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Thursday: so many meltdowns
Jul. 16th, 2020 11:00 pmAt one point today, it took less than 10 minutes to go from okay, happy to be done with the break and back at it to meltdown.
I think the new strategy for today and tomorrow is going to be: all breaks spend away from keyboard playing catch with me.
I walked with M. Something happened to her phone. She is too distressed to be able to tell me what happened, but by the end of our visit she was able to say she might be able to talk about it tomorrow.
I walked with A.
I have noticed that since playing catch with A., my arms fall asleep a lot less and wake me up in the middle of the night all painfully tingling. This is interesting! For a long time, I was able to minimize that problem by lifting weights, but over the last year, lifting has been less and less effective at fixing the problem (still useful for maintaining ADLs like, you know, putting shit on upper shelves). Hopefully, we will continue to play kooshball catch even after she is done with her virtual day camp.
There is an affecting ad about Trump and back to school. It is a series of Dear Diary moments told by a 14 year old girl (plus or minus) and over the weeks since returning to school, we learn about her uncle dying (refusing to wear a mask), to her best friend with asthma dying, to various staff dying, to finally her father dying, all with the little girl talking about how much she trust(s)(ed) Trump and that going back to school was the right thing, and also about her fears along the way. Whoever put that thing together basically looked at the Daisy ad and said, how do we do that for C19? The big difference being that the Daisy ad never mentions Goldwater and was favoring the incumbent whereas this one does name Trump — and never names the person who would be the obvious alternative. Well, you know, also that depicting the threat of nuclear war is super different than the threat of the pandemic. But both focus very crudely on the worst case, and do not necessarily pay much attention to the grinding daily awful. I sort of wish that we could do a better job of presenting just how _bad_ the Go Back to School option is, _if it works_. Like, if absolutely no one died, but the way we did it involved no singing, no music, no laughing out loud, no touching, masks all day, sitting in one chair all die, and everyone being afraid of dying all the time — that is awful. Why the hell would we do that? How could that be better than remote learning? I mean, fine, Before Times In Person is better than remote, but Before Times In Person is Off the Menu.
It’s like comparing birth control options to sylphium. Sylphium _is extinct_. Gone _forever_. The Before Times are in the past.
They are all dead Dave. Dave, everybody’s dead.
We gotta figure out a way to either reconfigure school dramatically to involve _much_ smaller, distributed groups (pods, quaranteams, nanny shares, WTF) or we need to go all remote, or some combination of the two. We have to quit pretending that large scale centralized warehousing of kids is a reasonable strategy for raising children. Period.
I think the new strategy for today and tomorrow is going to be: all breaks spend away from keyboard playing catch with me.
I walked with M. Something happened to her phone. She is too distressed to be able to tell me what happened, but by the end of our visit she was able to say she might be able to talk about it tomorrow.
I walked with A.
I have noticed that since playing catch with A., my arms fall asleep a lot less and wake me up in the middle of the night all painfully tingling. This is interesting! For a long time, I was able to minimize that problem by lifting weights, but over the last year, lifting has been less and less effective at fixing the problem (still useful for maintaining ADLs like, you know, putting shit on upper shelves). Hopefully, we will continue to play kooshball catch even after she is done with her virtual day camp.
There is an affecting ad about Trump and back to school. It is a series of Dear Diary moments told by a 14 year old girl (plus or minus) and over the weeks since returning to school, we learn about her uncle dying (refusing to wear a mask), to her best friend with asthma dying, to various staff dying, to finally her father dying, all with the little girl talking about how much she trust(s)(ed) Trump and that going back to school was the right thing, and also about her fears along the way. Whoever put that thing together basically looked at the Daisy ad and said, how do we do that for C19? The big difference being that the Daisy ad never mentions Goldwater and was favoring the incumbent whereas this one does name Trump — and never names the person who would be the obvious alternative. Well, you know, also that depicting the threat of nuclear war is super different than the threat of the pandemic. But both focus very crudely on the worst case, and do not necessarily pay much attention to the grinding daily awful. I sort of wish that we could do a better job of presenting just how _bad_ the Go Back to School option is, _if it works_. Like, if absolutely no one died, but the way we did it involved no singing, no music, no laughing out loud, no touching, masks all day, sitting in one chair all die, and everyone being afraid of dying all the time — that is awful. Why the hell would we do that? How could that be better than remote learning? I mean, fine, Before Times In Person is better than remote, but Before Times In Person is Off the Menu.
It’s like comparing birth control options to sylphium. Sylphium _is extinct_. Gone _forever_. The Before Times are in the past.
They are all dead Dave. Dave, everybody’s dead.
We gotta figure out a way to either reconfigure school dramatically to involve _much_ smaller, distributed groups (pods, quaranteams, nanny shares, WTF) or we need to go all remote, or some combination of the two. We have to quit pretending that large scale centralized warehousing of kids is a reasonable strategy for raising children. Period.