The Elusiveness of Normal

I’m not sure I can be normal again.

I’m fully vaccinated, about to leave 29° snow behind for a vacation in Maui, and these are my thoughts: Should I take some calming medication before sitting on a crowded airplane with a mask on for five hours? This is a plane where everyone has had to have a negative Covid test within 72 hours, but that’s not it.

I’m not scared of Covid; I’m scared of realizing that normal is no longer possible.

I look back at the past year; I’ve made a family recipe art book, tackled art projects, organized an online theater-watching group, read a bazillion books. I even was incredibly excited about getting a chocolate-dipped ice cream pop!

But now, I wake up adrift. Plans don’t excite me. I’m sick of snow, sick of skiing, sick of Netflix, sick of cooking, sick of grocery store pickup ordering, sick of my computer. I started posting poetry on signs on my yard, and now I’m sick of poetry. Sometimes I actually don’t feel like reading, which is truly cataclysmic. Vaccination has been like spotting a finish line and totally sagging before you cross it.

 

We just restarted our athletic club membership so I could swim again … and I haven’t gone. I’m not worried about catching Covid at the club, not worried about germs. I’m worried that swimming won’t feel good.

Early on in my Third Third, I discovered the Big Three that were necessary for a happy Third Third:

Without teaching at the Alaska Literacy Program, without in-person classes with OLÉ, my days have become sort of adrift. My ability to adapt has petered out. The only schedule I have is on the computer: a writing class, author interviews, recorded theater. Only occasionally am I “of use.” My community is on Zoom.

Our daughter quit her first job, one she had loved. For the last year, I characterized our phone calls as her trying to convince herself she was happy with her job. She faced workplace issues complicated by working remotely, and she was valiant in framing things positively, but her heart was no longer in it. It became just too hard and she quit. Hooray! She radiates happiness now. I’m a big supporter of eliminating negative conditions quickly and decisively.

But the ones I’m in – the ones we’re all in – just aren’t quickly and decisively going away, and I’m losing the ability to convince myself that “X will be fun; let’s do X!” Or even “I feel like doing X.” Or even “X has to be done, suck it up and do it.” I don’t suck it up anymore; I just drift.

I know that my negative conditions don’t include illness or death, job loss, or eviction – as many people’s do – and I’m grateful for that. I know that the snow I’m sick of covers a yard I may appreciate when the snow melts. For goodness sake, I’m heading to Maui! (stop whining!) But I also know that the Big Three for a happy Third Third have been disrupted, and it will take time to re-create the Third Third that works for me.

We’ve had our first fully-vaccinated guests for dinner, been guests for the first time in someone else’s fully-vaccinated home. Both those times felt just like the old normal once we were in them. Really. But they took some psychic lifting to actually do them. They’re still not a new normal.

We may have landed in this pandemic suddenly, but I think we’re going to have to lift ourselves out of it with baby steps.

 

Happy birthday, Our Third Thirds

It’s now been a year of blogging. 170 blog posts. Lots and lots of illustrations. Hooray! But time for a performance review: Is it doing what I’d hoped, both for me and you? Is it doing things I didn’t expect; did it surprise me? You?

The problem is that Internet writing can often feel like a black hole. I don’t see an audience, hear any applause. Instead, I get “likes” and comments and analytics telling me how many page views I got. I just came across a bit from Penelope/Meredith who said blogs tend to go away unless readers show their appreciation. “It takes … will to produce [a blog]. It takes hearing from, and feeling the support of, your audience to marshal that will.” How else will I know if my blog works for you?

She recommends:
•    Like posts on Facebook. “Even better, comment.” Facebook only sends out posts with “engagement.” So engage.
•    “Click through to the website. Those clicks matter.”
•    Recommend to a friend.
These things apply to me!

In the midst of my intermittent floundering over the last year, I discovered the required Big Three: Structure, Purpose, and a Sense of Community. I didn’t know the blog would help with all three. I didn’t know it would build connections as people touched base after reading a post. That is the biggest treat!

In the very first post, I elaborated on the ten reasons why I thought the Third Third was such a big deal and what I wanted to happen. This was #9: “How do I re-insert creativity into my life?”

So I’d say that one worked. I write and paint regularly. Sometimes it’s hard; I worry that I’ve run dry and have nothing to say. Most times, a thought is rummaging around in my brain and I am SO GLAD that I have a ready vehicle to try and work out its expression. I like figuring out how to say things both verbally and visually.

The biggest surprise: the positive reaction to the illustrations. I’d always thought of them as little doodles; the ones I drew when I was ten look the same. It has been really, really startling and delightful to get compliments on the art. (Now, spread the word!)

It helps to have a year’s worth of posts that remind me of what I have been doing/thinking/wondering about. Reading over old blogs gives me a nice burst of pleasant reminiscence … and makes me feel less like a lazy shit. So I’ll count that as an unanticipated benefit of the blog.

When readers tell me that posts have spoken to them, that sometimes I help them clarify their own explorations, questions, (anxieties, tribulations), I feel great relief! Your reader comments on the website or Facebook are often so eloquent and insightful they leave me gasping. None of us likes to feel alone. Please, add your voice to the mix.

A year later, and I still don’t have “a theme, an over-arching meaning to this part of my life.” My friend Sharon said, “But you’re a blogger,” as if that gave me definition, an identity. Does it? New in the mail today: blog business cards! At least I now have the trappings of an identity.

I could be very happy as a blogger in my Third Third. I could if I believed I was serving a valuable function. Sometimes I think, “Oh, no, what if I’m just a Florence Foster Jenkins who thinks she’s doing something right and well, and I’m really a dud?”

On the other hand, there’s that starfish story, about the guy throwing a stranded starfish into the ocean. He couldn’t save them all, he could barely save a fraction of them, but it made a difference to that one. So if ten people enjoy my blog, is that all it takes to make me a Blogger-with-a-capital-B?

I don’t think so, so I need your help. If a post resonates, please share it. Comment. Send people to the website 3rdthirds.blogspot.com. While there, take a look through older posts, find one that spoke to you or made you laugh, and share it. (I feel like Peter Pan exhorting everyone to clap their hands to help Tinkerbell or the Velveteen Rabbit wanting to become real.) I’ll be curious to see which posts go out. You can share to your Facebook friends, to your real-life friends, to colleagues or family, even to “influencers.” Please do this widely and often, and you can give me suggestions as to where potential readers hang out and read.

I think I’d like to be a Blogger-with-a-capital-B.

Anatomy of a Sleepless Night

When I discovered the Big Three recommendations for a good Third Third (structure, purpose, and a sense of community), I knew my most obvious challenge was probably going to be sleeping. Or rather, sleeping on a regular basis on a regular schedule for a regular number of hours. Or, to be more accurate, sleeping. Period.

Some people fall asleep. They close their eyes, and sleep comes to them. With my husband, sleep overtakes him. For me, sleep hides. I have to hunt for it, coax it out of hiding, and hope it decides to stay.

I used to follow little schedules: no exercising after 8 p.m. Begin sleep readiness and shut-down behaviors at 9 p.m. Go into bed at 10 p.m. Hope.

When Sophie was born, that was shot to hell. I don’t think she slept through the night till she was eleven. Even if she’d slept, I’d be Alert to Her. After I stopped being crazy from lack of sleep (Did I stop?), I adapted. I simply acknowledged that every now and then, I’d “go around the clock,” stopped fretting about it, and went along pretty smoothly. If you don’t worry about being tired, you can find that you don’t feel tired. But that was my Second Third.

Right now, writing this, I’m sort of dulled. Not comatose, but just a step up. No zip. I had a long, long night.

10 p.m. Uh, oh, I already knew I’d messed up. I was reading Nicci French’s Thursday’s Child, which is fourth in her series. Her books are intelligent and clever, but they kind of make my hair stand on end. I’d decided it was a daytime-only read book, but at 10 p.m., I’d already messed that up.

11 p.m. Go into bed. Pick some reading material that will force Nicci French out of my head. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time had worked the night before. Tim’s head hits the pillow, and he’s out.

12 a.m. According to general relativity, time moves more slowly closer to the earth’s surface because of gravity so, for example, a clock at sea level will run slower than one on a mountaintop. But is the clock itself actually slowing down – its mechanism and all – or is the elapsed time slowing down? Would the clock show a minute and ten seconds, for example, or would it show a longer minute? Obviously, Stephen Hawking is not putting me to sleep. He’s giving me IDEAS! I am so absorbed in this – I’ll have to check out the 1962 water tower/atomic clock experiment he refers to – that I have two choices: get up, embrace the night, follow this physics problem to its conclusion, OR try a chemical aid.

I have several choices: Advil PM or prescription Lunesta. I have to make this decision quickly because any later, and I’ll be stuck and groggy in the morning. I go with my latest experiment, that ZzzQuil generic.

1 a.m. I’m definitely drowsy, but now my restless legs are awake in bed. My head has moved off clocks and is back with Nicci French and who did it? I have learned that there is no relation between physical exhaustion and falling asleep. Either the toggle switch toggles to “sleep” or it doesn’t. I’d gone for a hike today, been outside, drank my warm milk, done all the right things to promote “feeling tired.” No dice.

3 a.m. I am really, really trying not to fret about the clocks and gravity. I think maybe if I browse a Good Housekeeping magazine, it will be brief (short articles), not intellectually exciting, and not scary. I lie in bed.

4 a.m. I decide to get up and go out to the couch so my reading won’t disturb Tim. As I cruise around getting a blanket, Tim emerges: “What’s going on?” and scares the shit out of me. Now I’m wide awake with adrenalin pumping and might as well finish the Nicci French book. Maybe once the mystery is resolved, I can relax and fall asleep.

6 a.m. I think that works; I may have dozed off for a while. Tim says goodbye. I get the newspaper.

8 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. I may have lost some time there because I’m aware of waking up to look at the clock (which is at sea level). I feel queasy and fogged. This is not going to be one of those smooth round-the-clock days. This is going to be a mess. I miss a 10:30 gathering.

I compensate by cleaning the stove, sink, and cabinets and Googling the water tower clock experiment and Einstein’s time dilation.

Relativity question: Is my Third Third going to be longer than my previous thirds because I spend more of it awake? Is my clock running slower? Or is that just a foggy question from a sleep-deprived fool?

Profiles in Third Thirds: Cindy

I ran into Cindy at our college reunion while I was harassing everyone with my question, “What are you doing in your Third Third?” Cindy handed me her business card – for her photography. For more than 30 years, she’d been a lawyer.

Now she’s readying things for her first solo exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum. One of her photographs was also just selected for the Metro card when the Expo line opens in 2016 in Santa Monica! (My transit-lover side thrills at this!) You can see her incredible photos at www.cindybendat.com.

So I thought, great, I’ll have Cindy tell her story of switching from a legal career to photography. But it’s not like that at all. For one thing, it’s not like Cindy discovered photography in her Third Third. It’s not a New Thing at all.

“One of my most interesting photographs is of Mick Jagger – taken with my trusty Instamatic when I was 12 years old!” *

Cindy took photography classes in high school and college and later joined a local group of photographers, but while she was working as a lawyer, she did most of her photography when she traveled. (Her friends got to see the slide shows.) Digital photography meant learning a whole new, more technical world, so she’s still taking classes.

As Cindy puts it, she and I were “cause people” in college and in our jobs. So she’s still a “cause person” as a photographer. One section of her exhibition is called “Legalize L.A.” It’s “documentary photographs of immigrant rights/amnesty demonstrations in downtown L.A. with what will be a clear pro-legalization message in an election year.”

If she were just a lawyer and then just a photographer, this might be a story about switching careers. But it’s not. When Cindy tells you what else she’s been doing with her life, it’s almost overwhelming. A Santa Monica resident, she served on the Santa Monica Pier Board, and she worked with others to save the palm trees in her neighborhood and to save an anti-war political art sculpture from destruction. Now she’s hoping to shut down the hazardous Santa Monica Airport and convert that public land into a beautiful park.

Being involved in so many other causes not only made her life interesting, it left her standing on many legs. Thinking about it this way, Cindy readied herself for ultimately leaving her job by having so many other things going. One leg could be removed, and the table would still stand.

Despite that, there are still some things that go when the steady job ends. I, too, have had a lot of “gigs” going, but steadiness – and all the things that go with it – disappears when the one bigger job ends. For some, it’s the paycheck or health insurance, sometimes the access to a professional world. Cindy misses the staff camaraderie and her clients.

“I thought that my longstanding interests would sustain me, and to some extent that has been true, but there are times projects have ended, and I’ve needed to figure out what is next in order to find meaning in how I spend my time.”

As she puts it – talking about the Big Three – “While I don’t always have Structure, I do have Purpose and Community.”

Like the rest of us, she also has aging parents, house repair stuff, and errands. But she also loves to travel, and with many years of photographing cultures and festivals around the world, her destinations have become “more and more obscure.” But as she says,

“It is also possible to travel and experience vibrant cultures while at home in L.A. because of the extraordinary diversity of the people who live here. It’s just a matter of choosing to explore.”

“It’s just a matter of choosing to explore.” Yup.

----------------
* Cindy was on a boat to Copenhagen when she spotted Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and got their autographs. Her brother yelled “Mick,” he turned, and she snapped the photo. She was that close! Trust me, that photo would make any Third Third woman sigh….

Best thing since sliced bread

One of the pleasures of being on my own schedule is that I get to volunteer on my own schedule, too. I’d been involved with the Alaska Literacy Program for years, mainly because of the old “teach a person to fish” idea. Giving people the tools to forge their own self-sufficient futures seems to me to be the way to go, and literacy is a natural. But I’d never actually tutored or taught a class.

Until I unemployed myself.

I started as a substitute, teaching writing for a couple of weeks. Then I took on a whole class on Idioms. They gave me a book with lessons and a classroom with students. We did a whole bit on anger: hit the roof, blow my top, go off the deep end, see red.

And then every now and then, there was an idiom on the list that I didn’t get: “take out the garbage.” Why was that an idiom? And then you realize, as you’re working with people whose first language is not English, that “take” usually means you get something and keep it. We take seconds on dessert. But we don’t hold onto our garbage; we dispose of it. So in that case, “take” is different, an idiom.

Oh, I love words!

Sometimes, when I’d give an assignment, I’d tell the class they had to come to class no matter what, no chickening out. “Chickening out?”

This was proving to be a lot of fun. Literacy Program students are committed adults; they are there because they want to learn, to become citizens, to be active members of their families and society. I graduated to teaching a whole writing class, and they taught me things, too. When Vilairat had been out collecting devil’s club, she ended up with lots of spines in her legs. She came into class with banana peels wrapped around her legs. I was skeptical … until the remedy showed up in one of my magazines at home.

Now I’m teaching a great class. I have students from Korea, Laos, Mexico, South Sudan, and China, and our book covers things like renting an apartment or visiting a doctor, reading prescription labels, dealing with emergencies. Yesterday, Sophia (who knows Chinese medicine and is preparing to apply for the test to be qualified to practice) told us that tofu and flour, mashed into a paste, is good for burns.

We have spent a lot of time recently on using the present perfect tense: I have eaten, you have danced. While I might use it because it sounds right to my ear, I have to provide the rules to help my students develop the ear. It reminds me of when I lived in Costa Rica, taking Spanish. After a while, when I finally mastered the subjunctive (I wish I were…), someone told me that made a big difference, that before I’d only spoken Tarzan Spanish: “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” I couldn’t tell. Even now, I wouldn’t feel the jarring it would give to a native speaker’s ear.

This is hard work. Rosario, from Mexico, was reading about elevating a wound. But pronunciation is tricky: this is wound like “woooond,” not like “wound around.” Rosario’s daughter goes to preschool down the hall while Rosario is in class, and she’s adorable.

We look at complex pictures of things going on and try to explain them in English. In the department store, a shopper had fallen asleep in a chair in the furniture department while a man checked the price tag. “No,” said Sophia, “that isn’t a price tag. That’s the controls. It’s a massage chair; that’s why she fell asleep.”

That one really had us laughing. Maybe you had to be there. In fact, you can be there. The Literacy Program is always looking for more teachers, and the staff gives lots of help and support. I am valued as a volunteer, and walking in the door is like walking into an oasis of pleasant, positive, meaningful activity. If one of the Big Three for a Third Third is Purpose, I get that. The fun is just gravy (an idiom).

Wanted: Daytime Friends

If one of the Big Three requirements for a happy Third Third is a sense of community, you may cheerfully look around and say, “I’ve got that.” So you quit your job and pretty quick you realize that many of your friends are still working. The daytime playmate pool is pretty meager. If time goes on, and you haven’t resolved this, eventually you don’t just need daytime playmates; you need human interaction.

Talking to cashiers and the postman just won’t cut it.

When I first quit my job, my daytime socializing was lunch. If everyone was busy working, I’d grab them during intermission. This worked pretty well, but mostly, I’m not a lunch-out-every-day person. So then we expanded to meeting for walks or lunch at my house.

I don’t drink coffee and I don’t work on a laptop so I haven’t hung out in coffee houses. Only recently did I discover that coffee people have their regular places and times so they meet the folks with those same regular places and times. It’s like the college dining hall: you don’t have to extend yourself and actually invite someone or make a plan; they’re just there.

This “just there” thing becomes pretty important when you start suffering social isolation. You start thinking everyone is busy during the day except you, and you get pathetic. It is just too hard for a pathetic person to call friends and make lunch plans. You are not just lonely; you’re also socially deficient.

Even if you went to a coffee house, probably no one would talk with you. Because you’re socially deficient.

I’m guessing stay-at-home moms may have had these same social issues, but the Third Third person lives in an empty nest so there isn’t even a kid.

I’ve been pretty lucky in that I’ve always had Fridays off. Many years ago, a group of us started meeting Friday mornings. We were all sole proprietors, and when it felt a little too solo we had each other. We ended up tight friends … who are still there Friday mornings. Many weeks, Friday morning was my social anchor.

When Irene retired, she started a regular Thursday morning group that rotated meeting in coffee houses all over Anchorage. That’s a little more drop-in so everyone is “just there.” Irene did a great public service arranging that. It even works for non-coffee drinkers.

So if I were to clarify the bit about needing “a sense of community,” I’d say “a sense of community that includes daytime friends unless the structure you’re created for yourself takes care of those daytime hours.”

A therapist with daytime openings does not count.

When Structure Goes

When I quit my job, I torpedoed structure. Left to my own devices, I’d get involved with something and stay up all night. I’d have commitments, contracts, or meetings, and I’d do them just fine; but the rest of the time, I was a free agent. Nothing was “fixed” and there was no regular schedule. I did something because I felt like it, not because it was routine. In the beginning, this was joyful, glorious freedom.

When my book club read Daily Rituals: How Artists Work; everyone shared the daily rituals of their lives, and I cringed. There was nothing routine about my days. But instead of feeling liberated and free, I was beginning to feel erratic and unstable. My sleep hygiene was a mess, and I tended to drift aimlessly between being and not being in the mood to do this or that. Sometimes I ran in the morning, sometimes in the evening. I always ate breakfast, but sometimes that was at 9 a.m. and sometimes at 2 p.m. While other people might think it was the sign of a free spirit, I knew it was courting craziness.

I told my book club, “I believe the absence of routine in ordering my day is really thinly-veiled absence of self-discipline. So I did something I ‘didn’t feel like’ yesterday … and it was just fine. Then I stayed up till 1 a.m. to give me back the part of the day I’d relinquished.”

I enrolled in an art class that met twice a week and had demanding homework. That helped in many ways – and I’ll write about that more – but doing art with deadlines for projects means you’re still pushing the sleep hygiene envelope. Or maybe that’s just me; everything pushes my sleep hygiene envelope. I’d charge ahead highly motivated, get stuff done, and then walk around spacey and sleepy getting nothing done.

While I was flailing around uselessly, I came across a newspaper article which quoted Ernie Zelinsky, author of The Joy of Not Working. In the article, he said, “There are three big needs jobs provide that people have to put back into their lives in retirement….” I’ll call them the Big Three, and I’ll write about them a lot more:

That’s it! I knew structure was an issue for me. Even back at college, I learned to sign up for the breakfast plan so I “had to” get up at 8 a.m. And when I was finishing my thesis and worked part-time, I worked 8-10 a.m. and then 1-4 p.m. It was my way of imposing structure on my days.

But now, with no external source of structure (job, driving kid to school, etc.), I was rootless. I’d sit in the living room free to read a book on an afternoon, but I couldn’t relax. Somehow, without a Time to Go to Work or a Time to Go to Class, I felt like I didn’t have a Time to Relax either. I don’t think it was feeling that relaxation was undeserved, just that it didn’t have a beginning or end. My friend Sherry called it feeling “untethered.”

Yup, that’s the word.