The Ides-est of Marches

What a weird year this week has been.

I'm mostly writing this because I was supposed to be working today, but work has been excruciatingly slow and now they're asking for people to voluntarily cut hours or be laid off. You might think that, being an EMT working for an ambulance company, we would be busier than ever, but that's not correct (yet). Most of the business is non-emergency transport; you're in a wheelchair and you need to get from a doctor's appointment back home, or you just had surgery and still have to stay in a hospital bed but now it's time to get from that hospital to a different hospital that'll manage your physical therapy and rehab until you're ready to go home, or you were admitted for a behavioral health issue and now need to be securely transported back home or to a care facility, or or or. I might go "permanently" part-time for the duration of this, but I don't know yet. I might lose my job entirely! Literally no way to know or control it, so I'm trying to take things as they come and focus on what I can actually impact.

Years and years of practicing letting go of things I don't have power over, and practicing moving my attention to where I can be effective, have me calmer than just about everyone else I'm in contact with at the moment. That, or I'm freaking out so deeply inside that I cannot access it at all. So either I'm doing relatively well, or I have no idea how I'm doing and won't discover it until much later. Maybe I'm doing relatively well *because* I have no idea how I'm doing? But I mostly feel fine. I've had a few days of willfully doing things I know will make me feel worse (Klondike bars for multiple meals in a row -- I don't recommend this!!), and I'm still resistant to some things I know absolutely will help me feel better (literally any exercise?), but I've still got good reflexes on reading social media while it's fun and putting it down the moment I start to feel gross. I'm still playing my years-long game of seeing how many days I can go without hearing the president's voice. At the suggestion of a friend, made before Covid19 was being reported, I try to find a moment every day to connect with my spouse and just...be people together who like each other and are enjoying our mutual company.

The motivating reason for that last one is because we're foster parents now, as of almost exactly one month after my dad died. Every dad-related emotion or idea I've ever had, just getting tapped all at once I guess? And I thought wrangling with all of that was going to be The Challenge, but now it's mostly "how to get a 16-year-old boy who doesn't really know or trust you much yet to leave his room for any length of time now that he's not in school and isn't allowed to see his friends in person?" Any/all teen parenting tips are deeply welcome, because I'm very new at this and so I figure I don't even know enough to know when I'm doing stuff badly yet. 

My dad remains dead, which continues to surprise me off and on. It used to be multiple times a day, but now a few times a week I'll be doing something and have to re-learn it all over again. The bitter twist in this is that he's one of the people I find myself wanting to talk to about my dad being dead. My aunt mailed me a bunch of his stuff in boxes, and while going through it I found a lot of the memorial ephemera from when his father died, including a pamphlet from the funeral home called "Losing Your Dad". It was, as you might expect, helpful, and probably more helpful than anything he would have actually said.

In that way where times of stress reveal more of ourselves than we might otherwise like: I was highly anticipating the new Animal Crossing game, and I do very much enjoy it, but I've also sort of pivoted to playing through Morrowind for the first time. Somewhere in the back of my head, "very old game you can mod" + "reputation for having almost TOO much content" = "move there emotionally until it's safe to socialize again"...although I don't know who I'm kidding, I didn't like socializing even when I *could* do it. I have a hard time making myself get on group Zoom calls, because it still feels like too much work. I know social interaction is important and healthy, and I generally feel good afterward, but also...talking. Hmm.

As always, I wish this was more polished and coherent, but it's not really a time for polish and coherence I suppose.