Category Archives: Paul

Not my favorite.

Monday’s can be problematic in general, as they are for many folks. Shifting gears from “relaxing” and “fun” for two days back to “working” and “stress” is a grind, and grinding gears is bad on your transmission. For me the normal Monday isn’t as terrible as it is for some, but that’s only because I tend to work a good chunk of the weekend as well, so I tend to only get a full weekend off about one out of every eight or ten. Not necessarily a better solution.

I forced myself to take a couple of days off during these back-to-back four-day weekends. Football has been watched, food (way, WAY too much food!) has been enjoyed, books have been read, a few chores around the house have been taken care of. But behind it all, lurking, no matter how much down time I take, or force myself to take, is the knowledge that I have the “to-do” lists from hell waiting for me.

Year-end, budgets, upcoming audits, deadlines up the yazoo – it will all be there first thing tomorrow. The next two to three months will be frantic, at best. Trying to put five pounds of pickles into a two-pound pickle bag, time management wise.

Of course, we continue to have the ongoing additional stress from COVID (still healthy! wear your mask!! STAY HOME!!!) and the political “Charlie Foxtrot” situation. There’s a reason that Kaiser Permanente was giving away a year’s subscription to the Calm app. We need it.

As Frost said, “no way out but through.” Just as true, he said:

It’s one thing to have your head know that it’s December, but in a year like 2020, which for a significant portion of the populace has been the worst year of our lives, it’s another thing to have your gut know.

Yes, I know that other societies have gone through truly horrific years that are worse than this – 1939 through 1945 come to mind, as do 1914 through 1918, and I’m sure that the early 1860’s were no picnic. You get the drift. And individuals no doubt have years which are much worse with deaths of family members, natural disasters, disease, all of the above, and so on. But for my generation and the several that follow, as a whole, as an international, global society, 2020 has arguably been the worst of our lifetimes.

And now it’s almost over. There’s hope for 2021 with vaccines on the horizon, as well as a shift in the political winds. That’s not to say that something even MORE horrific might not do a jump scare on us all still, but in real life the odds seem to be against it.

So we’re in that last month. We’re locked down. We’re wearing masks on the rare occasions we do go out for groceries or essential tasks. We’re decorating for the holidays and doing Zoom meetings instead of huge holiday dinners and parties. We’re sacrificing and we can see, if not the actual finish line, at least the bell lap coming in just four to seven weeks.

(By the way, if you’re NOT wearing masks and NOT quarantining and NOT staying home from parties, then please eat shit and die, fuck off, then keep fucking off, then fuck off until you come to a gate with a sign saying, “You can’t fuck off past here” – climb over that gate, dream the impossible dream, and just keep fucking off forever until the heat death of the universe.)

[Yeah, I know, I should come out and just say what I REALLY feel and not hold back…]

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah…

Assuming you’re sane and intelligent and not a sociopath (which is a good assumption since you’re reading my site), then you will understand why I was so struck today in a staff Zoom meeting (or was it Teams? or Slack? or Skype? or Ring Central?) when it hit my gut that we are finally in December. It’s symbolic. It’s a marker, a signpost, a solid, tangible bit of evidence that proves that 2020 is almost over. And 2021 is hope…

Stay safe. December’s going to be okay in some ways, incredibly rough in others. But we’ll make it through.

When you run the LA Marathon and you’re near the end, there’s a check point at the 40 kilometer point, which is essentially at Mile 25. There’s a little over a mile left, you’re near the coast (having started at Dodger Stadium and wound through Chinatown, downtown LA, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Century City, and finally Santa Monica) and if you’re running a good race you know that there’s a huge sense of accomplishment waiting around the bend, and a chance to rest following that.

BUT… You can’t let up. You have to finish strong. If you’re running your good race and you want that great time and you want to meet that goal that you’ve worked on for months and months, you need to keep up the pace and earn that rest.

Sunday night, especially this Sunday night before Thanksgiving, remind me of that feeling. It’s been a tough year in many respects and there has been a LOT of work put in on so many fronts. But I can’t let up yet – this next weekend there will be rest.

Here’s to a short week and a long weekend to come.

Someone mentioned their grandmother in a very moving and touching Twitter thread (she had come out to her family, terrified that they would reject her, and her grandmother in particular had done quite the opposite) and I got to thinking about how I never knew either of my grandmothers much.

My maternal grandparents both died before I was born (the result of my mother being near the bottom of the sibling list of a BIG family) and my paternal grandmother died when I was only four or five. (There’s a family tree around here somewhere, but who has time for that?) My few and hazy memories of her are probably more from the pictures and movies I saw of her than any actual memories of my own.

So if you have grandmothers, and they’re one of the good ones who are kind and thoughtful and giving and caring and nurturing and not one of the bad ones who torture their kids and make them sweep the ashes and cinders out of the fireplace and poison them with apples (I might be mixing my Disney metaphors badly here, but I’m really, REALLY tired) then give them a hug for me when COVID’s over and you can do that without infecting and killing them. In the meantime, just give them a call and tell them you love them.

Grandfathers, too. Same rules about good vs. bad, just substitute in some gender appropriate (or in this case, appropriately, some gender neutral or inappropriate) examples.

Damn, I’m tired. I need a grandmother to tell me it’s going to be all right and I’m doing great. And then give me cookies.

Mmmm, cookies…

Sometimes I guess I just need to write, knowing that there’s a message in there someplace, but being too tired, too close to the problems, too confused, too swept up in the chaos to find the optimal path to salvation. But one thing I got out of some training at both Annapolis and Pepperdine was a technique for dealing with such situations – MOVE. Not panic, not random motion, but get your ass in gear. Make your best choice, be ready to change direction if you get new or better information, but avoid paralyses  by analyses.

So let me ramble a bit and see if my muse can guide us toward an actual point…

One of the reasons that these thoughts are dwelling tonight is because do-or-die deadlines have been met and, for the moment at least (I’m well aware that this can change in a heartbeat) I’m not seeing any additional do-or-die deadlines on the immediate horizon. Meeting those deadlines has involved working a lot of hours right through what should have been a four-day holiday weekend, plus some 20+ hour days that had me up until 3AM or so this week – but the deadlines have been met. So I can breathe. And come up for air just a little bit.

It’s not like I have nothing to do. There are myriad other things that got pushed onto back burners, both at work, at home, at the hangar, and in my personal life. And it’s not like hitting those do-or-die deadline tasks was antagonistic or confrontational. Quite to the contrary. The people I’m working with now are supportive and wonderful. Making the move last October was the luckiest and best career move I’ve ever made. But in the end, by nature of the beast, my shoulders were where the burden fell (and will fall again in the future) and mine is the responsibility to get ‘er done.

The pressure and time requirements can be significant, the outcome uncertain, the anxiety levels high. But the feeling of accomplishment when it gets done? The kudos from people who I admire and enjoy working with? Those are significant as well.

Now, an ever so brief pause. Or at least a chance to ease it back out of overdrive and off of the afterburners for a couple of days.

There’s still this truly annoying, nagging, urgent voice in the back of my head that’s telling me that I have to optimize, and maximize, and be extremely efficient. How do I take advantage of this pause to catch up on the highest priority items off of those back burners? How do I gain an advantage and not waste the opportunity? When what I would truly like is the opportunity to waste away, to not think for a bit, to catch up on some recreational reading, to watch “Hamilton” again (I can’t believe I’ve only watched it once on Disney+!), to do something mindless for a couple of hours like crushing those cans in the garage for recycling, or take a walk with my camera (wearing a mask, socially distanced of course) to take pictures of things outside of my yard.

I think it’s a matter of balance. (I might have said something along these lines a few hundred times before, but I guess I need to remind myself.) Read a few chapters in that book that I’ve been neglecting for weeks, but also get caught up on some stuff for the hangar that’s past due. Watch “Hamilton” again, but also get those backups done and take a look at that hard disk that’s getting glitchy. Crush those cans, but also spend a few hours sorting and filing that increasingly threatening pile of loose documents in back of my desk that’s making it time-consuming and frustrating to find anything quickly.

Remember that there’s good in the world. The NFL season started tonight, and my beloved Chiefs pretty convincingly won the season opener. The three-minute long trailer for the new “Dune” came out and it’s freakin’ SPECTACULAR. I’ve got a big stack of new CD’s to burn and listen to, new music to sort through looking for new additions to my “best of” playlists.

Don’t despair. I know it’s so easy today – friends online let me know today of an acquaintance who lost her battle with depression. The fight is hard and there are days when we all wonder how much more we can take. I can’t be proud of the fact that I’ve yet to come that close to the end of my rope – I prefer to be grateful, knowing that darkest hour could be out there lurking somewhere.

Don’t forget. It’s just over a year ago that my dear friend Sandy passed away suddenly and totally unexpectedly. I’ve been thinking of her a lot this last week especially. I can talk to her in my head whenever I want, but I can’t get any answers. But for every “what if” question there are happy memories to offset the sorrow.

In summary, I guess the message for myself from this moment of reflection (remembering Tonio K.’s lyric from “American Love Affair, “No one’s let her take the time to think at all, much less think twice”) is to cut myself some slack, take some down time, but don’t take too much, and don’t forget to tell people that you love them. They may really, really need to hear it, and some day you may not get another chance.

Balance.

But keep moving.