Geraldine DeRuiter's Blog, page 4

Welcome to the Summer of Awkward!

Not gonna lie: when you said you were having a casual “we’re all vaccinated” shindig at your place, I wasn’t sure what you meant? Ha, not like casual sex, right? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. I mean, does casual refer to the attire? What does casual attired mean to me, someone who has been alternating between day pajamas to night pajamas and sometimes, hell, I just wear the same thing, in and out and back into bed again because time is meaningless, and who is going to judge me? Sorry, was I rambling? After a year trapped with the unfettered assery of my own thoughts, like a hamster running around in a plastic ball that it has repeatedly defecated in, I have forgotten how conversations work. Is it that I go and then you go again? Do we just take turns talking or what?

Sorry, should I be doing something with my hands? Do I just stare at your face the entire time? That can’t be right. Do we make eye contact? Do I stare at one eye? You can’t stare a two eyes at once, they are two distinct things, my god, how do humans with two eyes even look at one another? Do I flip between both of your eyes like watching a tennis match? That can’t be right and also now I have a headache, I’m just going to stare at the bridge of your nose oh god oh god, oh god, did you just ask me a question?

I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking about how much I missed you. How much I missed everything. And now I’m scared it’s somehow going to go away again. Is it weird if we hug? Like, right in the middle of our I’m not-quite-sure-this-is-a-conversation? Yes. Let’s hug.

Hugging. Wow. This is nice. You smell nice.

Huh. Never realized how much, like, contact there is with hugging. There’s a lot of contact, huh? You’d think it just involves your arms, but like, man, my boobs are just all pressed up against you. I just talked about boobs while hugging you. So, yeah, that’s a thing that happened.

Is this a normal length of time for a hug? Should we stop? When does a hug end? Is there a specified amount of time? This has gone on for too long, hasn’t it? Are you pulling away? I can’t tell. Maybe that’s a regular hug thing? Or did I freak you out because I tried to maintain eye contact while hugging?

I think the problem is that I’m not at home right now, so I’m sort of out of my comfort prison. Maybe you should come back to my place. Ha ha ha ha ha, like in the 70s! Like Rand and I are swingers! Come back to our place. Oh, god, not that we’re swingers. I mean, it’s okay if other people are. I’m not going to judge someone else’s lifestyle choice. Wait, is it a choice? (Oh, god, did I just say something super offensive?) It’s totally great if they are. The world needs swingers, right? Ha ha ha ha, maybe we should swing.

Oh, god, I mean, not really. Please don’t tell people that I suggested we should swing. I do not want to swing. I mean, it’s fine if you do. And it’s not personal. You seem like you’d be a very kind and generous lover. Not that I’m looking! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. You know what, maybe we should skip my house. I’ve been there for a year and a half, and I’m worried I have olfactory exhaustion and can’t smell my own house, and what if it smells weird? I’ve been lighting a LOT of incense. A lot. How much incense is too much incense? I go through a few sticks a day. I think maybe I have olfactory exhaustion from the incense? Oh, god, is incense culturally appropriative? I grew up Catholic, if that helps at all. I should probably just stick to candles. I have a lot of those, too. How many candles are too many candles? Oh, god, are the candles culturally appropriative? (Again, I grew up Catholic, if it helps.)

I think the church’s views on homosexuality and women’s rights are very antiquated and I don’t agree with them. I just want to be clear on that. But man, they really got the incense thing right!

…

I just want to be clear that I’m saying incense and not incest. I am not okay with incest.

Okay, I just need to take a deep breath, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, you know, I think the problem is that we’re inside, together, that’s the problem. Let’s go sit outside. Yes! Outdoors. You know, they say transmission is virtually impossible outdoors. But we’re vaccinated! So we don’t have to worry about that. No. Except there’s this new variant which they’re talking about. I tried reading the news story about it but I kept crying too hard to finish it. Ha! Typical me with my pandemic-related-trauma, amirite? The outdoors are nice, aren’t they? Look how much space we have. And the ventilation. That hug went on for too long before, huh? I’ll give you some space. Six feet, right? It’s really a shame, because you smell nice. Man, even with olfactory exhaustion, I detected that. Not that I’m like, a swinger or anything. But if I was, boy, howdy, you’d be first on my list! I mean, with your consent of course. Is it your turn to talk? I think it might be. You go ahead.

I’ve really missed you, you know.

In Which A Bluff Is Called, In the Buff

My husband’s Twitter account is a lot more professional than mine, because my husband is a lot more professional than I am. He’s also not really into PDAs, and so it’s pretty easy for me to embarrass him by simply mentioning that *lowers voice* we sometimes do adult things together.

So on a regular basis, I invade my husband’s Twitter mentions and tell him to stop whatever he’s doing and come suck face with me. Lately, he’s been working on instructional videos for his new company. While he’s great on camera (look, he just is! It’s not even me being biased because I think he’s a smokeshow!), actually doing the A/V work is pretty uncharted territory for him, so he gets on Twitter to ask people for advice on how things look, and what he should do differently. A lot of the answers are really helpful and supportive.

I also have things to say.

Lower the camera and take off shirt and maybe pants.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

okay but why are you still wearing a shirt, i thought i made myself clear

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 27, 2021

 

Anyway, apparently I’ve been doing stuff like this for a while?

I just found a picture of you as a naked toddler holding a bucket over your winky.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) November 4, 2016

 

Honestly, I’m just kind of a nightmare of a wife.

YOU CAN REPORT IT FOR ASSMENT.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

Anyway, today I did it again.

TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

The thing about Rand is that while he’s pretty good at playing the straight-man in this carnival ride of wedded whimsical fuckery, every now and then I push a little too far and … well … he’ll call me on my bluff.

pic.twitter.com/J0lw5yrU6z

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 3, 2021

Touché, Mr. Fishkin. Though I’d like to think we’re all winners here: him, for having that chest, me, for getting to appreciate it on the regular, and the good people of Twitter, who get to see it for the first time.

Now if you’ll excuse me …

sneaking into your office right now to make out

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

The Fear Of Feeling Hopeful, Post-Vaccination

Last week, a friend showed up on our doorstep. He was there to go to a birthday dinner with us, the sort of thing that was commonplace two years ago but slipped into the realm of impossibility over the last 14 months, and now, somehow, is possible again. The dinner was on a restaurant patio, the tabletops adorned with dispensers of foul-smelling hand sanitizer, the servers wearing masks. I threw up from motion sickness on the drive there, because my body has forgotten how to be in cars. But other than that: normalcy, or something resembling it.

When our friend arrived at our door, Rand looked at him and said, “Hey, guess what? We’re all fully vaccinated.” They’d gotten their second shots on the same day, and the CDC recommended waiting time for antibodies to build up had elapsed. They hugged on my porch, and I stared like I was watching a documentary, something beautiful I was removed from, before I realized I didn’t have to be simply an observer. I threw myself into the hug as well. We stood there on the porch, and another friend who is staying with us (another once-commonplace event made impossible, etc., etc.) saw the exchange and said, casually, “Oh, are we group hugging?” throwing her arms around us all.

My local grocery store had signs saying that fully vaccinated customers didn’t need to wear masks, based on the recommendation of the CDC. We all still wore them anyway. A few days later, they took down those signs, and replaced them with ones saying, basically, “Nevermind, keep wearing the masks, please, the CDC has no idea what’s going on.” For me, nothing had changed. I even had a dream about it, the old cliché about going to school naked, updated for the pandemic age: I was indoors, in public, without a mask. I kept apologizing to everyone, woke up relieved it wasn’t real. A few days later a maskless woman at the Goodwill berated me for wearing plastic gloves to pick through the shelves (something I do whenever I shop there, not because of Covid, but because I once found what I hope was cat poop on a sweater). The CDC ping-pongs back and forth. No one seems to exactly know what to do. Are we wearing masks? Are we hugging? Is it safe to eat indoors? Is this the end or just a lull? Why didn’t I tell that woman to shut her stupid face?

Later in the week, we went out to dinner again, this time eating indoors for the first time since February of last year. Our friends met us outside, and the hug we fell into was effortless, so that I didn’t even realize it at first. For a second, I’d forgotten to be amazed by this foreign thing, of stepping into the sacred six feet of space around one another.

Someone asked how I was doing, and in the aftermath of my second shot, I told them I could not stop crying. “Just openly weeping at everything,” I said. “I don’t really understand it.”

“Oh, me too,” they replied. “I read something that said it’s not PTSD we’re dealing with, because PTSD is for things that have passed. And this is something that we’re still in.”

There is the truth of it. The world is opening up, or parts of it are, at least – slowly, cracking open like a window left shut too long. The wind rushes in, that flash of fresh air, but I’m still hesitant to take a breath. I’m told this feeling is “social re-entry anxiety.” (We already have a name for it, for this nervousness about stepping back into the world.) More people are set to die globally from the pandemic in 2021 than 2020. Things are far from over, and trauma, as Ed Yong notes in The Atlantic, is lingering and unpredictable. Experts (in my mind’s eye, a group people in lab coats, against a dark and infinite background, holding clipboards) say that this wasn’t it. That the real big one is coming. I try to stop my imagination from going to dark places. I’ve read Station Eleven too many times.

“These next three weeks of summer are going to be great, until the variant hits,” a friend teases, and we all laugh and wince simultaneously. It hits too close to the fear that stops us from enjoying these moments thoroughly: we’re afraid of everything being snatched away again.

I try to be in the moment, but it’s hard to know exactly what this moment is. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t take away the fact that there was a tunnel to begin with. When you’re in it, your only focus is on getting through to the other side, more or less intact. It’s only afterwards, blinking in the light, that you have a second to turn around and think, well … that was awful. That’s where I am now: looking back at the dark we’ve just stepped out of, trying to acclimate to the brightness, and wondering if – and how long- it will last.

I Cleaned My Office. It Didn’t Work.

I cleaned out my office for the first time in *mumble mumble*, the final act in a string of procrastinations masquerading as chores. With the help of a friend, I hung a painting which spent the last two years lying propped up against the wall of the guest bedroom. I dusted the baseboards, and then I painted them, a spate of productivity than can only exist when you are avoiding something (in my case – writing). And then, finally, I tackled the pile of papers of my desk, and on every horizontal surface around my desk (the papers had spread over, like flowing lava).

I have heard that some people need a clean workspace in order to write – the unproven hypothesis that it promotes productivity. So I wince a little when I think of my office, a place where Rand will occasionally poke his head through the door and ask, “What is happening in here?” His tone is curious rather than judgmental. The room is like a science project, an anomaly when compared to the rest of our home.

“I’M GOOD AT OTHER THINGS,” I yell by way of reply. The bacchanalia of papers and dust and empty mugs on my desk is oddly comforting. I’ve hit organizational rock-bottom. I can scribble on pieces of paper, I can pile mail on top of more stacks of mail. I can shuffle Post-It notes that have lost their adhesive quality and are now just squares of brightly colored paper, moving them around like a Vegas card dealer. The only place to go from here is up.

I am an organized person. My mother says I inherited this quality from my father. She claims that fastidiousness can’t be taught; you either have it or you don’t. I’m inclined to disagree, because her argument removes personal responsibility from the equation. Order is something I work at, something I’ve learned. But I see her point – she loses her keys so regularly I’m not sure she ever had them. She once misplaced a piece of paper the instant I handed it to her, making it vanish like a magician performing a parlor trick. It follows that I must have been born with a sense of order, because I sure as heck didn’t learn it from her.

I’ve been procrastinating on my book for a while. Not making the progress I hope for, feeling uninspired by, well – gestures broadly at everything. No one wants to hear about it – the only thing worse than a self-satisfied writer is a self-loathing one. When the only thing standing in your way is you, you don’t get to complain. Sitting in front of my computer, the page count stagnant, I decided to tackle other projects. I hung curtains and cleaned out my closet. I threw out bags of items. Had I kept the things that sparked joy? I wasn’t sure. Mostly, I had just sparked existential dread. I felt like a failure.

My office was the last hold out, my desk the final boss. There are no before photos. The shame is too great. I shredded documents like I was an mid-level exec in a Ponzi scheme. I found stickers from the Washington State Book Awards that I was supposed to put on copies of my memoir, published years ago. I found the actual paper copy of my James Beard Award, and wondered if maybe I wasn’t a failure. Maybe I just needed to clean out my office more. (This moment of confidence was short-lived.)

I went through all the tiny scraps of paper I saved, ones which at the time I could not throw out. I always thought there might be an answer on them, something that would crack my manuscript wide open, fill in all my plot holes, save my protagonist.

I … I saved this for some reason.

“Filled in all my plot holes.” #headdesk

The realization that organizing my office wasn’t the answer to my writer’s block hits me like a wave. I gently rest my head on my newly cleaned desk. There is plenty of room to do this now. My office is neat and tidy. It is not a reflection of the innerworkings of my brain, except in this respect: it feels a little too empty, and I don’t know what to do next.

 

P.S. – Yes, I have a Chris Pine calendar because my friends are awesome and he is the best Chris, after Lloyd.

Lesser Known CDC Recommendations for Vaccinated People

I’ve just gotten my second vaccine (the technical term: a full vaxxiccino) and have been reading the CDC’s recommendations for safe summer activities for the fully vaccinated. I’m two weeks ahead of my husband, something I hold over his head because he has better abs than me and is just a better person all around, and if Earth gets evacuated because the sun suddenly decides to explode, he is absolute getting on the good escape shuttle. But I got vaccinated first (thank you brain tumor and asthma! I knew you’d come through for me!), which I’m pretending is some sort of moral achievement.

The CDC has said that vaccinated people can gather indoors with other vaccinated people! We can hang out inside with our friends! Like we used to! Like humans have for centuries, and also like a bunch of raccoons probably do if you leave the door to a cabin in the woods open. We can be raccoons! 

The full list is here. In the spirit of this, and based on no factual evidence, I’ve started making declarations about other things the CDC has recommended, because I can do that. Because the CDC says if you are fully vaccinated, you can make up things that the CDC has said.

Me after shot #1, or as it is technically called, a half-vaxxiccino.

 

The CDC has said if you are vaccinated, you do not need to wear a mask if you are outdoors in an uncrowded venue.

This probably means you won’t need to wear a mask to the CDC’s summer theater in the park production of Grease. Ticket sales have not been good.

The CDC would like to note that sales are probably bad because the entire concept of Grease is dated and sexist and the idea of changing for a guy is really awful and also some of the songs are super rapey. The CDC does not feel like it’s being listened to when it recommended Grease 2 as an alternative.

Grease 2, the CDC would like to note, is super feminist and about loving someone for who they are, not who they could be, and it’s all about the girl choosing the right guy, and it’s got some bangers in it.

The CDC recommends you watch the 1982 film version of Grease 2 right now. You can do so with unvaccinated people without wearing a mask provided they are from the same household and understand that Grease 2 is far superior to Grease.

Fine, the CDC will stop talking about Grease 2.

The CDC says fully vaccinated people can gather indoors without wearing a mask or keeping six feet apart, unless you are at an Eyes Wide Shut type party, at which point you will probably need to wear a mask, but it’s not like those cover your mouth. Having your mouth free seems to be an important part of an EWS party. Admittedly, the CDC hasn’t seen that movie, but the CDC did just google “Eyes Wide Shut Masks” and now Joan in IT probably has some questions about the CDC’s search history.

The CDC recommends Joan mind her own damn business.

Okay, the CDC maybe needs to chill out. The CDC has been under a lot of pressure these last few years. The CDC guarantees that you haven’t thought about the CDC this much in your life. Like, a handful of people made bad choices and suddenly the CDC is everywhere, and it’s thrilling and exhausting. It’s probably how Pauly Shore felt in the 90s. The CDC wonders if it needs a catchphrase.

I’m the Center for Disease Control, Babyyyyy!

No. The CDC does not recommend that. Nevermind. The CDC’s schtick is more of along the line of dad-jokes. If your dad were a giant governmental institution dedicated to promoting health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease. (Sigh. This is why the CDC is no good at parties. Which you should not have be having right now with unvaccinated people from several households.)

It’s not that the CDC can’t be funny!

The CDC says hop on one foot.

The CDC says raise one hand.

The CDC says raise your other hand.

The CDC says hop faster.

Okay, this is ridiculous, you can put your arms down … Ah, ah, ahhhhh, the CDC didn’t say!

(Now go wash those hands for the time it takes you to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice.)

The CDC recommends blocking your uncle on Facebook who says that the vaccine is going to put a tracking chip in your blood. The CDC would like to remind that uncle that his phone has GPS, everyone already knows where he is, and what he’s searching for while taking a dump, and no one cares.

The CDC says fully vaccinated people don’t have to wear pants. The CDC realizes that you probably haven’t been wearing pants anyway. The CDC lauds your preparedness.

The CDC really wants to know what happened to the neighbor’s cat. If you ask, the CDC would like to remind you to keep as distance of at least six feet, unless everyone has been vaccinated.

Actually, given the state of the cat, maybe stay six feet away, anyway.

The CDC recommends you avoid large indoor gatherings. The CDC recommends you just sit on the couch and rewatch Grease 2, because there is zero chance that you will accidentally run into your ex unexpectedly on your couch and be forced to have an awkward conversation about what they are up to now. Actually, you know what? The CDC is just going to permanently recommend avoiding large gatherings. Like, forever.

The CDC says that even if you have been vaccinated, you should still watch out for symptoms of Covid-19. I mean, you’ll probably be fine, but remember that final scene in Die Hard when you think Karl is dead but then he pops up and tries to kill John and Holly and Carl Winslow has to shoot him?

Covid is kind of like Karl.

The CDC is wondering if the CDC makes too many movie references.

The CDC recommends you still wear a mask in public spaces like stores and airports and around people who are immunocompromised. The CDC also recommends that you don’t race down an exit lane because it’s moving more quickly, and then swerve back into traffic just to save a few seconds. The CDC recommends you pick up your dog poop and that you don’t put that poop in a neighbor’s trash can because maybe that neighbor doesn’t have a dog specifically because they don’t want to deal with poop. The CDC expects you to throw that away at your house. Basically, the CDC wants you to care about other humans and not be an absolute shitburger, and realize that your individual liberty does not mean that you get to endanger others. The CDC would like to note that it isn’t hard to give, like, three flying fucks about other people, and frankly, the CDC can’t believe it has to tell people to stop acting like fully grown, spoiled-ass Veruca Salts, and explain to them that yes, science is real and yes, vaccines work, and yes, everyone in a society has an obligation to one another, and also, Grease 2 is amazing.

This shit is obvious, people.

The CDC is tired. The CDC is done. Happy summer, from the goddamn CDC, babyyyy.

Maybe Getting Back to Normal Is Just As Hard.

I got my second vaccination shot this past weekend, spent the day after nursing a sore arm and watching television, in the throes of something not quite like a hangover. The internet told me to expect the worst, as the internet usually does. I anticipated being laid out for 48 hours. Instead I had a headache, took two Tylenol, and then went for a walk. It was warm out, or maybe I was feverish, or perhaps it was a little of both. The burst of blossoms on the cherry trees outside felt almost aggressive, the lushness of spring in the northwest stunning after a grey winter. I had longed for it for months, and then it seemed to appear overnight.

Scrolling my social media, I see a stream of selfies; people receiving their vaccines, eyes smiling over their masks, a shirt-sleeve rolled up, something exceptionally vulnerable about that stretch of skin on the upper arm. Everything opening again. It feels both overdue and impossible all at once.

The thing that I – a shameless extrovert – have maintained over the last year is that when the world opened up again I would run screaming into it, possibly naked. I would unleash a torrent of affection and attention on whoever was willing, feeding off of the company of others, a social vampire. But as we’ve started seeing people – my mother, Rand’s grandfather, those few friends who, due to circumstance or profession are already vaccinated – I find myself unsure of how to return the world I once knew.

I don’t know how exactly to get back to normal anymore.

I remember those first few harrowing weeks when my town and state went on lockdown, stores and restaurants and gyms closing, my friends with children panicking at the idea of schools closing for two weeks (“TWO WEEKS!” a friend said to me now, a year later, a sputtering laugh coming out of her.) I didn’t know what to do with myself, with my days. I didn’t know how to exist in a world that wasn’t humming and busy, a sudden halting of the Indiana Jones animations of planes that I always imagined moving across a map whenever I traveled. I felt unmoored, rather paradoxically, from being stuck indoors. And then weeks melted into months and waves of despair hit again and again and I hit some sort of existential crisis (what happens to a travel writer when they are unable to travel?). I forgot what it was like before, and a new normal took over. Staying home, and walking into the street when anyone came towards me on the sidewalk. The lower half of someone’s face taking on a new, stunning intimacy. I wrote about being at home, I tried to work on my novel, I wrote nothing at all, I may have wasted a year.

It would all be fine, I told myself, when things went back to normal.

A week ago, some vaccinated friends invited us over to a backyard dinner. I figured I would step right back into it, but before I even left the house, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten exactly how to do it. I stared at an entire closet full of clean clothes – everything that wasn’t pajamas or workout wear was just hanging there – and was utterly baffled by what to do with it. Do you wear a blazer to dinner with friends? Do you talk about the weather? How do social interactions work? Am I being weird? Have I just been sitting here thinking about how weird I’m being, and staring at a spot on the ground with a weird look on my face, and now everyone is expecting me to say something? Or maybe they haven’t noticed at all, because I am not the center of the universe, honestly, why would I think that I am? I was suddenly on conversational training wheels. The CDC gives us parameters for hanging out, but no one tells you how awkward it might be.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. In the quest to get back to normal, it’s easy to ignore how the last year has changed us all. The things that once felt like a reflex, an effortless sort of second-nature, now feel foreign. We once hugged our friends, and we ate meals together, and we all sat around tables indoors. And then we lost loved ones and we were alone and we didn’t know when it would end, and it felt like all of that worked itself down to our marrow. Some of us lost a year of time, and others lost the futures they were promised. Movie theaters can reopen, but you still carry your grief. Something deep down that you can’t quite put your finger on, that you hesitate to call trauma, because that feels like an exaggeration, that feels too heavy, that feels like you are mitigating the real trauma of others. But what else is it? How else to describe it? The thing that made your grandparents save scraps of tin foil and refuse to throw out food. The thing that made your parents worry that you were going to be kidnapped, because of what happened to that poor boy on the news. The thing that – you fear – will make you keep your distance from other people and disinfect your hands until the end of your days.

How do you go back to normal when that world is already gone?

There are antibodies building inside of me, but my brain is taking longer to catch up. That’s the thing that no one told me while I sat at home, waiting for this moment – that I might not be ready for it. That the world opening up again might take just as much getting used to as the world shutting down. I stare at the leaves on the trees outside, back again after a long winter, and wonder what their secret is.

My Husband’s Pandemic Hobby.

Look, I am going to confess something, and as I do, please, please, please do not hurl anything heavy, because odds are, due to the pandemic and the ubiquity of the internet, we will not be in the same room, and it will not hit me. You’re just going to destroy your own computer or possibly damage something in your house, rather than hurt me.

Or maybe have at it, I’m not your mother.

Okay … ready?

Rand’s pandemic hobby has been cooking.

PUT THAT SHOE DOWN, WE DO NOT THROW THINGS.

Look, I know, I know. This is the last thing that you need to hear about childless couple who normally travels but is now stuck in their home for a year. Ideally, you would like to be reading about how one of us snapped and cannibalized the other, or that we’re at least starting to grate on one another’s nerves. And while we occasionally had moments like that (sometimes the cannibalization and the nerve-grating happened simultaneously as evidenced by the photo below) for the most part we just sort of … got along.

 

Look, we had the occasional fight, we occasionally had to go for a walk because the other was just “a lot right now”, but for the most part, things were okay, and I think a big part of that had to do, I am realizing now, with my husband making sure I was regularly fed and hydrated.

So maybe his pandemic hobby was neutralizing the fine middle-aged cannibal in the house. I still think it was a win-win. In the before times, dinner parties were our thing, that obnoxious pastime of people in their late 30s and beyond, bottles of wine and trays of charcuterie, mains and passed sides, me bringing out dessert and him pulling out bottles of scotch. It felt effortless and second-nature, was what we did, having people over and cooking for them, or going out to a restaurant with friends. At the start of a given week Rand would remind me of who we had dinner with in the days to come. Inevitably we’d have plans for at least four or five of the nights, more if we were on the road.

There was a novelty, early in the pandemic when it was just the two of the us (“We are eating in front of the TV!” “We are cooking just for ourselves!” “Our President is actively trying to kill us all!”), and we leaned into it because everything else was just too sad and scary to consider. After a while, Rand needed bigger challenges, and he started delving into new recipes. We watched Midnight Diner, a relaxing and hard-to-classify show that takes place in, obviously, a diner, a small one in Tokyo. He missed travel, he became wistful about our trip to Japan. He bought himself a donabe pot and temporarily lost his mind.

This was not the end of it. It rarely is with Rand. In the words of that fallen star, he’s always got to be starting something. He will roll out fresh pasta like he learned to do in Bologna.

At least once a month he will roast giant marrow bones and make a pot of stock, tossing in an entire chicken. He uses it to make risotto, and when his grandfather was fully vaccinated we had him over to help.

He makes me steaks and soups and pastas. He garnishes and composes and fries and braises and grills and simmers.

I have spent years writing about our travels, felt like our lives were an open book, hell, even wrote the damn book, but I’ve been tweeting out these photos, and it’s felt like opening people up to our home. The responses are occasionally overly-scrutinizing (people seem obsessed about the quantity of food that we cook, which feels inappropriate at best), but for the most part, lovely.

Keep posting your dude cooking. It’s my favorite activity and your evangelizing is helping to normalize it. Dual knife blocks is a nice touch.

— Gregg McLennan (@Strayarc) April 10, 2021

I love his aprons!

— Mary Swift (@swiftlytweet) April 10, 2021

Need that in my belly STAT

— One Fresh Pillow (@OneFreshPillow) April 11, 2021

Your husband really twinkles

— Colominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolomi (@MavetyStreet) April 5, 2021

 

Still, when online abusers are particularly active in my thread, they attack my husband’s masculinity specifically because he cooks for me.

 

They tell me to enjoy it, because he’s going to inevitably leave me (for a man, because they need to add homophobia to it).

Man this long con of his is loooooooong. pic.twitter.com/TpCZH2OeVD

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) March 21, 2021

“Why are they so invested in you leaving me?” I ask.

“Because if you are loved and happy, what does that say about their lives?”

There is something else, too. Something less personal. Professional chefs are often male. As a society, we’re comfortable with men cooking in that context – doing so as a job, in command of a restaurant. But a man cooking at home is occupying a space that we often expect women to – one of a caretaker. He is taking on invisible labor that we are used to dismissing. And in doing so, forcing misogynists into an uncomfortable reckoning: domestic work is important, valuable, and hard.

I tell him I can cook, or that we can get take-out, and sometimes he takes me up on the offer. I occasionally make dessert. If I’m quick enough, I can get the dishes done before he has a chance.

“Still – think how devastated I’d be if you left. I wouldn’t see it coming,” I say.

“Neither of us would.”

“No one was more surprised than us!”

I tease him that the worst part would be that I’d have to cook for myself, and he tells me that he could still come over and cook for me.

“And we could still make out?”

“Definitely.”

Maybe, I suggest tentatively, it would be best if he didn’t leave me in the first place. And he agrees that maybe that’s the best way to go. I mean, think about how brilliant and devastating this ruse will be if it goes on for another fifty years and then it ends.

It’ll be just heartbreaking.

Things I Have Falsely Claimed Are Side-Effects of The Covid-19 Vaccine

I got my first vaccine shot on Easter Sunday, prompting all sorts of blasphemous jokes about being resurrected from lockdown, though it’ll be another five weeks (three to my next shot, and another two after that) before all those little antibodies build up. I felt fine in the aftermath, and still do now, though this to be expected after your first shot. It’s like tequila. The first one is fine, and makes you feel invincible, and you feel an inexplicable but intense love for everyone around you, especially those who gave you the shot or took one with you. It’s really the second shot that takes you down.

Vaccines are rolling out – slow at first, and now a steady trickle. My friends and I keep checking in on one another as we have for the last year, though the topic has switched from “You hanging in there?” to “Any side-effects?” We’ve become a little bit like science experiments, marigolds clipped to electrodes. I have many hypotheses about what the effects of the world opening up again will be like after more than a year of trauma and death and lockdowns and the politicization of basic science. In the words of Jessie Spano, I’m so excited, and I’m so scared.

“Do you have your superpowers?” a man asked me as I left.

I remind myself of the luck and the privilege that allowed for this, with having internet and a governor who wasn’t corrupt, with having access and the ability to book my shot.

I treated many really sick Covid-19 patients today.

All wanted to get vaccinated but didn’t know how to navigate appointments, transportation. Might sound easy, but for many, it’s not.

Expanding eligibility doesn’t always mean accessibility, especially for the most vulnerable.

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) April 6, 2021

Rand was giddy about it when I came home – “I can’t believe it,” he said. I couldn’t either. When we went into lockdown last March he told me we’d be through by August.

“Six months, tops,” he said. By my birthday at the latest.

The time came and went. I turned 40 in lockdown, argued that it didn’t count while the skin under my neck flappingly disagreed. His grandmother died. My nephew started to walk and talk. My friends had babies. Time passed at the same time that it stood still, and I watched a lot of TV. When talk of the vaccine started, Rand said we’d probably not be able to get it until the end of summer, and he was wrong again, but this time in the best way. When that needle went in my arm I almost cried, not from the pain but because I realized I had been carrying all those damn tears around, everywhere I didn’t go.

“I need you to know,” I told him, “about some of the side-effects of the vaccine.”

“Oh?”

“I might get cranky if I don’t snack regularly.”

“I see.”

“That one seems to be unfortunately permanent.”

“And we’re going to attribute that to the vaccine, are we?”

“We are.”

Other things that, in the last two days, I have claimed were side-effects to the vaccine:

Demanding to be hand-fed Cheet-os as though I am a baby bird.
–Crying while watching The Great Pottery Thrown Down, a program which should not actually elicit tears, but reminds me that my studio has been closed for a year, and I don’t know if I still remember how to throw, or how to apply surface decoration, or the name of the woman with the dark hair who inspired me to spend a year reading female authors. Also, one of the judges cries all the time and it’s wonderful, truly, but that sort of thing is contagious.
–Farting.
–Eating an entire bag of kettle corn for dinner.
–Crying after learning that 7 million people will not get the vaccine because they are concerned about the cost of it, and they don’t realize that it is free.
–Being very scared that I am going to look back on this year having accomplished nothing besides surviving it.
–Crying while watching that very stupid Google commercial where people do searches and at first the searches are all “pandemic family activities” and then the cursor deletes “pandemic” and oh my god.
– Absolutely losing my mind with sobs when I ended a phone call with my brother and heard my little nephew say “Bye-bye” in the background.
–Screaming “I have had just about enough of everyone’s bullshit!” and then refusing to specify who everyone is and what bullshit I am referring to.
–Crying while watching The Muppets because technically shouldn’t some of them have died by now?
–Losing several hours to looking up the lifespan of the average Muppet.

Oh god.

–

 Going to the store to buy groceries and forgetting the one thing I went there to buy but picking up a whole bunch of other things that were not on my list but looked good at the time.
–An overwhelming worry that I’ve forgotten how to be in the world.
–More crying.

 

So, that’s where I am. Normalcy still feels elusive and I miss everyone and everything. If I think too hard about it and the last year, my eyesight gets all watery, and it makes it hard to see, but still – there it is, that stupid light at the end of that stupid tunnel, forever too late for some of us.

“It’s a side-effect,” I say into his shoulder as we sit on the couch.

“Okay,” he replies, and puts on a show. It makes me cry, but what did I expect?

All The Insults You Meet As a Woman On The Internet

CW: This post contains mentions of death/rape threats, some graphic language, descriptions of online abuse, screen caps of verbal abuse, transphobic and hateful comments. If you need a mental palate cleanser after just thinking about that, here’s a pic of Rand cooking. 

 

So, last week, or maybe two weeks ago, or three months (does it matter? Does anyone remember? Are we still keeping track? HOW IS IT STILL MARCH? IT HAS BEEN MARCH FOR A YEAR.) I did something that caught people’s attention on Twitter, and it amused some folks and rankled others, the way anything that catches people’s attention does.

And since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d talk about it.

A little while ago, Lauren Boebert, a Representative from Colorado (she was the one who was livetweeting the location of several sheltering Democratic officials, including Speaker Pelosi, during the armed siege of the Capitol, and also vowed to take a loaded glock onto the Senate floor) posed in front of her bookshelf, onto which she’d precariously shoved a bunch of firearms.

 

I decided to do the same with sanitary pads.

Decided to display menstrual products on the bookshelves behind me the way Lauren Boebert does firearms. pic.twitter.com/GGfai6gdqL

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 18, 2021

Generally if I tweet anything vaguely critical of the free-for-all smorgasboard that is American’s gun control laws, or anything that acknowledges the horrifying truth that menstruation happens for some humans, my mentions become a shitstorm for a few days. But this, dear friends, managed to hit the sweet spot in the Venn diagram where those two concepts overlap, and so I was hit with a monsoon of crap.

(Nice things were said, too. The problem with a monsoon of crap is that you tend to lose sight of all those nice things.)

At some point, even Boebert herself saw the tweet and felt the need to weigh in, with some weird transphobic comment that still remains baffling to me.

 

But what’s amazing is just how unoriginal all the insults were. They were the same thing I’ve always gotten. Every single time. Again and again and again. And they’re virtually identical to all the comments my friends get, again and again and again. It’s like Groundhog Day, but I’m surrounded by white supremacist misogynistic transphobes who are just deeply unloved. So, I figure, I’m just going to cover all the insults I get online here, so we don’t need to go through this again next time.

Narrator: she would absolutely be going through this again next time. 

“You are mentally ill and need help!”


Yes, please lock me up in a home for the unstable, for I have a wandering uterus which is giving me fits, and have developed a nasty habit of literacy, as well as an acute infection of feminism on the brain. The only cure is a mixture of laudanum, writing up legislation to repeal the 19th amendment, and planning my future dream life when I become Mrs. Matt Gaetz.
–“You look like a dude/ You secretly ARE a dude.” Please, if I was a dude, people would be listening to me right now.
–“Your husband is a girl.” Someone literally said this because Rand likes to cook.
Anyway, this is sexy as hell and calling someone a girl isn’t the insult you think it is.
– “You are super ugly.”
Oh, no, the guys on Twitter who are frightened by menstruation and find grammar as baffling as they do the clitoris doesn’t want to fuck me, whatever will I do.
–“Your husband doesn’t actually love you”/”How the fuck are you married, you’re disgusting” etc, etc.

DAMN IT, THEY HAVE FIGURED US OUT, HE JUST MARRIED ME FOR THE DOWRY AND THE TITLE OF MR. “SHE SEEMS LIKE A BITCH” pic.twitter.com/DY9zvuWq5T

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 19, 2021

Yup. It’s all a sham. And my husband is a girl. And I am a boy. We’re very unhappy. It’s been two decades of hell. I’m too gross to be loved.
We only stay together for the children, which is how I refer to our shared Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts.
–
–

“Just take the L!”
[image error]
Ah, take the L. I assume that this also what they say to women after they’ve failed to given them an O. HEYOOOOOOOO!!!!
–“You are gross/disgusting/need to bathe more.”



Fear not, gentle souls: when I am on my menses I will retreat to a dark cave in the forest until I am done, and should the dark day arise that I ever need to defecate, I will flee into the hinterlands, never to return to polite society. (Also, of all these folks who are very eager to tell me how gross I am, none of them are using their real photos. Because I’m sure they’re super comfortable with how they look.)
–“Some other insulting comment about my glasses/nose ring!”
–
Oh. Oh, JayeMarie. What was that about glasses?–“You are old! You are menopausal! YOU ARE 80!”

Sit down, my little kittens. Let me tell you a story. Sometime at the closing of the 1970s, in the sunset of Disco, my parents did lie together and begat a child of that long-ago epoch. Now, decades later, I watch my bones wither to dust and my memories fade. “The first time I saw Back to The Future,” I whisper, tears rolling down skin as thin and creased as crepe paper, “it really was 1985.”Anyway, I will continue to strive to be as comfortable with my withering looks as you, grown woman who uses cartoon avatar and guy whose profile pic is a blurry group shot.
–“You don’t know you’re talking about!” It’s literally a photo of me in front of tampons, Dave. I’m not sure that there’s that much to scrutinize here.
–The Death/Rape Threat. Of course, no discussion of online abuse would be complete without these guys, who truly are at the bottom of the shit barrel. They take a few forms, most of them single-celled. Some try to hide behind hypotheticals, like “How are you going to protect yourself when a rapist comes busting through your door?” and comments that assess our value according to how rapeable we are – i.e., “You are too ugly to rape, anyway!”. 

This dude felt the need to decapitate me because he got upset at the sight of menstrual pads. Imagine having this many books about programming on your shelf and still being this fucking bad at Photoshop.
–
–
Or being this mad because I. Posed. With. Maxi. Pads. He’s is about to give himself a rage stroke because he had to look at overnight super absorbents with wings.
–

The absolutely baffling.

–
Me:–Bonus: The unintentional self-burn.
The poor dipshits are so unfamiliar with basic human anatomy that they don’t understand why someone would need pads of different absorbencies.

 

What’s funny is I actually PREDICTED this would happen:

If you did this with menstrual products and contraceptives, the GOP would lose their minds pic.twitter.com/zyoYXG5VQs

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 18, 2021

Because the insults s are always the fucking same. Because hate is inherently unimaginative. It’s the opposite of creativity. If you hate, you haven’t put any thought into anything.

To anyone who feels the urge to repeat any of these messages to me, I would *strongly* encourage you to try to come up with something new. You might even find yourself thinking. And that might lead somewhere good. Because as things stand, y’all are getting a little predictable.

Until next time …

[image error]

How To Be Creative When Everything Is Bad

I hear a lot of people saying – as we approach the year anniversary of this pandemic and lockdown, a year of not knowing what it means to hug those close to us or see people we love, or do any of those previously forgettable but now utterly unimaginable everyday things like sitting at a crowded bar or sharing a dessert with everyone at the table – that they are hitting the wall.

I think I hit mine. (I say “think” because I realize that it may not have been it – that something worse might still be coming.) It happened a few months ago, knocking the wind from my lungs. I wanted rage at something, at the world and the circumstances that had shaped it into what it was, but it was like those dreams where you try to scream and nothing comes out. It just stays inside of you and you feel a little like you’re drowning. I was uncertain of what to do – everyone is falling apart at different times, and so whenever I do, it feels like I’m the only one who is.

I took long walks and cried and I did that again and again until the bruise from hitting the wall didn’t hurt so much, even when I pressed on it.

In all of this, I have been trying to be creative. I’ve spent a year working on a book and made little progress, and it’s a daily battle with myself and my brain. I look at the book that I wrote, years ago, and it is a piece of alchemy I do not understand. I put words together, again and again, enough of them to make a memoir, and it feels like someone else did that.

I spoke to my friend Rachel Friedman the other day, who wrote one of my favorite books about creativity (a book that made me cry because she wrote about things that I had felt acutely). We talked about what it means to try to create right now.

For me, I feel like I have no excuses. I have large swaths of time, a quiet office, few distractions. I don’t have children to homeschool or feed or keep alive. I have a husband who is clean and tidy and considerate and makes me dinner almost every night, and sometimes when I am tired and cranky he makes me lunch, too. The only thing stopping me, as always, seems to be me. This is insufferable, I know. No one wants to hear about a writer struggling to write. It’s a navel-gazing ouroboros, a nice big loop of self-woe from people with too much time on their hands.

“I don’t think writer’s block exists,” Rachel says to me delicately, when I tell her that I am wrestling with trying to make something in all of this mess. “I think what it is is fear. I think we’re afraid, and that fear means that we stop creating.”

There is truth to thing, of course, and let it be clear: I am soaking in fear and self-doubt. But I also have to get something done, I tell her. I need to make sense of this time. Because simply getting through this stretch doesn’t seem like enough. “Everyone keeps talking about how Shakespeare wrote Lear during the plague,” I say.

Rachel laughs, but it’s somehow gentle and light, not mocking. She tells me she doesn’t even know if that’s true. (I am inclined to agree. I tell her how I think Emilia wrote half his plays, and one day I’m going to write a book from her perspective, just one more in a list of projects that I talk about but never do.) Rachel tells me she thinks creativity isn’t as isolated an activity as we often think it is, and at a time when we’re all so alone, it’s unfair to expect that we can produce art.

And there is the crux of it, the catch-22 of it all.

So many of us are trying to create, because it seems like the only way to make sense of this lonely, sad, impossible moment in time.

But it’s so hard to create right now, because of how we feel in this lonely, sad, impossible moment in time.

I don’t really know what the answer is. Sometimes I tell myself that the only way I’ll get through this is if I finish this manuscript. Other days, I remind myself of the lesson in Rachel’s wonderful book – that there are so many ways to be creative. Like finding a new way to calm yourself down when the world feels impossible. Maybe it is a doodle you draw while you are on a Zoom call, or the cookies you bake your neighbor. Or the thread of texts that you and your friend send one another so that you each feel less alone in the quiet hours of the night. It might be the ridiculously wonderful calendar you get someone after she insists that Chris Pine is the best Chris.

 

If you are my husband, your creativity is in the food you cook, so lovingly that it makes my heart itch a little.

 

These are the things we make that are not books. But they make these days easier, and maybe that is miraculous in and of itself. Maybe that is its own kind of art.