Here & There, 1.15.2022
Well, Omicron got me this week. My school re-opened on January 3rd with no testing or precautions, so I honestly wasn’t even surprised when my throat started to hurt last Saturday. It felt inevitable. I’ve been really sick this week, way worse than I expected considering I’m vaccinated, boosted, and relatively young & healthy.
Maybe I’ll write about it more at some other point, maybe not. For now, all I have to say is that I remain furious at how little our society values children and the people who teach them. It’s exhausting & it feels like no one cares.
Anyway, despite feeling very sick this week, there were still lots of good things. Grilled cheese and chicken noodle soup deliveries. Amazingly helpful coworkers. An ice roller to help with the headaches. A fun puzzle for when I had the energy to stand. A delightful new-to-me mystery series. A few short, wintry walks with Sean as I started to feel better. Waking up on Friday morning to a beautiful falling snow & not needing to go anywhere.
*I was bored during quarantine, so I logged into Instagram for the first time in quite a while this week. The first few links are from there, just FYI!
A few links from here & there this week:
I got lots of conflicting advice around my Covid quarantine, and this is pretty much how it felt.
“We’ve got to stop working for free. We’ve got to stop giving them our free labor because we’re upholding a system that is not sustainable.” Adrienne was talking in her Instagram stories this week about how she’s not going in 2 hours early anymore to prep for her school day because she’s tired of working for free, and it really resonated with me. I can’t figure out how to link to the exact story, but she’s a rad teacher in Chicago that you should follow!
Along the same lines, this advice to “let it fail” struck a chord with me. The current education system feels too broken to cling to any longer. I also stand by this sentiment.
Moving on from education, I love the idea of a yearly or monthly “Did It” list. It seems like a fun way to reflect and celebrate all that happened!
In the midst of feeling very sick, and also feeling incredibly frustrated to still be sick after more than a week, this podcast episode on “How to Listen to Your Body” was just what I needed to hear.
This Atlantic article, about how technology has increased our availability and decreased the appropriate amount of time to take to respond to someone, was so interesting. I’ve been thinking about this quote (emphasis my own) for a while:
“Ellie Harmon, a senior instructor at Portland State University, pointed out to me that technology isn’t in and of itself stressful—other people’s expectations are. She came to understand this while studying how hikers on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail engaged with their phones. When she was on the trail for her research project, despite there being more cell service than she expected, she said she experienced a “perfect disconnection,” where “the obligations to others just dropped away.””
We used to do a version of this two-basket system for kitchen towels in our San Francisco apartment, but we just sort of stopped doing it when we moved. Not for any particular reason, but I think we ended up using those baskets to store other things, and thus haven’t had any real system for kitchen laundry since. This was a good reminder to bring that system back!
I’m not sure where it came from, but I got an itch to try making homemade candy bars this week. This is kind of random, because I don’t even like store-bought candy bars that much, but here we are. I’ve been eyeing this Nanaimo bar recipe (NYT Cooking) and also these homemade Twix bars.
Priya Krishna’s new YouTube series “On the Job” for NYT Cooking looks so good! I love her emphasis on labor in the food industry. Can’t wait to watch!
“Any exercise in any setting likely should help us cope better this winter, the researchers said.” This study on how cross country skiers were less likely to develop anxiety was interesting, and a good reminder to prioritize movement during my adjustment to winter.
Speaking of cross country skiing, I have this list of Twin Cities parks for cross-country skiing bookmarked. Sean cross country skis regularly, but since I haven’t cross country skied in… at least a decade? Maybe longer? I think we’ll start at Como Park first so I can rent skis to see how I like it.