Goodbye, 2020
Autumn Forest
Animal poem*
my naem is Duck
I sit in pot
you think am flower,
but am not
and when you try
to pluck my head
I bite you, yes,
for lack of bread.
*For those not familiar with this format, little two stanza poems written from the perspective of an animal and deliberately misspelled and/or containing errors are just . . . something that happens on the internet.
Goodbye, 2018
I
Merry Christmas!!
Guest Post: ME/CFS in Metaphor
Hey readers, this is a guest post from my sister-in-law, who also suffers from ME/CFS.
Let me compare CFS/ME to trying to live life with high roller friends while operating on a minimum wage salary. There’s some justice in this comparison. Think of it like this: all your friends and family are loaded with money—so much they take it for granted, and spend it freely. They don’t even think about it. Spending money is like breathing in and out. The most natural thing in the world. Cars. Jets. Charities. Vacations. This is their life. It’s what they are used to and they’ve never known anything different.
Your friends love you and want you to be with them. Of course, you want the same, but you’ve got thirteen bucks to your name and that won’t go very far on a high roller lifestyle. You have to stretch those coins out very carefully, and often creatively, just to get the bare minimum done with them. And they hardly cover the most basic needs, much less luxuries.
You explain your situation. And they understand, or… they try to understand. They offer to pay your way. They’ll cover the travel. They’ll cover the cost of the meal. But even then, you’ve got to wear something. And that dress and shoes are going to cost you. But you want to be with your friends and family, so you go into debt. And you go out and you smile and you take those pictures, and you clink your glass in that toast, but the cost of the dress and shoes is in the back of your mind all the time. You’ll have to pay for it.
And you do. Several days, or weeks, later you surface again and you see your friends and they invite you to a gala, but you’re still half shattered from the last experience. You shouldn’t go out again so soon. So you decline, and they try to understand, but they go away hurt anyway. You go away, lonelier than you can remember having ever been.
Invitations come less frequently, but you can’t give too much thought to it, because the bills are coming in and you can barely keep your nose above them. And you have to parse out that money so carefully, just to do the most basic things. Keep your child and husband fed. Clothed. Safe. Manage your work as best you can, pinching pennies and cutting back, going hungry yourself half of the time because you need the money more than the flesh on your bones.
It’s stressful, because you want that connection to the outside world, but you simply can’t afford it. There’s guilt as well as stress, and a gnawing hunger for an existence not quite so suffocating—not quite so narrow, but again, the stress only makes things worse. It comes calling in the persona of creditor. And if you believe in it too much, suddenly even the breath in your nose costs you and you know that you’ll never see your way out of debt—even the brief reprieves are only temporary.
Occasionally—only occasionally–you wonder what ever happened to your dreams. You look at yourself in the mirror and you see a husk of your former self, and still you guard that self and all it represents, because you must. You have debts to pay with it.
And your friends and family make excuses for you, but some few of them (in an ungenerous moment) wish you would try harder to be in the land of the living. Your child feels resentful and deprived. And she is right. She wants you and can’t have you. You are already quartered and sectioned off to the creditors.
The thing about CFS is it’s not money, but it’s energy you haven’t got. And healthy people have energy in spades. They take it for granted and can’t understand what it is to have such profound weakness and relentless pain without any explanation. Can it possibly be real?
Let me answer that question.
Yes, chronic fatigue is real and its victims are many. Our disappearance is not for lack of effort. Not for lack of determination. Nor for lack of heart or nerve. We slave invisibly under debts you cannot imagine. And you—you who have your health. You are the one percent to us. So extraordinarily, so unattainably rich. Do you know how wealthy you are?
We wouldn’t wish you any less. Take your abundance and do well with it. We simply wish you knew your wealth.
Armistice Day, 100 years later
It has now been one hundred years since the end of World War I, “the war to end all wars.” (If only.) That conflict radically reshaped and altered the world, and I wanted to make note of it today. I do not have any profound remarks, but my sense of history and occasion cannot let the date go by unmarked.
Small-batch Strawberry Jam
I love jam; who doesn’t? Probably only lizard people trying to pass themselves off as humans. I love it, but store bought jam is a) expensive, b) almost always has corn syrup in it, and c) isn’t as good. However, jam making can be a bit of a chore. But thanks to my sister, Isabella, I found a good recipe for making small batches of jam, and its sugar content it much lower than most jams, yet it is still sweet and wonderfully fruity!
Recipe:
- 1 pound fruit, fresh or frozen (weighed after pitting, peeling, or cutting if appropriate)
- 2 to 4 tablespoons water
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar or honey
- 1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice, or more to taste
- Optional: herbs, spices, other flavor additions
- Combine the fruit and water in a heavy-bottomed pan and set over medium heat. Bring to a low boil, cover the pot, and reduce the heat to medium low. Cook, stirring every few minutes, until the fruit breaks up into sauce, 10 to 15 minutes. (My personal note: so far I have only used strawberries with this recipe, and they do not break down completely. I used my handheld blender to purée them.)
- Uncover the pot and stir in the sugar or honey. Raise the heat to medium and continue to cook, uncovered, stirring often to prevent the jam from burning on the bottom of the pot, until the sauce thickens, 15 to 20 minutes. Stir in the lemon juice. Taste, and adjust for sweetness if necessary. Allow to cool and transfer to a jar. If you’ve added whole spices, you can either remove them now or leave them in the jar to continue to infuse the jam for a stronger flavor.
I tripled the recipe, and ended up with three pounds of jam (feels a bit odd to think of jam in pounds, but there you are). I also used much more lemon juice: it really ended up being more a strawberry-lemon jam, which was fine with me, as lemon is one of my favorite flavors. If you aren’t going to use it fairly quickly, you should freeze this jam to help it keep.
Knitting for the unravelled
It has long been my dream to be a knitter. Not just to knit, but to be someone who jauntily whips out a sweater with ease, who is learned in the ways of lace, who is not scared of patterns that require slipped stitches and yarn overs (yarns over?). A long time ago I knitted two scarves, and that was as far as I ventured into the dark and murky waters of yarn manipulation.
Fast forward to autumn 2017: I decided, moved by I know not what impulse, to resume knitting. I made a scarf, about which I have already posted. It was an important step in several ways: not only did it get me back in the swing of knitting, but I tried several things I had never done before: I made my own pattern, I used three different colors of yarn, and I learned how to join yarn. The success of the (rather itchy) scarf gave me the confidence I needed to move on to bigger and better things: baby blankets.
Since my mom is the person who taught me how to knit and is my main knitting resource, I talked to her about my renewed interest in the craft. She lent me a book of baby blanket patterns, and I decided the first one looked easy enough that I dared brave an attempt at it. The next step was finding the right yarn: I wanted a pastel material that was soft enough for a baby’s delicate skin. I had something of a bias against acrylic when I set out and had cotton in mind, but the yarn I ended up with was indeed acrylic, not only soft, but machine washable to boot! An important consideration for any textile that is going to be used primarily by or for babies.
Pattern: chosen. Yarn: found. Now, to begin the actual knitting. I cast on. I counted and recounted the stitches. And I tried. And attempted. And tried again. Over and over, I had to pull the yarn out. I can tell you, it is very demoralizing to tear out hundreds of stitches, redo them, and have to tear them out again. But I was learning.
Not only my brain, but my hands were in training. My knitting is generally very even, but I have an unfortunate tendency to knit too tightly, and my actual technique left something to be desired. I was using my pointer finger as leverage against the knitting needle at every stitch, which was rather painful (and Against the Rules).
As time went on and I became more comfortable with the pattern, however, my muscle memory developed and I was able to relax somewhat and begin to shed some of my bad habits. I came out the other side a better, more confident knitter.
The end of the saga: I finished knitting the blanket in time for the baby shower, and it is currently being used by my new niece! I am currently at work on another blanket of the same pattern, for another expected niece (I am VERY excited). Lessons learned: do not give it to fear of yarn. And keep on trying.
Finished at last!
Ready to be given away
Fear of Missing Out
To achieve the twin goals of expressing myself and showing people what life is like with ME/CFS, I’m going to start doing short posts with gifs, to add humor and a visual element.
Fear of Missing Out: we bypass FOMO and head straight to COMO (Certainty of Missing Out). It’s hard to get up to much when you’re very ill. There have been so many things, even quite small things, that I haven’t done because I just wasn’t well enough.
A small illustration: the vast majority of the time, I do not have the energy to drive myself somewhere, do whatever it is that needs doing, and drive back. Earlier this year I drove a few minutes to the pharmacy, picked up my medications, and came back. All by myself! And yes, that was a first, and a major triumph. I am somehow still surprised when people think I might show up somewhere without my husband (“Oh, is he with you?”). If he ain’t there, I ain’t either. He’s my ride.
Another example: we have lived in our current apartment for more than three and a half years, and there is a weekly knitting night at our local library that I have always wanted to attend. How many times have I been able to go? Zero. Sad but true.
But things are better than they used to be. There was a point in my life where I didn’t so much as set foot outside for days at a time, and it is now rare that I don’t make it at least to the mailbox. Progress, inchworm style.
The Tired Baker 