Lunch Notes

A phrase that I've been repeating to myself lately is: "It doesn't have to be this way." And I feel like I say it for a lot of different things. The university system I'm in for my PhD doesn't have to be as austere has it's been for spending on students (and definitely doesn't have to spend as much as it does on admin). The work I do doesn't have to feel overwhelming; I don't have to do all the things all the time, and all right now.

Even my own negative self-talk has been getting reexamined: I don't have to be as harsh to myself and view my actions with the most uncharitable reading. Being realistic about who I am and what I'm doing means also recognizing when I do good things too, or recognizing when things I do are neither good nor bad. (And I don't have to use such stark binary categories anyway when it comes to my life and my actions!)

This particular wave of having "It doesn't have to be this way" be my mantra is somewhat inspired by my reading The Ethical Slut by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton. Though I've been poly for a long time (my user name is a chemistry-inspired play on the word "polyamory"), I hadn't read this particular book. I'm glad I'm reading it when I am, though; it feels like a refreshing review, a reminder of all the good things that I've experienced as a polyamorous person. 

Chief among these good experiences is realizing that the set of givens I am working with as a citizen of the U.S. who is a cisgender, bisexual woman of color doesn't aren't immutable divine mandates. I can choose a life outside of the norm. It doesn't have to be that deep (but it's totally fine, and probably better in the long run, if it is). Permanent monogamy doesn't have to be the endgame. The life I choose doesn't have to look like anyone else's. 

My PhD advisor shared an imaginative exercise with us during class once: Imagine what you want writers you admire to say about your work. Write those words down. Put them up where you can see them and remind yourself of them.

I haven't quite done the last part of writing them down and then posting them in places where I can see them. There is some part of me that is a little skeptical about such reminders. I don't know if such simple acts are enough to get me to do the things I need to do in order to write what I want to write. It's a little silly, maybe, but there is some part of me that thinks that if I really want to write something, then I'll feel intrinsically motivated to do so.

Of course, I also know enough to know that motivation is hardly ever so clean. I know enough that intrinsic motivation is among the hardest things to do.

What I might try to do is to make such reminders into art that I can hang up. I recently had a minor disaster in my office: the felt pads that I've put up as a kind of bulletin board have started falling off because I kept repositioning them too much, so the sticky pads have stopped being sticky. It got so annoying to put them over and over that I took them down, and so now I have a blank wall. I'm planning on putting them back up soon, but in the meantime I'm thinking about what else to put on that board. What other reminders do I want? What other things do I want to highlight for myself? What will get me to do things, and not just sit around waiting for motivation?

I guess I'll see. The first step, is to figure out a way to get them to not fall off again.

I mentioned a few entries ago that I got COVID recently. It's only my second time, and the first time I got it was three or so years ago, but I remember the feeling of the slow recovery period and the challenges of feeling like I "should" be better much faster than I actually got better. This time is no different: I'm certainly feeling a lot better than I did when I was in the middle of my sickest point, but I am still not "back to normal." I get tired very easily. I sleep too little at night and need to take naps during the day. I'm short of breath. I sometimes get dizzy. Thinking through anything can sometimes feel like trying to think through sludge.

And, as with any event that disrupts my daily routine, I haven't been very good at keeping up with the little things that help me get through the day: habit trackers, daily planning, etc. I've been able to somewhat keep up my bare minimum of writing down a to-do list and using pomodoro timers throughout the day to stay on task. But everything else has been paused for the past few weeks.

Naturally, it's around this time that I start getting antsy to get back in the saddle on all the things I had paused before I got sick.

And, naturally, it's not a good idea for me to do too much all at once. I'm only going to make myself sad that I can't do all the things I was doing before I'm actually ready to do them again.

I know I'm not alone in this. All the former-gifted-kid memes tell me so. But if I need the reminder, then other people might need the reminder too: You're doing fine. You're not behind. And you don't need to do things at the same pace as other people.

And if you're sick, what are you doing on the internet? Get some rest!

As part of today's lunch break, I thought I'd read a bit of news, too, to sort of inform today's lunch post. And this headline stood out to me: "FDA appears to be slow-walking vaccine approvals" by Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and Brandy Zadrozny for NBC News.

Since I got COVID recently and am still recovering (it's going to take weeks for me to get rid of this cough, if past experience is any indication), I wanted to just post a few readings and reactions to this piece as I read through it. 

A few things I hate about this: 1) That this is a, supposedly, official government position that's being posted on social first, which always feels at least tacky and unprofessional, if not downright foolish, and 2) the rhetoric used sounds anti-corporate, but it's hiding the fact that this kind of (in)action is deeply anti-human.

I know that we've lived in a world for a while where social media seems to be the first line of information dissemination, but that doesn't mean that I have to like it. A social media-forward communications strategy for government agencies and the like feel like they further erode trust, not build up rapport with "ordinary" people. Because that, to me, is always the line for being social media-forward: it's an attempt to meet people where they are.

However, slow-rolling boosters means that people aren't getting the care they need. The anecdotal evidence of my own getting COVID recently is a testament to the fact that it's still around, that we aren't in a "post-pandemic" world, and that vaccines are still necessary to combat its spread. And using all the same buzzwords and turns of phrase that "The Left" likes to use (science, and attacking Big Pharma) is deeply upsetting.

In a written statement, an HHS spokesperson said the Biden administration waived clinical trial requirements for new Covid vaccines “using the COVID pandemic as an eternal justification for blanket approvals.” 

Under Makary, the spokesperson said, trials from four years ago “no longer suffice.”

Again, I just want to reiterate that those clinical trial requirements were waived during the COVID pandemic—and we are still in that pandemic.


This, to me, is one of the more alarming things about this administration. I remember that during the election season, many people had lots of criticisms of President Biden's pandemic response, ranging from it being a worse version of Trump's pandemic response in his first term. I remember hearing some buzz that the Biden administration declared the pandemic "over" when it so clearly wasn't.

But I can't imagine that a Democratic administration, Biden or Harris or anyone else, would take basically take away the path to rapid vaccine development and distribution. Based on this (admittedly, one) article, it seems like that is much more of a possibility under Trump 2.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts. COVID is one of those issues that I tend to pay more attention to for a whole host of reasons, and this headline, and the story that followed it, warranted a bit more of my attention.

I have these felt pads (squares of two different shades of green) on my wall that act as a bulletin board and a small bit of sound cushioning, and I recently rearranged them so that they were all on one wall instead of spreading out over two walls. While I liked checkerboard pattern and the paper ephemera I pinned to those boards, especially because it made my video call backgrounds more interesting, I did mess up when I first put them up and posted them so that the line of them slanted downward. Technically the built-in level app on my phone said that the line was straight, but when I actually looked at my video during meetings, I could see them sloping.

So I said, fuck it, I have half an hour before my work day starts. I'll just unpin all the stuff then shift them over (since these pads are, thankfully, fairly easy to reposition). I haven't yet re-pinned all the things yet, but that's what the second half of my lunch break is going to be spent doing.

This is often how I get through my day: I remind myself that a task that I've been dreading doesn't actually take that long, and I just decide to do it in the little time I have left between obligations. Like this lunchtime blogging. Or the reading I do for my degree. Or the tasks I have to do for work. When I have very little motivation to do things, it doesn't help me at all to berate myself for not doing something. But if I tell myself that it'll only take a part of a pomodoro interval to do the thing? That makes it easier.