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Month: August 2021

Finally!

Finally!

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If last week’s entry read like something twinged with equal parts trepidation, sadness, anger, and happiness, simultaneously, that’s about what life during this weird-ass and tragic time in history feels like most days. The suffering that humanity is enduring right now, both locally, here, in SCC, as well as abroad, is immense. Needless to say, it completely overshadows any minute inconvenience or annoyance my family, friends, or I may be experiencing because we know how incredibly fortunate we are. At the same time, when life affords you an opportunity to glimpse or experience “the way things were,” even for a short period, sometimes I feel guilty to know that the moment isn’t necessarily open to all. 

After a pretty heavy week last week — with the first day of school, and all the fears (and excitement) that comes with it, in addition to the big stories in the national and international news — I figure it’s time to temper ze blog with a little happiness, a nice reminder that sometimes, an occasional reminder that not all is doom and gloom. We (I) may need these periodic attitude shifts more than we (I) may realize. 

(TBCFH: this is something I have struggled with during the pandemic. Does writing or talking about stuff that matters to you, but is fairly irrelevant in the grand scheme of the mess of life during the pandemic, even make sense? Who TF cares, right? Personally, my family and I have been fine thus far, all things considered, but I know so many who haven’t, and my heart hurts for them. My heart hurts for the thousands and millions of people whom I don’t personally know whose lives have been upended because of this virus. My life, my family’s life, has definitely changed during the course of the pandemic, and [or “yet,” or “but,” or “or” … I think the contraction is operative here, and they all work equally well!] we still have a lot to be happy, and to feel grateful, about).

I got a reminder about this over the weekend. Following Saturday morning’s long run, on Sunday morning, I was up bright and early, yet again, but this time not to run but to instead volunteer! 

For! 

A! 

Local! 

Live! 

In-person! 

Road! 

Race!

In!

San Jose! 

The obnoxious exclamation marks are entirely appropriate because they begin to adequately convey my glee at doing something I love for the first time in a very, very long time. 

Sunday morning’s Bloom Energy Stars and Strides 5k/10k Run was an inaugural race to benefit the Valley Medical Center Foundation. Situated in downtown San Jose, with race day logistics and execution handled by our favs at Run Local, the race brought together over 1,500 registrants across three races (5k, 10k, kids’ race, with runners and walkers in each) and over 1,000 participants to the streets of downtown come 8am. 

Did I mention that it was the first (local) (road) race in San Jose since the pandemic shut everything down?

A small handful of my Wolfpack teammates and I helped out as course marshals on Sunday morning, and Mark and I hung out around the mile 3 marker, which meant we got to see all the runners at least twice: on their way out, shortly after the starting line; on their way back (5k runners heading for home and 10k runners about to split); and one last time (10k runners on their way home). At one point, we were responsible for telling the 5k/10k runners to split at the appropriate time (and to take the correct direction), but fortunately, it was fairly straightforward because the runners’ bibs were color-coded to their distance. 

I remembered to bring cowbells with me on Sunday morning, making the whole shebang more fun (and much louder). I’m glad I didn’t lose my voice or blister my knuckles from my vigorous ringing efforts. 

all matchy-matchy with Lisa and Mark

It made for a fun morning! Protip: don’t ask course marshals questions in the minutes preceding a race about things like about where bib pickup is (near the starting line?), or where people can street park (no idea, but the cop over there said they’re not enforcing neighborhood permits because of COVID, so…), or anything that’s not directly related to literally the ground we are standing on because that’s likely the beginning and end of our knowledge related to the race. Plan better, people! 

Anyway. It’s always so fun to spectate (or run) at local races, particularly small ones, because it’s pretty easy to run into people you know from the running community. A handful of my Wolfpack teammates raced or fun-ran it, as well as some other folks I know from the Run Local ambassadors or Bay Area Running Crew. It was like a small-scale reunion, and we all know that mid-run hugs (especially ones that haven’t happened in 18+ months!) can’t be beat. 🙂 

franddz!!!!!!!

I think the next race I’ll volunteer at with the team isn’t until early October, for the SJ RNR half marathon, so lmk if you’re running it, and I’ll be sure to hoot and holler for you. It’s usually fairly massive in size, and last I heard, they were planning on a full-scale, “normal” race production, but like anything else during COVID and delta-dominated life, I suppose time will tell.   

in it

in it

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And we’re off. Earlier this week, my children stepped foot into a school facility for the first time since March 13, 2020. Donned with their favorite masks — Yoda for A and rainbows for G — and bellies full of nervous energy, they finally did what they haven’t been able to do for over 18 months now.

At my departure, there were no tears, no last-minute-reconsiderations, just nerves and gratitude to be able to more safely do what they couldn’t for so long. When I picked them up on the first day, by the mid-afternoon, their early morning nervous energy had transformed into joy and exuberance, huge under-the-mask smiles that made it resoundingly clear that there was no place they’d rather be than there, finally, at long last. They liked distance learning and all, but there’s nothing like the real deal.

Speaking solely for myself here, it’s a complex dichotomy to work through as a parent, sending your child to school when there is still a respiratory pandemic raging in the world at large and a virus variant out there that’s worse, in practically every definition of the word, than any other that we’ve encountered in the past 18+ months. I say all of this but also temper it with the acknowledgement that the state, the district, and the school sites are employing tons of mitigation efforts, including mandating masks for all — vaccinated or not — inside school buildings, so it’s not as though our children are stepping foot into the fire without so much as an extinguisher to defend themselves.

What’s different right now is that my kids are in the company of “strangers” every day — people with whom we haven’t played or spent any amount of time with for 18+ months (or people whom we actually truly don’t know) — and the best we can do is hope that everyone is being thoughtful in their decision-making outside of school hours and not reckless and irresponsible. 

It feels like our tightly-held, uber-controlled vectors have just expanded a thousand-fold, and it’s jarring.  

We all want our kids to be in school; that’s why we’ve elected to allow them to return, in the first place, instead of opting for another year of independent studying/remote learning. It is incredibly difficult to *not* worry right now because we can’t possibly know what everyone is doing beyond school hours or otherwise. We can’t and won’t know whether people are vaccinated or not, whether they’re being irresponsible and taking unnecessary risks, nothing. Not everyone has the privilege of working remotely (at all or anymore), and with kids under 12 still ineligible for vaccination — combined with the insidious contagiousness of this delta variant — the risk feels more profound than ever before. 

It’s like the biggest trust fall ever, the biggest group project ever, where all we can do is hope that nobody fucks it up for the rest of us because so much is on the line. I guess we have to put our trust in numbers and hope that the 80% of us 12+ who have been fully vaccinated (or the 86.1% of us 12+ who have had at least one dose) is enough. 

We really can’t overstate the gravity of the situation we’re all in right now.   

—

Between the seemingly never-ending COVID crap and the week’s most recent travesties (looking at you, Afghanistan, Haiti, the seemingly never-ending Dixie Fire here, responsible for today’s disgusting skies, and in the running world, the death of Abby Anderson, the late Gabe Grunewald’s sister), the world, yet again — but maybe even more so? — feels really heavy. It feels somewhere between oppressive, suffocating, and nauseating, or maybe at some junction among the three. I surely can’t be the only one. 

So how are you doing? How are you dealing? 

For me, what feels best is what I’ve been trying to do the most of lately: plunging headfirst into volunteer stuff (between the kids’ school and GS), a lot of which got scaled back considerably last year, given the pandemic, and running, of course. It feels good to begin to have a semi-full calendar of stuff going on for the first time in nearly a year and a half. We just have to wait and see, and hope, I guess, that it all happens.