I've been thinking a lot about this summer - specifically, how (if?) I'm going to see my parents. I'm anxious about the fall bringing another outbreak, and not seeing them for an entire year (or more) doesn't feel like a thing I can handle. I also don't know if we even technically can travel this summer - it feels like the rules are changing on a near-daily basis - but I figured it's worth coming up with some ideas just in case we can make it happen.

I've thought about risking a flight, then quarantining myself before seeing them. I've thought about an RV. I've thought about teleportation (get on it, Elon). What I haven't - or hadn't - yet thought about was Amtrak. And then, after my accident the other week, I found myself aboard one for the first time in my life, and now I am obsessed.

A couple of years ago, I got in an unexpected confrontation with a woman at a party. It was during the era right after Trump was elected, when I found myself constantly angry, unable to stop talking about the state of the world even with people who didn't especially want to talk about it themselves - and who certainly did not want to talk about it at a party, when they were theoretically supposed to be having, you know...fun.

Eventually, this woman - I had never met her before; she was an old friend of the party's hosts - and I got to talking. She was the only black woman at the party - not especially surprising; the suburbs outside Silicon Valley aren't exactly known for their diversity. She told me about growing up in the foster care system, and introduced me to her wife. We talked about politics generally, and about the Martin Luther King marches specifically, and then started discussing how to raise the next generation of children with greater awareness. I told the woman about how my son and I had made posters of MLK quotes together to carry at the march, and how I'd framed them on our wall as a reminder to him. I remember feeling all proud of myself, telling her that (ugh, performative; ugh, self-congratulatory, just UGH).

All of a sudden - surprisingly then, unsurprisingly now - everything changed.

Last night, Kendrick and I were talking about Christian Cooper - the man who videotaped a white woman in Central Park flipping her lid and telling the cops that "an African-American man" was "threatening" her, despite the fact that he was demonstrably doing nothing of the sort - and George Floyd, whose story is so heartbreaking it defies description. About how easily the former story could have taken the the turn that the latter's did. Our son overheard us, and started asking questions. We answered as best as we could, while I tried to dance around the parts that sounded too scary for an eight-year-old. I don't know that I should have done that.

I don't know what to do.

How do you explain to a child that systematic racism is a "we" problem, when they may not be old enough to contextualize beyond "me" (e.g. white people did this --> white people are bad --> I am white --> I am bad). I have struggled also to explain the gross injustices suffered by women in this country to my son, a white boy who will one day grow into a white man. He sees t-shirts that say "Girl power" and I try to help him understand why he can't wear a t-shirt that says the same about him. I am trying to raise a nice boy. I also remember the things that the "nice boys" at my liberal arts university did to their female peers.

Anyone else freaking the fuck out about money? Oh hi there! Thanks for coming!

So look: Shopping isn't happening right now. Which is actually probably great in some ways, because the present moment is teaching us just how little we actually *need*. I, for example, have recently taken stock of my not-inconsiderable shoe wardrobe, and discovered that I wear exactly three of the pairs I own. Two of those are pairs of Birkenstocks, and of those two pairs of Birkenstocks, one is a pair of Birkenstocks that my dog is hell-bent on eating, with astonishingly successful results. Never, ever again in my life - and this is a promise that I feel very comfortable making - will I wear four-inch leopard-print stilettos. That ship has sailed, my friends.

Pour one out for the leopard-print stilettos.