Baby steps, part two.

My OT gave me a little sample of this rubbery silicone stuff, and encouraged me to wrap it around things where I needed a better grip that would reduce my need to pinch so hard. So I did this.

It actually helps a lot.

 

I tried playing for about ten minutes today and that was more than enough. My hand hurts (as it does after any extended pinching now), but holding the pick doesn't hurt as much as it did without the padding. I don't know what this is called, but I'm going to look for another couple sheets of the stuff to wrap around things like toothbrushes and such.

 

I've been warned not to expect drastic change -- I still have osteoarthritis and always will, and it will gradually increase over time -- but this will help me enjoy guitar for a longer period on an occasional basis. 

 

In short, my heavy gigging days are still over. But I can play for pleasure now and then, with care. And that is glorious.

I'm grateful.

 

Happy Friday and Shabbat Shalom.

 

 

Baby steps.

Today, my OT and I discussed the possibility of returning to very occasional, careful guitar playing. Not playing guitar since early February has been ten kinds of lousy for my mental well-being. We talked about finding the right balance between warming up, OT exercises and careful, gentle guitar playing. Going forward, as long as we can work to get my pain levels down from 8 to, say 3 or 4 on a regular basis, he sees no reason to continue the total hiatus. The rest has been good for my hands. And I’m slowly acquiring some tools that will help stabilize good hand positions and ease the pressure I need to hold things (like neoprene gloves for sleeping, rubber pencil wraps for writing, and daily use of the heating pillow in the mornings to give my hands a good start to the day.

He doesn’t think I’ll ever be able to play daily like I used to — and in fact, he told me that trying to return to that level of playing would do some damage to my hands in the long run. The goal is to keep what I have for as long as I can, knowing that as I age, I will see some continued diminishment in what my hands are able to do. I agreed that this was likely a good — and the best — outcome I could hope for. I’ll see him again in a month for an assessment, and keep doing the exercises on my own.

The news about playing guitar again was a real mood-lifter.

The same day, one of my oldest, dearest friends asked me if I would play guitar and sing at her daughter’s wedding in the fall. It’s not a lot, only two or three songs. But with my OT’s blessing, I happily said yes. Her daughter was a student of mine many years ago, and a is delighted that I can play. I’m giving my wedding music as a gift to her and her fiancé, which feels lovely and appropriate. 

I’ve also reached out to the rabbi at Shaarie Torah to let him know that I can carefully play guitar for him once a month if he wants me to. I have to be very astute and listen to my body, but I think this will be a good medium. And if my hands tell me I need another break in the future, that’s okay too.

The other questions remain. But this is a wonderful development.

A tremendous cleansing of sorts

As I contemplate the completeness of my stumble into this new phase of living, I am experiencing a sense of disorientation of sorts, and with it, a sense that I am shedding both physical and emotional things.

I am letting go of nearly all my guitars (I’m keeping one so I can play occasionally, at least for pleasure). I’m letting go of a lot of my drums and percussion items as the arthritis makes playing for extended periods harder. I am meeting with someone next week to sell off the majority of my bicycle tools and my repair stand, since I can no longer really use them. At some point, I think I’ll winnow down to one bicycle and a really good lock and call it good.

Along with these physical liquidations, I find myself feeling adrift from things and activities I used to participate in often and wholeheartedly. I keep thinking I could go to synagogue services somewhere, but to be honest I don’t feel called to it. I don’t feel like entering a space where I had once contributed so much, just so I can sit in the back row and hope not to be noticed, or worse, expected to get up and lead part of a service. I just don’t feel connected to that right now. I feel like the push-me-pull-you from Dr. Doolittle. I don’t feel like I fully belong anywhere — in fact, I have felt like I never fully belonged anywhere my whole life, but I could at least belong somewhat while I had something good to do. Now that I cannot do these things anymore, any sense of belonging I’ve spent so much time and energy trying to prop up and fill in the cracks of and/or manufacture is simply and utterly deflated. Empty.

Jewishly, I feel so adrift. I had felt that way for quite awhile during the time I tried to hang onto my connection to Havurah. When, after realizing that my Jewish music career was coming to an end, I had no reason to keep holding on, I quit my membership in Havurah. I continued to work monthly at Shaarie Torah, though I held no sense of hope that I might neatly slide into a space of full belonging there. After October 7, when being Jewish without a strong sense of connection to Israel became basically impossible except in private, I knew I would not join another synagogue anytime soon. This continues to be a challenge for me, because I have it stuck in my thinking that a couple ought to belong to the same synagogue. Sweetie’s parents had no such notions of conventionality; my father-in-law only went to services once or twice a year at most, while my mother-in-law has always been a regular participant in the synagogue community., and this seems totally fine with Sweetie. I think the challenge for me has to do with the fact that my parents tried to model a more “together” kind of togetherness in their marriage, which turned out to be a lie in the end. I’m not sure how to get past this sticking point, and in the end I may never get past it. Counseling can only help resolve so much in a lifetime.) 

I went to Bike Farm a couple weeks ago, to get the lay of the land as a precursor to possibly volunteering there. But when I walked in, I immediately lost interest in the whole idea. I did not want to hang out in a bike shop when I could not use my hands, and I knew that if I tried to use my hands I’d end up hurting myself. So I left, and that was that.

I played Shabbat Fusion early this month at Shaarie Torah, and it was nice, but I felt a distancing in myself even as I sang and played percussion. by the end of the evening, all that hand drumming was hurting my hands, and to be honest I was sort of relived to go home. I led my last religious school event there the following Sunday, and let the rabbi know I did not want to return to teach anything at religious school in the fall. I left the subject of Shabbat Fusion undiscussed further.

A few weeks ago, I notified the folks in Bremerton that I won’t be able to serve Erinne cantorial soloist at High Holy Days this year, and encouraged them to post a job listing to find someone else. I simply.cannot be the soloist I was last year.  I was already feeling the crisis of faith last year, on the bimah, that I now understand to be a precursor of so much more. I was already wondering what the he’ll I was doing there, and why. I didn’t know why I felt that way, but I felt it. And I had to be honest about that when I talked with the rabbi afterwards.

 I am certain that at some point soon I will have to make a decision about the future of my place in Jewish music. Or at least evolve the scale and frequency of it.

I committed to a composition project that isn’t due until December. I was honored to be asked, though a part of me feels like it came too late for me to feel truly excited about it. I simply said I would do it, and although I have loads of time, I am finding it difficult to feel at all inspired about the work ahead. Since I’ve already signed the agreement I suppose I will have to carry it out. I’ve already come up with a convincing “hook” to get started, which helps. And, if I must be true ally honest, the money won’t hurt either. But right now, I feel so blah about the whole thing that I find it hard to imagine coming up with anything I can believe in. 

I am finding it hard to believe in much of anything these days. 

I find that when I see people on social media that I used to connect with so much over our shared work, I now feel a distance growing between us that I cannot explain, or stop from happening. How much of this s connected to my forced retirement, and how much is rooted in a childhood of leaving or a young adulthood of failure to connect more deeply with people, with groups, even as I wished I could — I don’t know. I don’t know how much of it correlates to each thing. I don’t know how to know. I find myself thinking of unfriending more of those people, the ones I know less well, one at a time, so I won’t have to watch their ongoing successes in the Jewish music world. A world I cannot keep up with anymore.

I still ride to a couple of social events each week. I do this because I know getting outside is good for me, and because I know I need some contact with other people. But I also know that my life is totally changed by the turn of events over the last eight months, and I know that such disconnect can be exacerbated by emotional, mental and physical distance. 

I cannot keep up with the folks I used to keep up with. The folks I used to barely keep up with.

I don’t know where I belong right now. It’s disorienting and isolating.

I understand that this can be common when someone retires. I also understand that I have additional issues going on with my brain chemistry and the way I was socialized growing up that have nothing to do with retirement, but everything to do with who and what I am in the world.

It’s highly possible that, even if my parents HAD given me a greater sense of stability and connection, I still might not feel connected today simply because of who I am. Because of how I am in my body and in the world. 

The period of depression is the longest of the stages of grief after a loss. And I am in it a lot of the time these days. 

Luddite’s lament

I hate the modern world sometimes.

Okay, a LOT of the time.

As someone with ADHD, I have legitimate reasons for needing to keep my finances simple. The ugly truth is that my brain chemistry makes math very hard for me, and finances a disaster. Long before I learned that I have ADHD, I learned by painful experience that I needed to keep my income small and my shopping local and cash-based in order to stay out of trouble. A couple of forays into credit cards in my twenties only served to prove that even more.

I have used PayPal for almost twenty years to make online purchases.

And everything was mostly okay until last fall, when I got hacked by a scammer who then helped themselves to my PayPal balance and ran up a PayPal Credit balance that took me months to pay down. PayPal wasn’t willing to concede that their security system was anything less than perfect (“perhaps you shared your account info with this person,” the agent said. With a total stranger? Not likely. But they refused to help cover the bad purchases, and I was stuck.)

I should have quit PayPal right then and there, and I might have. Except that only other online payment systems all used apps that you needed to download to a smartphone, and I didn’t have that kind of phone. Moreover, I have never really wanted that kind of phone. So I’ve been making do with PayPal, and trying to get a handle on the way I handle money by spending it less. 

One way I’ve done that over the years is to buy local and pay cash whenever possible. Only now, a growing number of businesses are choosing to accept only electronic money or credit cards. I haven’t used credit cards in years. I won’t use them again, because for someone like me they’re a loaded gun. Besides, by encouraging me to buy now and pay later, the banks are charging me interest for the privilege of spending MY money. Screw that.

Today, I spent over an hour on the phone trying to get things sorted out with PayPal and PayPal Credit. Ultimately, I will need to mail in checks to close out my PayPal Credit balance so I can then close down my PayPal Credit account. After that, I should be able to close down my PayPal account as well.

I could switch to another electronic funds system, like Venmo or CashApp. Lots of people use those without issue. Also, if I ever want to use Uber or Lyft, I MUST have a smartphone in order to download their app and then use it. Which again requires me to utilize electronic funds apps in order to pay for the rides.

Screw that too.

The thought of having to learn apps and operating systems while I am still trying to wrap my head around the years of flailing leading up to my ADHD diagnosis just feels like an awful lot. And NO, I can’t just “get over it” like other people. I am NOT “other people” and only now I am beginning to understand why. 

A friend gave me a newer smartphone. It’s not an Apple phone, so I will have to learn how to use it and then how to make it communicate with my Apple computer. I can already see that this is going to be complicated and emotionally fraught for me, everyone is telling me I MUST have a smartphone and I MUST carry it everywhere with me, because the world is such a scary place now that I have to remain connected and connectable at all times, and blah blah blah fear fear fear. But honestly, I feel more afraid of getting sucked into the electronica even more than I already am.

The challenge is that we are all getting sucked in.

The problem is that my online presence for so long has been bigger than my in-person presence. I would like to turn that around if I can. Even if so many of my friends do not.

We still have a landline here at the house. We get a lot of “robo-calls” from machines that bleat messages trying to get us to part with even more of our money. If we don’t pick up and we let it ring long enough, the answering machine kicks in and then the robots just hang up. They’d rather not leave a message. And to be brutally honest, If I have to go through what I’ve gone through at PayPal with every other app, I’d rather not even start. 

The thought of learning a new system is awful to me right now. I don’t need another temptation, and I’d rather not have the robots call me on my smartphone.  I’m supposed to meet with my sister this week so she can teach me all the things about this new smartphone, but frankly I feel like I might be happier without it. I can use the old smartphone (which has no phone number attached to it, so it costs me nothing) and just hop on free WiFi whenever I need to. that stuff is almost everywhere in the city now, and I am fine with not paying for the privilege. Because it feels like more of a burden.

It was very nice of my friend to give me this newer smartphone. (I suspect it may have been his wife’s. She seldom used one, was a massive introvert and hardly went out socializing, and she recently passed away. So I’m guessing it never really got used at all.)

But I sort of really don’t want to use it. Because I can’t stand the modern world these days.

The inconvenience of being so creaky and wiped out

This morning, everything came crashing down.

I woke up hurting everywhere — my hands, my lower back, my knee — the culmination of pesky little aches and pains that have mushroomed with every foot put wrong and every attempt at my body compensating and my brain demanding that I do anything but sit still.

I cried in anger and anguish as I limped to the kitchen to make breakfast and heat up the corn pillow. Finally, I was able to settle into the living room chair, elevate my leg and do some OT exercises on my hands. Now, I’m so wiped from the entire series of events that all I want to do is crawl back to bed.

This not how I want to spend my days. 

Not at all.

Practice vs. performance — how do we know the difference?

The Portland State library has been cleared by Portland Police. Among the dozen or so protestors arrested and removed from the library, only four were actually students. The school has an awful mess to repair and clean up.

In other news, here’s a photo from the series Humans of New York, of someone at Columbia University.

Is he student? I don’t know. But he is clearly davening (praying) in a Jewish manner and garb — kipah, tefillin, eyes covered (perhaps he’s saying the Shema). No tallit, which is interesting. Behind him are protestors, presumably pro-Palestinian. This photo is uncaptioned, and so I have questions.

— where’s the tallit?

— why is he praying there?

— does he pray there, outside, on non-protest days?

I fear that this is performative. And if it is, how useful is it, really? Will other Jewish students see it and take heart? Will non-Jewish students see it and be offended? Is this for the media?

I have so many questions.