In a small effort to exert (a false sense of) control over my life, I bought some colored markers to “bullet journal”. hahahaha. I’ve always had a little datebook or notebook to keep track of dates/appointments/todo lists. I’ve had them since high school! It used to be an At-a-Glance calendar, but now it’s generally a Moleskine-type notebook. I don’t really need it to remind me to do anything (I write the same thing almost everyday), but I enjoy crossing the to-do items off the list. I could tell my life was in a spiral because I abandoned the date book for days and days in the middle of the summer. In a more concerted effort, I needed to rein in my phone use, basically took off the home page my 4 most used apps (which included both Instagram and the New York Times) and try to regain my footing. Now that we are sending kids back to school with a new, more contagious variant, I just need to accept that that is what is happening. I’m silently grateful that I don’t have littles in this pandemic. I can’t quite imagine being home with a three year old all last year and then now sending them back to school where they – mostly likely won’t get very sick – but will be little vectors into homes everywhere. I know that kids do need to be in school. I know that they, for the most part, won’t get sick sick. I know that this year, we have a vaccine unlike last year, so if you are vaccinated, you won’t get sick, sick. But, I acknowledge that I’m very bad at assessing risk. I know Rett Syndrome is rare, but you have one Google-research experience that proves to be true and just shatters your life, I’m predisposed to give weight to the one-in-a million things happening. When I got Edda’s diagnosis, we were young and everyone we knew was having healthy babies, it seemed like we were the only ones with bad luck. But now, all these “rare” things are happening all around me (not even covid-related), and it feels like I’m a magnet of bad luck or karma. Anyways, August is always a mess of a month. (Also, those poor, poor nursing staff working in hospitals taking care of unvaccinated patients. Just breaks my heart. I can barely muster enough good energy at my regular nursing job that I don’t work full time so I can rest and recover, sheeze those nurses are tired. Bone tired.)
My parents, usually ones to give cash and not gifts, recently noticed my interest in getting a jade bracelet and wanted to buy one for me. (I had worn a few that my mother had in her closet – fake? not fake” hard to tell). My father, not one to throw around opinions on matters of taste and generally not one of stylish taste himself, actually commented on what color jade bracelet he liked (though insisting all the while that I pick out one I liked). I liked the idea of me falling into my old-Chinese-lady self and scoured the internet for a reputable seller, settling into one who shipped from Singapore. So my parents bought me this one for my birthday. It’s pretty snug, I slipped it on my hand with the aid of a plastic produce bag and I think I can get it off with some effort (and pain). But I think I’m going to wear it for a while. If you believe in it, it is supposed to offer protection to the wearer. It’s a living thing, absorbing and releasing energy as you wear it. And if it breaks, it means it has sacrificed itself for you, that something bad was suppose to happen to you and instead, your bracelet took the pain instead. It’s mostly white, which is the preference of my parents, but there are small streaks of light green on the opposing side.
