Wow we are getting so much election-related mail. There’s one organization that sends repeated reminders that they can see whether we voted or not in previous elections, and gives us a score based on that attendance, and reminds us that this is public information that can also be seen by our neighbors. It’s super creepy and menacing. We’re also getting stacks of glossy oversized postcards that make me not want to donate any money to any candidate ever again.

We are back from a college open house for which we had two goals: show Elizabeth that this college had a really good art program despite having a non-artsy-sounding name, and help Edward decide between this school and another school that are his top two. Elizabeth did come away with a better feeling for the art program; also, we attended a presentation by the professor in charge of the illustration program (Elizabeth’s current frontrunner major), and we both felt like we came away with a much better idea of what that major would be like, both as a degree and as a future career. Edward was put off by a speaker for his program, an older guy who kept saying things like “You want an example of new tech? Two words: Tik Tok.” So now the other school is his top choice, which is too bad (because I don’t think this one speaker was a good representative of the school) but there it is. And Elizabeth would rather not go to the same college as Edward, so maybe this is for the best (Edward’s current top choice does not have an art program).

Elizabeth is getting increasingly stressed about choosing which colleges to apply to, which in turn is making me increasingly stressed. Her original goal was to go to the art college of a university: she wants non-art-program fellow students, plus the option of taking non-art-program classes, plus the ability to combine art with something else if she finds something else. But both of her high school art teachers are murmuring about this. “The art world is so competitive, and a well-known art school really helps”—that kind of thing. One of the teachers went to an inexpensive small local college and regrets not going to a bigger/better art school; the other teacher went to perhaps THE most well-known art-only college, and is colleagues with the first teacher at our middling small-town high school, so I don’t know if that gives any evidence for the idea that an art-only school is better.

But of course it’s making Elizabeth feel like she’s on the verge of making the wrong decision. And it’s not as if I know anything about it, so I can’t even advise her—but I’d thought her reasons for wanting a university sounded solid. What we’re going with now is something more like “Welp! We don’t know! So we’ll do the best we can here to make this very-hard-to-even-guess-what’s-right choice, and then you can transfer if you need to / get a further degree elsewhere / whatever needs to happen!”

Years ago, my doctor mentioned in an off-hand way that she always gets her flu shot in October, I don’t even remember what she said about the WHY but I assume it was exactly the boring explanation you’d expect about getting it early enough in the season to be helpful, but not so early that it might wear off before the season was over. For some reason this LODGED IN MY BRAIN. As in, I turn the calendar page to October and I think “OCTOBER: FLU SHOT TIME.”

Which is to say that one of the items on this week’s To Do List was getting my flu shot, and getting everyone else THEIR flu shots. As with the new Covid booster, I had to stop trying to maximize the efficiency of this task. When the kids were little, I used to bring them all to the pediatrician at once, and the nurse would herd us all into a room together and give the shots assembly-line-style. Now everybody’s got SCHEDULES I need to work around. So yesterday as soon as Edward came home from school, he and I went to the pharmacy and got our flu shots: I was extra-motivated to bring him, because he’ll be seeing his GI/Crohn’s doctor next week and the GI/Crohn’s doctor is for sure going to ask about the flu shot. And I was motivated for myself, because of the putting-my-own-oxygen-mask-on-first parenting concept, and also because I work in a public space, and also because it seems like if I’m old enough to be getting ARTHRITIS IN MY KNEES then I am old enough to be vigilant about my flu shot.

Henry is in another play so has rehearsal every day after school until dinnertime; I’ll have to bring him this weekend. I would have brought Elizabeth today, but she said “Noooooo not todayyyyyy I’m so busyyyyyyyy.” Paul can get his at a flu-shot clinic at work; William has his internship there but we don’t know if that means he can participate in the clinic or not, so probably I will just bring him when I bring Henry or Elizabeth.

I’ve been so focused on Covid shots/boosters the last couple of years, I’d forgotten what it was like to get something that didn’t need much aforethought. I didn’t think about the brand of my flu shot. I had to remember whether flu shots were normally accompanied by side effects or not. (For me, it’s only a matter of a sore arm.) I felt briefly panicked that I didn’t have a vaccination card with me for the pharmacist to write on, HOW WILL I PROVE I GOT THE FLU SHOT oh yeah they will just believe me.

What I’ve been hearing, mostly on NPR, is that the flu season is predicted to be extra intense this year. Something that puzzled me was that they interviewed someone who was saying that the past two years the flu has been very low because we’ve all been masking and social distancing and staying home. But, like, no we all the hell have not. Some of us have, but at least in my area the VAST MAJORITY have done no such thing for WELL OVER a year now—so why was LAST year a low year for flu? I wondered if it might be because, even in my area, most medical locations (including dental, vision, the people at Edward’s infusion clinic, etc.) are still masking and requiring patients to be masked. Perhaps a lot of the flu used to be spread in medical situations, and THAT’S where it’s been reduced? But surely not in schools and businesses, where even last flu season we felt like people were looking at us funny for wearing masks.

Spirit Day is coming up on Thursday, October 20th; which I mention now, more than 10 days in advance, in case you are going to suddenly realize you don’t have purple shirts for one or more people in your household who would like to wear a purple shirt.

This is definitely easier for women’s/girls’ clothing than men’s/boys’: one year Old Navy had men’s t-shirts in TWO shades of purple, and I bought a ton of them for all the men’s-clothing-wearing members of my household, which I’m particularly glad of because this year I’m not seeing much available. They do have a t-shirt in plum. Target has a purple Hanes men’s t-shirt that seems good.

I keep realizing each year at the last minute that my only purple shirt is a disappointingly wishy-washy pale purple, which is FINE, but now it has a little hole in it; and also I now wear more shirts with pictures on them, so I went looking for something new. I know I know I know but I bought myself one from Amazon: it’s this peony one, if you want to be Spirit Day twins with me.

(This zinnia one in purple was a close second, and now that I look at it again, I wonder if it would have been better: the pink of the peony sort of sways the color impression of the peony one. Well, but I liked the big peony better, and I do plan to wear this shirt all year.)

In case it helps with sizing, I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy t-shirts, and I can wear a women’s XL or 2XL in this brand, depending on whether I want it Fairly Fitted (like, I tuck my knees up under the hem to stretch it a little before going out in public) or Looser and Less Bust-Enhancing (the size I usually buy for my work t-shirts).

In 2017, on the day after Inauguration Day, I signed up for a $100/year online subscription to The Washington Post. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” yes, give me that, give me allllll of that. My intention was to support Journalism; I picked the particular paper in large part because of the columns of Alexandra Petri (her most recent column: “To Clarify, I Meant Ban Abortion Except for Republican Politicians: Myself Is the Last Person Who Should Be Bothered by My Values”).

I would be interested to see a little graph of my satisfaction levels each year when the subscription auto-renewed. For the first few years, satisfaction levels were high: DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS!! SUPPORT JOURNALISTS!!! SHINE A LIGHT!!! ETC.!!!

At some unknown point, I became aware that Jeff Bezos, multi-billionaire owner of Amazon, was also the multi-billionaire owner of The Washington Post. Satisfaction levels dropped somewhat—but, you know, Very Rich People have often funded such things, AS WELL THEY SHOULD. Carnegie. Rockefeller. Something about the railroads? I don’t really know anything except that rich people funded things and named them after themselves. Maybe that sort of thing was okay. Maybe that’s one of the GOOD ways rich people can spend their money! Journalism! Museums! Concert halls! Etc.! SOMEONE needs to fund those things! Maybe the opinion pieces on topics such as “Capitalism Is Great, Actually,” and “It Would Hurt Us All To Raise Taxes on Billionaires” were fine, just, you know, balanced discourse. I’m not really reading any of the articles I have access to, but we should still Support Journalism in These Dark Times.

In the last couple of years, I started wondering if another organization could make better use of my hundred dollars a year—especially when I saw subscription offers now going for $30. But I was reluctant to actually unsubscribe. It felt like Defunding/Devaluing Journalism.

Then, this week, The Washington Post sent an email, very similar to the emails I keep getting each year as my Amazon Prime membership increases, telling me that my subscription would be increasing to $120/year. I’d found my Line: $100 for a purely digital subscription I wasn’t actually using was Okay, but $120 for a purely digital subscription I was not actually using was Not Okay. I DO want to support journalism, I DO!! But I feel like maybe Jeff Bezos can easily afford to support it without my specific help? And also: I find NPR much more useful, news-wise, so perhaps I will just TRANSFER my support to THEM. Win-win! Funding journalism that NEEDS funding! Plus, NPR sometimes gives me a cute bird mug/tote!

As I tried to cancel my subscription, I encountered hurdles. First there was the screen that I might have carelessly thought meant I had successfully completed my cancellation—but no, I had to scroll past some paragraphs about the cancellation to find another button to click to ACTUALLY cancel.

Then, after I clicked that button, an offer: Would I like to keep my subscription, for $60/year?? Oh!!! Okay!!! I was already going to willingly pay $100/year! Then you raised it to $120/year, which is why I cancelled! And now it’s $60/year???? All along you could have been happy with HALF what you were going to charge me???? You didn’t NEED to raise the price after all, you were just TRYING IT?????? to SEE IF I’D PAY IT?????

Infuriating. And absolutely confirmed that I was making the right decision. I clicked YES UNSUBSCRIBE.

The next day, a new offer: Would I like to have the subscription for $40/year???

This post has two purposes: first, to tell you about how glad I am that I stopped my subscription to The Washington Post; second, to let you know that if you would like to continue your subscription, you can apparently get a better rate by trying to cancel. (Has anyone gotten similar results while canceling Amazon Prime?)

I am currently living the kind of life where I pretty often do things that don’t really make EFFICIENCY sense (such as driving round-trip 40 minutes to pick up a Target order without combining it with other errands out that way), because I can’t really fit those things in at a better time and/or because getting it done relieves enough To Do List Stress that it’s worth it. I will think “Yes, it will sort of waste 40 minutes to do this—but then I will have done it, and it will only be 45 minutes later than it is now. We will worry MOST of the time about efficient/responsible use of gasoline, but RIGHT NOW we will let it go in the interest of Getting It Done.”

Some other things we’ve been checking off the list:

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins, which was a bit of a hassle and had a lot of variables and also had a firm deadline. This was a process involving so many decisions/steps, it feels wrong to have it be just one dot.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: deciding who should take the photos, and when, and where.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: actually taking the pictures.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: going through hundreds of pictures to narrow them down to a reasonable number of finalists.

• Senior yearbook photos for the twins: choosing one from among the finalists, cropping it, and emailing it in. Yes, that feels more accurate.

• BABY yearbook photos for the twins, which meant going through several years’ worth of photos, and Elizabeth really wanted to help, but she is way busier right now than I am (two part-time jobs; several clubs; several AP classes; volunteering; social life), so then it became me going through the photos and making a folder of Very Narrowed-Down candidates that Elizabeth could help choose from.

• More college visits. I hate them so much, they are so boring and they all seem the same, but it does feel very good to get them done. Making it worse: my boss saying “Well, and when they find that Right College for them, you can just SEE it, they just KNOW!” Yes well good. How many colleges do we have to tour before I am allowed to give up on that Just Knowing part, because that has not happened yet for any of my first four children. And I kind of hope it DOESN’T, because what if they don’t get IN to the college they Just Know is right for them?? Also, I do not believe for the most part in Just Knowing.

• Updated Covid boosters for three of the kids, and for Paul. This is a good example of something where I had to stop trying to plan for efficiency, and instead just leap on opportunities: “Oh!! You’re home and I’m home and the pharmacy is open!! Let’s go RIGHT NOW.” Elizabeth had fever/chills the night of the vaccine, and felt pretty tired, but was better by mid-day the next day. William felt worn out the next day, and had a sore arm. Henry and Paul didn’t feel any side effects.

Then we had Parents’ Night at the high school, which led me to post this on Twitter:

I felt like with each teacher I was either TOO BLURTY, or else allowed an uncomfortable silence to fall, or else stayed too long, or else left too abruptly/soon. Mostly I worried I was too blurty. My main Coping Thought for such things is that the teachers are already exhausted after working a full day, and most of them just want to get through this evening alive so they can go home and put on soft pants, and they are meeting FAR TOO MANY parents to care too much about what any one particular parent is like. (The problem with this Coping Thought is that if I were a teacher I would be EXTREMELY KEEN to see what my students’ parents were like, and then I would spend a lot of time afterward thinking about those encounters. So.)

[Oh, dear, may I apologize in advance for what has turned into a long venty stress post? Please don’t feel as if you need to read it: I don’t think there is any NEWS in here.] [Oh, except at the end I mention some ice cream bars and books to try, so you might want to skim down to there.]

Right now I am doing a lot of laundry and feeling stymied and overwhelmed about William, who is 21 years old and in his fourth year of college and is still doing things such as missing housing deadlines—and this is AFTER he missed a housing deadline LAST year that meant he had to find temporary non-college housing in a big city, which was extremely stressful and expensive, so I would have thought that would really teach him not to do it again, but apparently not; and also he once again failed to waive the totally unnecessary/overpriced university health insurance (it’s okay, he was able to fix that after I HIT THE CEILING), which I didn’t know because he ALSO failed to approve parental access to his student account; so now I am projecting into the future when he will NEVER learn and will NEVER pay ANY of his bills on time or meet ANY of his work deadlines and so forth.

The reason I’m doing a lot of laundry is that William had gradually acquired nearly the entire household supply of dishcloths and cloth napkins in his room. We toss dirty ones into the empty washing machine as we go, so they just end up in whatever load of clothes go through next, so he kept ending up with a small batch of them in his laundry; and even with a fair amount of nagging he just WOULD NOT bring the clean ones out of his room, let alone do what I would consider the VERY REASONABLE TASK of folding them and putting them away. Instead he just kept tossing them back into his laundry basket, and then acquiring more the next time he did a load of laundry, and so on until we got to where we are now, with almost no dishcloths or cloth napkins. At some point, Reality As It Should Be (he should absolutely be doing this bare-minimum and reasonable thing, it is unfathomable that he is not doing it) had to yield to Reality As It Is (he is NOT DOING IT—and no matter what the REASON for his not-doing-it, my quality of life is being affected), so finally I went into his room and just collected all of them, along with what turned out to be EIGHT bath towels, and I am putting them all through the wash because they were mixed with his dirty laundry. It feels right at this moment like such a discouraging and disheartening waste of time and effort to raise children.

Meanwhile, I ordered some more of the SAME t-shirts I have bought MANY of in the past—and these three, in three different colors so it seems unlikely to be some sort of fluke defect, are MUCH too big for me. And I have had THREE back-and-forths now with the seller, and we seem no closer to resolution. Their position, which is fair enough, is that the shirts are labeled the same as my previous shirts are labeled, and they don’t believe anything about the sizing has changed; but that they’d be happy to exchange the ones I bought for another batch of the same size or for a smaller size or whatever I want. My position is that I don’t want them to spend time and money sending me another batch of too-big shirts if something about the sizing has in fact changed, but that I also can’t exchange them for a smaller size in case THESE FEW shirts are just mislabeled and the smaller size would be (1) correctly labeled and (2) therefore too small. I am feeling some despair because I wanted to order LOTS MORE of these shirts in coming years, but now I won’t know what size to order.

Meanwhile, the twins’ college search. Really, that is probably the main thing. And I am underpaid at work but seem unable to do anything about it; and there has been a shelving change at work that has decreased my daily work satisfaction. And William is doing a co-op/internship this semester, and sometimes he can drive in to work with Paul, but sometimes they each need a car, and then I have no car; and really with FIVE drivers we could use a third car, but this is still apparently a terrible time to buy a car. And I have been having to fight what appears to be the natural impulse of everyone involved to just assume they can take my car—and then having to deal with them acting like I am being unreasonable because I won’t change “my” plans (“mine” as in “taking three kids to the dentist”) so that they don’t have to deal with the mild inconvenience of needing to slightly adjust their own schedules in order to share a car. It is so boggling to me that I need to work/fight for this, and that it does not seem to be sinking in that MY PLANS DO NOT COME LAST TO EVERYONE ELSE’S PLANS. Really, it must be absolutely incredible to be socialized male in this society—like having constant low level of cocaine or something.

And the new Covid booster! I can’t figure it out! I tried to make an appointment online, but it still seemed to be offering me a choice of Pfizer or Moderna; IS the new booster available in either? My impression was that it was just The New Booster. Elizabeth works part-time in a drugstore and made me feel better by saying that many many customers seem similarly confused—but because she works in the front store rather than in the pharmacy, she wasn’t actually able to give me any information. Maybe she will find out more at work today. I found this NPR article that seemed to be saying both Pfizer and Moderna were updated. In which case I have to make a DECISION about which to get, and I have felt so ILL-EQUIPPED to be making such decisions as a non-medically-trained civilian, if only there were some sort of national advisory center specializing in the control of etc.

Okay, I will say TWO GOOD THINGS to try to balance this a little.

ONE: Have you tried the Biscoff ice cream bars?? I bought a box on a whim and I ate two of them that day and have been daydreaming about them ever since. The chocolate coating is so THICK AND DELICIOUS AND FULL OF COOKIE-CRUMBLES, it’s almost TOO much coating for the amount of ice cream. I guess they have pints of Biscoff ice cream, too, which I am going to have to look for.

TWO: I have been re-reading some of the OLD Elizabeth Berg books, from before she started writing books on topics such as Romantic WWII Nostalgia Worship, Unintentionally Demonstrating Everything That Is Wrong with Diet Culture, and Weird Biblical(??) Stuff. I read Durable Goods and Talk Before Sleep, and they were both just as good as I remembered them. Durable Goods is not my usual type of book: it’s a coming-of-age novel, which I have had just about enough of, and it almost reads like Junie B. Jones For Grown-ups; also, it involves the death of a mother and abuse by a military father. I mean, if I read the flap, I would NEVER try it. But I have read it several times and I love it. And Talk Before Sleep looks from the flap like it’s going to be such a downer, because it’s about a woman dying of cancer and it’s told from the point of view of her best friend; but I find it such a lovely, lovely story of female friendship, with a side order of marriage stuff, and the characters are so good and make me want to be friends with all of them, and of course it IS sad but I feel it leads you to it in a bearable way, and in a way that makes it seem natural, WHICH IT IS, and also so unnatural, WHICH IT ALSO IS. Both books have these moments where I stop, stunned, and need to think about something I just read.

We are gradually and with huge effort figuring out what we’re looking for in a school for Elizabeth, who wants to study art:

1. She does not want to go to An Art School; she wants to go to a school that has a good art degree but also has lots of other degrees. This is in part because she would like to stand out a little with her short dyed hair and interesting clothes/jewelry; and in part because she would like to be able to earn a living and so she will probably want to make it a combined or double major and/or add some minors; and in part because she finds art students annoying.

2. Majors we are looking for (but she is not at all sure): Illustration; Studio Art (Painting); Undeclared Art. (Are you about to suggest Graphic Design? So far she is not interested in Graphic Design. But I don’t think it would be a bad idea for the college to offer it, just in case.)

3. Apparently we are supposed to be looking for colleges that offer a BFA or BVA.

4. She wants a bigger college rather than a smaller one.

5. She’d prefer a separate campus, rather than one that is integrated with a town/city.

6. It should probably be in a state where, if she experiences an ectopic pregnancy, she won’t be left to die from it.

7. We are not expecting to get significant financial aid, and it is apparently pretty rare to get merit aid to major in art, so it needs to be a relatively affordable school. (We have gotten a fair number of suggestions from people my age who went to school quite a long time ago and don’t realize that the tuition at their formerly affordable school is now $80,000/year or whatever.)

Has this list helped us create a list of schools for her to apply to? Absolutely not. But it has let us rule out one school after another! Which I guess is helpful in its own way!

I don’t even know how to LOOK. I have tried many search terms, and what I mostly get is lists of schools that include, like, Yale and Harvard. No, yes, I have heard of Yale and Harvard, and I am aware they are Good Schools, but I am looking specifically for schools that have a good ART PROGRAM, not a Clickbuzz list of ten colleges some content-creator has heard of. I want a school that has a ceramics studio and a glass-blowing studio and a furniture-design studio, and graphic arts and illustration and studio painting, and an advisor who can say “Hey, you know what makes money if you combine it with art, other than working in a coffee shop? THIS.” I want a school that KNOWS majoring in art is a dicey thing, and is making sure they have a Genuine Quality Art Program Where the Degree Means Something.

There is a valance in our bathroom that has been Visibly Very Dusty ever since we had the hardwood floors refinished before we moved in…which was in 2018. Tonight I finally took it down and laundered it. I would love for this to be one of those “And it was so quick and easy and I don’t understand why I didn’t do it AGES ago, isn’t human psychology RIDICULOUS??” stories, and that was what I had in mind when I decided to tackle it. But actually it was a tremendous hassle and I don’t know if it was worth it.

It turned out that, as with many, many things in this house, the curtain rod was put up by an amateur who considered himself Handy—but who, just to give you an idea of the pervasive results of said handiness, wired a bunch of outlets BACKWARDS, so that when the inspector put in his little testing thingie, the little testing thingie registered an Oh No Fire Danger temperature within seconds. (We got $5000 off the price of the house to have an electrician fix those.)

Anyway. Taking down the curtain was perplexing: it was hard to understand the curtain-rod situation, and a cracking sound accompanied the understanding. Laundering the curtain was simple. Putting it back up was a task that broke the curtain-rod situation—or more likely it broke while I was taking the curtain down and there was a cracking sound, but it was while putting it back up that a piece of the assembly broke off. Now one side of the rod is just sort of balanced there, so that one day it can fall down and startle me.

Also: laundering it made me truly understand how ugly it is. When it was dusty, it was easy to think that the dust was the real problem. But now I see it is a valance made of faded 1980s shiny black prom-dress material, and it does not look very nice in our bathroom—which is OF COURSE light grey, as you should have known just from hearing we bought the house in 2018. Light-grey and black are theoretically compatible colors, but no. I would Just Replace It, but it is overwhelming me to think of removing the curtain rod, installing a curtain rod that makes sense, touching up the light grey paint, and choosing a new curtain. I remember doing those exact things when we moved into our first house over 20 years ago, but I was over 20 years younger then, and hadn’t yet started following politics.

Meanwhile, I have also been tearing up the pea-patch in other ways. (I am thinking of charting these energy surges, just to See. I feel as if for much of each month I am unable to cope, and then suddenly I am fixing/cleaning/booking everything.) I have arranged for the twins to attend the open house of a college that looks like it might be a good fit for both of them, and I have forced myself to get over the cost of a motel for that trip. We have started working on the Common App together, and it is already causing me to lose tooth enamel. I have purchased tickets to a musical in the nearest big city, not just for Henry, who is turning out to be a Theater Kid, but also because I love to see musicals/plays and want to see more of them. I have donated blood, and have set up my next appointment. I have panicked about our electrical bill, which has doubled, and NPR says I can expect it to triple; I have walked fretfully around the house turning off things that can be turned off. I have cleaned the dishwasher filter, and have run self-clean cycles on the dishwasher and the washing machine. And of course I have laundered the dusty black valance. (Still to do: calling a chimney service, because the Former Resident Amateur vented the dryer into a fireplace chimney, and that has not seemed like a good idea the entire nearly-four-years we’ve lived here, but nor have I gotten around to doing anything about it.)