Optimization and Infestation

On being forced to let go, maybe.

For my birthday this year, I got myself some ringworm. I was driving home from teaching my Thursday evening class, when a little itch drew my attention to my lower back, where I could feel an odd, quarter-sized thingamabob. It was raised, suspiciously spherical, and had a rough texture around the circumference and a smooth, taut one in the middle. It was not a bite or a scratch or something of the every day. Instead, it was immediately recognizable as something intentional, something with a plan.

Once my sister, a nurse-practicioner, had sufficiently convinced me that there was not an actual worm infiltrating my body (she did seem to take some pleasure in my distress about this, as older sisters do), and I’d moved through a great deal of embarrassment, I transitioned into the second stage of having ringworm: telling everyone you know that you have ringworm. This was by no means joyless, and some brave souls even let me show them the worm and its ring, a point of pride at this point, but only as a reaction to cover up the deep anxiety I felt in the fact that my skin, which my six-year-old reminds me on a regular basis is the largest organ in my body, was hosting a parasite. My father mentioned that in his day, when you got ringworm they made you shave your head. A mark of shame. I got a migraine and vomited hours before my birthday party. The migraine passed but the ringworm held strong.

Just as the ringworm was settling in, we began to notice a few small, black flies circling our kitchen sink. These same flies had paid us visits in the past — they seemed to breed in the heat, which had been blasting Northern California, causing schools to cancel or make bulk popsicle orders. I made my little vinegar trap and boasted of each new death like a warrior stitching scalps to his belt. Murdering the flies was kind of fun, an immediate relief that was harder to find in the slow, months-long-slog of treating a fungus.

But then it got worse. Undeterred by attempted genocide, the flies persisted, even increased their ranks. They showed up in the bathroom, which is nowhere near the kitchen, seemingly uninterested in food, even the eponymous fruit. We decided they must be thirsty. My mother texted me an article about how flies like to breed in drains. I poured bleach down the pipes. I read an article that explained that that was a very stupid thing to do.

I got a cold. A bad one. A somehow not-covid, but still bad, and really not, oddly enough, at all covid cold. Woke up one morning with a throat like sandpaper and not the slightest motivation to get out of my bed. For the next few days it felt like every passageway around my brain was filled with throngs of Black Friday shoppers, and my skull was the doors to Best Buy. I kept remembering an image from Camus’ The Plague, one of the handful of books I’ve read several times, of “lancing the buboes,” and longed for some medieval quack to slide open the pulsing nucleus of my illness with an unsanitized knife and let the puss drain out. My daughter caught the cold. She stayed home from school for two days that I did not feel I had to be idle. I was supposed to finish a report. I was supposed to prep for my course. I was supposed to think of a book idea and then convince myself and invisible readers that it was urgent and necessary. My cold eased but did not give up entirely, leaving a death rattle of congestion and coughing and exhaustion that lasted several days.

My husband flew to the east coast for a wedding Thursday night, and on Friday morning, my daughter finally back at school, I noticed a small round spot on the inside of my left bicep — scaly on the edges and smooth in the middle. I checked my body like I was hunting for tics, and there they were, four or five more red blotches, clearly related to one another, though completely distant. I took very fuzzy, badly lit photos of myself, straining to reach the phone around my back, sent them to my doctor in a panic. Everyone said it was not an emergency but it felt like my body had surrendered to some sort of invasion, an itchy one that I think we should all remember has the word “worm” in it. Despite being behind on so many things, I let myself ruminate on my condition for hours. Would I ever be touched again?

By Friday afternoon, the flies had multiplied exponentially, like some kind of invisible gate had been thrown open and everyone and their 4,000 brothers had been invited in. Whole swarms now rose up whenever I opened the medicine cabinet. They floated around the living room, erupted from the kitchen trash can, hopped around our wall of family photographs, rested coyly on the bristle of my electric toothbrush. I wiped every surface in more bleach, though I remembered not to pour it down the sink this time. I ordered small plastic apple thingies with guaranteed fly bait that turned out to just be more vinegar. I hunted for their source, opening cabinets and peering into cracks. In a moment of either brilliance or paranoia, I unplugged the microwave and carried it out onto the porch. My son, who had succumbed to the cold as soon as my daughter started to bounce back from it, started using a ceramic dinosaur to try and smash them into the walls. I yelled at my kids and then apologized, explaining, I believed rationally, that the flies were really starting to infiltrate my psyche. As a peace offering, I let them watch an episode of Is It Cake?, but I couldn’t even enjoy the irresistible combination of cakes that look like not-cake things and Mikey Day’s hosting, so dry it borders on performance art. I was thinking about the flies, and how many days it would be until the cold would finally un-burrow itself from my family’s upper bodies, and whether my daughter was making contact with any ringworm when she snuggled me on the couch. I also wondered if, and just hear me out for a second, the flies had somehow been laying eggs under my skin, leading to my growing rash, and also if my lingering cough was just the result of having the bodies of many flies stuck in my throat.

I have been attempting to listen to an audiobook version of Atomic Habits, a book by a White guy whose name I can’t remember (Jack?? Jake??), with a voice like a lot of other White guys whose names I can’t remember. I have heard some good ideas that were attributed to this book, but I am also finding it almost unbearable, and struggling to find the will to go on. Early in the book, after enduring a forward that follows a actually gripping backstory with an endless series of numerical figures about the author’s success, we learn that habits are not an aha moment, but a series of small adjustments that over time add up to big results. There are a lot of examples about how when we eat a little bit better each day we don't get fat (not actually a fact for many people). We hear many examples, all of which sound like fifth-grade word problems, that illustrate this point. There is a passage about an ice cube in a slowly warming room that is agonizingly long. Did you know that if a pilot headed to New York adjust his direction 3.5° South he would end up in Washington DC??? Did you know that adding 1% of something each day for 30 days means you actually add 37%??? Did you know that the British National Cycling team sucked, but then after obsessively tweaking every little thing about how they worked, just a little bit (oh, and also giving their players illegal performance enhancing drugs), they won seven Tour de Frances???

Apparently, you don’t need to make drastic overhauls and announce a new-found commitment to efficiency, productivity, exercise (for a book that Spotify classifies as Business, there’s a lot of exercise references), you just get marginally every day! There is something lovely, of course, about being given permission not to move mountains, just a few pebbles one day at a time. Don’t fret if your successes aren’t enormous, like the ones achieved by the book’s author and detailed in the forward, because for the most part, the sausage actually gets made slowly but consistently, and the sausage-makers aren’t even particularly interesting. It’s sweet, in a way, but also sort of violent to someone like me, who really only works in fits and bursts, whose saving grace is often a well executed down-to-the-wire procrastination, which you can imagine is heavily discouraged by Jake/Jack.

Though I am very familiar with the gradual spiral downwards (see above ramblings), slow climbs are not my specialty. My thing is more, “spend an entire day researching magnesium supplements because a doctor suggested they might help your migraines, put several different ones in your cart on internet shopping sites, decide you could get it faster local, ordered it at a CVS, pick it up, get home, and place your new bottle of magnesium on a shelf right next to, you better believe it, another bottle of magnesium that you then realize you had sought out in a very similar episode a few months or a year or who could even know, what is time anyway, ago.”

it could happen to you

I have been trying to promote myself, which I am absolute garbage at doing (I tip my hat at you Jack/Jake, for crushing self-promotion like a weightlifting class, probably incrementally). So I decided I would just do a little bit every day—a few emails asking a friend for an “warm introduction” or a few additions to something I just learned is called a “cred deck” to steadily, hopefully, move the needle forward. I really, honest to god thought it would work. But I am so inconsistent, physically (see above), psychologically, menstrually, that I find I cannot accomplish this on-paper very manageable one-percent enhancement. I find that I either am too depressed about my prospects to lift finger to keyboard, or, suddenly, so convinced of the need the world has for my gifts that I engage in a flurry of progress. If this will ever get me anywhere, I don’t know. But I want to go somewhere. I want to have atomic impacts, if not the habits that might, according to one dude, get me there.

On Saturday, still solo parenting, a second illness came for me. This one is an upper respiratory infection, that laid me out so bad I spent all of Sunday whisper-screaming at my children and collapsing onto the couch. At one point my son suggested we call his dad—”does Dada know what’s happening???” I wasn’t sure if he meant all the illness, or that the flies had gotten worse, or my unstable parenting. In an aha moment the day before, when I still had a small bit of energy, I had dragged them to the hardware store to purchase more traps and proper drain fluid and a toxic spray that I then realized could not be used by a family that was never leaving their apartment. I even got the kids fly swatters, in black and red, to indoctrinate them. But the flies didn’t care about our big push. I put on Pokemon and went to the kitchen to sob. I imagined my shaved head, covered in buboes, my lungs hacked up onto the floor, the flies feasting on them. My children checking my into an in-patient psychiatric ward. My clients and students and you all gathering somewhere to discuss in detail what a disappointment I was.

Why do we let ourselves fall apart so easily? Convince ourselves that a series of unfortunate events is a cosmic sign that we should just give up already? Why do these annoyances that are not actual threats consume me so entirely that I cannot attend to a four-year-old I love asking me what the word “ambitious” means?? Is it the mounting exhaustion from having, the rest of the time, to be gradually better and better? Why do we have to improve at all, why couldn’t British cyclists just happily remain “pretty good and fast but not like, Tour de France winning good and fast” for the rest of their days?

Maybe the problem isn’t actually falling apart, but spending so much time holding it together. I think my body is laying down its arms, or fly swatters, if you will. And I am filled with grief and fear at the possibility of my ambition doing the same thing, though what that would cost me is not entirely clear. My husband is home and he has graciously accepted my venting (My son: “Mama, why did you just tell dada that you are a ‘fucking hero’?”). My kids are at school. I’m still lying in bed, sucking on my zinc lozenges and swatting away the flies and squinting at all the things I’ve promised to do and trying to see what matters.

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Also, this:

A few weeks ago, these enormous, creepy dancer paintings were sitting outside my daughter’s ballet class. This weekend, one had been relocated across the street, in front of a food bank, and tagged. I love living in a city where there are constant conversations between people and things and unexpected, somewhat magical forces are always changing things slightly. It fills me with great happiness. If this isn’t art, I don’t know what it is.

Also, also this:

My friend Jen Bloomer and her very cool arts organization, Radici Studios are offering an online workshop Co-Create to Liberate for parents and educators on using art to combat racism with kids. It kicks off September 26th - you can register here or join them for a free one-hour webinar on September 13th (tonight) or 22nd to learn more.