Hi Darling Ones,

Everything continues to be awful and difficult here in the land of stroke recovery with the added bonus of COVID.

Yup. One week after the stroke and five days after being released from the hospital, I got the COVID. Again.

My new nurse practitioner winced when I told her this morning during a telehealth follow-up.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re going through a lot of scary stuff.”

Some of that stuff involves being a newly diagnosed diabetic with hypertension.

I don’t have the emotional stamina to get into the shame of all that right now.

Darling Ones, everything is so hard as it is. I have at least one tearful breakdown a day. Usually, it comes after I knock something over with my jerky hand or my sleeve lands in some food.

The other night I spilled some Caesar salad and cried for five minutes over it.

I cried because it took me three tries to open the pre-made salad. Then it took another minute or two to add the chicken, cheese, and croutons to the lettuce. Putting dressing on the salad was also a nightmare. Then to spill the salad on the floor where it would take more minutes to clean it up? Yeah, many tears.

And every single thing I do every day is like that. I think about every movement and how I want it to go. Meanwhile, my brain is doing its best to follow directions while also noting how things are not going as planned and how everything feels wrong.

Picking up a water cup and getting the straw to my mouth takes a ton of effort and thought. Now imagine how much it takes to prepare something to eat and feed myself.

Now that I’m diabetic, I have to use my shaky right hand and non-dominate left hand to check my blood sugar and inject myself with insulin.

And on top of it all, I’m sick and thus handling everything very poorly.

Forgive me for whining, but it’s all so much.

Jodi

The post Stroke Me Day 9: Cursed For Sure appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

I didn’t start having seasonal allergies until I was in my mid-30s. It feels like a ripoff to develop them at that point in life. Shouldn’t allergies be something you’re born with? I thought I won some kind of genetic lottery until that weird spring of 2000-aught-something when I was convinced every other day I was coming down with a cold.

My boss, JTo, listened to me wheeze and whine for like the third time in three days and then said, “You have allergies, take some Claritin-D and you’ll be fine.” She flung some of those tablets at me and that’s the day I accepted her as my personal lord and savior.

For the past two and a half years I’ve been playing a never-ending game of COVID or Allergies? So far 99.9% of the time I’ve played this game it has been allergies. When I finally did get the COVID, it was in January when allergies weren’t even a possibility.

It feels a little like March 2020 up in here. Since Thursday (the actual one that happened on June 9th and not like how today is Thursday, March 836, 2020 in COVID Standard Time) I’ve felt mostly like hot garbage with moments of room-temperature garbage. I felt so shitty last week I took a COVID test. It was negative.

This week I’m incapable of getting enough sleep. The limit for how much sleep I need does not exist. Yesterday I had to take a nap after breakfast. Also had to take one before dinner. This morning I almost had to take a nap between exercising and taking a shower. Instead, I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating a nap for 20 minutes.

Before dinner I googled to see if fatigue might be a symptom of allergies. It is. Also a symptom of cancer. After dinner I took another COVID test. It was negative.

Even though everyone I know who is afflicted with allergies keeps complaining how bad they are this year, mine seem extra-special uniquely terrible in a way far above everyone else’s allergy woes. I’ve also decided that extra super bad allergies is a symptom of Long COVID or maybe a side effect of having COVID. I came to this conclusion based on pure imagination.

Anyway, I feel rotten today. I know it’s super boring and you’d much rather hear about my new Joan Jett Funko Pop (pictured above), or how I’m re-reading A Little Devil in America or my thoughts on how boring and unsexy The Thorn Birds was. Instead you get this because I made a vow to myself to update this blog at least three times a week because I’m afraid of falling out of the habit and spending all my time on work.

I’m hoping tomorrow will be better.

Hazily yours,
Jodi

The post The COVID Diaries: Will the Game of Allergies or COVID Ever End? appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

I feel about Weike Wang’s novels the same way I do about Sally Rooney’s novels. While I’m in the books I’m all in. I’m never really sure where things are going or even if things are happening, then I reach a point where I have tears streaming down my cheeks, and by the time I’ve finished the book I have no damn clue what happened only that I enjoyed the journey.

Trying to describe the plots of either woman’s book makes you sound like a post-verbal stoner. Take, for instance, Joan is Okay, Wang’s new book that I finished today. The plot: Joan is a Chinese-American doctor struggling with the loss of her father and familial expectations in the waning days of 2019 and first months of 2020. Actually, that wasn’t too shabby. It’s quite reductive, but does an adequate job of the basics. What it doesn’t cover is Joan’s inner-turmoil, biting humor, ferocious anger, and drive.

It’s a damn good book even if you have to forgive it’s abrupt ending. I read another book this week (The Startup Wife) that also touches on the pandemic and ends abruptly. This is what I am calling a trend, where books with the pandemic just say “fuck it” and end without a lot of warning or reason. It makes some kind of sense, doesn’t it?

What I enjoyed so much about the book is how Joan is both okay and not okay at the same time. Sometimes she was alight with fury on the inside while projecting calm and sometimes her outer world was crumbling and she seemed to take it in stride.

The book got me thinking about okayness and what that even means as we enter year two of this deadly pandemic. Am I okay? Are you okay? What does it even mean to be okay anymore?

Are there people out there thriving and striving and enjoying the fuck out of life right now? Like for real? I’m sure there are some #girlbosses and social media influencers and motivational gurus trying to positive up the joint, but I definitely do not buy what they are selling.

For the most part I think I am okay.

I don’t think about dying every day or how dying might not be the worst thing to happen. However, I don’t feel like I have a lot of zest for life at the moment. Zest for life? I don’t fucking know. I’m angry a lot. I can go from okay to spitting rage in about two sentences if someone asks me about how we, as a country, are handling the pandemic. I get angry at people who are doing this safety theater acting as if they’re being careful when you cannot careful your way out of COVID. I know that is sanctimonious and hypocritical coming from someone recovering from a recent COVID infection. But people, I just want you to learn from my mistakes. Be ye not stupid like me. The past two weeks have not been fun. Even though I’m 95% better I still get exhausted super easily. I have to take a nap every day and not a cozy nap because I feel like it. It’s the kind of nap you have to take because you simply cannot continue on until you restore some energy. It sucks. Hard.

Plus, there’s all the normal rage that comes with living in a country on the precipice of fascism. Voting right? Abortion rights? Late-stage Capitalism? I got rage enough for all of it.

Is that being okay?

Along with that, I have zero motivation for most everything it takes to be a functioning human: work, cooking, cleaning. . . I don’t want to do any of it. I do it, but I don’t want to. This one might be better blamed on January than the existential burnout caused by the pandemic. But then, why can’t it be both?

Maybe this is the very definition of okay. Marking time, going through the motions until something else happens.

Damn, this is not fun.
Jodi

The post Jodi is Okay? appeared first on I Will Dare.

Well Darling Ones,

I do believe we are in the waning days, maybe even hours of my COVID infection. Today was the first day I didn’t wake up feeling like my lungs were filled with mold. However, I’m fucking exhausted despite sleeping pretty well last night and I’m not sure what that is all about.

Because COVID refuses to totally vacate the premises I decided I have COVID+ a variety of other illnesses including, but not limited to:

1. Bronchitis
2. Brain tumor
3. Pneumonia
4. Narcolepsy
5. Brain cloud
6. Sinus infection
7. Long COVID

All the exhaustion today might be a Mucinex hangover. Have you ever had Mucinex? That shit does not mess around.

I took it for the first time yesterday and while I’ve never been roofied, my assumption is that it’s not much different than taking Mucinex. I lost consciousness against my will and when I woke up I was unclear what day or year it was. For the record, today is Thursday, March 689th, 2020.

I was so alarmed by the reaction that I had to google to make sure I wasn’t dying. I had no idea severe drowsiness was a side-effect of Mucinex. Frankly, I was a little afraid to take it even though there are loads of it around the house. You see, when Cade was in the midst of his substance use problems Mucinex was his drug of choice.

After I had to kick him out, Maxwell found a ton of substances in the loft where Cade was staying. Amongst that stash were three or four sheets of Mucinex. I have no idea how such a little guy like him was able to take so much of it. I’m a fucking giant and two of them knocked me on my ass.

The exhaustion could also be the result of too many leftover enchiladas for lunch.

Or the fact that it’s January in Minnesota and I think the high temperature today was 10º.

Or you know, maybe it’s the continued existential burnout of being two years into a pandemic in a country that literally does not give one teeny, tiny, tenth of a shit about human beings.

Anyway, this is a very long way to tell you that I took a really delightful and much-needed nap after lunch today. Then when I woke up I ate two M&M cookies with a thermos of tea. Oh, yeah, I drink tea in the afternoon now like some sort of, I don’t know sophisticated tea drinking lady. I’m not a big fan of hot tea. It tastes like hot water with like dirt in it or something. But, I started drinking the hot tea at the beginning of my illness because the warmth felt good on my sore throat and aching chest.

Now I do it because it still feels good. I mean it tastes like, well, it tastes like honey because I squirt a lot of that shizz in there. But, it’s cozy and I like that. Plus, I got this super cute Yeti thermos from Peace Coffee (Yeti the cryptid not the expensive brand) and I’m like Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, where I will drink the shit out of something just so I can stare lovingly at the vessel. I even got some Sleepytime Tea to see if that will bring about the sleepy times.

Sophisticatedly yours,
Jodi

P.S. This is probably the last entry in this latest round of The COVID Diaries, god-willing & the creek don’t rise maybe the last entry ever? MAYBE? WHO KNOWS? WE’RE SO BAD AT THIS AS A COUNTRY THERE MIGHT BE 83 MORE ENTRIES COMING. I CAN’T PREDICT THE FUTURE.

The post The COVID Diaries: I Took a Nap & Ate Cookies Today appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

I was eight when John Lennon was killed outside The Dakota in December, 1980. I do not not remember a lot about his death, though I do have vague memories of reading about Mark David Chapman and his obsession with Catcher in the Rye in an issue of People, my mom’s favorite magazine.

The Beatles meant nothing to me at that age. Not a lot of things did, I was a pretty oblivious kid. My favorite song at the time was probably “Boy From New York City” and I thought that Fonzie and Richie Cunningham were actual people who lived in Milwaukee, whose lives we got to see once a week. Yes, as a child I thought all TV was reality TV.

I only became aware of John Lennon and his death when I watched the video for Elton John’s song “Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny).” Having lost my own grandfather shortly before seeing the video for the first time, I paid extra attention to it because the VJ introduced the song by saying John and written it about his friend John Lennon who was murdered, etc. You know the story. New grief, I was absolutely mesmerized by the idea that you could take your sadness and make into something for your dead friend.

For that exact reason I’ve always had a soft spot for Paul Westerberg’s “Good Day”, which I wrote about last year for Valentine’s Day.

Are you sensing a trend? Do you know what’s coming?

I’ve been obsessed with Frank Turner’s song “A Wave Across a Bay” for nearly a week now. I listen to it roughly seven times a day. I sing it to myself as I’m getting ready for bed and when I wake up in the morning.

It’s the soundtrack to these lingering days of COVID-related low-energy and unending congestion. I really thought once I got my taste back this COVID nonsense would be over. I was wrong. I feel like this is never going to end. I decided I was all better this morning and went about my pre-sickness routine. My body was pissed off about that and so I spent a lot of the afternoon tipped over on the couch wondering if I would ever get back to normal or if I would just die instead.

This song wrecks me in the most excruciating way. There are certain deaths by suicide that squeeze at my heart and make my stomachache in an anxious sort of way — Sylvia Plath, Robin Williams, Anne Sexton, David Foster Wallace. Scott Hutchinson, the subject of this song and the lead singer of Frightened Rabbit, is also on that list. I’m not sure why these people’s deaths feel extra painful to me. I did not know any of them. However, the way they turned their pain and inner turmoil into something tangible and beautiful makes their deaths seem extra-sorrowful. It’s like Turner sings, “You had something in your soul that we could recognize.”

Can you think of a better, finer tribute than that line? I can’t, at least not at the moment. Isn’t this what all artists want? Someone to recognize something in our souls?

Unrecognizably yours,
Jodi

The post The COVID Diaries: Lingering, not Malingering appeared first on I Will Dare.