Category: Life

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Life: Business Travel

Valley Lights
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

This year, I’ve traveled by plane three times for my career, but only once for recreation, which likely does reflect my priorities (ouch). It also feels like a lot of flying after the pandemic shelter-in-place times, even though it pales beside my old regular-commute-to-Europe phase.

This past week, I attended a conference in Las Vegas, where it reached 107 degrees outside. The conference schedule was packed and in a large hotel/conference center, which made it easy to stay engaged while hiding indoors from the heat. There were coffee and even espresso stations to help balance out the increasingly aggressive air conditioning with inner warmth. It was a good experience, and I even dreamt about new (highly sci-fi versions) of the presentations last night, so I am still processing what I experienced.

I’ve only been to Las Vegas twice, both times for this conference.

I have found it difficult to explain to friends who like Vegas why I don’t: just because I don’t enjoy drinking to excess, smoking of any kind, gambling, dressing for attention from hard-partying strangers, etc., doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with those activities. They just aren’t my cup of tea. And when it is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside, it isn’t like I can escape to the great outdoors – even frozen tea wouldn’t be enough to cool me to functional temperatures.

Returning home, I was filled with joy at the fog, plainly visible from the airplane, as we approached the City… It’s so good to be back in my natural habitat!

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Life: The Perils of “Return to Office”

A repeating collage of my most recent negative COVID test results
A repeating collage of my most recent negative COVID test results from fresh tests restocked last month. I’d swear the control lines used to be more vivid… But these are so reasonably priced!

My employer’s mandatory return-to-site policy has been in effect for several months. A pattern has emerged: every few weeks, the safety team’s email arrives, letting me know that I have been exposed during a likely contagious period to an unnamed work colleague who subsequently tested positive for COVID.

Again. And again.

Masks are freely available at work, which is nice. Test kits aren’t: now, you must fill out a form JUSTIFYING why you want one from a menu of specific types of exposure. This seems… counterproductive.

I actively monitor myself, I keep fresh at-home tests stocked (at my own expense!), I pay attention to changes in how I feel. I maintain a supply of fresh Korean KF-94 masks (I like the fit), prettier Hong Kong masks (rated EN149 & FFP2; I like the designs and colors), and some even prettier Japanese fabric masks (because not every situation requires a highly rated mask, and Japanese fabric patterns are so hip). There are fresh masks sealed in containers in nearly every type of purse, bag, or backpack I carry.

But this is effort. And money.

As another COVID wave rolls through the office, and we must navigate our obligations to keep others safe while not necessarily being safe ourselves, I marvel that this most recent office exposure (day zero) resulted in an authentic COVID headache (TM) and fatigue on day 4 – without a fever and without testing positive. My relief at the mildness of my condition arm-wrestles with the frustration that I must be exposed this way at all, and don’t know what to expect next.

My interpretation of current official guidance is: if/when I feel fine, it doesn’t really matter if I have COVID anyway (!?!), which seems like something written by COVID itself.

I have jokey flashbacks to that scene from the Devil Wears Prada about being ‘one stomach flu away from [my] goal weight,’ and joke that I feel ripped off: rather than returning to the office slimmer, or with fewer wrinkles, or with firmer abs as the result of my exposure, I’ll only return to the office with a higher risk of stroke and other unwanted conditions. (Zero stars: I do not recommend COVID at all.)

I write this as someone who likes going into the office three (or even four) days a week. There’s something about the flexibility that hybrid work policies gave people to stay home when they felt a little off without needing to justify it that was broadly beneficial. Those are just GOOD policies.

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Life: Sleep? What do you mean?

A screenshot from my fitbit showing that I enjoyed four hours and 38 minutes of sleep last night.

I have the nerve to wonder why I am so tired.

The wonderful thing about weekends, though, is that naps are possible if I don’t overschedule myself. Yes, I was up at five something, but by eleven (AM!) I went down so hard for a nap that I considered checking my neck for drugged darts.

I needed that.

Unlike this bottle of Pocari Sweat, which I don’t need, but which I am truly enjoying…

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Life: The Opposite of Reassurance

I told my mother I felt really bloated.

She helpfully (?) told me that bloating was an early symptom of ovarian cancer for her.

If I’d wanted to be told that any possible symptom is cancer, I would have used a run-of-the-mill search engine to obtain my dread more efficiently.

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Life: Early August

Two almond milk lattes at Ritual Coffee.
Delicious to look at, delicious to drink: hooray for almond milk lattes at Ritual Coffee!

Update on Facial Graffiti: After using a harsh fading shampoo three times in one day on my hennaed eyebrows, I went to work and… received compliments on my new glasses from a nice young man.

I didn’t have new glasses: my newly visible eyebrows frame my face so well, my glasses look better. All is well that ends with improvements to my vanity, I guess!

I just have to figure out how to avoid that first-day-Sharpie-attack look. And argue with my stylist about her very unrealistic definition of “light brown.”

Update on What I’m Reading: I was going to apologize for going from being the person who only writes about SERIOUS SUBJECTS (oooooh, so impressive) and summarizes US Supreme Court rulings with mildly catty commentary to someone who has 85% graphical fiction content with a trend toward gay male romances, but… why apologize? I’m enjoying myself! That’s what is important. Well, to me, anyway. There are always more heavy books in my pile, and I will get to them when the time is right.

What I’m (Not) Writing: I’m working on notes for the science fiction scenes that I imagine when I’m listening to too much of Massive Attack’s Angel, but I’m not getting far. Someone sits near me, and when he is there, I don’t write. I just… am. I hold the pen; I hold the notebook; words just float away.

The one who sits near me has the best hair. (Ahhhhh.)

Others sit near me and don’t have this effect, so I am not forever sabotaged: it’s just that the scenes that have come to me aren’t all smoothly connected (there is a war, war lacks narrative cohesion and involves abrupt transitions in my view), and it will take some time to connect them with proper bonds.

I’m afraid I’m being influenced by the styles of streaming television, as the wreckage in the first scene makes me want to put up a giant title card that says, “10 days earlier” and launch a flashback… I don’t need to write that way. Unless Netflix has a pile of money for me, in which case, I will happily change my style.

Also: I need to not kill off so many characters so early. Aside from the realism that would bring. (Have you noticed how most named characters survive nearly every improbable thing in American stories? What the hell?!?).

I designed a costume for the character modeled on myself years ago. The left arm of her spacesuit is a different color (red) from the rest of her suit, which is unfortunate, but is based on something she predicts before it happens. Her/My left arm has it EVEN WORSE in this story than it has in real life. Dear left arm in real life, I truly love you, even with the plate and screws (especially with the plate, screws, and the scar!), and I am so sorry for what happens to you in the novella.

COVID Negativity Is The Best Negativity: Stay positive in outlook, negative in fresh diagnostic tests!

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Life: Facial Graffiti

All the kids are making their eyebrows bolder now. (I want to blame the fabulous eyebrows on Korean drama actors, because those are some very attractive brows, but I doubt it is all their fault.) The women at work have them drawn in geometrically idealized eyebrow shapes with strong verticals and sharp edges, which they create with multiple tools, attention, and skill each morning.

My eyebrows, on the other hand, which have never matched my natural haircolor at any point, are fading from a neutral brown to white. They are mostly curves and awkward (startled or skeptical) angles. I’m not good at ‘multiple tools’ and ‘skill’ in the mornings. So, when I was getting my brows threaded into tidiness, I signed up to have them tinted. Tinting faded brows is the lazy way to roll out of bed and rush off to work without having a graphically important pair of features missing.

Tinting is a delicate professional thing: every box of hair dye you’ve ever seen tells you not to try it with hair products, because they will maim you. Sure enough, the eyebrow places use henna, which stains hair effectively with non-blinding, largely plant-based ingredients. My handler chose light brown, and got to work.

As she was finishing up and fresh, faintly-lemony scents evaporated from my forehead, she told me that the first day of henna is not the way it will really look: it just needs some time to finish setting. I have used henna for hair in the past, and know what she meant. So I wasn’t entirely surprised by the results.

But I was a little surprised.

Surprised in a way that could be seen from a distance.

It looks like my eyebrows have been drawn in with a Sharpie (TM).

I had other plans after my brow appointment, but cancelled them once I realized how bold my brows now (temporarily) are. My mother called, and I described this to my mother in my typical way. She couldn’t. stop. laughing.

Having delighted my mother means that I’ve achieved something worthwhile today.

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Life: Quiet Reading and Rest

Growing Moth Family
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

Slow, deep breath… Ahhh. I am making an effort to have a quiet, peaceful, restful, and restorative weekend, and am partly succeeding. However, internalized pressure to ‘be productive’ and the heaviness of being overworked in my career leave me feeling a bit hollowed out.

I’m being kind to myself: I’ve enjoyed a wonderful bubble bath, slept several consecutive hours, devoted most of a day to reading, ordered in delicious vegan & gluten-free ramen from a local restaurant, played with metallic watercolors, lounged without goals… Yet, I still feel like I’ve taken a beating. Two day weekends just aren’t quite enough.

Reading US News: I’m adjusting to the new political landscape, now that the competition for the White House had a significant upgrade. This has been the topic of excited conversation initiated by colleagues in the nearest kitchen, and we are all feeling a bit better about the future as a result, which is a pleasant change. It makes opening my news apps (The Guardian (UK) and the Washington Post (US)) easier to do without a experiencing a sense of dread.

Reading Books: My pile of non-fiction books is still centered on heavy topics, so the comics I’m reading soften these themes for me through the magic of escapism.

Reading Manga and Manhwa: To be methodical in reviewing graphic novels, I made a spreadsheet of everything I am or was reading. (Yes, this was inevitable, if you know me). I have 73 digital comic series on my apps and subscriptions. Of those that I’m enjoying and want to continue reading, 29 haven’t yet made it into this blog, excluding those that are written about & scheduled but not yet posted. (I’m a posting machine!)

Manhwa subgenre: the contract marriage: Both all-age and mature comics from Korea often have awkwardness around the plot device of contract-based marriages. I’ve given up on several of these – what started as an adventure instead is actually drama over whether or not to kiss someone you’ve been married to for a year, which is neither high stakes nor interesting.

Manhwa Relationship Peculiarities: Ten of the comics I haven’t yet written about are rated “mature,” and range from outright pr0n (an old euphemism), to romances where you see clothing loosened (thrills for the chaste!), to stories in which married couples have their physical relationship (a) implied (they share a room!), (b) illustrated (the floating cartoon word sound effects are hilarious), or (c) discussed (sometimes in a way that results in what sounds like sports injuries, which also amuses me). I’ve learned some things about sexual conventions which are non-standard here.

The more explicit mature stories have strange constraints. For example:

  • even the most outrageously sex-oriented heterosexual stories always result in marriage and children, making the ‘how did you two get together’ questions awkward. (My parents forced me into marriage forcing me to impersonate my twin sister… I got married to avoid marrying someone abusive… My family sold me to settle a debt… But that’s all fine, because now we have kids!)
  • after several bed scenes, there are often flashbacks to the couple having met as children, so even if the circumstances that brought the couple together in adulthood were strange / violent / inappropriate, it’s somehow all okay, because rather than being strangers / captives / conscripts / servants, they previously bonded meaningfully as toddlers or teens. (!?!?!?).
  • in situations where a royal person was abusing a commoner, the commoner is often secretly royalty, which means it wasn’t really an abuse of power. (? What?)

The childhood connection tope makes these relationships even weirder to me – I hope there was no one I befriended as a toddler who feels pressure to fulfill some adult relationship obligation to me now! (‘You babbled at me meaningfully as a toddler, a sure sign that fate is bringing us together, so now we must wed.’ [sound of me calling security])

I’m unsure if I should actually review these, as I may not be going into them with the correct attitude.

Reading about books: It would be too meta for me to summarize this.

Reading Letters and Writing Back: I have terrible tendonitis for unknown reasons (other than ‘I use my arms’), and it hurts to write by hand. This is why I’m not posting any images showing off my recent writing with fountain pens – there isn’t much, and what little there is is scrawl. This prevents me from responding properly to recent handwritten letters I’ve received. I hope to resume writing (and flaunting my shapely personal script and pretty pen collection) soon!

Reading about the current COVID Wave: The new wave is real, and affecting my colleagues, though none have been part of the 400 deaths / week I’ve read about, thankfully. Many colleagues are recovering now, just recovered this week, or are nursing someone who was positive last week. Others tested positive while traveling, complicating their self care (and hard-earned vacations) overseas.

This last topic has me dreading the return of additional vacationing colleagues.

I have plenty of masks in each of my bags and tucked into various jacket pockets (as always), but just had to restock my testing kits…

That next booster cannot. come. soon. enough.

Be well and stay safe out there…

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Life: Leisure and Leisure Panic

Coffee foam (tropical plant)
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

I enjoyed a truly wonderful staycation (stay at home vacation) over the Independence Day Holiday week. Part of what made it wonderful was that I resisted the urge to MAXIMIZE the time off.

One of my commute pals described her days off, and we both acknowledged that we suffer the psychological strain of leisure panic: the sense of having so little time off that we feel we Must.Do.Something.Amazing with our time off. Which… kind of defeats the purpose of having time off? Yet WE DO THIS. We leave work or wake up on our first day off with a goal-oriented sensibility. As if we have been programmed this way. Perhaps it doesn’t help that people are more likely to ask WHAT we did during the break (implying we should have done something?) rather than how it was (FANTASTIC, and all the more fantastic when I didn’t leave the house!).

I achieved a sort of balance during that time: I did plenty of fun things and I LOUNGED AROUND intensely. It was… so good. And it was so strange to see what I look like when I’ve had a full night’s sleep!

Some of my leisure was “busy.” There was a long walk / food /good conversation with friends; the PRIDE parade; medical appointments, lab tests, prescriptions, and so on (during which I had an honest conversation with a medical assistant about what people (like me) who work in law are like, and how she is a good friend for pressing her lawyer friends to sit on a beach with an umbrella-containing beverage and BE STILL); spa time; reading; writing; painting, and buying paint; minor chores; a little bit of online training to meet some arbitrary software deadlines; exploring the City on foot to visit a new place… But I took extra days off, so there was time for all those things to be spread thinly between even longer pajama hours.

My most serious commitment was to eating. The regional origins of the many types of foods I consumed include: Brazil (origin of the açai bowl, interpreted by Reveille), the Yucatan (Cochinita), Indonesia (Rasa Rasa), France (Grand Creperie), Ethiopian (Tadu), South Indian (I made fresh tomato rasam myself PLUS ordered in from Udupi Palace), Taiwanese (a gorgeous ube coconut milk latte boba from Boba Guys), Japanese (Sakesan plus homemade miso soups)… I didn’t repeat any restaurants (or shops!) from my artist pal’s recent visit, to my own surprise. Eating my way through the City in an unplanned way is a wonderful thing, any time!

There were many hours of staying at home in soft clothes and sitting still. Thinking. Watching the fog go out and return. Moving slowly. Drinking tea. Going back to bed after getting up too early. Having UNINTERRUPTED THOUGHTS. It was so… good.

(Even now, on this foggy Saturday afternoon, I am wearing soft , fastener-free clothes, have my hair in a bun above a makeup-free face. Topical caffeine is being absorbed by the bags under my eyes, while a salicylic acid sticker lies on emerging acne. So.NOT.photogenic! So comfy. I’ve heard gorgeous, presentable people described as making their great looks appear effortless. Please note that you really don’t want to see what my version of ‘effortless’ looks like! [evil, non-photogenic laughter])

As Independence Day weekend ended, and I began to dwell on what awaited me at work, I knew what to do: I ordered in fresh veggie sushi, sipped junmai ginjo sake out of a pretty glass, and read a new Korean comic. I was delighted for hours, with NO time wasted wondering about what my laptop would do when I turned it on. [happy sigh]. I hope this practice will allow me to JUST REST more (and more) often. And if anyone asks, I’ll say my weekend was GREAT, and I rested. Because that’s an achievement worth disclosing.

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Life: I know you!

The streetcar that I almost-finished the watercolor study of passed me Monday evening, and I was all, “HEY!”

I felt rather… proprietary towards it. Friendly, but also with a sense of ownership.

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Life: Managing Fear of (Watercolor) Failure

I sat down on the national holiday and made a little sketch to paint, and while it was harder than it should have been, it also wasn’t the end of the world. It isn’t finished – I need it to dry to glaze some sections that aren’t well defined – but it is recognizably the right general [vague hand-waving gesture] shape.

Watercolor study
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

I could say this reminds me of going from being a swimming instructor with superb form to feeling like a brick dragging itself through the water with weak arms after many years of not swimming laps regularly. (A thing that happened to me.) But the difference is: I was actually good at swimming. (I practiced for years every summer weekday as a student, and kept practicing as a swimming teacher, so there was a least a decade of intensive swimming there, including recreational racing with others.). When I lost that ease in the water, I felt… wrong. Like I’d forgotten something important, and had ‘let myself go’ in a way that made me sad.

However, I was always a beginner-level painter, so I can’t pretend to be crushed at still being one now. I took up watercolor with enthusiasm back in college, but took too many classes, and had no time to play. Painting lost out in favor of manual drafting (a skill I was rewarded for as both a student and professional). (OMG, I am so old!) Watercolor back then was something great for “renderings,” which were hand-painted, intentionally pretty illustrations of what a building would look like in the future, to help clients visualize their project in flattering ways. Being a renderer was a professional speciality people paid extra for. Now that’s all done digitally, which means design projects by others made during my youth are going to wind up in museums, and people will be so impressed that people could once make such images without computers…

Ah, well. There are some watercolor projects I’d like to try, and yesterday’s sketch suggests I can chip away at my fears and work on them.

Some of my watercolor project ideas are mere fantasies: much like cafes with big windows and views of gardens, the IDEA of painting is a fantasy of leisure. Imagine, having time to paint! Imagine, painting often enough to be good at it! Imagine having time to drink good coffee and practice! I know what I’m like: I work too much, I see what these ideas of quiet painting time offer, and I understand why these projects are such a draw, even if my actual results are so basic.

Once I overcome my dread of being bad, painting allows me to enjoy the process of painting. The results are less important than the experience, in some ways. If the experience is pleasant, I will try again. Even if the results aren’t great, I am still able to sit still for a while and put paint on paper for a few hours, which is a joy.

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