Paper Cutter

In my defense, moving with at least one three year old child is just…. I dont even have words for it. But now we’re in the apartment, the house is empty and it’s time to start finding the new normal. As much as I want to get back to making and creating, as the primary care parent it’s on me to make a supportive home environment for everyone else first.

My current struggle. I feel bad. I feel unsettled. I like a cozy home and pulling things out of boxes sucks. Not being able to find what I’m looking for stresses me out. There are so many little stressors in the first days after a move that can really drain my emotional reserves. I have to keep reminding myself that I haven’t done anything wrong, that bad feelings is looking for an explanation as to why it’s there. I’m not in trouble, things are just a little crazy. I have the power to make things better and resolve those bad feelings

In the run up to the move, I was very distressed by having to downsize and declutter. Hoarding is something I genuinely struggle with, and on the back half on a move I really, really have a hard time with all the little things that get lost or broken over the course of the move. That feeling of loss of control only exacerbates the desire to hoard. When you move frequently, that means a lot of time is spent fussing over stuff.

As stressful as a downsizing from a house to an apartment is, there are some things I’m really looking forward to.

For over ten years, I’ve made clothes from vintage sewing patterns as my chief hobby. I love every bit of it. Once upon a time, most of my wardrobe was homemade, vintage style and I loved it.

I was able to keep my hobby going through baby #1, but after baby #2 things got rocky. A big part of that was due to buying a house that needed an astronomical amount of work done and for two years my hobby was just keeping the roof over our heads in one piece. While there will be less space, there’s just no way that living in an apartment will demand as much work as living in a rotting house.

Along with my begrudging turn to minimalism comes plans for a common sense capsule wardrobe. I have always loved the idea of a capsule wardrobe, but I’ve never even been able to make it work on paper. And if one more person tells me in need to “invest in elevated basics” I’m going to be on the evening news. My love of vintage clothes tends much more towards the psychedelic prints of the 60s, the exaggerated details of the 70s, and the long vanished shapes of the 30s than the paired down drab “classic” looks.

We officially have a downtown apartment and will be leaving the suburbs in about a month. Time to get serious about pruning our family’s physical belongings. Now that I know the dimensions of our future living space, I can be much more definitive about wha goes and what has to be left behind.

The challenge to all this is that things will be left behind. There’s no organizational system to buy, no amount of plastic totes will change the fact that everything inside of a four room suburban house cannot fit inside of a two room apartment. And as a chronic hobby collector, I am the chief offending clutter bug.

At this point in the process, I’m feeling a little hopeless. I am chipping away at piles of junk that I don’t remember having, but yet can’t seem to get rid of. Every time I switch from one doom pile to the next, I watch another video on YouTube about how to be a minimalist, wishing I could dig down and find the grit to just throw out all this stuff! I’m so tired of spending so much of my day just moving stuff from one place to another!

I feel like the emerging theme of this season is humility and how it can ultimately set you free. It started with Landon. There was no getting around it, coming back to work after something like that IS humiliating, especially with the wrong attitude. But he’s been apologizing, trying to make things right, and doing his absolute best to prove himself. Sure he’s still a little bit of a mess, that’s why we love him. He has made peace with going from the top of the heap to being lower than dirt, he’ll get back to the top I’m sure, and he’ll be much more well rounded as a person and doctor for it. Dr Javadi got chewed the fuck out. Yes she made an honest mistake, but it’s the kind of mistake you just can’t make in that line of work. She took her lumps on the spot, that takes a lot of guts. Dr McKay is a mom and a doctor who has to oversee the death of a patient who is also a mom, while not as embarrassing as what the other two characters have gone through, it is still a humbling experience to bow out graciously and admit that death is the merciful option here. She also shared her sobriety journey with Langdon. Dr Santos started this season wanting with huge plans for her future career, plans that raised eyebrows with everyone she talked to. She’s taken a real beating professionally and personally, and she will undoubtedly have to take a good hard look at herself and find what makes her the good doctor we all know she is. Our two new kids, Ogilvie and Kwan have been through it. Ogalvie can’t hide behind book smarts when shit hits the fan and you have to get your hands dirty to save a life. Kwan isn’t above it all, and is perhaps perfectly suited to the mess and the muck of emergency medicine, rather than the calm work of a specialist in a laboratory. Again, humility isn’t a bad thing. If you can embrace it, it can set you free from all kinds of preconceived ideas that are holding you back. Dr Mel King has been working with an elephants worth of anxiety sitting on her mind because of the deposition, and even though Dr Elis has done everything she can to reassure her, this feels like an emotional valley that Mel is having to walk alone. And now we get to Dr Robby. A protagonist is not the same as a hero, and his antagonist, Dr Al-Hashimi is no villain. Over the course of this season he has gone from being someone we sympathize with to someone who may be even more dangerous to the ER than Langdon was last season. He has yelled at a female subordinate for the exact thing he is guilty of, personal feelings interfering with work. Only there’s no one to yell at Robby. He has been offered so much more help than he has been to everyone around him on this 4th of July shift.

So, who remains to be humbled in this allegorical look at The Pitt? Dr Robby for certain, perhaps there is a fate worse than death waiting for him, the fact that the hospital he derives all of his meaning from can not only function, but thrive without him. The only way through? He must humble himself and accept help. There is a mountain of pride that must be washed into the ocean for that to happen first.

I think Dr Al-Hashimi also has some trials ahead. Her issues haven’t been highlighted quite the same way. Between her strong reaction to the baby, her history of combat medicine, and her urgent call to her psychiatrist all paint the picture of someone who is hurting. At the start of the season I for one couldn’t help but see her through Dr Robby’s eyes, but I’ve been more than won over by her. So often women have to perform at a higher level to be taken seriously, and it’s embarrassing to be caught giving a fictional character the same treatment, but there you have it. I think that what remains for Dr Al-Hashimi and Dr Robby in this season is going to be really challenging.

It’s not vindictive to want to see a character embrace humility in order to move forward. Holding on too tight to pride and status is harmful not just to the person holding on, but to everyone around them. It’s not about who’s right or wrong, it’s about letting go and finding your place in the world so that you can help others.

My latest entry would be living in a smaller space than average, especially with a family.

This summer we, as a family of four, will be downsizing to an 1,100 square foot apartment from a four bedroom house. Like most people, the ever increasing cost of living is raising the limit of affordability for us. As parents, we want our kids to have opportunities to pursue their passions while maintaining our own sanity. In two years, the cost of renting our house has gone up 20%, the cost of health insurance has almost doubled, and food costs have already changed our eating habits. We have to make big changes to keep the balance of meeting everyone’s needs.

I’m choosing to frame this as an adventure and a creative opportunity, if for no other reason than I think it’s important for our kids to see that kind of positive problem solving modeled for them.

The trashy/classy divide comes from how you’re able to change your space. Yes, an architect living in Paris who owns their own apartment and can afford custom built furniture will no doubt have a beautiful, functional living space. The challenge comes from not having the money to make your space suit your needs exactly, and having to make do and repair what you have for as long as possible.

I have moved 13 (soon 14) times over the course of my 34 years, the last three (soon to be four) have been with small kids. That’s a lot of different places, and a lot of different life phases. Very few physical belongings have made it through all of those moves, but I’ve learned a thing or two about adapting needs to the space available.

The world has already changed, and I am begging you to prepare yourself.

My partner’s job has given them an insider view on what is happening in tech, specifically AI. Advancements are coming to the world of computing that make it almost impossible to predict what happens next. Quantum computing will open the door to changes the likes of which have not been seen since the industrial revolution.

I’m not telling you to dig a bunker and become a pepper, because I for one have no idea what we should be prepping for. What I do believe is that we all must get ourselves offline as much as possible, and be extremely careful about what you do share.

Delve into your humanity. Experience as much of the world with as many senses as you can. Build libraries, of books, music, poems, memes, recipes, silly videos and anything that’s ever made you laugh. And built them far away from the internet where they will be scrapped and sold for parts.

When I was a kid in Oklahoma my dad had many bouts of unemployment. They often overlapped with Christmas. One year when I was probably around 13 or 14 dad was once again out of a job. We were attending a church in a rich suburb of Oklahoma City, and it was about a 45 minute commute from where we lived in the sticks. As the weird homeschool kid attended a church where everyone else went to the private Christian school and that most tender age, I felt like I was invisible. There wasn’t a single thing that I had in common with anyone else there.

Enter Alexis. She was tall, pretty, a natural blonde, and had an infectious smile. Her family was also very well off, just like just about everyone else there. But she didn’t go to the nice private Christian school, and she didn’t come to church every weekend. Her parents were divorced, her father remarried, and I guess that was enough to keep her from making any friends at youth group too. For whatever reason, we took to each other and became good friends. The other kids had no idea what they were missing out on. For one thing, her step mom had horses that she let us ride on occasion. Her little sister was funny and sassy, her parents were generous and welcoming. We also had nothing in common with each other, but that didn’t matter. I only looked forward to church on weekends when I knew she would be at her dad’s house.

The other side of her story was much less visible to me. Her mother didn’t have nearly the means that her father did. I only visited her at her mom’s house once. It was a single wide trailer, far removed from the beautiful suburban two story house where she and her sister had their own rooms. That half of her life was very far away from the norm of all the other kids at church.

On to December. My dad was out of a job, again, and I was old enough to know that for Christmas that year not only would there not be anything under the tree, there wouldn’t even be a tree until Christmas Eve, when the nice old man down the road let us pick one up for free. It stung a little to know that Christmas was just going to be another day that year, especially when everyone around us was getting ready to celebrate in a big way. A few weeks earlier, I had complemented a beautiful bracelet Alexis was wearing. She took a lot of care in putting together nice outfits and she beamed at the compliment. I really didn’t think anything of it until the Sunday right before Christmas when Alexis handed me a small, bracelet sized box right as church ended and whispered to open it once I got to the car. I smiled and thanked her. I assumed it was the bracelet, it would have been completely in character for her to give me something of hers I liked.

Once I got to the car, my mom asked me about it. I very casually opened the box expecting to see the pretty blue and white crystal bracelet. Instead, there was $500 in cash. I stopped, dumbfounded, my mouth hanging open.

The fact that I’d been expecting the bracelet, the fact that she didn’t make a big deal out of it, the fact that I, a teenager, had been handed $500 by another teenager, it was incredible to me. That was almost a full month of rent for us.

My parents reached out to her parents to make sure everything was square, and her dad told them that she had been saving up her allowance for weeks. (No small feat, the girl loved a shopping trip). I honestly don’t remember what gifts we bought with the money. I know mom tidied away a few bills, and kept the lights on. But to me it almost felt vulgar to go out and spend that money. As two kids with no agency in that whole situation, she’d reached out in a way that told me she understood. I couldn’t help the fact that my dad didn’t have a job any more than she could change the complexities of her family life. In that moment, I knew she understood how uncomfortable it can be to receive charity.