Susan hates Facebook (exception FB Marketplace), there's no convincing her that anyone's ever said anything worthwhile on FB. She likes Instagram because it's pictures and all the words are easily ignored. She regularly weeds out Instagram accounts for which she's lost enthusiasm. It's not that she stopped liking them, our Susan only has so much attention to spare and has to draw the line. 

Often folks will be charming in their posts but allow politics to peek out in their stories, probably because stories disappear after 24 hours. Susan never cared if you liked a president or hated him, if you were one of the Star Belly Sneetches or the Plain Belly Sneetches, but then 2016 happened. Now if she sees a clip from Fox News on your Instagram that's it. You're out. Even if she likes you. She can't trust you and knows you'd turn her in to the nazi leadership just like Lisel's boyfriend in The Sound of Music. Plus, if you get your news from that cesspool of lies...don't make her say it. OK, you're stoopid.

Let's change the topic to today's anxiety baking; zucchini cake with orange glaze. If you want to feel good immediately, pound some cardamom and anise seeds with a mortar and pestle. You can make a cake with it if you want, although you don't have to, just smelling it is enough.

Oh, look at the time. See you tomorrow.

Susan's pandemic PTSD has returned her to being an anxious person once again. 

Was it redundant to put returned and once again in the same sentence? It was.

Anyway, she's successfully navigated this condition her entire life without medication, when she sez without medication that's only because she was able to handle things without it, Susan does not have an anti-medication attitude.

She employs a repertoire of things to calm and refocus herself and starts by treating the symptoms. One of her more effective efforts is through the meditative process of baking. Keep your yoga, Susan's got a cake in the oven. 

Susan doesn't enjoy anxiety, it's intrusive, debilitating and unnecessary. It's not like having something to worry about, that she understands, anxiety just attaches itself to whatever's in reach, like some needy f*cker.

For thirty years Susan and her father included a few minutes of anxiety strategizing in almost every phone call, it was nice to have his informed and calm counsel. Growing up he was a sarcastic pain in the ass, but always a good listener & kinda handicapped by being married to Susan's mother, so she forgave him.

Susan and her pal Kate were discussing their anxieties, and each made a pact to do something specific. Susan was going to schedule a counselling appointment within a week. Thus far she hasn't, but made some annual medical appointments instead. Susan will get it taken care of, she likes paying someone to listen to her talk about herself. That's actually her idea of Heaven.

Susan got her car serviced and was trapped for a time watching HGTV in the waiting room. Susan is years removed from any interest in HGTV with people saying things like beverage center and amazing memories and needing 5 bedrooms, and all their kids have stupid names, and OhMyGawd are we still doing farmhouse?

Susan is also not a cable TV subscriber, she gave that up when she was still in NY, she's strictly streaming service now. There's also a few chateau renovation shows she watches on YouTube as well as a favorite cemetery tour series and a girl in Brooklyn who's serious about plants.

Susan is aware of the brevity of her post today, but hopes you're happy that she posted anyway.

Susan knows that she hasn't written a post a day like she told you she would. 

Her earnest attempts to write a post a day have shown her that she can't really write a post a day. There are a few factors working against her, the big one is inspiration. Susan's topics can best be described as personal nonsense, they don't come from the newspaper, (whoa, newspaper?) or pop culture (why is her TikTok filled with traffic fatalities and ghosts) and she doesn't respond to well intentioned prompts. In fact, if you want to see how fast Susan won't do something, give her a well intentioned prompt.

Susan also just had her mother in the house for a week which kinda cramped her style. Even though her mother is no longer a demanding person, the limitations of her capabilities create the demand to be within close range to her almost every moment of every day. Susan finds this exhausting...and demanding. 

Susan can only tolerate being the back-up caretaker, advancing to the front lines when her Little Sister & husband manage to escape for a few days. This trip Susan also had their two dogs in her house, no big deal except the more elderly of the two pooped inside three times, each closer to becoming diarrhea. Managing the poop was relatively easy because Susan has this well priced and fantastically effective little green carpet cleaning machine which she heartily recommends if you're in a similar fix. Susan had to go to Little Sister's house each day to feed the cats (complicated) and take care of the chickens (surprisingly uncomplicated). Again, no big deal, she just had to time it to one of her mother's naps or encounter an old lady standing at the front door when she returned late. 

Whenever it's Susan's job to take care of her mother, she makes it as comfortable as possible and the two fall into an established pattern. Susan stocks the kind of food her mother likes, especially goodies, lest her kitchen be completely ransacked, even the freezer. Upon finishing her carton of milk on a previous caretaking weekend she drank the half & half. (Back then Susan texted her sister She drank my f*cking half & half!) Susan also chooses nightly movies they can watch together, the criteria being something her mother can understand and Susan can tolerate.

Susan spent the week working remotely while her mother napped the daylight hours away. After work Susan made dinner and her mother closed all available curtains so that no one could see inside. Then after dinner they watched their movie, including a new entrant into Susan's personal assessment of the worst movies in the world, Grumpy Old Men. She's glad Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are dead, they deserve to be after wasting Susan's time with that un-watchable sh*t.

On the last day, Susan was making a pot of meatballs to bring to Little Sister's house along with her mother and the dogs. She had made it through the week, the end was in sight! Susan was opening four cans of plum tomatoes when her crappy-replacement-for-a-previous-workhorse-of-a-can-opener started giving her the usual problem. As it traveled its way around the lid of the can it got hung up on the paper label and Susan was really getting tired of this sh*t. 

She hit critical mass on can #3.  

A stream of the foulest of foul words came out of Susan's mouth and didn't stop. She was only able to work her way through half of those last two lids so she beat and beat and BEAT THEM with the can opener. With every blow juice and plum tomato carcass pieces flew everywhere, yet she continued beating them and cursing while being very careful not to get her fingers near the sharp edges, years ago she learned that lesson on a can of black beans.

She beat and cursed and beat and cursed until the last bit of plum tomato was out of the can and on her walls. While this was going on her mother came out to investigate, and upon seeing Susan completely enraged and 90% out of control, she stood there and watched. Susan wanted to scream at her too, but she didn't. Instead she rinsed the cans out, put them in the recycling container, wiped the tomato off of her stove, counter, walls, cabinets, microwave and herself, then made the sauce. Later she threw out the can opener and  ordered an electric one from Jeff Bezos.

Susan, who's on record claiming not to have needed alcohol to get through the pandemic, has had a glass of wine every night since Saturday, coinciding with a week of baby-sitting duties for her mother. A glass a night is no big deal, but a week with her mother underfoot is. Tonight, she was down to her last inch of pinot noir which was positioned within knocking over range when Susan knocked it over. It was impressive how far and wide an inch of red wine was able to spray the room including a smart bomb ability to hit anything that would stain.

Susan busted out her favorite all purpose homemade cocktail of vinegar + water + liquid soap + essential oil originally introduced by her pal Yuna. Yuna would saw a roll of paper towels in half, stuff it into a coffee can, pour the homemade cocktail into the can, poke a hole in the plastic lid, then feed the paper towels through the hole a la disinfecting wipes. Susan prefers to use hers as a spray, she has other homemade cleaners meant for specific purposes, but this one's great in emergencies.

Anyway, Susan crawled around on her hands and knees for twenty minutes locating every red dot she could and replacing the smell of red wine with vinegar and essential oil.

That's it, that's all she's got for ya today; she knocked a glass over and cleaned it up.

You can tell when Susan gets tired of BLAHg-ing because she kinda just writes one more sentence and stops. Like yesterday when she was b*tching about coffee, she took a look at the time and pulled the plug. If she continued she would've said that she opts for other hot drinks when there's a high probability of coffee disappointment. Our Susan loves chai and often makes her own on the stovetop (black tea, cardamom, fennel, cinnamon, peppercorns, with an abundance of fresh ginger), out in the wild her flexible chai standards accommodate those that may run sweet or spicy or milky or even a bit savory. 

Susan's coffee can only be served to her one way; strong and perfect. 

At home she grinds a few days worth of beans at a time which she keeps in the cabinet NOT the freezer, and employs the pour-over method using a scale to measure exactly 12.15 ounces of water into her favorite cup (a gift from Cousin Caroline). Until recently she used a ceramic pour over filter created by her ceramicist daughter, but that ended when Susan carelessly allowed it to fall to its death from the drying rack. Now she uses a plastic Melita from the supermarket and reusable linen filters. She's not married to the linen filters, she just likes that they never run out.

Giving tea equal time Susan loves this smoky lapsang souchong which smells intoxicatingly like the road in front of her house is being re-tarred, and a loose clove tea in a pretty tin from Pearl River Mart as well as this honey-lemon-ginger-cinnamon tea that her pal Nicole hipped her to.

Oh, will you look at the time!

Susan hasn't had a good cup of coffee outside of her own kitchen since she moved to NC. (For the sake of this complaint she's not including two very reliable American multinational coffee franchises). The best she's had is an acceptable cup, which is not really acceptable at all. Of course Susan hasn't been everywhere in her adopted state, but over the last three years she's been to enough independently operated places with the word coffee in their title she figured they should know how to pour hot water over beans and make her happy. Susan has been heard to describe what she wants in a cup of coffee as 'A five dollar Brooklyn pour over'. Nothing fancy, no flavors or sugars or anything other than full fat cream. And if she even gets a whiff of hazelnut or pumpkin spice it is her solemn vow that she will vomit right there, so step back.

Susan is not of the attitude that everything south of New Yawk is somehow not as good, people down here come from everywhere else and bring their talents with them. She admits to missing the plentiful-ness of everything in NY, but she can get whatever she wants, she just has to find out where it is. 

Except the f*cking coffee.

Susan keeps a list of her recurring monthly expenses in order of their auto-withdrawal tacked in a secluded spot in her kitchen. She finds this list comforting, and isn't worried about anyone seeing it unless they like to poke around in non-descript areas of utilitarian rooms. Plus, who cares anyway? 

She's able to live within the confines of her salary as long as she doesn't spend more than she has in the bank. The other day Susan updated her refrigerator list and used that opportunity to investigate where the rest of her money goes each month. The holidays and a few unexpected domestic infrastructure emergencies skewed the results, but that notwithstanding, Susan learned she needs to spend less money. 

Susan's not in the habit of following a budget, she's got a natural thriftiness that keeps her largely in line. For instance she's outfitted much of her house from FB Marketplace & estate sales, but every once in a while she's got to spend $150 on a fancy electric kettle that she never really liked. 

A good portion of Susan's extraneous expenses involve food and gas, but she's also got a bit of a glittery disco ball habit. Anyway, Susan's considering a budget, or maybe a spending fast, she's not yet sure. She's very good at setting limits and sticking to them until she loses interest or revises them. 

One of the biggest reasons Susan moved to NC was to escape the financial stranglehold of her beloved NY, she makes less money where she is but things cost less, so it's kinda a draw. Only cheese and dry cleaning don't cost less. Recently Susan purchased a wool coat from the thrift store, she took a chance on the color but it didn't bother her to think she may end up re-donating it. Then she had it dry cleaned. 

Now she has to wear it.

Susan's not sure she has anything interesting to BLAHg about today. Wait! Susan always has something interesting to say, more accurately she just lacks creative energy today. 

She took a break from being unshowered and living in the same clothes for the last two days to emerge as a clean and dressed person in a big, bejeweled necklace (fake) and sparkly Rebecca Minkoff boots (estate sale). In fact she looked so nice that she was complimented for looking so nice. 

In the evening she went to her Little Sister's house to babysit her mother (topic for another day) and then sing happy birthday to her brother in law and eat icecream cake. She was sent home with a very on-sale plant gift and immediately repotted it, mixing up her own soil, drenching the newly potted plant, and leaving it to drain in the dishwasher. Susan has a renewed enthusiasm for plants since purchasing a 1971 house with a lot of windows. The previous owner died in the house but that doesn't bother Susan at all. Anyway, she'll tell you about the house when she has creative energy. Don't get all excited, there's no ghost stories, it's just a regular house with a surplus of unfinished projects.

Another symptom of Susan's Pandemic PTSD is her prolonged lack of motivation to get stuff done. Some folks might argue that this resembles her normal state and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong. However, it's going on for a really long time and Susan doesn't feel like she can change it. She's not non-functioning, it's just she can't do some things at all. 

Work has become a real problem, she takes lots of breaks to go out into the yard and throw sticks around with the dog (sometimes getting bitten), or to the bathroom to scrub the mineral deposits from her toilet with a pumice stone, or scroll through FB Marketplace searching for a tall rice paper lamp to put in the northwest corner of her den, or check the possibility that one her plants need water.  But, she always returns to her job of pressing buttons on a keyboard until she can't stand it one second longer, then gets up to look out the window with her gold opera glasses (a Christmas present from her Little Sister for when they see Hamilton from the cheap seats) or make a snack of chocolate chips mixed directly into a jar of peanut butter, or check her traps for dead mice (usually empty).

Sometimes feeding herself is an issue, like she just went thru a period where any meal not provided at her sister's house (many are) was a bowl of cereal. Quite honestly she was just in a mood to eat cereal combined with being in a mood not to cook anything. 

Susan has a ton of tiny little home projects, most completely within her ability and not more than a few hours work, but she just can't. She wants to, but she can't. She is considering making a list of everything that needs to be done, so maybe she's getting ready to get ready. We'll see.

Anyway, even though Susan took a nap directly after she logged off work today, she's still tired and is going to say seeya tomorrow.

Susan remembers with nostalgic fondness how she used to pull out a book and read at every available opportunity; in the evening after her toddlers were in bed, on the train during her commute to NYC, in the bleachers at her son's basketball games, during her daughter's guitar lessons, and any time she waited in the car for someone. She still reads every day, but not books, and not in that lovely leisurely way she enjoyed.

Susan's reading is all online now, the laptop for work, or the phone for articles that interest her. Recently she watched this version of MacBeth and whenever she got tripped up by the language or Scottish accent she paused the movie, pulled up Shakespeare's text, then headed to Cliff's Notes to see what she missed. 'Twas very handy.

Susan also encountered a helpful article about how to get in the habit of reading more. Everything starts with keeping a book on us (or e-reader), then reading for however long we have. Possibly reading a few books at a time so there's always something to suit our mood sounds like something Susan would never do, although she has friends who read two books at a time. 

Graphic novels were recommended for a reading rut. Susan is a tremendous fan of graphic novels and has her pal Mikey to thank. He lent her his series of  Preacher novels, which she held onto for like two years, and didn't really like, but she loved the format and has been seeking them out ever since. In fact, Susan thinks you should go out and find yourself a graphic novel tomorrow, she knows your library has them. 

There is no difference between books, e-readers or the phone, however one prefers to read is fine.

A final suggestion was to incorporate reading into our existing daily rituals; instead of scrolling through the phone while we have coffee, read.  And if we don't like a book, stop reading it. Susan absolutely agrees with this and has zero allegiance to that which bores her.

Anyway, Susan is kinda discombobulated by reintroducing her daily BLAHg-ing and needs a little more time to incorporate actual physical books into her schedule. She thinks an hour a day is a good start, and will work out the logistics sometime this week.

Thanks for sticking with her, she'll be back tomorrow.

Susan has changed over the last two years, she thinks it's due to a combination of advancing decrepitude and Pandemic PTSD. For a while she thought she may be a little ADHD, but those symptoms seemed much more severe than Susan's so she abandoned that diagnosis.

Anyway, Susan doesn't do details anymore. At the very least she's not reliable about details, so it's best to assume she's going to get something wrong. A recent example was when she showed up at her sister's house all decked out for New Year's Eve on December 30th. 

Another manifestation of Susan's current state of mind are the limited amount of things she cares about. It's like her brain doesn't produce enough caring to get through the day, so she distributes it to an established list of recipients and is dismissive about the rest. To her credit, she is able to open up and add extra things to care about, but not if they come with responsibilities.

She can no longer do two things at once (who can, really?). If she's home following a simple recipe displayed directly in front of her while having a hands-free phone conversation, she's leaving out an ingredient. 

Working in isolation has turned her into the type of employee she hates, one who just does the minimum. On her annual evaluation she answered a question about her future goals by saying she had no future goals. She can't even fake it anymore. 

That's one of the biggest symptoms; Susan can't fake it anymore. The best she can hope for is to keep her mouth shut, and sometimes she can't do that much. Even if she can, her face is right there to give her away, like she's a toddler and can't keep from spilling the secret that she hates this sh*t.

Lest she not reveal herself to be a total loser, there are still tons of things Susan does regularly and competently; she gets enough sleep, pays her taxes, waters her plants, maintains her relationships (with enthusiasm), and has hope for the future as long as that illiterate nazi c*cks*cker doesn't get back into office.

Susan used to write then she stopped. 

She didn't stop wanting to write, she just stopped writing, and then went all in with the non-writing. Susan doesn't know why she stopped, she figures it's got something to do with depression, but a few small personal revelations over the last 24 hours have made her think she can give it a go again. She's super out of practice and is going to schedule time every day to write her BLAHg. Since writing doesn't necessarily mean posting, she's going to commit to posting every day. Susan's not sure for how long, but is comfortable leaving that up in the air.

Fun facts about Susan's personality: She absolutely requires the structure of a schedule in order to get anything done. She also thinks she has pandemic PTSD from working remotely for twenty two months.

Just in case any of you are fixin' to be worried about Susan, she asks that you save it for someone else. Neither alcohol nor retail consumption have increased over this time period although she may have gained ten pounds in cookie weight and bought some second hand books. She even responded to the discovery that there was not a dribble of water coming out of her faucets with calm and decisive measures. 

So, happy 2022 guys, Susan will meet you back here tomorrow.