Boomer Randomness

The first 8 notes of The Dance. The first six notes of Take Five. The first four notes of Friends In Low Places or Oye Como Va. The first three notes of Smoke On the Water. The first chord of Hard Day’s Night. Did you hear those songs in your head as you read the descriptions of the first notes of each? Do the opening moments any of those iconic songs instantly take you back to a moment in your life as fast as Elizabeth Montgomery’s nose scrunch in Bewitched? Music is a powerful thing. Notes, chords and lyrics tap into our emotions. A song can be a time machine, transporting you back to a concert, a first date, a wedding, a prom. Music might lead to laughing, crying or dancing. Your favorite songs can wrap around you like a warm blanket, providing a little security during the uncertainty of what’s going on right now. A song you hate can cut you like a knife. “Happy Birthday” may be the first song many of us hear. Songs our parents liked when we were kids instantly take us bac...

Fifty years ago? Yesterday, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we woke up to the cleanest air in, well, fifty years. It’s sad that the COVID19 has sequestered most of us, but clean air is a positive byproduct. Millions of cars are not on the roads and the air is cleaner than it’s been in decades, maybe centuries. Residents of some cities are able to see distant natural landmarks for the first time in their lives. An example: the Himalayas are visible from New Delhi. Los Angeles residents can see sky, mountains and buildings from miles away. Our country and our planet have come a long way in fifty years. Cars and manufacturing plants are more fuel efficient and less polluting. Recycling is more the rule than the exception. Yet we have so much further to go. Global warming is real and the earth’s temperature is rising, leading to sea level rises and increasingly severe weather conditions, among other things. Big businesses with short-sighted goals, enabled by an ignorant, hear...

I’m generally a home body, so being confined to my apartment because of COVID19 isn’t much of an issue for me. On the surface. Staying home for days at a time is fine when it’s a choice.  Not so fine when it’s a mandate. I understand the mandate and mostly agree with it. But it is starting to ware on me and we’re only four weeks in. I miss the option of people contact. Texting, emailing, phoning and FaceTiming are all methods of contact I am grateful we have, but I miss in person contact. Shaking hands and hugging. Seeing the facial nuances of conversation that are harder to see clearly in Zoom. Working from home is an interesting phenomenon. I’ve been slowly preparing for eventually working partly from home. I never, however, pictured a mandatory work from home scenario. I quickly discovered I wasn’t as prepared as I thought. And I hadn’t envisioned two of us working from home, a 2-bedroom apartment. Things have been pretty smooth, so far, but my space in this place...

If you’re used to going to work every day and now you’re working from home, do you lose track of what day it is? I thought that the day I started writing this was a Tuesday. Turns out it was a Wednesday. I laughed at the jokes about losing track of the day of the week, thinking that only happens to other people, but now the joke is on me. So why does this happen? My observation (without any actual research, because I just don’t feel like it) is that we lose our usual daily and hourly cues. Our normal work week pattern has a certain rhythm... work day start and end times, commute times, working out, chores, etc. Our work day might also have patterns, like scheduled meetings, project timelines, lunch. Doing our job from home should have at least a few similar patterns, like meetings (virtual) and lunch. The rhythm of the day, however, is different when your entire commute is from the kitchen to the den. No traffic, no passing scenery, no red lights. Instead of a few miles e...