Work With Hope

BOTTOM LEVEL: Master Bedroom, master bath, laundry room, patio

SECOND LEVEL: Entrance to the garage

THIRD LEVEL: front door, living room, back balcony

FOURTH LEVEL: dining room, kitchen, guest bath, spare bedroom, front balcony

Given the levels and important features on each, I find myself on the stairs much of the day. At first I thought this might be annoying, but it’s funny how quickly I’ve fallen into the rhythm of the house and going from level to level feels no more than moving from one room to the next (with one exception, today I was rewiring an outlet in the kitchen, and I had to make innumerable trips down to the garage to turn the power on and off…I felt it then, but that may also have been the frustration with things not working).

The advantages to a multi-level place are how high the ceilings are and how bright every room is. I also love that my bedroom at the bottom is a true retreat, completely away from all the other functions of the house, and wonderfully cool, even on a warm day.

Living life on multiple levels takes some adjustment, but I’ve found it fits me just fine.

Be well, be strong

Today’s playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Ce6C69rKG1iVDA9ii37n2?si=JU18ILsXRvmEABrG1t8xPw

As I think I said, I moved in 17 days ago. My new condo is in a nice complex in the hills of Orange. Though there are several complexes in this area, my street is a little alcove of about twenty addresses, and it feels very secluded from the rest of the area. People regularly walk their dogs and talk to each other even in these restricted conditions (each of the condos has balconies, so sometimes people talk from ground to balcony, something I call Romeo and Juliet Social Distancing).

I haven’t met many of the other people on the street, though everyone seems friendly enough and says hello on their walks. I suppose it was unrealistic to expect people to bring baked goods in the current situation. However, I have met my immediate neighbor, the one place I share a wall with.

She is a lovely person, and we have taken quickly to saying hello when we see each other and send texts every few days checking on one another’s health. She is in a more vulnerable group than I, and she was self isolating a full week before I started. So she was an old hand at this craziness and was reassuring during the first day.

I go to the store regularly, going early in the morning so I avoid most people, but once a week I go to Trader Joe’s. If you don’t know why, you must not have a Trader Joe’s near you. As I prepared for my trip today, I texted my neighbor and asked her (as I always do) if I could pick something up for her. However, this time instead of her usual no, she asked if I could get a few things for her because she doesn’t want to face the lines and the crowds at TJs. I was never happier to do so, and as I left the bag on her doorstep, rang the bell, and stepped away, I felt home in a way I haven’t before.

Most of us live in complexes or tracts, but neighborhoods are few. In my first two houses I lived as if I were on a 100 acre estate, even though my next door neighbors were no more than ten feet away. The opportunity to know, to look out for, and best of all help each other has been washed out of modern city living, and for a moment today brought together by this place and this terrible time, I found it.

Be safe, be strong

Today’s Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7gYIK14rMIRYJK4TuyWBuS?si=KSZtCtkoQdm48iayZMLCWA

Well, over that weekend federal guidelines recommended that we maintain shelter in place protocols for at least another month. While I’m sure that others worried about their jobs and loved ones (I did too), my first thought was!”How am I going to do blogposts for another thirty days!”

So in an effort to pad the portal, I’ve decided to intersperse “thought pieces” with a pictorial portrait of my new condo, since it is unlikely that anyone is going to see it for quite some time

This is my middle balcony. I have a balcony or patio on each level. It is right off the living room on the floor one enters. It is lovely as you can see, and it has the sound of running water from the (artificial) stream below. The sky has been incredibly blue recently, hasn’t it? It will be a wonderful place to enjoy drinks or even dinner with friends…ah, dinner with friends, I remember that.

I’ll show you a bit more in a couple of days, we’ve got time.

Be safe, be strong.

As we enter the third week of somewhat intense lockdown, I was reflecting on the first two weeks and realizing (as I suppose many others are) that I am not well made for this. I hear of people on Facebook and elsewhere who are reveling in the time and solitude, and though I have always enjoyed my space, I find myself counting hours by minutes and looking for ANY excuse to leave the house (if you need me to do your shopping, call. If you want me to stand in line at the DMV…). I think this is mainly because I lack two fundamental characteristics that are most needed to manage this time, patience and the ability to give up control.

I am not a particularly patient person. To quote Carrie Fischer’s book, Postcards from the Edge, “Instant gratification takes too long.” Now, to be clear, I’m not particularly impatient with people (some may disagree) or situations, only with time. I hate waiting, a fault which is compounded by the unknown. Tell me you are going to be five, or fifteen, or an hour late, and I’m generally fine, but make me wait for even a short time and I’m going nuts. COVID-19 is like the most annoying late person ever. No authority, with the exception of your President, is making any true predictions for how long we will be home bound, and all we can do is wait. Without being able to set our internal clocks for a release date, the wait seems unending.

To call me a control freak, would probably be a disservice…to control freaks. I like to know where every aspect of my life is at any moment, and I want things to go the way I want them to go. Uncertainty is great, as long as you tell me how much there is going to be and exactly how long it will last. Oddly, my life hasn’t been particularly orderly in the last few years, but this has not made me less of a control freak, just a stressed out control freak. Even more than patience, the lack of real control in my life during this time has made me want to peal the skin off my face. In efforts to remain in control, I set up order to my day, to what I eat, to exercise, to work, but these only hide the terrifying things which I cannot control.

Of course in reality all of life is waiting and we have surprisingly little control over any of it. In our day to day “normal” lives we can’t control other people or circumstances (as much as we may try), and so much of life is about waiting an indeterminate time for something to happen, or not. I believe that the abrupt massive constriction of our lives in the face of a merciless indiscriminate virus makes us more aware of how powerless we are.

I hope that this time may end soon, but it’s not in my (shaking) hands.

Be safe, be strong!

Just as yesterday I talked about the abrupt shift to online instruction, today I want to talk about another paradigm slam that our new realities have made commonplace. Since we are locked in our houses either alone or with a tight circle, the bulk of our friendly and business intercourse has moved overnight to various digital platforms, from texting and calling, to the video options of Skype, FaceTime, GoToMeeting, Zoom, etc. I FaceTime with my daughter regularly. My next door neighbor meets with her Zen group multiple times a week for meditation and sharing. People are holding virtual cocktail parties with friends, we held a virtual book club this week, and of course, those that can are continuing business via zoom meetings all day long.

Though it has been impressive how quickly this shift has taken place and how many, who might never have considered using these tools, have taken to them, I am also hearing amid the flood of communication a recognition of loss and a fatigue with the medium. This is particularly true with business via zoom. I have had many home workers say to me how tired they are after a meeting and how the platform has quickly lost its novelty and has become a drudge. A counselor who met with patients for a full day of FaceTime sessions said that she had never felt as exhausted when meeting people in her office. One friend did say that she hadn’t noticed any difference, though she had been doing this for a while, and I suspect there is always some outlier experience. “FaceTime Fatigue” will be one of the side effects of the realities of the spring of 2020. Though I suspect there are myriad reasons for this fatigue, three come to mind as probably most prevalent.

The first is focus. When in a meeting room, each person is simultaneously immersed in the meeting (not to say that people don’t drift off) and there are fewer distractions. Sitting in one’s kitchen, it is far easier to lose focus or to notice something that is cooking, needs cleaning, or needs doing later in the day. Adding in the noise and demands of children, appliances, and spouses (in that order), it is a wonder that we have any focus for the upcoming sales campaign. Just as we are distracted, so is every other attendee, so one can never be certain the level of attention or comprehension of the others. Once again, this is not unique to digital meetings; however, every challenge to a live meeting is compounded at home, and the exhaustion comes from working to hold focus in a wind tunnel.

The second issue is more directly tied to the nature of screen communications. Even with the best of cameras and connections (which we often don’t have) it is challenging to read affect over a screen as easily as we do in person. Our communication is built on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visual and aural cues, many of which are literally flattened on a screen. We are having to make more assumptions, more guesses, which creates low level stress through the whole encounter. I noticed this during our virtual book club, when I found myself having to be much broader in humor, and I was texting people during the meeting to explain subtext of what I was saying to avoid hurt feelings. The usual easy going patter of the meeting was doubled and tripled in complexity by “reading”challenges, turning much of the conversation into, “What do you mean by that?”

Finally there are the practical maddening challenges of an imperfect medium. Echoing sound, uncertainty of who is speaking, and people leaving the digital room and reentering because of poor connections are all part of almost every digital meeting. Most meetings take several minutes to simply establish everyone in the room, and by this time many attendees are climbing the walls, “Fix your stinking microphone!” “Mute yourself when you are not talking!” ” Unmute yourself when you want to talk!” are thoughts going through peoples heads instead of the focus of the meeting. Something particularly maddening for me is the inability for two people to speak at once. While this is never a good practice, and maybe we will become better at it during this time, it’s bothersome to hear the blur and then have each person stop only to start again simultaneously like two cars edging out into an intersection of Hell and No. lack of visual clues makes this all the more challenging both for the speakers and all the listeners.

Apart from these is the interesting new phenomena of “Zoom bombing,” strangers jumping into public zoom meetings and making a scene. If you want an example, search “Poor Jennifer” on YouTube, but be warned, it’s NSFW.

This is not to suggest that we abandon this platform, any more than abandoning text because of autocorrrect fails. Several imperfect things are saving us from isolation and chaos right now. However, by acknowledging the challenges, we might be able to create experiences that are more practical and less stressful.

Darn it! My mic has been off this whole time so no one heard anything!

Be safe, be strong.

I have been asked by a few colleagues whether I am finding the current national shift to digital instruction gratifying. I even had a former colleague call me to thank me for helping to make this shift possible. While I am humbled and grateful for his thanks, I have to say that I don’t want my name on whatever it is that’s going to happen because I fear that the coming months may set back digital instruction by a decade.

Lest I be accused of revisionism, I have advocated for greater integration of digital tools in education for almost two decades. I know that, used correctly under the guidance of a strong teacher, digital tools can improve performance and expand access. However, if you read that last sentence, there are several qualifiers, none of which is being met in the current ” throw them in the deep end of the pool and see if they swim” approach. We are being forced to make the digital shift too quickly after not preparing people for it for the past ten years when it has been clearly coming.

There are several elements of this shift that make it necessary, but unlikely to have broad success beyond having an untrained workforce. Students who have been instructed and assessed in one set of methodologies are suddenly completing the year using another. It is inevitable that performance will change, and the reliability of assessments will shrink. Talking to teachers I know, I’ve heard that many schools and districts, realizing this fundamental unfairness, are indirectly (and directly) telling teachers not to let performances during this digital shift affect overall grade. This would be fine if instruction were only about grades and not about learning. Another inequality is the gap between levels of access and equipment. Though some districts are loaning equipment during the shift (anecdotally, some are running out) and some cable companies are even supplying free access, this is far from a level field. Advantages based on background go all the way back to Gatsby, but a quick shift such as this will exacerbate these further. For schools that have already moved to tru 1x1environments, this issue is not as clear, but even these represent a small portion of schools today.

Even the assumption that a class designed to be live can flip a switch and become digital is highly flawed. Many teachers will fall into what I have called for some time the “Old wine into new wineskins” trap, assuming that things that work in a classroom situation simply have to be made videos or handouts and expecting the same results. Digital tools call for very specific types of instruction and simply scanning lecture notes is not a replacement for a live classroom discussion.

“So, what’s the big deal?” some might ask, “We do this for a few months and then go back to the old way and we will be that much further ahead in our use of digital tools from this experience.” While I wish this could be so, I believe that widespread failure, or even lack of brilliant success, may be used to set back the integration of these tools by a decade or more. The anecdotal stories of “how hard” it was or how it just seemed that the students weren’t leaning as well (locked in their homes, learning in a new way, with the co-pressures of a global pandemic and a global economic collapse surrounding them), will pollute the stream of progress and will be used as excuses to not take necessary steps. One of the most pernicious things I regularly hear from (mostly veteran) teachers is, ” We tried that, it didn’t work.” To which I always want to reply, “Well, maybe that’s because you stank at it, and we should do it better!”

So while I remain confident that digital integration is part of the future of education, I do not take this current turn on a dime as a harbinger of good things to come. More likely it will be one more cost of this challenging time.

Perhaps you have seen them, and I am late to the game. I have seen chalk messages on Facebook, but this morning I came upon two during my walk to the store. These random messages of hope are apparently becoming part of our collective coping mechanism. Yesterday my friends were telling me about a “socially distant” neighborhood picnic, with each family eating on their own porches and drawing chalk messages on their sidewalks.

What could capture the hopeful spirit of this impermanent time better than a positive message drawn in chalk left for the world? We cannot touch each other, but we can touch each other and maybe provide just the encouragement to manage another day.

Please don’t tell me about environmental impact of colored chalk entering our water source, surely we’ve made up for it in other ways during these days of less.

All I know is I now have a driveway, and I’m going to get me some chalk.

Be safe, be strong

Interesting question as I head into the second week of these posts: How long is this sustainable? Someone asked me this during the week that I started, and I realized that I had very little exit strategy. I guess I figured that I would conclude on the day that we re-emerge like Chilean miners trapped beneath the earth. However, as that day appears to be more and more distant, and also the real possibility exists that there will not be a hard stop by a rolling ending to our confinement, I will have to examine this in the days and weeks ahead (I’m sure if I continue in as depressing a vein as yesterday, some would prefer that I finish now). So what I’m saying today is that I will do this for 30 days if we are in for that long, and then I’ll reassess.

Today I want to talk about a topic I’ve been thinking of writing about for some time. It is indisputable that as we work with tools to shape our world, our tools are simultaneously shaping us. This is certainly true of digital tools that have given us abilities and opportunities beyond anything we have had before, but have also changed our habits and our thinking. Nowhere can this be more clearly seen than with autocorrect.

The autocorrect feature allows us to type more quickly on a digital keyboard by anticipating the words that we are typing and offering to complete them or to correct spelling once a word is done. It is a convenience given the challenges of typing on a tiny phone keyboard. Though many find this feature annoying and troublesome, the more one texts (which we are doing more than ever these days) the more one begins to integrated it into typing patterns. And with the convenience comes the cost of the autocorrect fail.

There are actually two types of autocorrect errors, one obvious and one less so. The first is what most think of when hearing the name; the machine substitutes an unintended word for what was typed. Everyone has had this frustration as we repeatedly retype our intended word or phrase, only to have it incorrectly corrected multiple times (if I had meant for you to go duck yourself…). When the miscorrection is missed, we send texts that are confusing and sometimes hilarious. This happens so often that we have developed the protocol of typing just the mistaken word or words in the following text message, and the reader knows to reread the correction into the original. No machine is perfect, and we accept the limitations for the convenience.

The second type of autocorrect fail is one which I see more and more, at least in my own writing, and one which is far more interesting to me. This fail is when we type something incorrectly, knowing it is incorrect, and assume that autocorrect will fix it, but it doesn’t. This is often true with spelling errors. We are not certain about spelling, so we type in an approximation and continue typing, usually sure that the correction must have occurred. This is done because we have learned that most of the time, this works, and only after we notice only after it is sent and curse the autocorrect feature for its error. These errors are often more frustrating than the first type, because these are truly our own, and while we blame the machine, we are blaming it for our own mistakes.

The second type of error is more interesting to me than the first, because it illustrates the principle that tools shape us. In the first incident, we are using a yet-imperfect tool, and the imperfections show when our demands are greater than current capacity. However, the second type of error suggests that we are actively doing less, relying on the tool to do more than a typewriter ever could, and our reliance on this ability results in errors.

As with most human behavior and all machine activity, this is neither good nor bad, it just is. I’m certain there is a tendency toward judgment about “lazy” writers who don’t take the time to look up the spelling of a word. However, I see it as evolution of the way we communicate, anticipating abilities that are there, but not fully there yet. As we communicate more than ever through new tools, while we adjust the tools to do this more correctly, the tools are simultaneously adjusting us to use them more fully.

Be safe, be strong.

While taking my daily walk to the store today, I was greeted with just a nub of a rainbow on the horizon. Of course one cannot see a rainbow without immediately jumping to metaphor and anthropomorphism.

Is this the “shelter in place” rainbow, a rainbow that is confined in its dwelling and unable to stretch forth and shine? A rainbow that reminds us that it’s there, but remains at a safe distance? A brilliant metaphor for the many who are likewise confined, yet still shining?

Or is this a metaphor for the current crushing of the individual and collective human spirit by the darkness of the virus and its horrible touch in lives? As we listen to stories on the news and on the phone of devastation caused by virus and by response to virus, it is truly hard to maintain much hope. A rainbow, the most hopeful and glorious natural phenomena, that is unable to compete with the oppressive heavy cloud cover?

Or is it a sign to us that even in the darkness of the current moment, that the undeniable light at the heart of the human condition cannot be denied? Even in total cloud cover, the nub of transcendence cannot be snuffed out. As awful as this time, this moment, may be, and as frightening as what may be tomorrow, there remains within nature and the human spirit a spark of something, something that continues to make it worthwhile.

It was instructive to see the “rain-nub” this morning. Today was the worst day as far as my own spirits are concerned. The battle between the devastating disease and its real victims and the anxiety about what the ultimate effects of this time will be on my remaining life and on our world fights out within my soul and overwhelms me with exhaustion and insomnia. Grief, both altruistic for the real sufferings of others, and selfish for my own small desires can be particularly paralyzing. It was nice to see something on the horizon that suggested that it’s worth continuing to head there.

In my favorite book by John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire, there is a phrase that captures the moment pretty well. Our job during this time is to “keep passing the open windows” (as opposed to jumping out of them). Lily, once of the central characters, a sensitive and artistic young woman (though likely clinically depressed like most characters in Irving’s novels), identifies this as the true challenge of her young life, one which she succeeds…until she doesn’t. For many, life, physically and emotionally, is and is going to be pretty brutal, and though this essential reality can’t be changed, the one thing we can do is not be lured into the invitation to escape. Whether this escape is through giving in to anger, giving up parts of ourselves, giving up on other people, or just giving up hope, “keep passing the open windows.” Instead, look through them and you might just see a nub of a rainbow on the horizon.

Be strong, be safe…keep passing open windows.

Yesterday was, to quote one of my friends, “a lot,” and though I’m not apologizing, as it was a completely therapeutic exercise for me to write it, I thought lighter fare might be called for today.

I was doing my morning “keep from going crazy” walk (how long after this is past will we maintain the muscle memory of evasive maneuvering whenever someone walks our way), and I came upon this sign. I’ve seen these signs before, and they always make me smile.

I suppose this is good thing for all of us to remember right now. Though we are cut off, and separated, and sometimes just falling apart, there remains a beauty inside each of our homes, each of our selves that transcends this awful time.

Remember as you think of your absent friends, or pass people anonymously on the street, we’re all beautiful inside.

Be safe, be strong.