Monday, May 25, 2020

Bored? Some Folks Will Always Be Homebound

Photo by Postmaster / Shutterstock I think Marcus Aurelius once said, “We choose to participate in the rave.”
This post originally appeared in the Cameron Herald and Thorndale Tribune on 2020-05-21 and on the Hearts, Homes, and Hands blog on 2020-05-21.
Me and Loretta, we don’t talk much more
She sits and stares through the back-door screen
And all the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen

—John Prine

You see them more and more on the evening news: people out en masse, partying in crowded, recently opened (or illegally opened) bars. Some have just come from rallies where they gathered around Patrick Henry’s immortal soundbite, “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” You can almost hear the excess capitalization as they ignore the fact that Liberty and Death are not mutually exclusive. In a pandemic, they can be correlative, if not causative.
But I understand where they’re coming from. Boredom. At least, that’s what most seem to say on camera. “I’ve just got to get out of the house!” One day blurs into the next, giving us the new word “Blursday.” A meme shows a generic calendar with each column headed by the same word. “Day.”
Our brains thrive on novelty. The first bite of our favorite foods can cause our eyelids to flutter shut and our eyes to roll back in transient ecstasy. A month later, you’ll remember that first bite, but you won’t remember the ninth or tenth by the end of the meal.
Photo by EVZ / Shutterstock Nanci Griffith once sang about being a clock without hands. She was more right than metaphorical. Our brains measure time in very long increments and tiny ones. And those measurements don’t really relate to each other.
Savoring that first bite can seem to take as long as the rest of the meal. That’s because our brains have many clocks to keep track of time. None of these brain clocks have hour hands. They measure time in fractions of a day or fractions of a second. There’s nothing really in between.
We experience that first bite in what neurologists call “prospective time.” While we’re looking forward to it and experiencing it, our brains measure time in fractions of a second. But the rest of the meal doesn’t get as much attention as that first bite. Rather than form new memories of each bite, our brains overwrite the same memory pattern over and over again. We don’t experience eating the rest of the meal so much as remember it later in “retrospective time.”
The same thing happens all the time. We experience new things in prospective time, but repetitive actions blur into retrospective time. We tend to live in prospective time where the length a pause in conversation can have real meaning. We may have only a split second to react when we see a snake while hiking through the fields. Is it a rat snake or a rattlesnake? Boom! We decide. That’s why time drags on forever when we’re bored. Each tick of the clock may take a week. But when we look back at a month of boredom, it seems to have slipped by in a blink as each day blurs into the one before.
Now put yourself in a different place. What if you weren’t “stuck at home” because of a government order? (An order that is being gradually relaxed as I write this.) What if you couldn’t leave home because your body was unable to take you outside? What if you were stuck at home—maybe even confined to your bed—for the foreseeable future? For the rest of your life? Your mind would turn the seconds into minutes and the minutes into hours. But it would also turn the months into days and the years into weeks.
Photo by Photographee.eu / Shutterstock If you’re feeling like you just have to get out of the house right now, please take a minute to think about those who will still be homebound when Shelter in Place fades into memory.
Many people are in this unenviable situation because of injury, disease, or age. Since 1891, these people have been called “shut-ins” or, more kindly, “homebound.” Shelter in Place orders have given all of us the opportunity to experience their reality. The difference is we can escape to protest or to deal with essential tasks. Even when the last Shelter in Place order is lifted, the homebound will remain…well, shut in.
One of the services we provide at Hearts, Homes, and Hands is to help the homebound deal with their persistent reality.
Even though it seems like it wouldn’t work, one of the best things you can do to fight isolation and boredom is to keep to your normal schedule as much as you can. Go to bed and wake up at the same time as before COVID. Prepare your meals and eat them when you normally would. Exercise on your regular schedule even if it means jogging around the living room or lifting your kids instead of weights. If you can’t go to work, set aside some time to learn new things, to write letters, or to play games—anything to create new experiences for your brain to look forward to.
But the most important thing to schedule is downtime. Set aside time to do nothing. That’s right. Make time to do nothing at all. Force your brain to be bored so it looks forward to and enjoys the experiences it can have. Contrast real boredom with routine, and most of us will really appreciate being able to focus on and savor that first bite of activity—whatever it is.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

“It was paper when we started...”

Photo by The New York Times I remember thinking at the time, “That’s easy for you to say.”
The best things in life are free
But you can keep them for the birds and bees
Now give me money
(That's what I want)

—Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford

It’s not often you’ll hear me say I learned a valuable lesson from Sam Walton, but today is one of those days.
Thanks to declining production and falling oil prices, I had to take a huge write down in the valuation of one of my properties yesterday. It was frightening and disheartening.
To be clear, this isn’t real money. It didn’t come out of my pocket, but it does affect my net worth. And banks tend to look down on reductions in net worth.
So, I’m grateful for the lesson I learned from Walton way back in 1987. After the stock market crashed on Black Friday, he lost about a half-billion dollars in Wal-mart’s market capitalization the following Monday. Walton shrugged off the loss. He said, “It was paper when we started, and it’s paper afterward.”
I remember thinking at the time, “That’s easy for you to say.” But the truth is, paper losses hurt about as much as paper gains help. That is to say, not much. I still own the land, and my taxes will go down because of the write down.

Monday, May 11, 2020

Caring for Our Pets

Penny loves to cuddle, but I am trying to be more careful about keeping her tongue out of my face. Next, I’ll work on the feet.
Brody always took hand washing and social distancing very seriously…even before they were a thing.
This post originally appeared on the Hearts, Homes, and Hands blog on 2020-05-08.
A big black dog
A little too much gray around the muzzle
A big black dog
Why she ended up at the pound is a puzzle

—Emmylou Harris

We all love our fur babies. Well, most of us. I suppose there are still people around like WC Fields hey, about her screenwriter Leo Rosten once said, “any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.“ I just don’t know any.
Just about everyone I know falls at the other end of the spectrum. At Hearts Homes and Hands, we love our animals. Most of us have more pets at home than people. in fact, two members of our team are on the Board of Directors for Milam Touch of Love, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization dedicated to the welfare of animals in Milam County. Others have contributed to or done volunteer work for that organization.
If you use the term “fur babies“—it took me a long time to get used to it. But then I realized I call Carlton “Baby Boy“ and Penny “Baby Girl.“ Sigh. Anyway—if you use the term “fur babies,” you probably have experienced their delicate, little (or big, sloppy) kisses…whether you wanted to or not.
And that brings me to Winston, who made national news a couple of days before I wrote this article. Winston is a pug who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his family of four humans. The two adults are both doctors, but all four are COVID survivors.
One day Doctor Mom noticed Winston’s behavior was a little off. He even skipped breakfast. No pug I have ever known willingly skips a meal unless something is very wrong. So, Doctor Mom has Winston tested. Sure enough, he was positive for COVID.
Winston is the first American dog to test positive and the first confirmed case of human-canine transmission. We already knew that cats, including lions and tigers and—well, not bears—at the NY Zoo could get COVID. But Dr. Anthony Fauchi, the face of the Administration’s COVID Response Team, said there is “no evidence” of pets giving the virus to their people. That’s good. Just try putting a mask on a cat. Neither one of you will have a good result.
But Fauchi didn’t rule out the possibility of pet-human transmission. All “no evidence” means is that we haven’t proven that it happens, not that it doesn’t happen.
All this is to say our pets need to practice social distancing as much as we do. Right now, it’s a good idea to keep your indoor pets inside and your outdoor pets away from others. And avoiding those fur baby kisses can help protect both of you.

Saturday, May 02, 2020

Feeling Isolated?

Photo by Suna Sue Ann says hi from Zoom with her under-the-sea background.
Photo from Lee’s Fakebook page Suna say, “Lee’s Facebook page is so old it still has his graduation picture on it.” Yeah, right! My sixth grade graduation, maybe. That was back when books were on paper, a non-volatile storage media (unless you had a match).
This post originally appeared in the Cameron Herald and Thorndale Tribune on 2020-04-30 and on the Hearts, Homes, and Hands blog on 2020-04-07.
Yes, I'm lonely
Want to die
If I ain't dead already, hoo
Girl, you know the reason why

—John Lennon, Paul McCartney

It’s no big secret: social distancing can cause its own set of problems. One of these is isolation. When we lock ourselves in our homes away from everybody else, we can get lonely.
Fortunately, technology provides us a workaround. Since we’ve been distancing, I don’t think a day has gone by when Sue Ann has not been on her phone or her computer Fakebooking, FaceTiming, Zooming, or using some other social media to stay in touch with her friends and coworkers.
I’ll admit I’m not the best at all of that. I kind of enjoy the isolation. But, in many people, isolation can lead to other problems like depression, or just to loss of motivation. For some of these people, technology is not an option for the simple reason that they’ve never needed or wanted to use it before (or can’t afford internet access).
I have a Facebook account that I think I logged into two years ago. I’ve never used Zoom. And I’ve never used video chat or FaceTime. However, I’ll admit that these are good ways to keep in touch with people when you can’t just go see them.
What do you do if you don’t have access to technology or don’t know how to use them? Well, here again, Hearts Homes and Hands can help. Some of our caregivers are very fluent with these technologies. They can help you set up a smart phone for the first time. They can help you Zoom or FaceTime so you can talk to your grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or children who live far away.
Just give Kathleen a call at 254-627-1200 and she can talk to you about all the different ways we can help you safely stay in contact.
Oh, and one bit of good news! A recent study showed that COVID-19 can’t be spread through flatulence. Everyone in my family is very relieved.