what’s the right thing to do. I made a tone deaf post on FB recently decrying the lack of basic decency in America right now - and unsurprisingly all my POC friends swooped in to tell me it’s always been this way and express their annoyance with me that I’m only now just noticing it, because of my white privilege. And I get that, but also, I’m not only just now seeing it, and the point I was trying to make was about how this cruel and sadistic regime enables people’s cruelty and racism in ways we haven’t seen (publicly) in decades; I don’t think that can be debated. But I can’t explain that, because it makes me sound defensive, and I can’t delete the post because it’s “dirty deleting”, so I have to just leave it up there for people to misread and continue to paint me as just another clueless white lady who thought we solved racism when Obama was elected. Sigh. This is where we are. And I hate it. From now on I’m going to more carefully vet my posts because this one was definitely a mistake and not at all the message I was trying to convey and not at all how I see things. Lesson learned.
In other news, I started the terzepatide pills yesterday. Just took pill #2. So I can say with some certitude that a) I am not allergic to it, and b) I’m not so sensitive to it that I instantly start projectile vomiting. I can already see a problem, though - since it’s a pill that you’re supposed to dissolve under your tongue and not chew or swallow, so far what I see happening is it pretty much just dissolves into your saliva and then you swallow it so you’re pretty much just swallowing the pill anyway. I’ve seen people complain about this online. So my prediction at this point is that these pills will be largely ineffective - I’m going to guess I’ll take these for a month with zero results, then switch to shots. Most people seem to go this route and notice an instant change.
I have *some* of our summer figured out. I was able to get the kids registered for one week of a local inexpensive camp in June that focuses on volunteering efforts. It’s definitely an experiment; it was recommended to me but nobody had actually had their kids there. Still, it’s local, cheap, and just one week right after school ends. Then I booked a cruise that straddles two weeks in June and gets us back on July 1, so I can just not book any camps during that time since we’ll be gone too many days each week for camp to be worthwhile. So now I only have to find a camp for four weeks, and the one I have my sites on is the one they barely got into last year, which opens for registration on Thursday. I called and they have a CIT program for older kids that you just sign up for, no interview process. So I’ve got my fingers crossed that I will be able to get both kids in there. I suppose I’ll just go camp out on the sidewalk like I did last year. Stressful!
We’re headed to the desert as a family next weekend, and it might be our last, sadly, as the only available weekend after that is Memorial Day, and odds are we’ll be playing Knott’s that night (also, it’s going to be wicked hot). I’d like to go the weekend after, too, to shut the place down for the summer, but again, wicked hot, and Knott’s. I’ll miss that place. I hope we can spend lots of time there in the fall.